The Arabs are reacting the way they always do when someone doesn't see things they're way. They're acting like spoiled children whose candy was taken away by threatening Australia with trade sanctions over its insistence on referring to 'east' Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria as something other than 'occupied territory.' This is from the first link.
"We asked the government to reverse this position," Abdulhadi said of the diplomatic protest. He threatened that trade sanctions could be put in place against Canberra if the government persisted with its stance, which he said left Australia isolated.
"It depends on the reaction of the Australian government," he said, adding that the issue could also be taken to the United Nations General Assembly. "Unfortunately I think there will be negative consequences for the (Australian) government."
Australia's export trade with the Middle East is significant, accounting for billions of dollars annually, particularly in wheat and meat, with Qatar and Jordan being major markets for live sheep.
"We want to maintain the trade and we will work very hard with them to ensure that that happens," Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss told reporters on Friday.
Abdulhadi said he would meet Foreign Minister Julie Bishop next week and was hopeful that, after being threatened, Australia could explain the decision.
"Maybe we can avoid all this sort of thing if we can have good discussions," he said.
Something tells me that Julie Bishop is quite capable of handling Mr. Abdulhadi.
'Palestinians' seeking Arab League and Islamic Conference review of Australia
Former 'Palestinian' chief negotiatorbottle washer Saeb Erekat has written a letter to the Australian government saying that the 'Palestinians' will seek a review of relations with Australia by the Arab League and the Islamic conference.
“Palestine will request that the Arab League and the Islamic Conference
[Organization of Islamic Cooperation] review the relations of the Arab
and Islamic world with Australia in light of Australia’s unlawful
recognition of the illegal settlement regime in occupied Palestine,”
Saeb Erekat wrote in the letter, dated June 5.
...
In the letter, Erekat responded to Brandis’
statement, saying it showed that Australia “does not intend to comply
with its duty under international law not to recognize Israeli
sovereignty over any part of the Palestinian territory occupied by
Israel in 1967, including East Jerusalem.”
He added that the term “occupation” reflects a “legal fact” based on UN resolutions.
...
In May, Australia’s ambassador to Israel, Dave
Sharma, drew fire after meeting with Housing Minister Uri Ariel in the
latter’s East Jerusalem office.
“It should be noted that diplomatic
recognition of the situation created by the attempted annexation of our
capital is a flagrant violation of international law,” Erekat wrote to
Canberra after that meeting.
Hey Saeb! If it's illegal, why don't you just take them to court? BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
PA President Mahmoud Abbas expressed
gratitude to his Iranian counterpart for his support of the unilateral
Palestinian statehood bid at the UN. The leaders also discussed the
peace process, the PA's financial crisis, and reconciliation with Hamas,
according to WAFA.
The discussion was to be followed by a meeting between Fatah and Hamas
officials in Cairo to discuss reconciliation agreements, Palestinian
news agency Ma'an quoted a Fatah offiial as saying on Wednesday.
The 'Palestinians' are always saying how they want to be 'martyrs,' and if God forbid Ahmadinejad nukes us, they'll likely get their chance.
The UN, run by a cartel of brutal barbaric Islamic hellholes
Here's Pat Condell talking about Israel and the UN. He refers to the United Nations as being a cartel of bronze age barbarians, and as being run by brutal, barbaric Islamic hellholes. You'll love it.
He also calls Saudi Arabia the world's moral... maybe I won't finish that one....
EU member states had proposed participation by some of the top EU bureaucrats, including European Commission President José Manuel Barroso and President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy, who are now unsure whether they will be able to attend the summit taking in Chicago on May 20-21 as representatives of the union due to the objections from Turkey, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Friday. Raising the EU's commitment to a NATO peace mission in Afghanistan, EU member countries including France had argued that the EU should be represented, while Turkey is maintaining that there should only be member state participation in the summit, the WSJ claimed.
“If non-NATO members will also participate, the OIC should be represented [in the Chicago summit] first and foremost,” Turkish diplomatic sources said in explaining Ankara’s position, speaking to Today’s Zaman on Sunday. The sources claimed that the OIC’s commitment exceeded the EU contribution in the Afghanistan peace mission.
The EU has exerted efforts for the reconstruction and democratization of Afghanistan in preparation for the post-NATO-mission period in the country. The EU launched a rule of law mission (EUPOL) under the banner of the European Security and Defense Program (ESDP) in June 2007. The union has also initiated a program for justice reform and is helping to fund civilian projects in NATO-run Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs).
Meanwhile, the OIC, a bloc of 56 countries, is also taking a growing interest in the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and in 2010 it accepted a proposal by member states Turkey and the United Arab Emirates to appoint an OIC permanent representative for Afghanistan.
But wait for it.... This wasn't Turkey's idea. It was Obama's.
The US administration has joined the push for greater OIC involvement in Afghanistan for the last couple of years, which would bring benefits in efforts towards reconciliation between the Afghan government and the Taliban.
Huh? Okay, I don't watch Afghanistan too closely, but I thought that the whole point of the US being in Afghanistan was to get rid of the Taliban.
In any event, it appears that the Obama administration is complicit with Israel being excluded from NATO and with the OIC being included in NATO. I guess that's all part of what Hussein Obama calls 'having Israel's back.'
But Mr. Obama, as anyone who reads his books can tell, also has a sophisticated understanding of the world and America's place in it.
However the paper offered one caveat:
Mr. Obama's greatest deviation from current policy is also our biggest worry: his insistence on withdrawing U.S. combat troops from Iraq on a fixed timeline. Thanks to the surge that Mr. Obama opposed, it may be feasible to withdraw many troops during his first two years in office. But if it isn't -- and U.S. generals have warned that the hard-won gains of the past 18 months could be lost by a precipitous withdrawal -- we can only hope and assume that Mr. Obama would recognize the strategic importance of success in Iraq and adjust his plans.
Those concerns, as well as the hope of checking Iran’s influence, prompted U.S. commanders to recommend that a follow-on force in the tens of thousands remain in Iraq next year. Iraqi politics, and the agreement struck by the Bush administration mandating a full withdrawal at the end of 2011, made that tricky — but a conflicted Obama administration never tried very hard to strike a deal with Mr. Maliki. Now, having promised in 2008 to end the war “responsibly,” Mr. Obama seems to feel obliged to prematurely declare the war over — and to oversell the regime that U.S. soldiers are leaving behind.
In ten or eleven months, I have little doubt that the Washington Post will endorse President Obama for a second term. The question is whether it will be candid about the ways that the President has disappointed.
At issue is the "Istanbul process conference" talks with the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) about fighting Islamophobia. Suzan Johnson Cook, Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, offered the administration's opening remarks the other day. She said:
In this country, religious freedom is guaranteed in our Constitution’s Bill of Rights. We continue to work at improving respect for our religious diversity and protecting freedom of expression. Yet we continue to see individuals involved in acts of intolerance, and attempts to discriminate against other religious groups. They usually get wide coverage in our free press, and yet, we have freedom of expression and use effective measures to deal with these issues that are consistent with the steps recommended in Resolution 16/18. Complacency is not an option. Over the next three days, we seek frank discussions that will help our governments promote tolerance, combat discrimination and violence, and help us learn from each others’ experiences. Resolution 16/18 is a roadmap. Our agenda for the next three days is to explore how to use that map to implement the resolution in ways that will improve conditions for all of our citizens.
It does not appear that much of the conference will be open to the public, but Nina Shea was invited to the opening and closing sessions. She was discomfited by what she saw:
The three-day conference was closed to the public, but I was invited to its opening session (as well as to the closing session to be held on Wednesday) by virtue of my being a commissioner on the official but independent U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. “Chatham House Rules,” which State directed us to abide by, forbid releasing anything about a specific delegation or quoting for attribution. To speak more generally, then: Legal and security officials of a delegation which will remain unnamed gave a sweeping overview of American founding principles on religious freedom and how they have been breached time and again in American history by attacks against a broad variety of religious minority groups — including now against Muslims. A raft of current cases were mentioned; America’s relative exemplary and distinctive achievement in upholding religious freedom in an emphatically pluralistic society was not. That same speaker reassured the audience, which was packed with diplomats from around the world, that the Obama administration is working diligently to prosecute American Islamophobes and is transforming the U.S. Justice Department into the conscience of the nation, though it could no doubt learn a thing or two from the assembled delegates on other ways to stop persistent religious intolerance in America. Across the room, smirking delegates from some of the world’s most repressive and intolerant regimes could be spotted, furiously taking notes.
I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. The real test is what would happen if Bibi tried to speak at, let’s say, the University of Wisconsin. My guess is that many students would boycott him and many Jewish students would stay away, not because they are hostile but because they are confused.
Is there any difference between Friedman's sentiment and Walt and Mearsheimer's? Netanyahu got a standing ovation in Congress because Israel is popular with the American people. The pro-Israel lobby wouldn't be successful, if Israel did not already have grass roots support in the United States.
And Friedman's line about the University of Wisconsin ignores the anti-Israel dynamics on North American campuses. Nearly ten years ago, Netanyahu tried to speak at Concordia University but was prevented from doing so by protests. Given that Ahmadinejad was allowed to speak at Columbia University, anyone reasonable would conclude that (the hypothetical) opposition to Netanyahu on campus is not rational, but the result of especially virulent antisemitic activism.Academia and journalism are out of touch with the rest of the country.
In one paragraph Friedman ignores antisemitism in academia and feeds antisemitism in the political sphere.
Not content to stop there Friedman continues:
It confuses them to read that Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who met with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin of Russia last Wednesday, was quoted as saying that the recent Russian elections were “absolutely fair, free and democratic.” Yes, those elections — the ones that brought thousands of Russian democrats into the streets to protest the fraud. Israel’s foreign minister sided with Putin.
Not only is Friedman echoing the unhinged thesis of once serious academics, he criticizes someone else for misplaced admiration of tyranny. He's a hypocrite too.
Mrs. Clinton gives up whatever principles she might ever have had to suck up to Islam.
Last July in Istanbul, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton co-chaired a "High-Level Meeting on Combating Religious Intolerance" with the Saudi-based Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Mrs. Clinton invited the OIC to Washington for a conference to build "muscles of respect and empathy and tolerance." That conference is scheduled for Dec. 12 through Dec. 14.
For more than 20 years, the OIC has pressed Western governments to restrict speech about Islam. Its charter commits it "to combat defamation of Islam," and its current action plan calls for "deterrent punishments" by all states to counter purported Islamophobia.
...
OIC pressure on European countries to ban "negative stereotyping of Islam" has increased since the 2004 murder of Theo Van Gogh for his film "Submission" and the Danish Muhammad cartoon imbroglio of 2005. Many countries (such as France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Finland, Italy and Sweden), hoping to ensure social peace, now prosecute people for "vilifying" Islam or insulting Muslims' religious feelings.
Encouraging a more civil discourse is commendable, and First Amendment freedoms mean the U.S. won't veer down Europe's path anytime soon. But if the Obama administration is committed to defending constitutional rights, why is it, as the OIC's Mr. Ihsanoglu wrote in the Turkish Weekly after the Istanbul meeting, standing "united" on speech issues with an organization trying to undercut our freedoms? Mr. Ihsanoglu celebrates this partnership even while lamenting in his op-ed that America permits "Islamophobia" under "the banner of freedom of expression."
President Obama should put a stop to this nonsense and declare that in free societies all views and religions are subject to contradiction and critique—and the OIC must learn to tolerate that. The alternative is what the late Indonesian Muslim President Abdurrahman Wahid called "a narrow suffocating chamber of dogmatism."
Ah, but the problem is that she's only doing Obama's bidding....
Christian Europe destroying itself to destroy Israel
Bat Yeor has an amazing article on how Christian Europe is following the directives of the OIC and destroying itself in order to destroy Israel. These people are blind.
For three decades, Europe obeyed the OIC in a servile manner. The EU has effectively created a major problem for itself that is eating away and destroying it. The EU made Palestine the hub of its international policy, transforming it into a symbol of peace and universal harmony, in a world that would not know "justice" until its coming. The only obstacle to this paradise is the Machiavellian Israel, the oppressor and usurper of Palestine, whose purity as a peaceful victim is the harbinger of global justice.
Europe does not yet dare use armed force against Israel, whose existence it claims to defend, while advising it to commit suicide. Europe fights Israel with the infamous Nazi weapons by delegitimizing its existence, robbing it of its history, defaming it by propaganda, hatred and attempts to destroy its economy through boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS). Toward this goal it encourages an international campaign of incitement to hatred by financing anti-Israel NGOs and lobbies. Europe claims that Jewish existence in its ancestral homeland, Judea and Samaria, is an "occupation" - a colonization. In this way, Israel has become a state that is occupying its own historical homeland. In Orwellian language propagandists speak of "the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land" that is called Judea, and not of the ethnic and religious cleansing of Jews from their homeland through wars, expulsions, dispossession and the dehumanizing apartheid rule of dhimmitude. Euro-jihadists invoke "Palestinian resistance" rather than the reality of their terrorism that has spread throughout the planet. The EU has used every stratagem to force Israel to self-destruct in the name of Palestine. That destruction would lead to an era of "justice and peace" in the world in the same way the charnel houses of Auschwitz were meant to purify humanity from Jews.
What does Palestinization mean? Firstly, it means creating a people as a substitute for Israel, which takes over its history and therefore its legitimacy. From Palestinization (like the Nazification of Europe two decades before) comes the delegitimization of Israel, an intruder state in the region and in history, even in humanity. The Palestinization of history denies Israel’s identity, culture, historic and human rights within its homeland, including Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. For the OIC this process is part and parcel of Islamic theology, which regards the Bible as simply a falsified version of the Koran. According to Islam, biblical history is Islamic history, and the biblical characters we see represented in churches are all Muslim prophets who have virtually no connection with the facts reported in the Bible.
This context explains the Islamization of the Jewish and Christian religious heritage, an approach that involves denying the identity of these two religions, since Christianity views itself as emerging from Judaism, whose Scriptures it adopted. If the Bible is an Islamic account, Christianity too, and not just Judaism, are both falsifications of Islam. The negation of biblical history, with which Europe has assiduously linked itself by claiming that Israel is a colonizing intruder in its own homeland thereby challenges the historic rights of the Jews to their own homeland. This also negates Christian history and confirms the Koranic interpretation refuting the historicity of both the Torah and the Gospels.
Hence, if there was never a history of Israel or of the Gospels, but only the history of Ibrahim, Ishmael, Issa (the Koranic Jesus), if all the biblical kings and prophets were Muslim, in what is the West rooted? Would it not be in the Koran? That is the logical conclusion of Europe's choice, when, furious at the return of the Jews to Jerusalem in 1967, it deliberately decided to deny them their ancient capital. It attributed their heritage to those who, by a war of invasion, had illegitimately occupied it since 1948, expelling and dispossessing all its Jewish inhabitants. In a nutshell, if the Israelis are foreign colonialists, occupiers of their own country, it means they have no past, no history, and if Judaism is just a tissue of lies, the same applies to Christianity. If Israel never existed in the past, then its modern restoration is just a colonial deception to conquer territory to which it has no historical, religious or cultural claims, and so its destruction is justified. If history testifies to the contrary, then Europe becomes willingly responsible for the abominable crime of genocide – wiping out the past existence of a people in order to remove its current legitimacy and its human, religious, cultural and historical rights. This reflects the participation, organization and financing by European nations and the European Commission of an international campaign of incitement to hatred for the dismembering of Israel.
I take comfort in the fact that most of these kids don't look Jewish and hope that Jewish kids aren't as ignorant about the Middle East as these kids at UCLA.
The OIC's delegitimization campaign against Israel
Bat Yeor reports that the OIC's ongoing delegitimization campaign against Israel has notched another accomplishment with the declaration of Rachel's tomb as an 'Islamic holy site.'
The article is quite long, but I suggest that you read the whole thing. Bottom line: If the world is to be saved from the menace of Islam, both the OIC and the UN ought to be delegitimized.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
