The leading indicators don’t look good for America

Posted on February 11, 2016 by Victor Rosenthal

In economics, a ‘leading indicator’ is something that can be used to predict the future behavior of a market or even a national economy. For example, if the number of building permits issued per month increases, then one might expect that construction activity will soon follow, along with higher stock prices for companies making or selling building materials.

There are also social and political leading indicators. It used to be said that California was a leading indicator for the US as a whole, and in some ways this is or was true. California experienced the increasingly extreme polarization of left vs. right – Berkeley against Orange County – back in the early 1960s, before it became the rule rather than the exception.

Young people are the ultimate political leading indicator, with adjustments for their immaturity and tendency to tilt leftward. After all, they grow up to become our political and cultural leaders.

And young people in the US have changed greatly in the past 50 years or so. Perhaps I should say that they have been changed. It started in the late 1960s, when the system of higher education – which influences young people at the age that they are first developing their political consciousness – underwent a rapid and massive upheaval.

I was in college and graduate school between 1960 and 1970, first as a student and then as a teacher. I continued to teach part-time for a year afterwards, before I realized that I wasn’t suited for academic life. I watched the change happen in real time.

One aspect of it was the politicization of the professoriate. Although there were exceptions, in 1960 there was a general belief that a teacher should be objective; that is, that he should not allow political opinions to color his presentation. It was recognized that to some extent it is impossible to prevent personal politics and prejudices from affecting teaching, but it was expected that an instructor would try his best to be fair when dealing with controversial subjects.

By 1970, it was generally believed that objectivity was impossible, and therefore – a very unsound inference – that no attempt to achieve it should be made. Not all, but many teachers unabashedly delivered political polemics in their classrooms and engaged in political organizing on campus. This was justified as ‘academic freedom’, even though the original concept of academic freedom was about freedom to take positions unpopular in a professor’s discipline, not to pontificate about unrelated political issues.

At the same time, the black civil rights movement and the other ‘liberation’ movements that it inspired drew attention to the fact that culture, history, and contributions to society of groups like African-Americans and women were often ignored in scholarly and popular discourse, and that their disadvantaged position in society was partly a result of this.

The solution that was demanded, however, was not to make existing disciplines mend their ways but to establish new and separate disciplines of Black Studies, Women’s Studies and others. A corollary to the dogma that objectivity is impossible is the one that only a member of a designated ‘oppressed’ group can understand the problems of that group, so the staff of these departments had to be drawn from the relevant groups. Such departments were very highly politicized, sometimes so much so that their members were primarily political activists and only secondarily teachers. Today, some of the most politically active academics, some of them radical extremists, come from departments of ethnic and gender studies.

There were several other related changes. Because minority students were under-represented, universities ‘solved’ the problem by including ethnic criteria in admissions decisions (affirmative action) or going to an open admissions model, in which any high school graduate from a given area who applied would be admitted regardless of grades and test scores (one highly controversial example was the City University of New York).

Sometimes administrators and faculty accepted these changes because they were ideologically in agreement with them, but in many other cases they did so out of fear of violent disruptions if they did not meet the non-negotiable demands of student activists. The success of the politics of fear was in itself a lesson for students.

Also at the same time, the combination of increased admissions of students that were not prepared for traditional university-level academic work, fashionable educational theories which saw grades and competition as destructive to learning, as well as the non-judgmental atmosphere of the time, led to grade inflation. Suddenly, the average grade in most non-STEM courses became a B+ or A- instead of a C, and no one who could drag his or her body to class got less than a passing grade.

When I started college in 1960, it was understood that students who couldn’t meet academic standards would be kicked out, and they were. By the end of the decade, the only real requirement for graduation was attendance.

So what has come out of the post-sixties American system of higher education? Here is a list:

  • Indoctrinated students, taught factually incorrect and politically biased material by activist professors
  • Students unable to distinguish between academic studies and political polemics
  • The rise of identity politics, in which political decisions are based on race or ethnicity
  • Postmodernism, in which truth itself is subordinate to identity
  • Laziness and lack of perseverance
  • The belief that the best way to achieve political goals is by violence or threats of violence
  • A general belief that success is coming to you and doesn’t need to be earned
  • A lack of respect for the norms of a free society, especially freedom of expression

Barack Obama is a product of this system and was elected by products of it. His anti-Western bias and intellectual laziness come directly from his academic mentors, such as Edward Said. His election was a triumph of identity politics.

There has been little improvement since the 1960s. Recently, the values of democracy and free speech have come under attack on campuses allegedly to protect tender students from disturbing ‘triggers’ and providing them ‘safe spaces’ to avoid ideas that might make them feel threatened. Administrators and faculty, who by now are mostly baby boomers and younger, have responded in the most craven way possible.

In some cases students have been allowed to give free reign to brutal fascism without even having to come up with excuses. For example, on several campuses, anti-Israel students have disrupted lectures or classes by Israeli officials, pro-Israelis or even left-wing Israelis who criticize government policy, simply because they are Israelis. Faculty members that are even slightly pro-Israel have been hounded off campus and given no support by their administrations.

When they graduate and take actual jobs, the former students begin the maturation process that was delayed by their four or more years at the university (the Israeli custom of military service before university studies is far superior in this respect, despite a similarly politicized faculty). If they work in private industry, they might even be forced to take responsibility for the success – not just the attempt – of their endeavors, although this is by no means guaranteed. Many never take responsibility for anything, not at work and not in their private lives.

The changes that began in the 1960s and 70s molded the generation of Americans, led and exemplified by Barack Obama, whose members are now presiding over America’s abdication of its world leadership role. They are the products of its elite universities, holding important positions in government, media, nonprofits and academia.

Judging by the ideological climate on campuses today, the next few years promise to be even worse. The leading indicators tell us so.

Posted in Academia, American politics | 4 Comments

Who is guilty of stupidity?

Posted on February 7, 2016 by Victor Rosenthal
Basel Ghattas (l), Haneen Zoabi and Jamal Zahalka

Basel Ghattas (l), Haneen Zoabi and Jamal Zahalka

The three members of Israel’s Knesset – Jamal Zahalka, Haneen Zoabi and Basel Ghattas – who met recently with the families of three terrorist murderers, were condemned from all sides of Israel’s political spectrum. In addition to harsh criticism from PM Netanyahu, members of the Likud and of the opposition, even a member of the left-wing Meretz party said that their action was “provocation, malice [רשעות] and stupidity.”

The act of the three, members of the Balad party, the most extreme of the Arab parties making up the Joint List, was far worse than that description. By calling the terrorists ‘martyrs’ and standing for a moment of silence in their honor, they encouraged Palestinian Arabs to continue their vicious campaign of almost-daily murders of civilians, police officers and soldiers on the streets of Israel and even in our homes. As the representatives of Arab citizens, they in effect called upon them to take a more active part in the murder campaign (so far, most of the terrorists have come from eastern Jerusalem or the territories).

The Knesset’s ethics committee will undoubtedly sanction them. They can be suspended for six months or made to pay fines of 20,000 shekels (about $5000). This is laughable.

What they have done is incitement to murder. In addition, the 31 people murdered and 304 injured in the 119 stabbings, 41 shootings and 23 vehicular attacks since September 13 are casualties in a war being waged against the state and its people by the combined forces of the PLO, Hamas and other terrorist groups. Therefore it is not unreasonable to charge them with aiding the enemy in time of war – treason.

The three should be arrested, tried and sent to prison. When they finish their sentences, they should be stripped of their citizenship and expelled from the country.

The Basic Law regarding the Knesset (basic laws are Israel’s equivalent to a constitution) states (sec. 7a) that

A candidates’ list shall not participate in elections to the Knesset, and a person shall not be a candidate for election to the Knesset, if the objects or actions of the list or the actions of the person, expressly or by implication, include one of the following:

  • negation of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state;

  • incitement to racism;

  • support of armed struggle, by a hostile state or a terrorist organization, against the State of Israel.

Meir Kahane and his Kach party were disqualified from running for the Knesset in 1988 under this law. Haneen Zoabi was also disqualified by a full vote of the Knesset prior to this election, on the grounds that statements she made incited violence – but Israel’s Supreme Court overturned the result and allowed her to be seated. Zoabi, among her other actions, sailed on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara in 2010, when Israeli sailors were attacked with iron bars and knives after they boarded the vessel to stop it from breaking the legal blockade of Gaza. She also once said that kidnapping wasn’t terrorism.

The three traitors are not guilty of stupidity. We are the stupid ones. How much humiliation do we need to accept? Our citizens are being cut to pieces on our streets, shot to death and run over, and we allow those who advocate this viciousness to sit in our parliament and spew their hate?

Arrest them, jail them, and kick them out!

Posted in Israeli Arabs, Israeli Politics | 2 Comments

Hillary’s advisers from Hell

Posted on February 5, 2016 by Victor Rosenthal

So it turns out that the advice Hillary Clinton gets from her advisers regarding Israel is overwhelmingly anti-Israel:

…the stream of anti-Israel advice received by Hillary was much more comprehensive than that which came from just [Sidney Blumenthal]. In the entire batch of Hillary’s emails, you will be hard pressed to find a single email that is sympathetic towards the Jewish state, from any of the people on whom she relied. …

These emails seem to demonstrate that a huge segment of her close advisers and confidants were attacking Israel, condemning Netanyahu, and strategizing about how to force Israel to withdraw from Judea and Samaria at all costs.

Someone recently remarked that “soon the US will get a president from the SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine] generation,” and that this is true of younger staff members already. Clinton is old enough to know better, but it seems she is hearing only one side of the story.

President Obama, too, is a special case. He is ahead of most of his age group, probably because of his third-world anti-Western orientation. But soon most educated Americans will have absorbed what is becoming the conventional wisdom: Israel bad, Palestinian Arabs good.

The universities are not the only institutions working overtime against us. The US media systematically underreports Arab terrorism: how many Americans know that since October 1, virtually every day has seen at least one murder or attempted murder of an Israeli Jew by an Arab? And much of the media implicitly or explicitly promotes the administration’s position that the reason the conflict continues is that “Israel is building settlements and won’t negotiate” – both false propositions.

There isn’t much that can be expected from over-educated academics, who live on a planet that exists only on the insides of their eyelids, and under-informed media people who care more about access to administration sources than truth. But what’s with the hard-headed political analysts that are advising the candidates? They are supposed to be developing policies that will advance the interests of the US in the world. Are they unaware that the world has changed significantly since the 1990s?

I have always believed that it was both in America’s practical interest and consistent with its values to back Israel. But until recently, it was possible to argue (and many did) that the need to guarantee the oil supply required the US to maintain good relations with the Arab nations – which implied that it had to continue to try to force Israel to abandon all the territory it had come to control in 1967.

But in the past decade and a half, several very significant events have occurred which have vitiated this argument. They are:

  • Technological developments that have increased the oil supply, especially in the US and Canada, and have brought about a precipitous reduction in the world price of oil,
  • The burgeoning Sunni jihad against the West, and
  • The advance of Iran in the region, aided by the splintering of its traditional enemy, Iraq, and by its recent diplomatic and financial gains from its humiliation of the US in nuclear negotiations.

America no longer needs to live in fear of the Arab ‘oil weapon’. At the same time, it is menaced by both the Sunni jihad pursued by groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda and the Shiite one of soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. The US then has a very practical interest in fighting the Sunni jihad and restraining Iran, as well as supporting Israel – which is the key to defending Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt against the jihadists of both stripes.

The “domino theory” applies here. If Israel goes down, so do its neighbors – and so does the rest of the eastern Mediterranean region. And there is no doubt that the Sunni and Shiite jihads are pressuring Israel with an eye on Europe. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi claims that the IS will “conquer Rome,” and it isn’t unimaginable that it might succeed.

The Obama Administration has taken a course almost completely opposed to America’s real interests, supporting the Muslim Brotherhood – part of the axis of jihad – allowing Iran a free hand in Iraq and Syria as well as failing to interdict its nuclear program, not taking serious action against the IS, and doing its best to force Israel to accept indefensible borders.

Barack Obama not only won’t act against it, he refuses even to admit that jihadist Islam is a threat to the West.

Obama’s motives are opaque, but they are probably composed of anti-colonialist ideology, a strong pro-Islamic and anti-Western bias, historical ignorance, and cowardice in the face of terrorist threats (like that historically displayed by European leaders). Regardless of the reason, his policy can seriously damage the US in the long run, exposing it to the threat of terrorism and even nuclear attack. And if it is in the American interest to keep the entire Middle East from becoming a jihadist stronghold, a strong Israel is the best defense.

So what’s wrong with Hillary Clinton’s advisers? Probably they are less concerned with the American interest than with personal interests. Although the Saudi regime is threatened by the IS, Saudi individuals are its biggest backers. They have a history of buying influence by paying off American functionaries – sometimes after they leave office, as in the case of Bill Clinton and of course Jimmy Carter. There are also persistent rumors that Hillary’s closest assistant and adviser, Huma Abedin, is sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The continued anti-Israel (and essentially pro-jihad) American policy is profoundly immoral, contrary to traditional American values, and not justifiable in terms of Realpolitik or in any other way. Its practitioners are either antisemitic or corrupt, and if it is not changed, it may result in the destruction of the Jewish state and a triumph for the Islamic jihad.

In that case, historians will write that if the first blow of World War III was struck on 9/11, its turning point against the West and toward Islam was the loss of Israel. Assuming anyone is left to write from a Western viewpoint, they will not be kind to those American leaders who sold Israel – and ultimately their own country – out.

A new American president will have the opportunity to reverse this irrational and dangerous policy. Here’s a tip for the folks advising Hillary and the other candidates: as my father used to say, the American people are not as dumb as they look.

Posted in American politics | 6 Comments

Waiting for Capote

Posted on January 30, 2016 by Victor Rosenthal

The right-wing Im Tirtzu group was hit by a storm of criticism, after it called a large group of Israeli authors, actors and other artists ‘moles’ or ‘foreign agents’ in Israeli culture, because of their leftist views (the Hebrew word used translates literally as ‘plants’).

This was too much for practically every political figure in the country, including PM Netanyahu, who harshly criticized the organization. Naftali Bennett, the head of the Beit Yehudi party, considered the most right-wing element in the government, called the campaign “embarrassing, unnecessary and shameful.” The founder of Im Tirtzu admitted that they went too far, and its director apologized.

The cultural establishment in Israel tends to hold strong, even extreme views, opposed to Israel’s continued control of the territories, critical of the government, strongly anti-war, and supportive of Palestinian aspirations. But Israel prides itself on maintaining freedom of expression despite the difficult security situation, and there is a difference between having opinions critical of the government and helping the enemies of the state. It would be particularly wrong to call authors David Grossman and Amos Oz, both strong Zionists, ‘plants’, despite their oft-expressed views.

This made me wonder why it is that so many artists and writers do espouse left-wing causes. I think it is in part because their capacity for empathy is much greater than normal. Empathy – the ability to put oneself in the position of others, to see the world through their eyes – is one of the most important talents of a writer or actor. How could it be possible to write fiction or play a role otherwise?

Empathy is in general a good quality, a humanizing one. A person that cannot empathize with his or her spouse or children will not have a successful family life. A lack of empathy for others, for poor people, the disabled, animals, and so forth may express itself as cruelty. A lack of empathy for members of different ethnic or racial groups is the basis of racism.

Some people are even capable of empathy for vicious criminals. The writer Truman Capote tested the limits of empathy when he researched and wrote his book “In Cold Blood,” a highly detailed account of a sadistic, pointless murder of an innocent family, the backgrounds and motivations of the perpetrators and their thoughts as they faced execution. One can imagine him thinking that if he could empathize with these creatures, no human evil would be beyond his understanding.

Empathy is one of the factors that we call on to help us make moral decisions. Should I give this beggar a couple of shekels? If so, how much? Empathy makes us generous.

Can a person have too much empathy? Sometimes. Empathy must be balanced with other considerations, like justice and self-preservation. If everyone had a strong sense of empathy and none for justice, then no criminals would be punished. If someone puts a knife to your throat – and this is not an academic discussion in Israel today – that is not the time to empathize with your aspiring murderer, but to fight him off.

The psychological makeup of Oz and Grossman that makes them such wonderful writers also makes them poor political analysts. They can give us deep insight into human behavior, but they live in a world where wishes can be reality. They can make their characters do whatever they want; in the real world you need an army for that. We shouldn’t criticize them too much for their empathy, but we shouldn’t think their political judgment is any better than that of the average taxi driver.

The Palestinian Arabs have strong feelings. They are people, just like my family are people. I can empathize with them to a certain extent. I understand that they feel humiliated and victimized and they have a need to recapture their honor and get revenge. I understand that in some ways their lives are poorer than mine.

Empathy pushes me leftward. Why can’t they have the state they say they want? Why do we humiliate them in so many ways? But empathy for the Arabs isn’t the only principle active in my deliberations. There is the question of justice, based on my understanding of history and politics. There is the question of self-preservation. And there is my tribalism, the fact that I feel more empathy for my own people than I do for others.

Creativity can be associated with an overdeveloped – ‘over’ because it becomes anti-survival – ability to empathize. These individuals feel the Arabs’ pain so keenly that it overrides their sense of justice, and even their sense of self-preservation. They empathize so strongly with all humans that their tribal feelings are attenuated (indeed, the Left often criticizes the Right for its tribalism which they see as atavistic, a sign of a lower moral consciousness).

The Palestinian Arab culture, on the other hand, appears to have an underdeveloped sense of empathy, as evidenced by their cruelty to women, children and animals – and above all, to their Jewish cousins whom they are capable of slaughtering like the countless goats they kill on Eid al-Adha.

The Left, creative and otherwise, doesn’t realize this. Despite – or maybe because – of their powerful ability to empathize, they don’t seem to be able to understand that their neighbors lack that ability.

Perhaps they are waiting for a Truman Capote to explain it.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Israeli Society | 4 Comments

The coming US election as seen by an American-Israeli

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Victor Rosenthal

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.—Pericles (Athens, c. 430 BCE)

America hasn’t been invaded since 1812, and after the Civil War (which only peripherally involved other nations), all of its wars were fought on battlefields comfortably far away. The Imperial Japanese came the closest to striking America at home, but were not able to follow up their successful attack on Pearl Harbor with an invasion. Americans have been almost uniquely isolated from the rest of the world, and especially the tribal complexities of the Middle East until very recently, and in general they still tend to be remarkably ignorant about them. Even presidential candidates.

Andrew McCarthy noted recently that Donald Trump, for all his attitude, has trouble distinguishing his ass from a hole in the ground in this connection. Some of the other candidates, like Bernie Sanders are not much better. And Hillary Clinton, while she certainly is better acquainted with the players, may or may not be on the right team.

Here in Israel, security is the number one issue in politics, for obvious reasons. The US hasn’t reached that point yet, although its enemies are pushing it harder and harder. But the American in the street and some in Congress are often less well-informed than even The Donald.

Not that the Middle East is simple. Several years ago I asked the late Barry Rubin why Shiite Iran was helping the Sunni Hamas in Gaza, while it opposed the ideologically similar Muslim Brotherhood. This was despite the fact that Iran’s deadly enemy Saddam Hussein was close to both Hamas and the PLO. Arafat famously took Saddam’s side in the first Gulf war and got Palestinian guest workers kicked out of Kuwait, and the families of Hamas suicide bombers received stipends from Saddam. Rubin just laughed and said that when I understood that I would understand the Middle East.

The broad Sunni-Shiite struggle is reflected in American politics, too. Historically, the US has been on the Saudi (Sunni) side, a result of the Saudis’ massive purchases of influence with American politicians and academic institutions. Sometimes working through oil companies and sometimes by promising huge sums of money (payable after a politician leaves office) as in the case of Jimmy Carter and the Clintons, the Saudis seemingly locked up the US. Even the supposedly tough Israel lobby couldn’t beat the Saudis when they went head to head (as happened when the US sold AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia in the mid-1980s).

When Barack Obama was elected, everyone expected that he would maintain the cooperation with the House of Saud like Reagan, Clinton and the Bushes. But in a move that shocked many, Obama turned against the Saudis and toward Iran, making a deal that greatly strengthened the Islamic Republic in its bid to replace the US-Saudi axis as the dominant power in the region.

One explanation for this shift in policy is that Obama seems to have bought into the 2006 Iraq Study Group report, lock, stock and barrel. The report argued that in order to stabilize the Middle East, the US had to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by creating a Palestinian state in the territories, and engage with Syria and Iran. The report was wrong-headed, both in its misunderstanding of the objectives of Iran and its acceptance of the idiotic ‘Linkage Theory’, in which the root cause of Mideast problems is Israel’s occupation of territories captured in 1967. In any event, it became the keystone of his foreign policy.

To be fair to the authors of the report (one of which was Obama advisor Ben Rhodes), they may not have intended to translate ‘engagement’ as ‘surrender’. But that is how Obama sees it, with his ideology of apology, his belief that most of the world’s ills are due to the use of Western, particularly American, power. He wishes to engage in order to withdraw.

America’s abandonment of the Middle East is a major change in a policy that has been more or less constant since the end of the Second World War. It will probably be the one thing that students of history 50 years hence will know about the presidency of Barack Obama, in addition to the fact that he was the first ‘black’ president. But we will see the fruits of the deal much sooner, probably within the next five years, in the form of a regional war in the Middle East, a massive increase in worldwide terrorism, and perhaps even ‘man-made disasters’ in the US.

Although Hillary Clinton endorsed the Iranian nuclear deal and claims to favor ‘engagement’ with Iran, she did not actively campaign for it. She did not take part in the negotiations with Iran; she was replaced by John Kerry in February 2013, and the initially secret channel with Iran was opened in March of that year. Maybe she stepped down in advance because she did not want to participate in this process.

Why wouldn’t she? Well, the Clinton Foundation had recently received $25 million from Saudi Arabia, and multiple millions in grants and speaking fees from other Gulf states worried about Iran. Bill and Hillary Clinton have reported to have been paid over $125 million (and there may be more payments that were unreported) by companies and foreign governments since 2001, many in the Middle East. She is certainly in the Saudi corner.

She also might be smart enough to realize that nothing good can come from the deal, and doesn’t want to be associated with it when the fallout hits the fan.

She has been very guarded about what her actual policies would be if elected, and she is not – how can I put this delicately – someone known for excessive truthfulness anyway. From an Israeli point of view, some of her connections, like Sid Blumenthal, Thomas Pickering and of course Huma Abedin are troubling. And there is a long list of more-than-questionable things said and done by Ms Clinton in connection with Israel over the years.

The coming presidential election will be immensely important, because it may not be too late to reverse the course set by Obama. As an Israeli, I care that the American president be one that will reassert power in the Mideast – and one that will support Israel. And as an American, I want one that understands the danger that the civilized world faces from expansionist Islam of both the Sunni and Shiite variety, and who will keep America safe from the very real threats that Obama pretends not to see.

That certainly isn’t Trump, Clinton or Sanders. It might be Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. Choose wisely.

Posted in American politics | 3 Comments

The PLO can’t be fixed

Posted on January 24, 2016 by Victor Rosenthal

It has been revealed that a secret deal kept Switzerland free of PLO terrorism:

According to the author, Swiss journalist Marcel Gyr, Switzerland was in turmoil after a spate of Palestinian terror attacks, including the February 1970 bombing of a Swissair flight from Zurich to Tel Aviv, which killed all on board shortly after takeoff. Gyr recounts that in the wake of the attacks in 1969 and 1970, then-foreign minister Pierre Graber contacted the PLO clandestinely and without informing his fellow ministers, the BBC reported Friday. …

Graber, through a Swiss member of parliament, purportedly reached an agreement with the PLO to free those charged for [a deadly 1969 attack on an El Al plane in Zurich] in return the release of the hostages in Jordan. Furthermore, he agreed that Switzerland would “quietly shelve” the investigation into bombing of the Swissair plane, and make a diplomatic push for international recognition of the PLO.

The Swiss MP, Jean Ziegler, now 81, confirmed that he had been the go-between and said “This might be absolutely shocking, but the reward was that there were no more attacks.”

Shocking? No, it was standard operating procedure. Take Italy for example:

…former Italian President Francesco Cossiga revealed that the government of Italy agreed to allow Arab terrorist groups freedom of movement in the country in exchange for immunity from attacks in Italy. Cossiga wrote that the government of the late Prime Minister Aldo Moro reached a “secret non-belligerence pact between the Italian state and Palestinian resistance [sic] organizations, including terrorist groups,” in the 1970s. According to the former president, it was Moro himself who designed the terms of the agreement with the foreign Arab terrorists. Ironically, Moro later met his death at the hands of homegrown Italian terrorists, the Red Brigades, in 1978.

Even Germany, with its “special relationship” to Israel, sold its soul. Matt Rees, in his book Cain’s Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East (p. 100) explained,

Arafat put Zakaria Baloush in charge of European operations and contacts. He built a fine relationship with Italian antiterrorist intelligence. His biggest coup, however, was a secret mission to West Germany. Through Libyan intelligence, West Germany asked the PLO for a deal. In 1980 Zakaria went to West Germany with a delegation of PLO officials. They agreed not to carry out any attacks on West German territory. In return they were allowed to operate in West Germany and exchange information with the West Germans.

Today European governments and the European Union provide a hefty part of the cost of running the PLO-based Palestinian Authority, spend millions of Euros financing illegal Arab construction in Area C – the part of Judea/Samaria that according to the Oslo Accords is under full Israeli control – and of course provide tens of millions to Israeli left-wing NGOs which act as a fifth column inside Israel. These NGOs, which have been called “wholly-owned subsidiaries” of the EU and European governments, provide raw material for anti-Israel UN resolutions, ‘lawfare’ against Israeli leaders and IDF soldiers, and provoke violent confrontations to try to destabilize the country. There is no doubt that this anti-state movement would barely exist were it not for European subsides.

The hypocrisy of claiming to oppose terrorism while giving its greatest perpetrators a free pass is obvious. It is no less hypocritical to oppose Israeli construction in disputed areas while paying for illegal Arab building there, and to require products of Judea/Samaria to have special labels while products of countless other “occupied” and disputed territories in the world need not be labeled.

The PLO is possibly one of the most malign entities to come into being in the 20th century, no less than the Nazi party or the Stalinist soviet regime, albeit on a smaller scale. In the years from its founding in 1964 and through its unfortunate legitimization by Israel as the representative of the Palestinians – one of the two greatest strategic mistakes made by an Israeli government since the founding of the state – the PLO brought terrorism into the mainstream of international politics, started wars and destabilized governments. It always kept its primary objective foremost: to destroy Israel by killing Israeli Jews. Thanks to Oslo it now has the status of a governmental authority.

The Palestinian Authority has no economy to speak of except the international dole, and much of this flows directly into the Swiss bank accounts of PLO officials. Some is also used to pay PLO fighters that are incarcerated in Israel for murder and terrorism, as well as pensions for the families of ‘martyrs’, who died in the process of killing Jews. Over the years, literally billions of dollars of aid that has been given to ‘the Palestinians’ has been used to support terrorism and the lifestyle of PLO honchos.

The PLO never allowed any voices to be heard among the Palestinian Arabs except those calling for confrontation. Moderates were liquidated and a reign of fear established. The PLO rules the areas under its control with an iron fist. Those who want to cooperate with Israel in any way are silenced.

PA leader Mahmoud Abbas claims to be opposed to “violence,” but what he means is that he does not advocate that the PLO return to organized attacks on Israelis using firearms and explosives. On the other hand, he encourages what he calls “popular resistance,” calling on individual Palestinians and groups on their own to kill Jews with knives, Molotov cocktails, stones, automobiles, meat cleavers, and so on. And the PA continues to name schools, streets and sports teams after terrorists, as well as treating the ‘martyrs of the popular resistance’ as heroes in its official media. It also makes numerous false accusations to stir up trouble, such as that Israel plans to build a third Temple on the Temple Mount, or that soldiers and police murder Palestinians and plant knives nearby.

The PLO/PA’s educational system continues to present Israeli Jews as subhumans who stole the land from them and to present the recovery of all of ‘Palestine’ from the river to the sea and the expulsion of the Jews as their objective, and not the creation of a peaceful Palestinian state on part of the territory. This system and the PA media which glorify martyrdom in the name of Palestine are directly responsible for children as young as 11 trying to murder Jews and often being killed themselves.

The PLO is a cancer in the international body. Initially given life by Egypt in 1964 as another weapon against Israel, it took its own direction when it was taken over by Yasser Arafat in 1968. It drew strength from the great-power conflict of the cold war, when it was armed by the Soviets as part of their struggle against the West. More recently it has parasitized the US (which provides the PA with $400 million/year, including a program to arm and train its ‘security’ forces) and of course the EU which gives it somewhat less. It’s difficult to determine the total amount of international aid, because it comes through many different sources (the US, UN, EU and other donors) and multiple programs. But it is at least $1 billion/year.

What is truly shocking is not that the Europeans made deals with the devil in order to protect themselves. It’s that after all these years nobody – not even Benjamin Netanyahu – has been prepared to stand up and say “enough.”

Enough money and assistance has been given to these terrorist murderers. Enough blackmail has been paid. Enough resources that could have been used to help alleviate hunger and fight disease have been squandered on this destabilizing force which has demonstrated over and over that its primary objective – its only objective – isn’t peace, but the destruction of a nation.

One of the main reasons that the PLO has continued to exist is that Israel since Oslo has believed or pretended to believe that it is in some sense a peace partner. Now that there seems to finally be a consensus here that the Oslo idea has blown up in our faces and there will not be a two-state solution in the near future, Israel has a great opportunity to do the world – including the Palestinian Arabs – a favor.

The PLO and its creature the PA has proven to be a failure – a failure as a peace partner, and a failure as a governing authority for the Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria. Israel could root out and destroy this cancer by removing the PLO from power, disarming its militias, and going back to its pre-Oslo position that it would only negotiate with non-terrorist entities.

This might end up with Israel in full control of the territories again, something that many Israelis see as a burden they are loathe to undertake. But in the long term there is no alternative. The PLO, like a tumor, can’t be fixed. It must be removed.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs | 2 Comments

A culture of hate and its ‘Terror Children’

Posted on January 22, 2016 by Victor Rosenthal

Israelis are used to waking up to news reports of horrific murders, sometimes mass murders, but the slaughter of 38-year old Dafna Meir, in her own home and in front of her children by a teenage Arab terrorist has been exceptionally painful for the nation. Meir, a mother of four who also had two foster children, was a nurse at a Beer Sheva hospital where she cared for all of her patients, Arab and Jew, with devotion and professionalism.

The murderer apparently sneaked into the community of Otniel in the south Hevron hills – a place that has seen more than its share of terrorism – on Sunday afternoon, saw the diminutive woman painting the front door of her house, pushed her inside and stabbed her multiple times while she fought and screamed. According to her 17-year old daughter Renana, who witnessed the murder, only their screams and the fact that the terrorist was unable to pull the knife out of Dafna’s body prevented him from attacking her and the younger children.

The terrorist Morad Bader Abdullah Adais, whose age is variously given as 15 or 16, fled home to the nearby village of Beit Amra, where he was arrested by IDF soldiers Monday night. Security forces released a video of the moments leading up to his arrest which shows the mansion – there’s no other word for it – that his family lived in (and which PM Netanyahu has promised will be destroyed). This particular terrorist was not driven to murder by grinding poverty!

This is prelude to what for me was the most significant part of this terrible story, which appeared in this morning’s newspaper (Israel Hayom, 20 Jan. 2016, p. 5 “הרוצח נשלף מהמיטה”). The father of the murderer told a reporter for Israel’s channel 2, that his son did not commit the crime, and if he had, the father would have turned him in himself. And then he turned around and said this to Palestinian media:

I am proud of my son. Every Palestinian must sacrifice for the sake of the homeland, and this is what my son did.

This is the Palestinian Arab Muslim culture of death and lies. This is the father and the culture that produced this vicious creature, like the 15-year old that stabbed a pregnant woman in Tekoa on Monday (she and her child will survive), like the 17 and 18-year old Awad cousins who killed five members of the Fogel family in 2011, the 16-year old girl Ashraqat Qatnani, who tried and failed to kill a Jewish girl (her father was proud of her too), the 11 and 14-year old Jerusalem Light Rail stabbers, and countless other young Palestinian Arabs who did what they have been taught is their duty to their people: to murder Jews. They are what I have called Terror Children:

The encouragement of children to become terrorists is not an accident. The Palestinian educational system is designed to do it. Child soldiers are nothing new, but their use as self-guided terrorist missiles is a Palestinian innovation. It can be counted along with the other Palestinian contributions to humanity, like the popularization of airplane hijacking, the Qassam rocket, and automotive terrorism.

From time to time in history a particularly interesting political entity with a unique culture arises. It can be based on religion like the Islamic State, a combination of peoplehood and religion like the State of Israel, or an ideology like the Soviet Union or the United States. But the ‘Palestinian people’ is the only one I can think of whose single unifying principle is hatred for another culture. Palestinian science, literature, art, politics, morality and economy only exist as expressions of hatred for the Jewish people and Israel. They like to say they are an “ancient people” tied to the land, and from a historical point of view this is nonsense. But it is wrong to say, as many Zionists do, that they are not a people at all. The ‘Palestinian people’ arose sometime after the State of Israel did, as its antithesis and would-be nemesis, unified by their rejection of Jewish sovereignty.

Its leaders, starting with al-Husseini and especially Arafat, understood that their power over the Arabs in the Land of Israel – as well as their ability to gain support from the rest of the antisemitic world depended upon, even flowed directly from, their population’s burning hatred and resentment. So they nurtured it, founded their institutions upon it, and educated their children to burn even brighter, to hate more strongly, even to subjugate their drive for self-preservation to the demands of hating and killing.

This is one reason that the Palestinians always rejected opportunities for statehood. All of the proposals put before them from the 1937 Peel Commission on have implied that there will be a counterpart Jewish state; and this of course directly contradicts their national essence. But it is also the case that a culture that is all hate leaves little room for constructive impulses, so – unlike the pre-state yishuv of the Jews – they have failed to create the political and economic structure needed for a state.

The Palestinians got the world’s attention for their cause with airplane and ship hijackings, terrorism, hostage-taking and murder. Arafat stole billions from the West intended to improve the lot of his people, stashed them in his Swiss bank accounts and bought arms to attack Israel. He destabilized Lebanon and tried to overthrow the king of Jordan, causing untold misery and at least two wars. Arafat, the most revered and loved of all Palestinian leaders, epitomized the culture of hate that he helped create.

So here we are in 2016, and almost the entire world believes that the Palestinians, who have been at the center of so much violence – and whose tactics served as a model for the terrorism of Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and the Islamic state – are not perpetrators, but victims! And the world is falling over itself to ‘fix’ the problem at our expense. I have absolutely no doubt that Barack Obama will finally complete his betrayal of Israel before the end of his term by abstaining from a UN Security Council vote ‘establishing’ the state of Palestine.

One would think that the world would have noticed something amiss with the Palestinians by now. But – to a great extent because of their choice of enemies – most of it is sympathetic to them, terror children and all.

It should be obvious at this point that there cannot be a negotiated settlement that can reconcile one nation with another whose very reason for being is to hate and destroy the first. It should be obvious that in this situation the only way to stop the terrorism and the incitement that leads to it is to physically prevent it, which means to overthrow the elites that are leading it and to either control or disperse the population that is carrying it out.

It should be obvious, so what are we waiting for?

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For Dafna

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Victor Rosenthal
The family of Dafna Meir arrives for her funeral

The family of Dafna Meir arrives for her funeral

The murderer of Dafna Meir, a mother of 6 children has been arrested. He is a Palestinian Arab variously reported to be 15 or 16 years old, from the nearby village of Beit Amra.

Arrested, unfortunately – take note, Margot Wallstrom – and not cut down on the spot like the monstrous devil spawn that he is, as justice, honor and deterrence demand.

My initial angry reaction was that we should kill 100 Arabs, 10 each for her, her husband, her children and her parents. But that would have little effect, since, as they often remind us, they love death as we love life. And from what I have read about Dafna Meir, a nurse who devotedly took care of everyone, Arab and Jew, that most definitely would not have been her wish.

But collective punishment is appropriate here because there is collective guilt. His village and his people praise terrorists and make heroes out of them. The leaders that they support and their media encourage and incite murder. Their religious guides tell them that a boy who slaughters a Jewish mother in front of her children is an example for all Muslim youth, and if he is killed in the process he will go to paradise where he can have all the sex that his repressive culture denies him on earth.

They have created a generation that murders Jews as easily as cutting the throat of a goat to cook for dinner.

So what can we do? What will satisfy our need for justice, preserve our honor and deter our enemies?

Here is what we can and must do: build settlements, as many as we can, in the Hevron Hills area. Name them after Dafna Meir if you wish. Confiscate land from the Arab village of Beit Amra to build them. Dispossess the inhabitants or just let the village wither.

The violence we are experiencing is a battle in a war for possession of the land of Israel, the continuation of our War of Independence. If we understand this, then the proper response to it will be clear.

Update [20 Jan 1016 IST]: corrected the name of the terrorist’s village.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Terrorism | 2 Comments