Category Archives: Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

What Distinguishes Israelis From Their Neighbors

Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Palestinian Authority

Personally, I’ve already heard from Israeli friends and family who’re disgusted at the suspected revenge murder of Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khder, 16—revenge for the murder of three Israeli teens, last month. Now, contrary to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ weak response to the abductions and murders that sparked this last savage act, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telephoned the father of the east Jerusalem teenager, to say the following:

In a statement, Netanyahu’s office said he had spoken with the teenager’s father, Hussein Abu Khder, to offer his condolences and express his outrage over the “abhorrent” murder a day after the security forces confirmed arresting six Jewish extremists on suspicion of involvement.
“I would like to express my outrage and that of the citizens of Israel over the reprehensible murder of your son,” Netanyahu told him.
“We acted immediately to apprehend the murderers. We will bring them to trial and they will be dealt with to the fullest extent of the law,” he said.
“We denounce all brutal behaviour. The murder of your son is abhorrent and cannot be countenanced by any human being.”
The family, who live in Shuafat in east Jerusalem, contacted police just before dawn on Wednesday to say they believed their son had been kidnapped.
His body was discovered shortly afterwards in a forest in west Jerusalem, with initial post-mortem results indicating he was burned alive.

On the matter of the murder of Abu Khder, I venture that Netanyahu speaks for a majority of the Israeli people.

One State: Is It The Solution Or The Final Solution To The Jewish State?

English, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Neoconservatism, Palestinian Authority

For at least a decade now, Ambassador Yoram Ettinger has been sending me his newsletter. The Ettinger Report is devoted to debunking the myth of Palestinian demographic superiority. Thus the idea that the fertility rates of Israeli Jews are gaining on and even greater than those of the Palestinians is hardly new.

Cut to the Mark Levin Show. The other day I heard a whiny woman talking Israel with the host. It tuns out the woman was the neoconservative writer Caroline Glick, whom I had never heard before. She was promoting her Levin-endorsed book, The Israeli Solution, in which the fertility and immigration rates on which Ettinger had been reporting for years serve as the basis for Glick’s support for a “One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East,” namely a one-state solution.

The Jewish fertility rate has increased as the Palestinian rates have collapsed along with those of the Muslim world as a whole. Israeli Jews now have higher fertility rates than the Arabs of Judea and Samaria, (3.04 vs. 2.91 children per woman). Israel’s immigration rate is high and rising. Palestinian emigration rates have skyrocketed over the past decade.

Why does the one-state solution follow from “the demographic good news,” as the writer puts it? (Doesn’t “the good demographic news” make for a better-ordered sentence?)

I read Glick’s FrontPage article hoping to find a decisive argument as to why the author has concluded that, in the absence of the threat of death by demographics–a one-state solution would be in Israel’s best interests.

I found nothing of the sort in Glick’s rather weak (and not terribly well written) article.

Michael Scheuer: Let The Russians Or Chinese Deal With Middle-East

Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, libertarianism, Middle East, Terrorism

“A pox on all of them,” says former head of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden tracking unit, Michael Scheuer. “…What could be better than to let the Russians or the Chinese deal with the Middle-East mess?” We’ve borne the burden for long enough. “In the past we bet on tyranny. That’s gone. As is our influence.”

AND, “We have managed to turn a democratic election in Egypt into a disaster for the US. We’ve helped put the military back in power and aggravated an enemy that could be very powerful, as have we opened the way to civil war in Egypt. Time to cut aid to the whole lot, Israel too.”

Or, as this writer put it, “Frankly, My Dear Egyptians, I Don’t Give a Damn.”

Especially accurate is what Scheuer had to say about John McCain and Lindsay Graham, the neoconservative senators whose positions are in opposition to the interests of the American people (whether the latter know it or not): “The two might as well be sitting in the Israeli Knesset.”

UPDATED: The Fox Is Guarding The Chicken Scoop [Sic] (On Other Crypto-Leftist Conservatives)

Bush, Conservatism, Critique, Ethics, IMMIGRATION, Intelligence, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Journalism, Media, Propaganda, Republicans

Last week, the once relatively forthright Jim Pinkerton cheerily informed Fox News Watch viewers that the media did a bang-up job in covering the Boston bombing, when the truth was exactly the opposite.

This week, Mr. Pinkerton belatedly changed his story, recounting the embarrassment of April 17, which Barely A Blog reported well before Big, Dishonest Media did:

Over the course of a few hours today (April 17), the hysterical and histrionic US media—front men and women for CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and the rest—have gone from asserting the arrest of a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, to screening amateur images of their fantasy felon, to decamping to the courthouse in expectation of an arraignment, to confessing without a smidgen of shame that nothing of the sort had transpired.
We lied. OK, we fibbed. Let’s move on. Quick. There is to be no meta reporting about the misreporting.

Pinkerton went on to shill for Fox News, incorrectly crediting Megyn Kelly (I don’t care if I’ve misspelled her ridiculous name) with breaking the story about the brothers Tsarnaev as welfare recipients. Nonsense. As I chronicled in this week’s WND column, The Boston Herald did that shoe-leather reporting, not whatshername Kelly.

And as for the oozing over the odious George Bush: The entire Fox News Watch panel partook.

They call themselves “Fox News Watch”! It’s more like the Fox guarding the chicken scoop [sic].

Fox News mediated another magic meeting of the minds when it sent ditz Dana Perino to interview her ex-boss George Bush, who, sadly, has seen fit to emerge from hiding.

That chick is dumb.

Good for Tom Brokaw for refusing to attend the Annual White House Sycophants’ Dinner, held tonight. “It’s a sickening specter: Some of the most pretentious, worthless people in the country—in politics, journalism and entertainment—get together to revel in their ability to petition and curry favor with one another, usually to the detriment of the rest of us.”

UPDATE (4/27): MORE CONSERVATIVE CRYPTO-LEFTISM.

Mr. Pinkerton, who used to be a straight shooter, is an editor at The American Conservative. Recently, a prominent leader on the Old Right commented that TAC “has moved far to the left of The Nation.”

Yeah, Leon Hadar sounds as boring, redundant and ridiculous as Joan Walsh of Salon, when he suggests ever so subtly that Republicans “are hostile toward immigrants and toward Americans who are non-white and non-Christian.” (For a correction, read “The D-Bomb Has Dropped,” for example.)

You can locate a non sequitur in almost every one of Noah Millman’s lightweight, bloodless blogs. The eyes glance over the stuff in speed-read mode, savoring not a thing—not a turn of phrase or an original insight—as the mouth opens in a yawn.

Never boring, Larry Auster, RIP, was nevertheless not the rigorous “thinker” that a leaderless, desperate, dumbed-down traditionalist movement is casting him as, posthumously. But boy!, was Larry 100% perceptive in assessing, to quote Auster, the “founding editor of The American Conservative (known here as The Paleostinian Conservative), Scott McConnell, who has twice endorsed Obama for president yet continues to call himself a conservative.”

On this front, the 2006 “Final Solution to the Jewish State” preceded Larry in deconstructing the dissembling manner in which “TAC’s editor and publisher “introduc[ed his] readers to ‘Palestinian Liberation Theology.'”