Diehl: Abbas playing a waiting game.

In our meeting Wednesday, Abbas acknowledged that Olmert [unbeknownst to the public, made a peace offer.] In all, [according to the details revealed by Abbas] Olmert's peace offer was more generous to the Palestinians than either that of Bush or Bill Clinton; ... Abbas turned it down [flat]. --Jackson Diehl

By Jackson Diehl, Deputy Editorial Page Editor, Washington Post
Friday, May 29, 2009

Mahmoud Abbas says there is nothing for him to do.

True, the Palestinian president walked into his meeting with Barack Obama yesterday as the pivotal player in any Middle East peace process. If there is to be a deal, Abbas must (1) agree on all the details of a two-state settlement with the new Israeli government of Binyamin Netanyahu, which hasn't yet accepted Palestinian statehood, and (2) somehow overcome the huge split in Palestinian governance between his Fatah movement, which controls the West Bank, and Hamas, which rules Gaza and hasn't yet accepted Israel's right to exist.

Yet on Wednesday afternoon, as he prepared for the White House meeting in a suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City, Abbas insisted that his only role was to wait. He will wait for Hamas to capitulate to his demand that any Palestinian unity government recognize Israel and swear off violence. And he will wait for the Obama administration to force a recalcitrant Netanyahu to freeze Israeli settlement construction and publicly accept the two-state formula.

Until Israel meets his demands, the Palestinian president says, he will refuse to begin negotiations. He won't even agree to help Obama's envoy, George J. Mitchell, persuade Arab states to take small confidence-building measures. "We can't talk to the Arabs until Israel agrees to freeze settlements and recognize the two-state solution," he insisted in an interview. "Until then we can't talk to anyone."

For veterans of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Abbas's bargaining position will be bone-wearyingly familiar: Both sides invariably begin by arguing that they cannot act until the other side offers far-reaching concessions. Netanyahu suggested during his own visit to Washington last week that the Palestinians should start by recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, though he didn't make it a precondition for meeting with Abbas.

What's interesting about Abbas's hardline position, however, is what it says about the message that Obama's first Middle East steps have sent to Palestinians and Arab governments. From its first days the Bush administration made it clear that the onus for change in the Middle East was on the Palestinians: Until they put an end to terrorism, established a democratic government and accepted the basic parameters for a settlement, the United States was not going to expect major concessions from Israel.

Obama, in contrast, has repeatedly and publicly stressed the need for a West Bank settlement freeze, with no exceptions. In so doing he has shifted the focus to Israel. He has revived a long-dormant Palestinian fantasy: that the United States will simply force Israel to make critical concessions, whether or not its democratic government agrees, while Arabs passively watch and applaud. "The Americans are the leaders of the world," Abbas told me and Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt. "They can use their weight with anyone around the world. Two years ago they used their weight on us. Now they should tell the Israelis, 'You have to comply with the conditions.' "

It's true, of course, that if Obama is to broker a Middle East settlement he will have to overcome the recalcitrance of Netanyahu and his Likud party, which has not yet reconciled itself to the idea that Israel will have to give up most of the West Bank and evacuate tens of thousands of settlers. But Palestinians remain a long way from swallowing reality as well. Setting aside Hamas and its insistence that Israel must be liquidated, Abbas -- usually described as the most moderate of Palestinian leaders -- last year helped doom Netanyahu's predecessor, Ehud Olmert, by rejecting a generous outline for Palestinian statehood.

In our meeting Wednesday, Abbas acknowledged that Olmert had shown him a map proposing a Palestinian state on 97 percent of the West Bank -- though he complained that the Israeli leader refused to give him a copy of the plan. He confirmed that Olmert "accepted the principle" of the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees -- something no previous Israeli prime minister had done -- and offered to resettle thousands in Israel. In all, Olmert's peace offer was more generous to the Palestinians than either that of Bush or Bill Clinton; it's almost impossible to imagine Obama, or any Israeli government, going further.

Abbas turned it down. "The gaps were wide," he said.

Abbas and his team fully expect that Netanyahu will never agree to the full settlement freeze -- if he did, his center-right coalition would almost certainly collapse. So they plan to sit back and watch while U.S. pressure slowly squeezes the Israeli prime minister from office. "It will take a couple of years," one official breezily predicted. Abbas rejects the notion that he should make any comparable concession -- such as recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, which would imply renunciation of any large-scale resettlement of refugees.

Instead, he says, he will remain passive. "I will wait for Hamas to accept international commitments. I will wait for Israel to freeze settlements," he said. "Until then, in the West Bank we have a good reality . . . the people are living a normal life." In the Obama administration, so far, it's easy being Palestinian.

The two-state solution illusion

May 27, 2009

“There is no partner on the Palestinian side,” Toameh says.


While Ottawa’s political leaders were meeting on Parliament Hill Tuesday with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, a group of businessmen (no women, for some reason) met for lunch in downtown Calgary with Khaled Abu Toameh, the Arab-born West Bank and Gaza correspondent for the Jerusalem Post. And while the Conservatives condemned Israel's settlements as an obstacle to a peaceful "two-state solution", with Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and Abbas also mouthing support for the same vision for Israel and the Palestinians, Toameh couldn’t help but chuckle. “I laugh when they talk about a two-state solution,” he said. “It’s unreal. It’s not going to work. But we all have to say we support it, maybe because that’s what [U.S. President Barack] Obama wants.”

Toameh—in town as a guest of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy—doesn’t dismiss the idea for the same reasons as Hamas, which considers Israel a temporary, alien cancer to be mercilessly excised from the Muslim Middle East, not co-existed with. He dismisses it because, as those living in the territories well know, the Palestinians cannot even co-exist with themselves, let alone with Israel. Since Yassir Arafat died—“the only good thing he ever did,” Toameh says—life for the average Palestinian has gone from miserable to worse; the territories descended into low-intensity civil war, with 2,000 Palestinians killed in the last three years amidst the political and revenge-motivated attacks of Hamas on Fatah and Fatah on Hamas, as well as the marginal mayhem of terrorist groups such as the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades and the Popular Resistance Committees. For the first time, more Palestinians are killed from internecine violence than in conflicts with Israel. Election promises first by Abbas and then by Hamas of an end to corruption, lawlessness, poverty, and failure have all proven lies, Toameh points out: each has assumed power—Fatah in the West Bank, Hamas in Gaza—only to show themselves to be as abusive, crooked and ineffectual in building a civil society as Arafat was. Neither party enjoys credibility or actually governs in any real sense the anarchic territories, where unemployment exceeds 60%—though Hamas is at least closer to legitimacy, enjoying far more popular support than Abbas does (Palestinians see Western support for Fatah as Zionist meddling, he says, driving them further into the arms of Hamas and other jihadists). “Abbas doesn’t even have power in downtown Ramallah, where he works and lives,” he says.

A two-state solution sounds pleasant to Western ears. It seems the proper thing for Canadian politicians to say. Certainly the media would pillory Harper and Ignatieff were they to refuse to play along. But were Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to endorse the plan tomorrow—as Barack Obama wants as precondition to helping Israel resist Iranian nuclear agression—it would be utterly meaningless. “There is no partner on the Palestinian side,” Toameh says. Israel's West Bank settlements are no obstacle, he adds; they are a red herring: a minor issue that Jerusalem will easily handle—based on its readiness to dismantle its settlements in the past—when the moment is right. That time is not now, and is not coming soon. Because, in today's environment, whatever proposed peace agreement is backed by Abbas would only be instantly rejected by Hamas, and any deal with Hamas—were any possible—reflexively rejected by Fatah. And neither group has much validity in citizens' eyes, he reports. In fact, Toameh mischievously suggests Netanyahu might be clever to try what Obama wants and publicly back a two-state plan immediately, if only to put the Palestinians and international peace-plan backers “in a corner” by revealing to all how truly impossible implementing anything of the sort would be under the current circumstances.

The international community’s error, says Toameh, is that it seems to think statehood is something to be handed to Palestinians, like a gift. It is, he believes, an undeserved one. “I believe a state is not something we should be given, it is something we should earn,” says the West Bank-born journalist. Far from demonstrating a capability to create a functioning, responsible civil society, he says, Palestinians have only proven their willingness to tolerate chaos, mob-rule and terror. They watched as, instead of building hospitals and schools and infrastructure with the billions sent to Ramallah and Gaza, Arafat lined his own pockets, Fatah fattened its cronies, and Hamas purchased weapons. On the one hand, Palestinians have fallen again and again for rotten leadership, which in turn, do their best to suppress the emergence of more responsible alternatives. On the other, Toameh seems to suggest that the Palestinians are getting the government they deserve. “Everything is going in the wrong direction, largely because of the failure of Palestinians to hold [their] government accountable,” he says.

This is not a happy fact for Toameh. He’s convinced that with the right leadership following the death of Arafat’s terror-minded kleptocracy, and with so much enthusiasm on the part of the international community—including Israel—to help create a modern, functional Palestinian state, there is no reason that, with the implementation of democratic, transparent and accountable institutions, the Palestinians could not have built themselves a new Hong Kong or Singapore. Were Western donor countries to insist upon those very elements in exchange for all their aid dollars, they could have helped make it so. Instead Canada, the U.S. and Europe have merely sponsored one lousy dictator over another. And instead, the Palestinians have opted to make for themselves a new Afghanistan, a savage playground of corrupt warlords and Islamist fanatics. The world already has enough states like that. And any so-called solution that proposes to create another is no solution at all.

New York: More than a thousand attend rally for Shalit

05.27.09,

More than a thousand people, mostly young adults, held a rally opposite the Red Cross Headquarters in New York City on Wednesday in protest of the conditions of captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit's imprisonment.


"We are fighting for Gilad's human rights. How can it be that Hamas prisoners in Gaza receive visitations and proper (living) conditions while Gilad is rotting in jail without our knowing how he is," Protest organizer Hagit Hadar told Ynet.

 

Stop ignoring Islam's antisemitic doctrine: Bronx bomb plot  reminds us of a core religious problem

By Andrew Bostom
Special to NYDailyNews.com       Wednesday, May 27th 2009,

"These were people who were eager to bring death to the Jews and the Jewish community." Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Snyder provided this apt characterization of the four converts to Islam whose plans to bomb a Bronx synagogue and a Jewish community center were thwarted.

Richard Williams, uncle of the arrested plotter Onta "Hamza" Williams, lamented that his nephew, a Baptist who converted to Islam, "…wasn't raised this way. All this happened when he became a Muslim in prison." Indeed, Warith Deen Umar, a Muslim chaplain who worked for 25 years in the New York State prisons and was considered a highly influential cleric, reportedly boasted that this vast incarceration system was, "...the perfect recruitment and training ground for radicalism and the Islamic religion." During his chaplaincy, Umar also repeatedly gave sermons fomenting Jew hatred, witnessed by prison staff.

But beyond all this, the obvious question persists - although dutifully avoided by our learned religious, media and political elites in this sorry age of Islamic correctness: What Islamic teachings might these American Muslim converts have learned, whether in prison, or elsewhere, which caused them to target their American Jewish neighbors, specifically, for mass killing? Simply put, it is impossible to comprehend this ugly phenomenon without understanding the core, mainstream Islamic theology - still unreformed and unrepentant - which has inspired hatred of Jews since the advent of Islam?

For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, has served as the academic shrine - much as Mecca is the religious shrine - of the global Muslim community. Al Azhar University and its mosque represent the pinnacle of Islamic religious education.

A front page New York Times story published Saturday Jan. 10, 2009, included extracts from the Friday sermon (the day before) at Al Azhar mosque by Egyptian-government appointed cleric Sheik Eid Abdel Hamid Youssef. Referencing well-established antisemitic motifs from the Koran (citations provided, below), Sheikh Youssef intoned:

"Muslim brothers, God has inflicted the Muslim nation with a people whom God has become angry at [Koran 1:7] and whom he cursed [Koran 5:78] so he made monkeys and pigs [Koran 5:60] out of them. They killed prophets and messengers [Koran 2:61/3:112] and sowed corruption on Earth. [Koran 5:33/5:64] They are the most evil on Earth. [Koran 5:62 /63]"

In authoritative classical and modern Koranic interpretations, the Koran's central antisemitic theme - its eternal curse for "prophet killing" and violating Allah's commands - is coupled to Koranic verses 5:60 and 5:78, which describe the Jews' transformation into apes and swine (5:60), or simply apes (i.e. verses 2:65 and 7:166), having been "...cursed by the tongue of David, and Jesus, Mary's son" (5:78). The Muslim prophet Muhammad himself repeats this Koranic curse in a canonical hadith (sacred collections of Muhammad's words and deeds).

Moreover, just before subduing the Medinan Jewish tribe Banu Qurayza and orchestrating the mass execution of their adult males, Muhammad invoked Koran 2:65/7:166, addressing these Jews, with hateful disparagement, as "You brothers of apes." Finally, Islamic end of times theology teaches that the dawning of the messianic era cannot begin until the Jews are violently exterminated en masse. Both Shiite and Sunni Muslims invoke the infamous hadith attributed to Muhammad: "The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: 'Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him.'" Each Friday this genocidal hadith is quoted in sermons across the Islamic world, including among U.S. Muslim communities.

In February 2008, Franco Frattini, the European Union official responsible "for combating racism and antisemitism in Europe," revealed that Muslims - who comprise 4% of the European population - were responsible for fully half (50%) of the documented antisemitic incidents in continental Europe. Thus, on a population percentage basis, Muslims in Western Europe already accounted for roughly 25 times the number of Antisemitic incidents as their non-Muslim European counterparts.

When the late 23 year-old Parisian Jew Ilan Halimi was being tortured to death in February 2006, his Muslim captors reportedly phoned his family and made them listen to the recitation of verses from the Koran, interspersed with Ilan's background screams of agony. In the heart of Western Europe, Halimi's torturers-murderers did not invoke any non-Islamic sources of anti-Jewish hate - only the Koran.

Unless and until we confront the menace of theologically-motivated Islamic Jew hatred, we are missing the point. Despite continuous interfaith dialogue sessions, Jewish leaders in Europe and America never demand a mea culpa from their Muslim interlocutors for the living legacy of doctrinal Islamic Jew hatred, whose ugly consequences are evident on a daily basis. Their dereliction of duty is shameful.

Bostom (www.andrewbostom.org) is the author of "The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism."

Iran's Ahmadinejad rejects Western nuclear proposal
Mon May 25, 2009 11:15am EDT

"Our talks (with major powers) will only be in the framework of cooperation for managing global issues and nothing else. We have clearly announced this," Ahmadinejad said."The nuclear issue is a finished issue for us," he told a news conference.

By Parisa Hafezi and Zahra Hosseinian

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday rejected a Western proposal for it to "freeze" its nuclear work in return for no new sanctions and ruled out any talks with major powers on the issue.

The comments by the conservative president, who is seeking a second term in a June 12 election, are likely to further disappoint the U.S. administration of President Barack Obama, which is seeking to engage Iran diplomatically.

The United States, Russia, China, France, Germany and Britain said in April they would invite Iran to a meeting to try and find a diplomatic solution to the nuclear row.

The West accuses Iran of secretly developing atomic weapons. Iran, the world's fifth-largest oil exporter, denies the charge and says it only wants nuclear power to generate electricity.

Breaking with past U.S. policy of shunning direct talks with Iran, Obama's administration last month said it would join nuclear discussions with Tehran from now on.

Ahmadinejad proposed a debate with Obama at the United Nations in New York "regarding the roots of world problems" but he made clear Tehran would not bow to pressure on the nuclear issue.

"Our talks (with major powers) will only be in the framework of cooperation for managing global issues and nothing else. We have clearly announced this," Ahmadinejad said.

"The nuclear issue is a finished issue for us," he told a news conference. "From now on we will continue our path in the framework of the (U.N. nuclear watchdog) agency."

He was asked about a so-called "freeze-for-freeze" proposal first put forward last year under which Iran would freeze expansion of its nuclear program in return for the U.N. Security Council halting further sanctions against Tehran.

....

Netanyahu: No new W. Bank settlements
May. 24, 2009 THE JERUSALEM POST

Amid a flurry of comments among politicians regarding the possible evacuation of numerous unauthorized outposts in the West Bank, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu vowed on Sunday not to build new settlements while assuring that "natural growth" will not go unanswered.

"We are obliged to protect the law," he said during the weekly cabinet meeting. "We won't establish new settlements, but there is no logic in not providing an answer to natural growth."

Prior to the meeting, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that nearly two dozen illegal outposts in the West Bank will be dismantled, with force if necessary.

"There are 26 illegal outposts - declared as such by the Talia Sasson Commission - which the [Ariel Sharon] government promised the Americans would be evacuated," he told ministers. "But this isn't the issue between us and the Americans, and us and the Palestinians, rather first and foremost amongst ourselves.

"This is an issue of the rule of law in the state, and the authority of the law over its citizens," Barak continued. "We have evacuated three outposts, come to an understanding with another, and have not allowed any additional outposts to be constructed.

"The 22 additional outposts must be taken care of now, and in a responsible and correct way," the defense minister said, "first by trying to work something out with negotiations, and if that's not possible, through unilateral means, including the use of force."

Arrested Islamists planned to attack Jews in Morocco

May 21, 2009 Agence France Presse

RABAT (AFP) — A group of alleged Islamists recently arrested in Morocco planned to attack Jewish interests in the country, a court source said Thursday, citing the charges against them.

The suspects, alleged to be members of a cell that was part of the radical Islamist movement Salafia Jihadia, were also preparing attacks against Moroccan security services, the source said.

Details of the alleged attack plans were not available.

The cell -- Jamaat Al Mourabitine Al Jodod, or New Fighters Group -- allegedly began operating in March 2008 in southern Morocco and sought to recruit militants from Koranic schools with the intention of infiltrating political parties.

Authorities announced their arrest on May 12 and they face charges including forming a criminal gang with the aim of carrying out "terrorist" acts. They are being held in jail.

"Police dismantled the cell as part of a regular operation in the battle against terrorism," the court source said.

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