December 24, 2014
All
too often critics of the
State of Israel have
been obsessed believers
of what they regard as
the truth or been guilty
of bad faith or
dishonesty. Some have
propounded lunatic
conspiracy theories of
Jews in the world and
Israelis today as
ruthless, treacherous
individuals whose
ambition and reach of
power have no limits in
time or space.
Palestinian
Arab and Islamic
authorities, in mixed
tones of envy and
hatred, relate the
accomplishments of the
detested people: Jews
have spread poison,
disseminated AIDS, and
convinced people of the
myth of the Holocaust –
that it never happened,
or that it was simply a
trivial incident in
which Nazis responded to
Jewish brutality. In
their quest for world
domination, the Israelis
have used extraordinary
devices: griffon
vultures carrying an
Israeli tracking unit;
sharks in the Arabian
Gulf with a GPS tracking
unit; a European
bee-eater with an
Israeli microchip.
We
have been informed by
reputable Palestinian
and Arab sources that
the leader of the
Islamic State of Iraq
and Syria is a Mossad
agent. Though they
might be reasonably
accused of paranoia,
some of those sources
have told us that Jews
are responsible for the
Boston Marathon bombing
on April 15, 2013, and
for the murder of 20
schoolchildren and six
educators in the
elementary school in
Newtown, Connecticut on
December 14, 2012.
In
view of this assessment
of unlimited Jewish
power, it is bewildering
to find that Jews in
general and the State of
Israel in particular are
not held responsible by
Palestinian and Islamic
representatives for some
contemporary activities.
Perhaps the behavior
most disconcerting for
those well- meaning
advocates of a
Palestinian state is the
friction, including
currently over the
collection of taxes,
between the Palestinian
groups Fatah and Hamas
and the violent
Palestinian
demonstrators against
UNRWA.
The
World Council of
Churches and Archbishop
Desmond Tutu have been
righteously concerned
with the blockade of
Gaza. In their
indignation they have
apparently not noticed
the Egyptian blockade in
December 2014 of the
Rafah crossing into the
Gaza Strip. The
well-meaning advocates
must be perplexed by the
Palestinian inefficiency
and irresponsibility in
failing to resolve the
strike by cleaners in
Gaza hospitals or the
mountains of garbage
there.
Israeli
behavior and power are
not blamed for the
refusal of Palestinian
President Abbas to visit
the Gaza Strip or for
the fact that his
ministers do so only
rarely. Even more
disconcerting is the
striking animosity
between Mahmoud Abbas
and Mohammed Dahlan, the
former leader of Fatah
in the Gaza Strip, where
he was born, now exiled
in the UAE. Neither
Palestinian has blamed
Israel for this
particular problem.
Abbas has told us that
Dahlan was partly
responsible for
poisoning and murdering
Yasser Arafat. In his
turn, Dahlan has told us
that Abbas is a
catastrophe for the
Palestinians.
Israel
has not been held
responsible for the
dismissal of the 2,000
Fatah members associated
with Dahlan from the
security forces in Gaza.
Other signs of friction
among Palestinian rival
groups, not only Hamas
and Fatah, are evident.
Gaza was the setting of
a number of public
activities organized by
Dahlan’s supporters that
marked the 10th anniversary
of the death of Arafat,
while Abbas refused to
engage in any such
commemoration.
Moreover, slogans
appeared in streets in
Gaza City, not in Tel
Aviv, alluding to Abbas
as “the symbol of
dictatorship and
surrender.” In December
2014, banners and
posters blamed Abbas for
the continuing suffering
in the Gaza Strip.
Israelis
do not visit Qatar. At
the meeting of the Gulf
Cooperation Council in
Doha, Qatar in December,
there were acute
differences of opinion
among the leaders of the
Gulf States over various
issues, especially the
ouster on July 3, 2013
of Egypt’s former
President Mohamed Morsi,
over the different armed
gangs in Libya, and in
support for the groups
fighting the regime of
President Bashar
al-Assad in Syria. The
most contentious
friction is between
Qatar on one side and
Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates on
the other.
At
the center of the
difference is how to
deal with the two
Islamic entities, Iran
and the Islamic Republic
of Iraq and Syria.
Qatar has been friendly
to the Muslim
Brotherhood, some of
whose members it has
sheltered, and thus to
the former ruler in
Egypt, and critical of
the present President
Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, and
uses the Al Jazeera
network as a propaganda
weapon.
Israeli
power seems not to have
extended to Asia or
North Africa. Pakistan
experienced a great
tragedy with the
Peshawar school massacre
on December 16, 2014 by
Taliban terrorists. It
has become aware of its
irresponsibility in
allowing its security
organizations to use
militant jihadist groups
in its actions against
India and Afghanistan.
The government now
recognizes that all
those groups must be
controlled. The rule
that has existed for
seven years imposing a
moratorium on the death
penalty for terrorists
has been ended. Some
changes have already
occurred since General
Raheel Sharif became
head of the army a year
ago, especially the
offensive starting in
June 2014 against the
jihadists in the North
Waziristan area.
In Nigeria, the
brutal Islamic terrorists
Boko Haram have kidnapped
hundreds of young men and
women, the worst incident
being 276 schoolgirls on
April 14, 2014. They have
carried out massacres in
marketplaces, caused the
deaths of more than 16,000
people, created
checkpoints on highways,
destroyed mosques, and
imposed harsh Islamic law
in the 11,000 square miles
they control. At last,
Nigeria’s military has
been reacting, using
Russian-made helicopter
gunships and surveillance
planes.
Israel
has been careful in
respecting the truce
between it and Syria.
It was long assumed
that the July 2012
bombing in Syria – the
attack on the regime,
and especially on the
National Security Bureau
that killed senior
officials including
Assad’s brother-in-law,
General Assef Shawkat –
was the result of
opponents of the regime.
As a result, Assad
became more aggressive
and used chemical
weapons against
opponents and civilians.
Now allegations have
appeared that the
bombing was connected
with and organized by
the Assad regime because
of the differences
between the Assad family
and its allies on one
side and Syrian
officials such as former
General Manaf Tlass, in
favor of negotiations
with rebel groups, on
the other.
As
a result of Assad’s
actions, more support
was obtained from Iran
and Hezb'allah in
defending the regime.
The result of this was
more success for Assad’s
forces, causing a
dramatic rise in the
number of deaths to
200,000 and also the
displacement of millions
of Syrians from their
homes. Brutality in
Syria, a failed state,
has become
indiscriminate and
chaotic.
Israel,
like all democratic
countries, has its
faults, but slavery is
not one of them. The
Global Slavery Index of
2014 calculates that
35.8 million people are
presently enslaved in
the world. It lists the
ten worst countries with
the highest percentage
of population as slaves.
In order, they are
Mauritania, Uzbekistan,
Haiti, Qatar, India,
Pakistan, the Republic
of the Congo, Sudan,
Syria, and the Central
African Republic.
Slaves in the Middle
East countries amount to
2.1 million: in four of
the countries, Qatar,
Syria, the UAE, and
Iraq, more than 1
percent of the
population is enslaved.
The
worst country in the
world is Mauritania. It
was the last state in
the world to abolish
slavery, which it did in
1981. Yet though it
nominally criminalized
slavery in 2007, slavery
has never been
completely condemned
there. Among the total
population of 3.5
million, a number,
variously calculated to
be between 150,000 and
300,000, are slaves.
It
is unfortunate that the
“international
community” and the
United Nations
organizations have not
appreciated and tried to
deal with these
distressing issues.
They should remember
there is a world outside
Palestine.
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