It just doesn't get any clearer or simpler than this. Gov. Palin has made one of the strongest pro-Israel statements of any sitting political figure in the US today. After starting with a somewhat cliche but still relevant comment of "preventing another Holocaust" as a justification to befriend Israel (language probably from an advisor) Gov. Palin then went on to make a value statement usually left presumed in comments made by "pro-Israel" US politicians. In fact, it would be nice to see more Israeli elected officials with such clear convictions as these. Saying "Israel is the good guy" is a welcome and significant break from the current administration's Pali-state support.
It is this sort of basic goodness, decency of character and common sense the American people are known for which has made Gov. Palin an overnight sensation. To hold such fundamental views as Gov. Palin expresses is a throw-back to a day before America was inundated with PC leftism. One wonders what sort of crisis or conflict would be needed to make Barack Obama make a decision between what is good and what is bad or what is right and what is wrong. In Obama's world, it is more important to talk to the bad and accommodate the evil. In Gov. Palin's world, the bad is shunned and good is upheld. The 2008 Presidential election will determine whether American traditional values as represented by McCain-Palin will confront an increasingly dangerous world and shaky international economy or the message of accommodation and retreat represented by the Obama-Biden ticket will re-shape America's charge of leadership into a role of back bench observer.
(IsraelNN.com) "We shouldn't second guess Israel's security efforts because we cannot ever afford to send a message that we would allow a second Holocaust," Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin said in a television interview for CBS. "Israel has got to have the opportunity and the ability to protect itself. They are our closest ally in the Mideast. We need them. They need us. And we shouldn't second guess their efforts," the Alaska governor added.
"It is obvious to me who the good guys are in this one and who the bad guys are. The bad guys are the ones who say Israel is a stinking corpse and should be wiped off the face of the earth," Palin explained.
Below is yet another documented article in the parade of warnings about Barack Hussein Obama. Welcome Aboard. This post makes the guilt by association argument in greater depth than my own Barack Obama Myths Facts and Obfuscating. Well done Mr. Williams. Someone reading the Williams article and not being even slightly concerned about democratic candidate Obama's past connections and judgment would have to either be on the Obama payroll or on drugs. There are too many inconsistencies, too many bad calls, too many rotten associations, and too many racist antiJews in Obama's past to ignore. See also a nice post from Protein Wisdom - O!bama Doodles! documenting the close connections between BHO and terrorist William Ayers. Here is a sneak peak:
The CAC’s basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.
One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama’s “recruitment” to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.
The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism.[...]
Guilt by Association? - JB Williams - The New Media Journal -September 25, 2008 The long list of evil Obama associates seems to grow daily and although Obama has spent the last few years dodging questions, ignoring demands for full open disclosure of his past and making excuses about a plethora of bad associations, one fact seems glaringly obvious...Obama has far more to hide than to share!
A Christian?
For months, despite his Arab Muslim name and background, Obama told the public via his surrogates in the press, that he was not a Muslim but a devoted Christian and he offered as proof, his twenty year membership in the Rev. Wright’s church of radical racism, where he and wife Michelle were married, their children were baptized and the Obama family sat in a pew for twenty years without ever noticing that they belonged to a radically anti-American church of racism.
Such a story begs a great lapse in judgment on the part of the listener...
Only after “the new media” released actual video footage of the Rev. Wright’s weekly tirades against “white America” did he reluctantly denounce his pastor of twenty years, claiming that this was not the Rev. Wright he had known, and that the founder and pastor did not speak for the church...
Then “the new media” released video of the new pastor who replaced the suddenly retiring Rev. Wright, and his vitriolic racist rhetoric was no different.
In the end, he left the church and denounced his pastor of twenty years, as well as the congregation he raised his children around. This was his proof of a Christian life? America looked the other way....
A Community Organizer?
Listed as the sole accomplishment on Obama’s résumé was “community organizing.” So, people naturally wanted to know what his community organizing was all about.
That’s when the names Saul Alinsky and William Ayers surfaced. Saul Alinsky was the father of the communist practice known as “community organizing,” the practice of exploiting poor and under-educated communities through race-baiting and class warfare. William Ayers is of course the famed convicted terrorist from left-wing homegrown terror organization Weatherman.
The basis for this particular group of community organizers is the communist strategy of exploiting poor, youthfully ill-informed and easily manipulated pockets of the population into mobilizing on behalf of their organizers’ agenda. In this case, Alinsky and Ayers set the radical left-wing agenda.
Though the initiative operated under the cover of a Vietnam era anti-war movement and Students for a Democratic Society, connected to the Black Panther movement and several other college campus initiatives led by the Communist Party, it was nothing more than standard run-of-the-mill communist propaganda parties aimed and exploiting the ignorant into moving the leftist agenda forward.
While Ayers is a prominent figure due to his bombing of government buildings, acts he still believes were justified today, the most famous member of the movement was infamous convicted murderer, Charles Manson.
This was Obama’s community organizing years in a nutshell. Radical leftists and Black Nationalists, all of whom operated violent illegal activities in opposition to American principles and values, in particular, capitalism. This is where Obama met the radical Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It’s also where he first came in contact with other radicals operating in common. Meanwhile, the leftist American press continued to look the other way.
Birds of a Feather?
During the early years of radical left-wing community organizing efforts, William Ayers and his father Thomas came into cooperative contact with the Black Panther’s and Black Panther behind the scenes mentor Donald Warden, known today as Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, the name he took when he adopted the radical Wahabbi Muslim faith through friends in the Saudi Royal family.
In a March 2008 TV interview, former Malcom X lawyer and Harlem burough president Percy Sutton named Khalid al-Mansour as the manchurian puppetmaster behind Barack Hussein Obama. He told of how al-Mansour was raising money for the education of Barack Obama, and asked Sutton to write a letter of recommendation to Harvard University on Obama’s behalf.
Politico blogger and Obama supporter Ben Smith immediately sought, received and printed a “ family retraction” of Sutton’s TV statements on the Politico blog. Newspapers across the country ready to run with the story of a manchurian candidate groomed by Saudi Royal family deal maker al-Mansour stopped dead in their tracks, biting on the Sutton retraction effectively manufactured by Smith in a rush to defend his candidate, Barack Obama.
However, the alleged Sutton retraction, issued by former Hillary Clinton Harlem campaign chief Kevin Wardally, turned out to be fake. When questioned about the retraction by NewsMax investigative journalist Ken Timmerman, official Sutton family representatives answered, “that neither Mr. Sutton or his family had ever heard of Kevin Wardally.”
”Who is this person?” asked Sutton’s assistant, Karen Malone. When told that he portrayed himself as a “spokesman” for the family, Malone told NewsMax, “Well, he’s not.”
Wardally refused to retract his false retraction, stating to NewsMax that, “he had been retained by a nephew of the elder Sutton, who is in our office almost every week.”
Timmerman reports, “Wardally works for Bill Lynch Associations, a Harlem political consulting firm. The nephew, Chuck Sutton, no longer works with the elder Sutton at Inner City Broadcasting, but for a high-tech start-up called Synematics.”
Still, nothing in the left-wing lamestream press about a growing number of miscreants who appear to be lying on behalf of the Obama campaign, including campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt...
The Harvard Law Grad?
The combination of ill-fated coincidences and shady characters surrounding what increasingly appears to be a corrupt Obama campaign is now leading honest investigative journalists like Ken Timmerman at NewsMax to ask more obvious questions.
Like, how did a poor black boy from a broken home, who never held down steady work or disclosed student loan information on his tax returns, managed to pay for seven years of the most expensive schooling in the country?
In searching for answers to this and many other obvious questions, reporters have received the runaround from Obama campaign spokespersons who can’t seem to stop cornering themselves in blatant contradictions.
While the Obama campaign continues to use his Harvard years as a centerpiece for a White House bid which he claims to be an “open book,” his Harvard records remain under lock and key, beyond the reach of journalists seeking to know more about a man who wants to be President of the United States.
Why won’t Obama sign a release for his college records at Harvard, Columbia or Occidental? And why is the left-wing lamestream press still silent on all of it? The answers should be obvious to everyone by now.
Guilt by Association?
In a candidate with no real relative experience on his résumé, the company he has chosen to keep over the years may be the only means of knowing what the man actually believes in. Yet the man is desperate to run from almost every associate he has ever known. This is because his life is filled with personal associates whom have a very public history of highly anti-social and very anti-American backgrounds.
The public has a right and good reason to know if Barack Hussein Obama is the Manchurian candidate of the Saudi Royal Family and at present, all evidence certainly points in that direction. At a minimum, there are way too many unanswered questions regarding an endless string of less than acceptable associations.
As a general rule, people who hide things have something to hide.
When Obama’s twenty year pastor and mentor became a racially charged public disgrace, Obama cried “guilt by association.”
When Obama was caught lying about the depth and breadth of his personal relationship with Weatherman terrorist William Ayers, he again cried “guilt by association.”
When former Black Panther lawyer Percy Sutton connected Obama to Black Panther mentor and Saudi front man Khalid al-Mansour, Obama cried “guilt by association” yet again.
When the nation learned that Obama’s “community organizing” was nothing more than Alinsky style communist bent Black community rabble-rousing in an effort to manipulate the most easily manipulated segments of our population, Obama cried “foul and more guilt by association.”
As Obama is linked to Arab Muslim after Arab Muslim, and mountains of money pour in from all over the globe through more than 500 campaign bundlers, with no means of backtracking where all of that money is really coming from, Obama runs for cover and redirects press attention away from himself by sending an army of investigators to Alaska to dig up (or invent if necessary) dirt on Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
Meanwhile, nobody in the left-wing lamestream press is asking a single serious question of the Obama campaign and there is NO mass public outcry for full disclosure from the candidate who is running on “full disclosure.”
Scumbags of a Feather Sink Together?
Best I can tell from all available evidence, Barack Hussein Obama is the Manchurian candidate of the Saudi Royal Family.
He has been propped up for years by Black Nationalists, former Black Panther thugs, Wahabbi wealth and communist sympathizers masquerading as Alinsky styled “community activists” who have bilked the poorest and most unsuspecting members of society out of their freedom and liberty in pursuit of left-wing political power.
Dr. Khalid al-Mansour is certainly capable of being the official puppet master behind what is clearly a puppet presidential candidate. More than forty years of political alignments by al-Mansour demonstrate that he is a brilliant individual, of great wealth and power, extraordinarily well connected, with a hardcore anti-American agenda and a life long desire to seat the first Black Nationalist President, maybe even operating under the command and control of the Saudi family that made al-Mansour the international power-broker he is today.
We have lots of facts, lots of questions and very few forthright answers here. We have all seen Obama’s alleged intellect disappear the minute he is without a teleprompter. He’s only eloquent when someone is feeding him words. So, who is feeding Obama those words?
Rev. Wright, Father Pfleger, Percy Sutton, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Saul Alinsky, William Ayers, Donald Warden (aka Dr. Khalid al-Mansour), pro-Palestinian Rashid Khalidi, Antoin 'Tony' Rezko, Nadhmi Auchi, Joseph Aramanda and Louis Farrahkan.
These names and more like them are repeatedly intertwined with Obama’s entire adult life over the last twenty odd years. The list of Obama associates is distinguished and consistent. Consistently corrupt, radically leftist, racially charged and anti-American...
When one has nothing but evil associates in his past, it is very difficult not to draw the natural conclusion that this individual, with such a long history of association with a multitude of corrupt friends, complete with very anti-American rap sheets, is also corrupt and anti-American at best.
Obama has the power to lay all such suspicions to rest by simply offering full disclosure of his brief but busy background.
Yet for some reason, Obama continues to run from his past and his past associations, leaving investigative journalists crisscrossing the country kicking over rocks and following trails that would lead any honest critical thinker to conclude that Obama is nothing he reports himself to be.
With each passing day, investigative journalists uncover another and then another Obama connection to leftist corruption, Arab money and tyrannical communist friends. If Obama refuses to answer the questions directly by fully opening up his life, he does so at the risk of allowing reporters and the voting public to draw their own conclusions from whatever evidence they are able to uncover on their own.
Meanwhile, the “candidate of full disclosure” can not run on his own “full disclosure” since he has offered no disclosure concerning his life.
People working around the clock to hide their past generally have something in their past worth hiding. People willing to open up their past for all to see, generally have nothing to hide.
His defenders call it guilt by association. But try running a Republican candidate who sat in the pew of a White Supremacist church for twenty years, hung out with skin heads on weekends and was groomed and funded for twenty years by Fidel Castro and see how long it takes leftists and their press to lynch that candidate by way of his associations...
Unless and until Obama is ready to stop running from his past, I suggest that every honest investigative journalist in America spend the next few weeks kicking over every rock around Obama and Dr. Khalid al-Mansour. At the moment, all evidence implicates Obama as a left-wing Saudi puppet and al-Mansour as the Saudi puppet master.
If this is the basis upon which Obama wants American voters to make their November decision, so be it. But losing in November won’t be the result of “racism.” It will be the result of life long “guilt by association” and the fact that Obama refused to answer a plethora of very real and reasonable questions about his past.
If he won’t explain the vast number of ill-conceived relationships, he will sink with his friends, including those in the lamestream press, who stopped being the unbiased eyes and ears of the people years ago.
I sincerely hope that Obama decides to open his résumé up to the standard scrutiny expected in every run for the highest office in the land. But I won’t be holding my breath...
Ok. There are a few rules we need to understand about President Bush's new Iraq. The point is that just because the government may be freely elected it doesn't mean that:
The country or government will be Jew friendly
Just laws will be passed
Un-just laws will be overturned
All democratically elected states will have the same interests
Armed conflict is always avoidable between two states with democratically elected leaders
Having said all that, the world is certainly safer and Israel definitely safer after Saddam Hussein's rope burn swing. Iraq will determine its own future. For now, US security interests will benefit from the new Iraq. Such assurances may not, in the future bear fruit. I, for one, will not be a bit surprised, if Iraq survives as a state that one day, a stronger, democratically elected Iraqi government will take the lead in organizing another region effort to oppose the "Zionist Entity". Does that mean the war was a mistake? Heck no. It is just as likely that Iraq doesn't hold it together, breaks into sectarian conflict for an extended time and eventually ends up ruled by another dictator. Only time will tell whether that dictator is more Saddam Hussein or OBL.
As to the subject of the article, Israel should offer al-Alusi amnesty. There is after all a difference between free, democratic, and just. Much of the world misses this point.
First his two sons were murdered. Now he faces prosecution. The reason for Mithal al-Alusi's troubles? Visiting Israel and advocating peace with the Jewish state - something Iraq's leaders refuse to consider.
The Iraqi is at the center of a political storm after his fellow lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to strip him of his immunity and allow his prosecution for visiting Israel - a crime punishable by death under a 1950s-era law. Such a fate is unlikely for al-Alusi, though he may lose his party's sole seat in parliament.
Because he had visited Israel, many Iraqis assume the maverick legislator was the real target of the assassins who killed his sons in 2005 while he escaped unharmed.
Now he is in trouble for again visiting Israel and attending a conference a week ago at the International Institute for Counterterrorism.
"He wasn't set to speak, but he was in the audience and conversed with a lecturer on a panel about insurgency and terrorism in Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel," said conference organizer Eitan Azani. "We didn't invite him. He came on his own initiative."
Al-Alusi has a German passport, allowing him to travel without visa restrictions imposed on other Iraqis. Lawmakers accused him of humiliating the nation with a trip to the "enemy" state.
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor called the reaction to al-Arusi's visit "very distressing" and said it was sad this was the response to someone who merely visited Israel and was interested in a dialogue with it.
"It is very unfortunate that the reaction was so violent and aggressive," he said. "It adds nothing."
Palmor said Israel was appreciative of al-Alusi's "courage," and that the reactions to his visit were an example of the extremism that was plaguing that country and leading to so much bloodshed there.
The uproar shows how far Iraq has moved from the early US goal of creating a democracy that would make peace with Israel and remove a critical force from the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The US Embassy declined comment. "It is an issue for the Iraqi parliament, not the US Mission to Iraq," said spokesman Armand Cucciniello.
"What has happened was a catastrophe for democracy," Al-Alusi told The Associated Press in an interview in his Baghdad home. "Within an hour's time, the parliament became the policeman, the investigator, the judge, the government and the law. It was a sham trial."
Al-Alusi said he went to Israel to seek international support for Iraq as it struggles against terrorism, and insisted that the outcry reflected Iranian meddling in Iraq's internal affairs - an accusation often leveled by Sunnis like himself against Iraq's mostly Shi'ite neighbor.
"Iran is behind Hamas and Hizbullah and many other terrorist organizations. Israelis are suffering like me, like my people. So we need to be together," he said. "Peace will have more of a chance."
Iraq sent troops to three Arab wars against Israel, and fired Scud missiles at it in the 1991 Gulf War. It remains technically at war with the Jewish state. Iraq's once-thriving Jewish community has shriveled to just a few people, most having fled after Israel was established in 1948.
It seems according to this story running on Arutz Sheva, that silly politics has become more important than defending Israel.
Since the anti-Ahmadinejad at the UN rally has become a political affair, it should be cancelled. If Jews cannot even get together and use what ever means possible to protest the terrorist from Teheran, and in Elul nonetheless, it is better not to even try.
This failure to even schedule speakers, (yes all who can help should come, Hillary as well as Gov. Palin) is embarrasing. Iran and all islamic facist terrorists are strengthened by our divisions and dis-unity.
And, thanks democrat-liberal Jews for finally admitting that your political agenda comes before the well-being of your brethren in Israel. And to the democrats in general, thanks for your whole hearted support of the Jewish people. The parted curtains reveal a petty political organization of easily offended operatives who hold by “my way or the highway”. I call upon the democrat party to send a high level representative to NY, (if the event is not cancelled) possibly even one of the two candidates on their presidential ticket and I call upon the organizers to re-invite Sarah Palin. Don’t force the conclusion upon the world that you only care about Israel and the Jews when it is politically convenient to do so.
Iran and the madman must be stopped but more importantly, the unification of the Jews must begin. The first goal cannot be met until the second goal is achieved.
I remember attending the big Soviet Jewry rally in DC in the late 80's. Politicians from across the spectrum spoke and to my knowledge, no one was axed due to party affiliation. HaShem should have mercy on his people.
Today is 9/11. Many people are taking a vacation from politics to honor the fallen, to re-visit the horrible day in 2001 where America received a wake up call for ignoring the threat of Islamic facism.
Today as we remember the fallen, we warn the jihadists and would-be jihadists in the words of Ronald Reagan, you can run but you can't hide. And for this reason, it is appropriate not to pause from politics, but to consider how to defend America in the future. Who will put country before the UN? It is clear that only 1 candidate seeking the office of President of the United States understands war and will not shy away from defending America. One candidate will not make offers of no pre-condition talks with madmen, nations, people and religions which do not seek peace with America but capitulation from her. In the words of Fred Thompson, supporting John McCain:
Here McCain makes his own vivid impression. His record shows that, early on, he understood the ominous intentions of Russia’s leaders, made the Iranian mullahs fear him and foresaw the need for a troop surge in Iraq, which, along with his own military service and longtime Armed Services Committee membership, add up to real national security experience.
By contrast, voters struggle with his opponent’s virtually nonexistent record on these issues. It comes down to a common sense decision that says: With national security traffic so heavy, this is not the moment to turn the car keys over to a teenage driver. Presidents don’t have time for drivers ed.
Although Americans are used to Labor Day campaign kickoffs, this year’s back-to-back political conventions meant exposure to more than the usual number of partisan promises of a bright future and excoriation of the opposition.
So, while most of us who address the national conventions like to think our words will make all the difference for our party and the great American who is our nominee, in reality our speeches usually just blend into a kaleidoscope of impressions the public takes from the week’s events.
That is why, in my own convention speech, I tried to tap into a sentiment already established in the public mind. I talked about John McCain’s remarkable and heroic record as a POW. But I also talked about the John McCain that I got to know while sitting in the desk next to his on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
Citing any senator’s record, however impressive, may or may not electrify convention delegates. But it was my way of laying down a marker on behalf of a theory I have about both conventions and campaigns in general. Even amid a convention’s staged bedlam and overly hortatory speeches, voters do pick up information that develops into lasting impressions that count for something on Election Day.
The pundits and the political class sometimes underestimate the extent to which the public, in its subliminal but thorough way, collects data and makes informed electoral decisions. In a broader sense, voters carry into the polling booth this ultimate question about presidential candidates: “Who do I trust to make the right decision?”
Key issues for voters in this election will be freedom and national security, and here their impressions will be vivid: rogue nations with rapidly developing nuclear capabilities, nuclear-armed nations in volatile regions such as India and Pakistan, traditional nuclear powers such as Russia flexing their muscles and threatening the liberty and stability of those around them, and China building up its military in a way that suggests it wants to beat the United States in more than gold medals.
Here McCain makes his own vivid impression. His record shows that, early on, he understood the ominous intentions of Russia’s leaders, made the Iranian mullahs fear him and foresaw the need for a troop surge in Iraq, which, along with his own military service and longtime Armed Services Committee membership, add up to real national security experience.
By contrast, voters struggle with his opponent’s virtually nonexistent record on these issues. It comes down to a common sense decision that says: With national security traffic so heavy, this is not the moment to turn the car keys over to a teenage driver. Presidents don’t have time for drivers ed.
On the economy, voters have the same impression of McCain that I had on the Senate floor, where he fought plenty of fiscal battles. Some he lost. Some he won. Sometimes his colleagues liked him for it. Sometimes they most decidedly did not like him for it.
But the impression left with voters is, again, one that contrasts with his opponent’s. The McCain record shows he often stood alone in understanding that long-term prosperity of the American people requires us to stop wasting and spending the birthright of the next generation. And he knows, as his opponent does not, that you don’t make the American people prosperous by making the government richer and that, in an economic downturn, you don’t impose the largest tax increase in American history.
Finally, an issue McCain has asked me to help his campaign with — the federal judiciary — is one that disturbs voters to the point of having enormous electoral possibilities. The federal judiciary is the Democratic Party’s vehicle of choice to enact policies that could never see the light of day if they were required to go through the democratic process. And that party now talks about electing a supermajority in the Congress that, along with the most liberal president in our lifetime, would allow them to change the face of America without enacting one piece of legislation — a change that would take us a generation to rectify, if we ever could.
McCain has chosen to make this issue a priority because he thinks the public worries about a Supreme Court lost to liberalism for our lifetime, and that it cares about the appointment of federal judges who will follow the law and the Constitution and not remake it along the lines of their own policy preferences.
McCain’s opponent has carefully worked his way up the political ladder, guided by no discernible political principles except adherence to party positions — which he has showed a willingness to change if the political winds blow too strongly against them. By contrast, McCain’s life and career exemplifies courage, sacrifice and leadership.
Put simply: Others talked about reaching across the aisle and reconciling differences; John McCain did it. Others went along with pork barrel spending and getting the political benefit from it; John McCain fought it. Others wanted to declare defeat and cut and run in the central front of the war on terrorism; John McCain fought for a strategy that would ensure victory. Others gave lip service to reform; John McCain actually made it happen.
So impressions matter in politics — as do the facts and the record that create those impressions. Through all the convention hoopla and focus on the Electoral College horse race, then, the impressions of John McCain come through. Impressions of the same John McCain who lit up the political atmosphere last week with a startling and brilliant choice for running mate, the impressions of a lifetime record summed up by a word: leader. And a title: Mr. President.
Children's Poetry Booklet Recalled After Arabs Complain (Israeli censorship kowtows to Arabs. When Will We Tell The Truth Without Fear)
(IsraelNN.com 7 Sivan 5768/June 10, '08) Ynet's web site and Arab complaints against a ten-year-old boy's poem about terrorists has resulted in the recall of all of the Nes Ziona municipality's children's poetry booklets.
Ynet boasts that its coverage of the poem resulted in its being recalled.
The text of the poem (Ynet's translation):
Ahmed's bunker has surprises galore: Grenades, rifles are hung on the wall. Ahmed is planning another bombing!What a bunker Ahmed has, who causes daily harm.Ahmed knows how to make a bomb. Ahmed is Ahmed, that's who he is, so don't forget to be careful of him.We get blasted while they have a blast!Ahmed and his friends could be wealthy and sunny, if only they wouldn't buy rockets with all their money.
Poetry competition director Marika Berkowitz, who published the booklet, was surprised at the protests and told Ynet: "This is the boy's creation and this is what he wanted to express. Of course there should be a limit, but I think the there is no racism here. 'Ahmed' is a general term for the enemy. These are the murmurings of an innocent child."
The Education Ministry told Ynet: "The local authority that published the booklet should have guided the students in a more correct manner through the schools. The district will investigate the issue with the local authorities."
The Bare Basic Facts of the History of Palestine. Louis Rene Beres - Feb 21, 2009 The Jewish Press President Barack Obama has already placed the Middle East at the very top of his foreign policy agenda. There is nothing inherently wrong with this - quite the contrary. The problem, however, is that the new administration's ambitious negotiations remain structured upon altogether erroneous assumptions. In this connection, the gravest continuing misrepresentation of all is that there are Arab lands under an Israeli occupation.
Today, as always, words matter. Over the years, a notably durable Arab patience in building Palestine upon whole mountains of Jewish corpses has drawn directly upon a prior linguistic victory. Yet, the still generally unchallenged language referring provocatively to an Israeli occupation always overlooks the pertinent and logically incontestable history of the West Bank (Judea/Samaria) and Gaza.
Perhaps the most evident omission still concerns the precise and unwitting manner in which these Territories fell into Israel's hands in the first place. Here it is simply and widely disregarded that occupation followed the multi-state Arab state aggression of 1967. Egypt Syria or Jordan, of course, never disguised this aggression.
A sovereign state of Palestine did not exist before 1967 or 1948. Nor, did UN Security Council Resolution 242 ever promise a state of Palestine. Contrary to popular understanding, a state of Palestine has never existed. Never. Even as a non-state legal entity Palestine ceased to exist m 1948 when Great Britain relinquished its League of Nations mandate. During the 1948-49 Israeli War of Independence (a war of survival fought because the entire Arab world had rejected the authoritative United Nations resolution creating a Jewish State), the West Bank and Gaza came under flagrantly illegal control of Jordan and Egypt, respectively. These Arab conquests did not put an end to an already-existing state or to an ongoing trust territory. What these aggressions did accomplish was the effective prevention, sui generis, (Being the only example of its kind; unique) of a state of Palestine.
Let us return to an earlier history. From the Biblical Period (ca 1350 BCE to 586 BCE) to the British Mandate (1918 - 1948), the land, named by the Romans after the ancient Philistines was controlled only by non-Palestinian elements. Significantly, however, a continuous chain of Jewish possession of the land was legally recognized after World War I at the San Remo Peace Conference of April 1920. There, a binding treaty was signed in which Great Britain was given mandatory authority over Palestine (the area had been ruled by the Ottoman Turks since 1516) to prepare it to become the national home for the Jewish People. Palestine, according to the Treaty comprised territories encompassing what are now the Jordan and Israel, including the West Bank and Gaza.
Present day Israel comprises only 22 percent of Palestine as defined and ratified at the San Remo Peace Conference. In 1922, Great Britain unilaterally and without any lawful authority split off 78 percent of the lands promised to the Jews - all of Palestine east of the Jordan - and gave it to Abdullah, the non-Palestinian son of the Sharif of Mecca. Eastern-Palestine now took the name Transjordan, which it retained until April 1949, when it was renamed as Jordan. From the moment of its creation, Transjordan was closed to all Jewish migration and settlement - a clear betrayal of the British promise in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and a patent contravention of its Mandatory obligations under international law.
On July 20, 1951, a Palestinian Arab assassinated King Abdullah for the latter's hostility to Palestinian aspirations and concerns. Regarding these aspirations, Jordan's moderate King Hussein - 19 years later, during September 1970 - brutally murdered thousands of defenseless Palestinians under his jurisdiction. In 1947, several years prior to Abdullah's killing, the newly-formed United Nations, rather than designate the entire land west of the Jordan River as the long-promised Jewish national homeland, enacted a second partition. Curiously, because this second fission again gave complete advantage to Arab interests, Jewish leaders accepted the painful judgment.
As readers of The Jewish Press already know all too well, the Arab states did not. On May 15, 1948, exactly 24 hours after the State of Israel came into existence, Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League, declared to a tiny new country founded upon the ashes of the Holocaust: This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre. This unambiguous declaration of genocide has been at the core of all subsequent Arab orientations toward Imoderate' Fatah. Even, by the strict legal standards of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Arab actions and attitudes toward the microscopic Jewish state in their midst, has remained patently devoted to the annhilation of Israel. For some reason, this persistence has repeatedly been made to appear benign. However, President Obama and Senator Mitchell now have a clear obligation to look behind these propagandistic appearances.
In 1967, almost 20 years alter Israel's entry into the community of states, the Jewish state, as a result of its unexpected military victory over Arab aggressor states, gained unintended control over West Bank and Gaza. Although the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war is properly codified in the UN Charter, there existed no authoritative sovereign to whom the Territories could be returned. Israel could hardly have been expected to transfer them back to Jordan and Egypt, which had exercised unauthorized and terribly cruel control since the Arab-initiated war of extermination in 1948-49. Moreover, the idea of Palestinian self-determination had only just begun to emerge after the Six-Day War, and, significantly, had not even been included in UN Security Council Resolution 242 which was adopted on November 22, 1967.
For their part, the Arab states convened a summit in Khartoum in August 1967, concluding "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it." The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed three years earlier, in 1964, before there were any Israeli Occupied Territories. Exactly what was it, therefore that the PLO sought to liberate between 1964 and 1967? This critical question should now be considered by Barack Obama's special envoy to the region, Senator George Mitchell.
This has been a very brief account of essential historic reasons why the so-called Palestinian Territories are not occupied by Israel. Several other equally valid reasons stem from Israel's intrinsic legal right to security and self-defense. As I have said so often in this column, international law is not a suicide pact. Because a Palestinian state would severely threaten the very existence of Israel- a fact that remains altogether unhidden even in the Arab media and governments - the Jewish State is under no binding obligation to-end a falsely alleged occupation. No state, not even a Jewish one, can ever be required to accept complicity in its own dismemberment.
No doubt, both President Obama and Senator Mitchell want to be fair and evenhanded in their developing plans for the Middle East. To meet this obligation, however, it is essential that they first build all pertinent negotiations upon a firm foundation of historical accuracy and ethical truth. This means, at a minimum, the aspiring US peacemakers must familiarize themselves with correct history, and not simply allow themselves to be swallowed up with their many predecessors in ritualistic dogma and empty platitudes.
LOUIS RENE BERES was educated at Princeton (Ph D, 1971) and is a long-time expert in international relations and international law.
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