The Incoherent Excuses for Hating Israel

by Bruce S. Thorton // FrontPage Magazine

Photo via www.marketoracle.co.uk
Photo via www.marketoracle.co.uk

Israel’s military operation to degrade Hamas’ ability to rain rockets down on Israeli cities has stirred up the usual noisy and nasty protests in Europe. We need not dwell on demonstrations by Muslim immigrants, whose genocidal Jew-hatred has been an Islamic tradition for 14 centuries. More revealing is the hatred of Israel by so many Europeans, ranging from leftover leftists and idealizers of the dark-skinned “other,” to far-right xenophobes and morally addled Christians. Whatever its origins, one thing their bitter hatred of Israel does not have is any foundation in coherent principle.

Continue reading “The Incoherent Excuses for Hating Israel”

Moral Equivalence, Moral Idiocy

by Bruce Thornton // FrontPage Magazine

Image by © marco bottelli/Demotix/Corbis
Image by © marco bottelli/Demotix/Corbis

Scenes all too familiar from the Arab conflict with Israel have followed the murder last Wednesday of a 16-year-old Palestinian, Mohammed Abu Khdeir. Mourners at his funeral chanting the Muslim war-cry “Allahu Akbar” as they carry the boy’s open coffin, the crowd shouting slogans like “Intifada rise up” and “America and Israel are the terrorists,” banners representing terrorist organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad waving above the crowd, gangs of “youths” attacking Israeli police throughout East Jerusalem, barrages of rockets fired from Gaza into Israel, and the usual condemnations of Israel and calls for “restraint” from the “international community” – all sadly are business as usual. And the “business” is the demonization of Israel and the obscene double standards indulged by too many in the West.

Continue reading “Moral Equivalence, Moral Idiocy”

Our Bad Habit of Negotiating with Terrorists

by Bruce Thornton // FrontPage Magazine

Photo via Wikicommons By Chris Brown
Photo via Wikicommons By Chris Brown

 

Every parent should be happy for the Bergdahl family, whose son was returned to them after five years of captivity among the Taliban. But every parent is not the president of the United States, whose primary responsibility is to protect the security and interests of all Americans, both now and in the long-term. The release of 5 “high-risk”––a phrase meaning they’re eager to kill Americans–– Taliban jihadists held in Guantanamo Bay is nothing more than ransom paid to kidnappers, and an invitation to the enemy to take more Americans captive and to hold them as bargaining chips for more concessions. And the release of hardened, high-ranking Taliban terrorists means there will be more dead Americans after theses soldiers of Allah return to the battlefield.

Continue reading “Our Bad Habit of Negotiating with Terrorists”

Israel’s Worst Enemy: Lies and Myths

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine 

The Washington Post reports that some members of Secretary of State John Kerry’s senior staff think it’s time to say “enough” of Kerry’s futile and delusional attempts to broker peace between the Israelis and Arabs and implement the “two-

Templar1307 via Flickr
Templar1307 via Flickr

state solution.” That’s a revelation one would think the chief diplomat of the greatest power in history would have experienced decades ago. Since the failed 1993 Oslo Accords, it has been obvious to all except the duplicitous, the ignorant, and the Jew-hater that the Arabs do not want a “Palestinian state living in peace side-by-side with Israel,” something they could have had many times in the past. On the contrary, as they serially prove in word and deed, they want Israel destroyed.

As Caroline Glick documents in her new book The Israeli Solution, the “two-state solution” is a diplomatic chimera for the West, and a tactic for revanchist Arabs who cannot achieve their eliminationist aims by military means. But the “Palestinian state” is merely one of many myths, half-truths, and outright lies that befuddle Western diplomats and leaders, and put the security and possibly the existence of Israel at risk.

First there is the canard that Israel is somehow an illegitimate state, a neo-imperialist outpost that Westerners created to protect their economic and geopolitical interests. In this popular myth, invading Jewish colonists “stole” the land and ethnically cleansed the region of its true possessors, the indigenous “Palestinian people.” This crime was repeated after 1967 Six Day War, when Israel seized the “West Bank,” occupying it as a colonial power and subjecting its inhabitants to a brutally discriminatory regime. The continuing power of this lie Continue reading “Israel’s Worst Enemy: Lies and Myths”

Why the Media Doesn’t Cover Jihadist Attacks on Middle East Christians

by Raymond Ibrahim // The Torch 

“To their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting cufiHim to public disgrace”—Hebrews 6:6

The United Nations, Western governments, media, universities, and talking heads everywhere insist that Palestinians are suffering tremendous abuses from the state of Israel.  Conversely, the greatest human rights tragedy of our time—radical Muslim persecution of Christians, including in Palestinian controlled areas—is devotedly ignored.

The facts speak for themselves. Reliable estimates indicate that anywhere from 100-200 million Christians are persecuted every year; one Christian is martyred every five minutes. Approximately 85% of this persecution occurs in Muslim majority nations. In 1900, 20% of the Middle East was Christian. Today, less than 2% is.

In one week in Egypt alone, where my Christian family emigrated, the Muslim Brotherhood launched akristallnacht—attacking, destroying, and/or torching some 82 Christian churches (some of which were built in the 5th century, when Egypt was still a Christian-majority nation before the Islamic conquests).  Al-Qaeda’s black flag has been raised atop churches.  Christians—including priests, women and children—have beenattacked, beheaded, and killed. Continue reading “Why the Media Doesn’t Cover Jihadist Attacks on Middle East Christians”

The Israel Double Standard

The prejudice against Israel in diplomatic matters is as troubling as more cruse bigotry agains Jews.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online 

An obscure academic organization called the American Studies Association not long ago voted to endorse a resolution calling for a boycott of Israeli universities. The self-appointed moralists were purportedly outraged over the Israeli

MathKnight and Zachi Evenor
MathKnight and Zachi Evenor

government’s treatment of Palestinians.

Given academia’s past obsessions with the Jewish state, the targeting of Israel is not new. Yet why do the professors focus on Israel and not Saudi Arabia, which denies women the right to drive and only recently granted them the right to vote? Why not Russia, which has been accused of suppressing free speech, or Nigeria, which has passed retrograde anti-homosexual legislation?

The hip poet Amiri Baraka (a.k.a. Everett LeRoi Jones) recently died. He was once poet laureate of New Jersey, held prestigious university posts, and was canonized with awards — despite being a hateful anti-Semite.

After 9/11, Baraka wrote a poem that suggested Israel knew about the plan to attack the World Trade Center. One of his poems from the ’60s included this unabashedly anti-Semitic passage: “Smile, jew. Dance, jew. Continue reading “The Israel Double Standard”

The Palestinian Playbook

by Bruce Thronton

Frontpage Magazine

The most depressing thing about the Obama administration’s foreign policy debacle unfolding in the Middle East is that for sixty years we’ve repeatedly experienced the same Islamist game plan for defeating us that is being employed today. There is no tactic currently being used by the Muslim Brothers and other jihadist groups that wasn’t perfected by the Palestinian Arabs in their fight to destroy Israel. Continue reading “The Palestinian Playbook”

Harvard Promotes the Palestinians’ Slow-Motion ‘Final Solution’

by Bruce S. Thornton

FrontPage Media

There is no idea so hateful or useless that some university somewhere won’t hold a conference on it. The latest example of this unfortunate truism is the recently announced “Israel/Palestine and the One-State Conference” scheduled for early March at the Harvard Kennedy School. Continue reading “Harvard Promotes the Palestinians’ Slow-Motion ‘Final Solution’”

Newt Challenges the Myth of Palestinian Nationalism

by Bruce S. Thornton

FrontPage Magazine

Newt Gingrich touched off a mini-firestorm when he told a Jewish television channel that the Palestinians are an “invented” people “who are in fact Arabs,” and “who were historically part of the Arab community.” Continue reading “Newt Challenges the Myth of Palestinian Nationalism”

Panetta’s Failure of Imagination: The Defense Secretary Gives Israel a ‘Turn of the Screw’

by Bruce S. Thronton

FrontPage Magazine

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s “chiding” of Israel, as the Washington Postput it, was a strange performance, so muddled in its ignorance of fact and logic that one wonders if the Secretary was attempting some rhetorical misdirection to lull our enemies into complacency. Continue reading “Panetta’s Failure of Imagination: The Defense Secretary Gives Israel a ‘Turn of the Screw’”