Outpost
Editor: Rael Jean Isaac
Editorial Board: Ruth King, Rita Kramer

Outpost is distributed free to Members of Americans for a Safe Israel

Annual membership: $100.00

Americans For a Safe Israel
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Zionism 101.org: Herbert Zweibon’s Last Project

Online now: British Mandate IV: Illegal Immigration

Illegal Immigration describes the desperate efforts of Jews to reach Palestine even as the British cruelly bar the country’s gates. Indeed, the first two people killed by the British on the opening day of World War II are not Nazis, but two Jews aboard the SS Tiger Hill.

There are already 40 videos on the site, covering everything from Zionism’s founding fathers to Christian Zionism.

Zionism 101.org is free. You need only register to see the videos and to be informed when the next video is available.

Next AFSI Mission to Israel: June 2-10, 2015

Join us for an extraordinary, eye-opening experience. Learn about the real Israel. Reservations now being taken.

If Benjamin Netanyahu had thrice the 45-60 minutes he’ll be allotted for his March 3rd address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress–assuming that address hasn’t been sabotaged by the time these words appear–he’d be hard pressed to give full scope to the dimensions and potential consequences of the “get-out-of-jail” card the P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France , Russia and China plus Germany) appears ready to award Ayatollah Khamenei sometime between now and the March 24th deadline for a “framework” agreement to a resolution of the Iranian nuclear weapons threat.
Putting this nine-year global drama in perspective, there’s an outside chance the March 24th run-up to a projected final June agreement with Tehran on the suspension of uranium enrichment will go the way of two previous “deadlines,” established and disestablished, since Iran signed on to a November, 2013 six-month deadline on a resolution of its enrichment activities (illegal under six separate UN Security Council Chapter VII rulings) and a halt to further work on its heavy water Arak plutonium reactor. We are now in the 15th month of that original six-month agreement.

“It will depend on difficult decisions the Iranians will have to make” regarding concessions integral to the conclusion of a deal, a senior Israeli diplomat observed. For the P5+1, he adds, “it may be hard to see the possibility of overcoming an Iranian demand, purely on the basis of a rough-edged ‘framework’ agreement, for the immediate lifting of all the sanctions currently in place.”

Divesting from America
It was bound to happen. Bursting with moral fervor, eager students hunting down miscreants from Israel to Israel to Israel have found an additional target—the United States of America. The University of California Student Association board, representing all 233,000 students enrolled in the UC’s ten campuses, approved a resolution calling on the university to financially divest from the United States.
The resolution outlines alleged U.S. “human rights violations” from drone strikes to a racist justice system to mistreatment of immigrants to propping up dictatorships.
The students have vowed to take their fight now to the UC Regents, the board governing the University of California.
There is an obvious first step the students could take toward implementing their program—renounce all Pell grants and demand an end to all federal funding for research throughout the university’s campuses. But to no one’s surprise this does not seem to have occurred to the social justice mavens of the Student Association Board. Indeed one can be confident they would howl with rage if any of their government benefits should be touched. Financial divestment from the federal cash cow for themselves or their faculty allies, one can safely say, is the last thing they have in mind.

What the Meaning of “Is” is
The administration is apparently confusing Israel with ISIS. We’ll cut Secretary of State Kerry some slack given that he is what might be termed “intellectually challenged.” But President Obama, who boasts of his academic credentials? That he should barrel down on Israel as if it were our main antagonist? Perhaps it’s because both ISIS and Israel begin with “IS.” Those nefarious letters could also account for Obama appointee Benjamin Wagner, U.S. attorney for California’s Eastern District, revealing in an interview (reported by Lloyd Billingsley) that he was more concerned with Islamophobia than ISIS.

Islamic State publicized a horrifying twenty minute video this week, the high point of which was the execution of a Jordanian pilot, Maaz al-Kassasbeh, by burning him alive. The film attempts to justify the punishment by describing Jordan’s part in the war against ISIS, using photos of ISIS dead, including women, children, men and mainly those burned to death.

The entire film is meant to justify the scene that is shown near its end: the burning alive of the Jordanian pilot. The event is carefully staged: the pilot is put in an iron cage so that he has no chance of escaping the fire, and the orange clothes which he wears throughout the film are soaked in gasoline. Even the sand under the cage is full of gasoline and a rivulet of gasoline-soaked sand reaches the spot where a soldier stands carrying a stick to which a gasoline-soaked rag is attached. Another soldier lights the rag, it sets the rivulet on fire, the flames advance towards the cage and set the gasoline under the pilot’s feet ablaze and after the pilot dies in excruciating agony, a bulldozer arrives and covers the cage with rocks.

“We cannot win this war by killing them,” Marie Harf said on MSNBC.
Reversing thousands of years of battlefield experience in which wars were won by “killing them”, the State Department spokeswoman argued that you can’t defeat ISIS by killing its fighters.
“We cannot kill our way out of this war,” she said. “We need in the medium and longer term to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it is lack of opportunity for jobs.”

War is one of the few things in life we can reliably kill our way out of. The United States has had a great track record of killing our way out of wars. We killed our way out of WWI. We killed our way out of WWII. The problem began when we stopped trying to kill our way out of wars and started trying to hug our way out of wars instead. Progressive academics added war to economics, terrorism and the climate in the list of subjects they did not understand and wanted to make certain that no one else was allowed to understand. Because the solution to war is so obvious that no progressive could possibly think of it.

This is excerpted from a speech before the Britain Israel Communication & Research Centre in London on January 26.

I have been writing from and about Israel for most of the past 20 years, since I moved there from Toronto at age 17. During the five and a half years I spent as part of the international press corps as a reporter for the American news agency The Associated Press, between 2006 and 2011, I gradually began to be aware of certain malfunctions in the coverage of the Israel story–recurring omissions, recurring inflations, decisions made according to considerations that were not journalistic but political, all in the context of a story staffed and reported more than any other international story on earth. When I worked in the AP’s Jerusalem bureau, the Israel story was covered by more AP news staff than China, or India, or all of the fifty-odd countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. This is representative of the industry as a whole.

In early 2009, to give one fairly routine example of an editorial decision of the kind I mean, I was instructed by my superiors to report a second-hand story taken from an Israeli newspaper about offensive T-shirts supposedly worn by Israeli soldiers. We had no confirmation of our own of the story’s veracity, and one doesn’t see much coverage of things US Marines or British infantrymen have tattooed on their chests or arms. And yet T-shirts worn by Israeli soldiers were newsworthy in the eyes of one of the world’s most powerful news organizations. This was because we sought to hint or say outright that Israeli soldiers were war criminals, and every detail supporting that portrayal was to be seized upon.

Much of the international press corps covered the T-shirt story. At around the same time, several Israeli soldiers were quoted anonymously in a school newsletter speaking of abuses they had supposedly witnessed while fighting in Gaza; we wrote no fewer than three separate stories about this, although the use of sources whose identity isn’t known to reporters is banned for good reason by the AP’s own in-house rules. This story, too, was very much one that we wanted to tell. By the time the soldiers came forward to say they hadn’t actually witnessed the events they supposedly described, and were trying to make a point to young students about the horrors and moral challenges of warfare, it was, of course, too late.

On Feb. 15, 2015 Israel’s Prime Minister said “Jews have been murdered again on European soil only because they were Jews. Of course, Jews deserve protection in every country, but we say to Jews, to our brothers and sisters: Israel is your home.” The next day he repeated: “To the Jews of Europe and to the Jews of the world I say that Israel is waiting for you with open arms.”
The response was less than gracious. The New York Times called it “insensitive and timed for political advantage. “

Foreign leaders were also miffed.

President François Hollande of France told French Jews: “Your place is here, in your home. France is your country.“ And again: “I will not just let what was said in Israel pass, leading people to believe that Jews no longer have a place in Europe and in France, in particular.” That Sunday, hundreds of Jewish tombstones were found vandalized in eastern France.

The Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt said: “The Jewish community is a large and integrated part of Danish society.” Thanks Helle. Your nation is exploding with Muslim immigrants, who get generous benefits from welfare programs, but engage in Islamic violence and demands for Sharia law. Not a peep from you.

Most irritating were the responses of some Jews: Thanks for the option but we like it here was the line of some Swedish, Danish, Belgian, Austrian and French Jews.
Jair Melchior, Denmark’s chief rabbi, said he was “disappointed” by Mr. Netanyahu’s call. For good measure he added:” “If the way we deal with terror is to run somewhere else, we should all run to a deserted island.”

Shlomo Avineri, an Israeli professor of political science who just prior to the Yom Kippur War, in the pages of Commentary, accused Israel of harboring a “Massada complex”, described Mr. Netanyahu’s call as “an intellectual and moral mistake” and accused him of taking a populist stance for electoral purposes.
Have these Jews forgotten so soon what happened when Jews had nowhere to go?

Outpost
Editor: Rael Jean Isaac
Editorial Board: Ruth King, Rita Kramer

Outpost is distributed free to Members of Americans for a Safe Israel

Annual membership: $50.

Americans For a Safe Israel
1751 Second Ave. (at 91st Street)
New York, NY 10128
Tel (212) 828-2424 / fax (212) 828-1717
Email: afsi@rcn.com

Zionism 101.org: Herbert Zweibon’s Last Project

Online now: British Mandate III: The Jewish Brigade

The Jewish Brigade chronicles Zionist efforts to establish a Jewish Brigade to fight Hitler alongside the allies. Blocked for years by Britain which is fearful of upsetting the Arabs, the Jewish Brigade will only reach the shores of Europe toward the end of the war, in early 1945. Its main impact will come in the war’s aftermath.There are already 40 videos on the site, covering everything from Zionism’s founding fathers to Christian Zionism.

Zionism 101.org is free. You need only register to see the videos and to be informed when the next video is available.

NEXT AFSI MISSION TO ISRAEL: JUNE 2-10, 2015

Join us for an extraordinary, eye-opening experience.Learn about the real Israel. Reservations now being taken.

The parameters of Mahmoud Abbas’ desperation are tellingly defined by the dangerous game he has embarked on. It reads like a manual on diplomatic self-immolation.
Not content with pushing the UN Security Council to within a single vote of compelling a U.S. veto of a resolution mandating an Israeli retreat to the 1949 armistice lines and the proclamation of Jerusalem as the capital of “Palestine,” the Palestinian Authority president is vowing to reintroduce the resolution. The addition of pro-Palestinian Malaysia and Venezuela to the 15-member body is almost certain to provide him with a “victory,” plus the certainty of an American veto. His naked repudiation of bilateral negotiations as the prescribed route to a peace settlement, Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin asserts, “leaves President Obama, who has sought at every turn to blame Israel for the breakdown of the ‘peace process,’ with egg on his face.” Confronted now with Abbas’ acceptance as a member of the International Criminal Court—of which neither Israel nor the United States is a member — and the ICC’s decision to launch an “inquiry” into alleged Israeli “war crimes” during and prior to the 50-day Gaza conflict, Mr. Obama seems badly in need of a towel.

For one thing, Abbas’ trashing of the Obama-Kerry “negotiated peace” enterprise makes a cutoff of $400 million in annual U.S. aid to the PA a near slam-dunk. That money was already in bipartisan Congressional trouble due to the PA’s merger with Hamas, an organization still solidly ensconced on the State Department’s terrorist list. For another, it violates an absolute condition tied to the funding – that the PA must under no circumstances initiate any action against Israel in The Hague.

With a fury normally reserved for Jerusalem apartment builders, a wounded State Department has questioned the legitimacy of the ICC’s decision to institute a “war crimes” investigation of Israel on the grounds that the litigant, “Palestine,” is without legal standing. “We do not believe that Palestine is a state and therefore…that it is eligible to join the International Criminal Court.” “It is a tragic irony,” the State Department memo adds, “that Israel, which has withstood thousands of terrorist rockets fired at its civilians and neighborhoods, is now being scrutinized by the ICC…The place to resolve the differences between the parties is through negotiations, not unilateral actions by either side.” Bibi Netanyahu couldn’t have said it better

Joan Peters dies
AFSI mourns the death of our member and friend Joan Peters Caro. In her 1984 book From Time Immemorial she challenged the Arab narrative that Jewish immigrants to Palestine dispossessed an ancient and indigenous Arab population. She was also one of the early writers to describe the painful lot of Jews living as “dhimmis” in Arab nations. Her e-mails or phone calls followed virtually every issue of Outpost–always with sound commentary.

Another Two-State Solution?
Writer/farmer Bernie Quigley, writing in The Hill, notes that while France (as well as Europe and the U.S.) has “found the two-state solution to be the practical alternative for Israel,” the day may not be far off when that will be advocated for France.
Quigley notes the no-go zones (which it is suddenly fashionable to deny exist) in which French authorities have already ceded control to Islamists. He cites the French militant Muslims who talk openly of ruling the country one day and instituting sharia law. (Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, a few years back argued that adopting some aspects of shariah law in England seemed “unavoidable.”)
Writes Quigley: “Should Sharia law come to France, Britain, Germany or anywhere else in Europe, it would amount to an occupation. It would create new internal states within the older (dying) states.
We have been told by the Europeans for decades that the only alternative to all-out war, the only way to appease and accommodate Arab terrorism in Israel, is a two state solution. Says Quigley: “Not now, but in time and perhaps soon, the terrorists throughout Europe, possibly in allegiance with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria or al Qaeda, will bring a case to the UN for autonomous state status in post-Christian Europe—with some credibility, citing Europe’s and America’s long term plans for Israel as precedent.”

Political Opera
What is it these days with the opera, which normally is confined to cultural news? First there was the debacle of the Klinghoffer opera, transforming villain into victim. Now there’s the spectacle of the Israel Opera denying the request of French-Jewish conductor Frederic Chaslin to say a few words and play the Hatikva in honor of those murdered in Paris.
To his credit, Chaslin, the son of Holocaust survivors, refused to appear for the performance, writing on Facebook: “It was refused to me. ‘It would upset our audience.’ ‘It is against the management’s policies.’ What management? What policy? Where am I? In a country supposed to be the sanctuary for all Jews in the world? Has the ‘audience’ of this country lost their souls?”
In response, the Israeli opera produced a statement setting forth its “policy:” “This is the way of the opera—not to allow terror to win and disturb the routine of our lives.” Playing the Israeli national anthem in honor of the Jewish victims of Islamic terror (who were brought to Israel for burial) would mean that terror “won”? This is not borderline insanity. It’s the real thing.