Israel Vs. "Palestine": The Crux of the Matter

It is discussed here, by Mario Loyola (who I like to think of as a sort of anti-Neil Macdonald):

Settlements are not the reason that the two-state solution is “now in jeopardy,” as Secretary of State John Kerry put it in his mea non culpa speech last week. There is only one reason the two-state solution is in jeopardy, or more accurately dead, and that is Muslim terrorism against innocent Jews. There is only one reason for the harsh security measures imposed in the occupied territories, and that is Muslim terrorism against innocent Jews.  

There is only one reason for the continuing conflict between Israel and its neighbors, and that is Muslim terrorism against innocent Jews. A century of terrorism by Muslims against the Jews of Palestine — at first organic, then incited by the Soviets, and now propelled by political Islam — is the essence of this conflict and the only reason that it persists. Muslims extremism has now become a worldwide problem, claiming victims and threatening liberty on every continent except Antarctica. It is time to reshape U.S. policy on the whole Middle East, including Palestine, on the basis of a new principle, namely the decisive defeat of Muslim extremism.

Hear, hear!

The Definition of a Thankless Job: Being a Cop in Cologne, Germany

If you're wondering why there was no repeat of last year's New Year's Eve antics in Cologne, Germany--"over a thousand women...robbed or sexually assaulted" by young Muslim men--it's because this year police were more prepared for them. But even with ten times more cops on hand than last year, "police themselves were most surprised that they needed to call in reinforcements." That's because they had to deal with 1,000 or so men, "repeat offenders"/wannbe gropers, who arrived in town on the 10 p.m. train.

You would think that such preparedness would earn kudos from Germans. Instead, some are complaining about "racial profiling," especially since the cops have taken to calling these, er, repeat offenders "Nafris"--short for "North Africans."

Silly Germans. If anything, "Nafri" is a politically correct euphemism.

Used by people who are afraid to say the word "Muslims."

John Podesta's Diabolically Tricky Password That Took Putin's Top Hackers Weeks to Crack

Just kidding. His password was "password" (h/t: MW).

In a Feat of Wishful Thinking, CBC Israel-Loather Neil Macdonald Sees Israelis Overrun By a Spiraling Arab Birthrate

The Ceeb's Neil Macdonald, who has never been a fan of Israel (far from it, in fact), gins up the fear that Israel will effectively become an apartheid state should the "two state solution" fail and the Arabs' birthrate overtake the Jews', an inevitability, he says:

Having colonized the West Bank, Israel can proceed with whatever its plans are for the Palestinian underclass governed by the Israeli military. 

Because what to do with that underclass is the real issue. 

Right now, 1.4 million Palestinians are Israeli citizens, in a population of eight million. There are at least 2.4 million more Palestinians in the West Bank. Annex the West Bank, and you annex a great many of them. And then what? Offer them citizenship? Don't forget, Palestinians have a significantly higher birth rate than Israelis. At some point, perhaps as soon as 2020, the aggregate Palestinian population in Israel and Gaza and the West Bank will exceed the Jewish population.  

So, what will Israel do? Forcibly transfer them to tiny Bantustans? Difficult. More likely, there will be three echelons of residents: full Jewish citizens, many of whom immigrated from abroad, indigenous Arabs with Israeli passports and millions of indigenous Arab residents with no real rights at all.  

There is a term for that sort of political system, and it's ugly.

You know what's really ugly? The Ceeb's persistent anti-Israel bias.

So in an effort to dispel Neil's fear and rage/doom and gloom re the disastrous demography, here's an opposing view:

Critics of Israel love to exploit Jewish fears and anxieties. The most extreme resort to Holocaust inversion, boycotts, blacklists, and other singling-out methods reminiscent of Europe’s anti-Semitic past. Secretary of State John Kerry likes to wave around the threat of Israel’s demographic extinction. 

Acute Israeli sensitivity on this matter came to the fore in the late 1960s, when Israeli rule over the newly won Gaza Strip and West Bank was thought by many to be untenable owing to much-higher Palestinian birth rates. If Israel chose to annex the territories, it would be obliged either to disenfranchise their Palestinian inhabitants, making Israel undemocratic, or extend the vote and watch Israel’s Jewish majority turn into a minority. For Israel to remain both a democratic and a Jewish state, according to the conventional wisdom, it would have to give the territories up. “The womb of the Arab woman,” the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat famously said, was his “best weapon.” 

Fast-forward five decades. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), the number of (non-Jewish) Arabs living in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem (4.62 million) and in Israel (1.68 million) for the first time matches the number of Jews (6.3 million). Taking into account still-higher Palestinian birthrates, as neatly graphed out in a September 2016 full-page New York Times advertisement by a pro-Palestinian group, the Jewish population in the expanse of territory “from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River” is projected to decline to 44 percent in 2030. 

In his drive to wrest Israeli concessions he believes will break the Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic logjam, Secretary Kerry has repeatedly warned of a demographic doomsday for Israel. “How does Israel possibly maintain its character as a Jewish and democratic state when from the river to the sea, there would not even be a Jewish majority?” he warned last December. Time is “running out” for Israel, Kerry maintains, insinuating that Arabs will be even less likely to accept a Jewish state as part of the former Palestine mandate once they become an overall majority, instead returning to their demand for a “one-state” solution. Israel then winds up “either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens — or … a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state.” 

But time is not running out, at least not for Israel...

Thankfully, however, it is running out for the likes of John Kerry and Neil "Eeyore" Macdonald.

Beam Him Up, Scotty!

Depending on your viewpoint, that's either an unfortunate or an unintentionally hilarious juxtaposition of images on the NatPo's front page (newsprint version) today. 

Allow me to describe it for you.

At the top, there's a photo of the starship Enterprise, a promo for a piece inside about "The economics of Star Trek." Beneath it is a close cropped shot of about 3/4 of our youthful PM's body, one hand held aloft in what could be a hearty greeting; then again, it could be him miming "aye" to the question, "Which world leader could appear on the cover of Non-Threatening Boys Magazine?" To his left is this headline--"It's 2017: Should you know WHERE YOUR minister IS?" (Obviously, the online headers are slightly different.)

As per the imagery, that's easily answered: he's somewhere out in deep space.

UK's Feckless Extradition Efforts: It Can't Get Rid of an Algerian Jihadi No Matter What

File this one under "Western die-versity."

One Singular German Sensation

Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' becomes German bestseller year after reprint

NYT's Anti-Israel Bias on Full Display in Cockamamie Editorial--AND in a Later "Correction"

In the wake of Obama's last minute anti-Israel shenanigans at the UN, an editorial in the New York Times came up with various reason "why Netanyahu will (supposedly) miss Obama." (To which the only sane response is: Bibi will miss Obama--like a hole in the head, like a thorn in his tuches, like the Ayatollah Khamenei would "miss" Israel should he be able to obliterate it via nuclear means.)

According to the editorial, this is one of the things that Netanyahuu will "miss"--and one in which the paper's skewed bias is on prominent display (my bolds):

Or take Mr. Trump’s campaign commitment to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem, satisfying longstanding Israeli calls to recognize an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state — but also angering Palestinians and Muslims around the world. Like the visit by Ariel Sharon to what Jews call the Temple Mount (and which Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary) in 2000, which prompted the second intifada, moving the embassy is a symbolic step that could have substantial repercussions.

Thus does the New York Times breathe new life into the long-discredited canard that former PM Sharon--and not eliminationist Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat--was responsible for unleashing that bloody Jew-killing campaign.

This isn't the first time the NYT has purveyed this particular fiction. It was flagged by blogger Elder of Ziyon when he read it in the paper's obit for Shimon Peres last September. Here's what was printed at the time:

Mr. Peres, Mr. Rabin and Arafat were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.

But the era of good feelings did not last. It was shattered in 2000 after a visit by the opposition leader Ariel Sharon to the sacred plaza in Jerusalem known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. The next day, the Israeli police fired on stone-throwing protesters, inaugurating a new round of violence that became known as the second intifada.

Again with the "Noble Sanctuary" stuff. Why, it's almost as if that's how the Obama-besotted New York Times (and Obama) views it, too.

But wait--surely by now the paper's error has been pointed out to it, and the appropriate better-late-than-never correction has been made:

Correction: December 29, 2016
An earlier version of this article misstated Ariel Sharon’s public role at the time of his September 2000 visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City. He was leader of Israel’s opposition Likud Party, not prime minister.

Guess not.

Calling All Toronto Area "Tikkun Olam"-Balkers: Let's Show Up At This One

Why Are American Jews Losing Their Love for Israel? Blame It on the Lure of the Hellenistic and "Tikkun Olam"

It's an age-old conflict, one that's perhaps best exemplified by the Channukah story: Hellenized Jews longing to blend in with the non-Jewish majority versus Jews like the Macabees, who insist on the right to their own particularism, and who are determined to fight for it.

Here's Elliott Abrams discussing two new books which examine the widening divide between Hellenistic Jews in America, who want to drop the tribalism and embrace the "tikkun olam"/"social justice" agenda for the greater good of mankind in general, and Israeli Jews, who, like the Macabees of old, insist, dammit!, on their right to Jewish particularity and self-determination:

[T]hese concerns about exclusively Jewish problems and threats to Jewish communities abroad did not override, or sit comfortably with, the liberal and universalist impulses that remained powerful among American Jews. The American Jewish Committee (AJC) and other leading organizations had created a synthesis that was meant to substitute for Jewish parochialism. In this conception, the particular interests of  Jews would be best protected not by tribalism, i.e., by focusing exclusively on fighting anti-Semitism and rescuing endangered Jews, but by creating a more just society, in which all forms of bigotry would be countered and destroyed, and by forging a world order built on peace, justice, and law. Thus, the AJC, in an internal memo quoted by Barnett, resolved “as a matter of enlightened self-interest, to interest ourselves in situations involving other minorities, even though Jews are not primarily affected.” During the 1960s, Barnett writes, the AJC’s American Jewish Year Book “often gave more prominence to the civil-rights movement than to Israel.” 

This cosmopolitan outlook was itself consonant with the “prophetic Judaism” that had long been the hallmark of the Reform movement; today, it is increasingly the religion of all non-Orthodox American Jews. Tikkun olam, “repairing the world” through action for “social justice,” is regarded by many American Jews as more important than actually observing Jewish rituals or supporting Israel. It is also necessarily in tension, sometimes more and sometimes less, with the need and the desire to protect Jews who are in danger. When Israel or some other community of Jews seems at risk—as during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, for example, or when the Soviet regime was sending “refuseniks” to Siberia for the crime of seeking to learn Hebrew and move to Israel—the tribal instinct may appear to dominate, at least for a time. Still, that impulse is itself often framed in terms of universal themes like the concern for international human rights, the right to emigrate, the right to freedom of religion, and so forth. 

Today, Barnett writes, when fewer Jews seem to be in physical danger, certainly in this country, and with Israel regarded as a major Middle Eastern power, many American Jews see no need whatsoever for the tribal approach. After all, “in 1914, 76 percent of all Jews lived in illiberal lands . . . [but] now a minuscule 3.5 percent live in authoritarian countries [while] 96.5 percent live in liberal democracies.” No wonder, then, that the “prophetic” or “cosmopolitan” outlook has prevailed, or that to some extent (again, Barnett is cautious about the “accepted wisdom”) American Jews are “losing their love for Israel.” He puts it this way: “there are forces at home and in the world that are leading American Jews to return to a political theology of prophetic Judaism, and an Israel that is increasingly acting like an ethnonational state is not the best outlet for such cosmopolitan longings.”

Add to that the most recent inter-marriage stats, which are, to say the least, alarming, and there's little doubt that non-Orthodox "tikkun olam"-orientated American Jews are fated to become, sorry to have to say it, the latest of the Jews' lost tribes.

Best Quip Du Jour

Obama suffers from "Waldheimer's Disease."