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What is Going to Become of Gaza?: Dr. Mordechai Kedar, Arutz Sheva, Aug. 8, 2014 — The question worrying everyone who has an interest in Israel's security is how Operation Protective Edge will end and what the near and distant future of Gaza will be.
ISIS, Hamas, and Boko Haram: Newt Gingrich, CNN, Aug. 8, 2014 — Grim, unyielding and violent reality is beginning to confront the American political establishment with facts from which it cannot hide.
For Gaza Critics, Lessons From ISIS on Genocide: Michael Wilner, Jerusalem Post, Aug. 9, 2014 — Protestors against Israel's operation in Gaza should pay close attention to what is happening tonight in northern Iraq.
Exposing the UN’s Unreliable Data on Gaza Casualties: Evelyn Gordon, Commentary, Aug. 8, 2014 — Okay, it’s official: Even the BBC now admits the UN has been essentially collaborating with a terrorist organization to libel Israel.
How a Hamas Anthem Became a Hit in Israel: Yoram Hazony, Tablet, Aug. 8, 2014
Beyond Bombs: To Stop ISIS, US Must Engage: Amir Taheri, New York Post, Aug. 8, 2014
Kurds Need More U.S. Help to Defeat Islamic State: Masoud Barzani, Washington Post, Aug. 10, 2014
Hamas Could Have Chosen Peace. Instead, It Made Gaza Suffer: Dennis Ross, Washington Post, Aug. 8, 2014
WHAT IS GOING TO BECOME OF GAZA?
Dr. Mordechai Kedar
Arutz Sheva, Aug. 8, 2014
What is going to happen in Gaza? The question worrying everyone who has an interest in Israel's security is how Operation Protective Edge will end and what the near and distant future of Gaza will be. The media are filled with Israeli and foreign speakers who know what should happen to Gaza, each according to his own mindset. In this article we will attempt to evaluate the predictions according to the way Hamas sees things. Let us enumerate some of them: 1.Hamas will need outside help on a massive scale to rebuild its ruins: The "proof" of this claim is Hamas' turning to the nations of the world for aid in reconstruction. Except that the real truth is that the Hamas leadership does not want to rebuild the ruins, it wants to use them for many years to milk the world for funds. Leaving things the way they are is in Hamas' interests, rebuilding is not. They will bring journalists, politicians, human right activists and ordinary tourists to look, get them to open their hearts and wallets and pour billions into the hands of Hamas. This money is needed to reconstruct their military infrastructure, to dig tunnels leading to Israel, to manufacture arms, rebuild the rocket-manufacturing sites and continue building underground Gaza.
2. Gaza must be demilitarized: Demilitarizing Gaza is a pipe-dream, which a few people in Israel and the world believe can come true, even though demilitarization on such a large scale has never succeeded when there is local resistance to it. There isn't an army in the world that is willing to come to Gaza to battle Hamas, Palestinain Islamic Jihad and other organizations who refuse to give up their weapons. This mission will lead to widescale bloodshed of the force that tries to take away large and varied amount of arms from a terrorist group. And even if some armed force manages to take some of the weapons of a few groups, they will buy new weapons with Qatar funding and from other countries who do not check what the Palestinians did with the money they received before the Operation. 3. Hamas will have to change for the sake of the Gazan civilian population: That, too, is a pipe-dream. Jihadist movements listen only to Allah and the commandment to do Jihad for him, not to the needs of any man woman or child. Allah and Jihad are way above any human needs, and the welfare of Gazans doesn't interest the Jihadists any more than did the lives of the Gazans who were their human shields. On the contrary, the more the people suffer the easier it is to bring the media and politicians to see them and thereby squeeze some more international funds for "humanitarian purposes" – like digging tunnels and acquiring more rockets.
4. Gazans will rebel against Hamas rule: The probability that the people of Gaza will protest against Hamas rule or act against the organization is very low, because Hamas rule is no different from any Islamic State: the terrorists have no problem killing, torturing and humiliating anyone who acts against them or even demonstrates against them. The rule of fear and terror that Hamas has built in Gaza since its 2007 takeover is still going strong and will continue in the future, in the name of Allah and the Palestinian people, of course. 5. Hamas' demand to lift the sea blockade is sensible and justified : There are people in the world, some even in Israel, who think that the people of Gaza have the right to have access to the sea, to import and export merchandise freely, as do most of the nations that border the sea. Hamas also thinks it has this right, but for a totally different reason: the terrorists must get their "irrigation pipes" from Iran, cement from Turkey, and raw materials for manufacturing "humanitarian goods" from North Korea. Those tired souls who believe in removing the siege are acting as if they don't know just why Hamas wants the blockade lifted. Worst of all, Israel has several organizations, most of them funded by the New Israel Fund, that used legal and public measures to make it easier for Hamas to prepare its military infrastructure…How long will it take for these organizations and others of their type to go back to working on the legal, political and public level in Israel and abroad, trying to "ease the life of the residents of Gaza" by removing the siege on importing "humanitarian goods" for the peaceful army of Hamas? Someone will say that instead of cement, one can allow boards and sheets of hammered metal, so that houses can be built. It is worthwhile remembering that a terror tunnel can be built with a ceiling supported by metal sheets held up by vertical boards. That is how the IDF once built fortifications, and Hamas is capable of doing that in the future.
6. We must bring the PA to Gaza to replace Hamas' rule: That, perhaps, is the most egregious statement of all. As opposed to the mantra repeated by Oslo Accord supporters, that "Arafat will deal with terror without having to worry about Betselem (see above organizations, ed.) or the Supreme Court", the PA led by Mahmoud Abbas has never had to commit itself to eliminating terror organizations. The PA has labored throughout to "calm" the terror organizations, which used the period to get stronger and better armed. There were those in Israel and the world who knew the truth, who read the books by Ronen Bergman and Kenneth Levine. Israelis and others deluded themselves and the world into thinking that the PA is on the right path. Meanwhile Hamas won a majority of the seats in the PA legislature in January 2006, and forcibly – and bloodily – gained control of Gaza in June 2007, establishing a terror state there. Will the PA agree to get Gaza back? Very possibly it will, but not so as to demilitarize Hamas. It will do so to be on the receiving end of the money sent to rebuild Gaza from Europe, America, Qatar, the UN and private donors. What these donors do not know is that the PA's leaders will siphon off, as they have done in the past, a good part of the money for their private bank accounts before they buy one brick for Gaza. There are those who will say that they can be supervised in order to prevent that, as if past supervision ever did any good. It is possible that if the PA gets to Gaza, the Dayton Force that the US established will battle the Jihadists in the tunnels? Will the PA "Security Forces" discover the tunnels and destroy them? Will they take on the terror organization fighters who refuse to give up their rockets and arms? Will Abbas close the rocket factories? The answer to these questions is as clear and bright as the August noon sun: NO and once again, NO. The opposite will occur: the PA presence in Gaza will make it harder for Israel to act against terror and will add another "mediating" factor which will soon become a terror-masking entity whose actions vis a vis Israel will be chosen with a Hamas gun to its head. Is there someone in Israel who can promise that this is not what will happen?
7. The "secure passage" from Gaza to Judea and Samaria must be opened: This, too, is an idiotic idea that is meant – either on purpose or through utter naivete – to allow Hamas and the other terrorist organizations to establish Hamastan in Judea and Samaria, a terror state that will be able to look over the entire length and breadth of Israel from Beer Sheva and Dimona in the south to Afula and Beit Shean in the north and including the coastal plain from Ashkelon to Haifa, Tel Aviv and its suburbs. No airline, Israeli or international, will agree to put its airplanes and passengers in danger during landing and takeoff in Ben Gurion Airport when Jihadists are perched on the hills of Beit Aryeh setting their light weaponry's sights (the ones given to them by Israel) on those airplanes. Opening the "secure passage" will allow the transferring weapons of war and the practical knowledge needed to manufacture them from Gaza to Judea and Samaria and will allow all the enemies of Israel, whenever they wish, to aim at Tel Aviv, Dimona and Afula – and paralyze Israel's economy. What will those tired souls say then, when Hamas deals with the PA without worrying about Betselem and the High Court? Is there anyone in Israel and the world that can give their word that this scenario won't be played out? Can anyone prevent Hamas from, once again, winning most of the seats in the legislature democratically? And what will the countries of Europe, America or the UN do when Hamas controls Judea and Samaria the way they control Gaza?
Three main conclusions can be reached from the above: The first is that we must not reach any agreement with Gaza. What can bring quiet to Gaza is only fear based on the sure knowledge that any provocation – and it doesn't matter which organization does that provocation – will be answered with a non-proportionate response. The idea of removing the sea blockade should not even be broached and certainly not the thought of an airport. Israel can continue to sell Gaza food, water, medicines, gasoline and electricity to prevent a humanitarian tragedy there…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
Newt Gingrich
CNN, Aug. 8, 2014
Grim, unyielding and violent reality is beginning to confront the American political establishment with facts from which it cannot hide. For 35 years, since Iranians seized the American Embassy on November 4, 1979, and kept the Americans in it as hostages, the United States has been at war with radical Islamists. They knew it. We hid from it. Year after year since then, radical Islamists have grown more militant, more sophisticated and more numerous. Now, in an arc of terror from Boko Haram in Nigeria through Hamas in Gaza to ISIS in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, there is a clear wave of vicious religious warfare being waged against civilization by fanatics who openly promise and engage in genocidal killing.
To understand why I link ISIS, Hamas and Boko Haram, consider the language of their own statements. Why not take them at their word? ISIS has made its murderous intentions painfully clear. It has proven in town after town that it will force people to convert to Islam or it will kill them in numbers that are now being called genocidal. As President Obama said in his speech Thursday night, “Many thousands of innocent civilians are faced with the danger of being wiped out.” The group has also made clear that it views its mission as a worldwide war. “I say to America that the Islamic caliphate has been established,” a spokesman for the group said Thursday. He warned that the group will attack America and “will raise the flag of Allah in the White House.” “Don’t be cowards and attack us with drones,” he said. “Instead send your soldiers, the ones we humiliated in Iraq. We will humiliate them everywhere.” Its actions give us no choice but to acknowledge that ISIS means what it says.
Many people seem to be confused or deluded into believing that Hamas does not have similarly genocidal intentions. Its charter is a useful starting point. “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors,” it says. What does “eliminate” mean, you might ask? More from the charter: “…[T]he Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah’s promise whatever time it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!” As Americans and Europeans beg for cease-fires, it is useful to see Hamas’ attitude toward such arrangements. From “Article Thirteen: Peaceful Solutions, [Peace] Initiatives and International Conferences”: “[Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion…the movement educates its members to adhere to its principles and to raise the banner of Allah over their homeland as they fight their Jihad. …“There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad,” it concludes. “The initiatives, proposals and international conferences are but a waste of time, an exercise in futility. The Palestinian people are too noble to have their future, their right and their destiny submitted to a vain game.” Of course, the Charter of Hamas was written in 1988, so maybe they have mellowed? During this current struggle, while Westerners were begging the Israelis to be reasonable, an imam amplified Hamas’ position in a public, televised sermon. “Our doctrine in fighting you [the Jews] is that we will totally exterminate you. We will not leave a single one of you alive, because you are alien usurpers of the land and eternal mercenaries.” Obviously the organization exists for the same genocidal mission as ISIS.
Boko Haram has its own contribution to this hateful movement. A spokesman for Boko Haram recently told a Nigerian newspaper that “the Nigerian state and Christians are our enemies and we will be launching attacks on the Nigerian state and its security apparatus as well as churches until we achieve our goal of establishing an Islamic state in place of the secular state.” Boko Haram threatened its captured Christian girls with death or being sold into slavery if they didn’t convert to Islam. ISIS is saying the same thing to the Yazidi girls they are capturing. The civilized world faces an existential challenge to its very right to exist. This violent, genocidal ideology holds more territory today than at any time in modern history. From Nigeria to Iraq, the challenge is being organized by sincere, serious fanatics motivated by religion and willing, indeed eager, to die for their cause. Western elites are terrified of confronting this reality. For years they have refused to take these people at their word, and millions of Iraqis, Syrians, Nigerians, Lebanese, Palestinians and Israelis, among many others, are paying the price…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
FOR GAZA CRITICS, LESSONS FROM ISIS ON GENOCIDE
Michael Wilner
Jerusalem Post, Aug. 9, 2014
Protestors against Israel's operation in Gaza should pay close attention to what is happening tonight in northern Iraq. From a mountaintop, with a view over enemy combatants from a clear moral high ground, the United States is acting against the pending threat of actual genocide: the intentional, regime-sponsored systematic extermination of a people based on their identity. Genocide is not a word often uttered by American presidents. In part, that is because genocide is an exceptionally rare crime. But when the act occurs, it is unmistakeable in its scale and its hallmarks: the world knows what has happened, because historically, its perpetrators hold a worldview that their murderous actions were justified.
In that tradition, the medieval Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, has made no secret of its goal to rule a "caliphate" full of zealot Sunnis, where women are enslaved and mutilated, and nonbelievers are tortured and beheaded. Tens of thousands of innocents have run for their lives from its warpath without much help from the international community— until now, from the United States, which has committed its military to the enforcement of that very basic international norm. Can we expect mass protests in Vienna, Paris and Berlin calling for the protection of the oppressed of Iraq? The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says over 1 million have been displaced across Iraqi territory in the last month alone, with over 100,000 Christians, Yazidis, and many Muslims now seeking shelter. This is what the threat of genocide looks like, for all those confused by its definition. Yazidi children are dying of thirst on the peak of a low mountain, without roofs over their heads to protect them from the August Iraqi sun, in flight from their homes because ISIS believes their families should submit and convert or perish. ISIS wants these people dead at their hands; the acute travesty unfolding in Iraq is just that simple. International norms require the world make every effort to protect these innocent men and women stranded on Mount Sinjar, regardless of their religion, creed or ethnicity. Thankfully, due to the hard-fought successes of liberal democracies, that standard applies to all peoples, everywhere, including the Jews of Israel and of the diaspora, and the desperate Palestinians of Gaza.
Unfortunately for Gazans, they are ruled by a government that, like ISIS, makes no secret of its intention to kill, systematically, on a massive scale. "For our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave," Hamas' charter reads, "so much so that it will need all the loyal efforts we can wield, to be followed by further steps and reinforced by successive battalions from the multifarious Arab and Islamic world, until the enemies are defeated." Not two weeks ago, Hamas officials called for the killing of all Jews worldwide. And a week before that, Hamas' leadership said that the objectives of the group, as listed in their charter, are more important than the cherished lives of the people in Gaza that they claim to represent. Nevertheless, this organization has mobilized the support of parties throughout Europe, after building an infrastructure with minimal resources that facilitates the indiscriminate targeting of not only Jews, but of all people throughout the lands of a sovereign neighboring state. Quite transparently, the group seeks the targeted, regime-sponsored systematic extermination of a people based on their identity. Terrorists in the Middle East today, driven perversely by Islamic fundamentalism, operate from a paradigm that does not value human life— and certainly not liberty, taken for granted by those demonstrating freely throughout the streets of Europe. A xenophobic interpretation of the Quran, instead, justifies to some the mass control and killing of men as the will of God. Israel seeks the basic rights of a state, and has demonstrated its desire to protect Gazan civilians from military actions against those who attempt to deny those basic rights: sovereign borders, free from the daily threat of attacks against its people. And yet throughout the last month, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and PLO ambassador to the United Nations Riyad Mansour, have openly charged Israel with actions tantamount to this stark charge of genocide.
Put succinctly: Leadership of the Palestinian Authority, considered the moderate representation of the Palestinian people, have equated Israel's operation in Gaza to ISIS' operations in eastern Syria and northern Iraq. "It is shameful and disgraceful that these terrorists are doing this in the name of religion, killing the people whose killing Allah has forbidden, and mutilating their bodies and feeling proud in publishing this,” Saudi Arabian King Abdullah said of Hamas' tactics last month, at the height of the conflict. "They have distorted the image of Islam with its purity and humanity and smeared it with all sorts of bad qualities by their actions, injustice and crimes.” Way too many people have died in Gaza, and the tactics and wisdom of Israel's operation should be matters of fierce public debate. They surely will. But such cries of genocide, crimes against humanity and other war crimes are accusations of an intent among Israelis that go far beyond the reality of those supporting and executing Operation Protective Edge. Genocide is what happens when a people are discriminated against, corralled, and led to slaughter; misrepresenting the deed does an injustice to all of its true victims, and complicates good-faith efforts to prevent the crime from happening again.
EXPOSING THE UN’S UNRELIABLE DATA ON GAZA CASUALTIES
Evelyn Gordon
Commentary, Aug. 8, 2014
Okay, it’s official: Even the BBC now admits the UN has been essentially collaborating with a terrorist organization to libel Israel. Of course, the venerable British broadcaster doesn’t say so explicitly; it even assures its readers that UN officials aren’t to blame for the misinformation they’ve been propagating. But it’s hard to reach any other conclusion after reading this analysis of Gaza’s casualty figures by the station’s head of statistics, Anthony Reuben. As Reuben notes, the figures on Palestinian casualties cited by most news organizations come from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. As of August 6, this agency was reporting 1,843 Palestinian fatalities, including at least 1,354 civilians; 279 hadn’t yet been identified. Thus civilians ostensibly comprise at least 73 percent of total fatalities, and since the UN excludes unidentified casualties from its calculations, it usually cites an even higher figure–currently 86 percent.
But as Reuben writes, “if the Israeli attacks have been ‘indiscriminate’, as the UN Human Rights Council says, it is hard to work out why they have killed so many more civilian men than women.” Quoting a New York Times analysis, he noted that men aged 20-29, who are the most likely to be combatants, are “also the most overrepresented in the death toll,” comprising 9 percent of Gazans but 34 percent of identified fatalities. In contrast, “women and children under 15, the least likely to be legitimate targets, were the most underrepresented, making up 71 percent of the population and 33 percent of the known-age casualties.”
So Reuben asked the high commissioner’s office how it explains this statistical anomaly. Here’s the mind-boggling response: “Matthias Behnk, from OHCHR, told BBC News that the organisation would not want to speculate about why there had been so many adult male casualties.” In other words, confronted with a glaring statistical anomaly, the UN opted “not to speculate” about whether this cast doubt on the credibility of its claim that over 80 percent of fatalities were civilians. Instead, it kept right on feeding that number to journalists–most of whom promptly regurgitated it with no questions asked. The statistical anomaly is compounded by other known facts: Terrorists don’t usually fight in uniform, so they arrive at the morgue in civilian clothing; the Hamas Interior Ministry explicitly ordered Gazans to identify all casualties as “innocent civilians” even if they aren’t; and Hamas has a history of mislabeling militants as civilian casualties: It did so during the 2009 war in Gaza as well, only admitting years later that, just as Israel claimed, most of the dead were militants rather than civilians. All this provides further grounds for suspecting that many male combat-age “civilians” were actually militants, and thus for caution about declaring them civilians. But the UN evinced no such qualms.
Finally, there’s the minor detail that some civilian casualties were caused by Hamas’s own misfired rockets. We know for certain about some such cases; for instance, an Italian journalist confirmed (after leaving Gaza) that one Palestinian rocket killed 10 Palestinians, including eight children, in a park in al-Shati. But there are undoubtedly many more that we don’t yet know about, because according to IDF data, almost a sixth of all Palestinian rockets launched–475 out of 3,137–landed in Gaza rather than Israel. That statistic is highly credible, because the Iron Dome system tracks every rocket’s trajectory to determine whether it needs intercepting, and couldn’t have achieved the success it did if its trajectory tracking system weren’t extremely accurate. And since Gaza has neither Iron Dome nor bomb shelters, Hamas rockets would be far more lethal there than they were in Israel. Yet the UN unhesitatingly blames Israel for all Palestinian casualties. Reuben insists the UN shouldn’t be blamed for its misleading data, since “their statistics are accompanied by caveats and described as preliminary and subject to revision.” But that’s ridiculous. If the UN had doubts about the data’s veracity, it should have told the media it “would not want to speculate” about the civilian-to-combatant ratio. Instead, it opted to publish wildly exaggerated civilian casualty counts as unqualified fact while declining “to speculate” about the glaring statistical anomalies in its data. In short, it collaborated wittingly and willingly with Hamas’s strategy to smear Israel by accusing it of massacring civilians. And most of the world’s media unhesitatingly played along.
How a Hamas Anthem Became a Hit in Israel: Yoram Hazony, Tablet, Aug. 8, 2014—A few days ago, I called a young relative who is serving in the Israeli air force and asked him: “Do you know that song—“Kum, Aseh Piguim”?
Beyond Bombs: To Stop ISIS, US Must Engage: Amir Taheri, New York Post, Aug. 8, 2014 —The “Islamic State” is on the march. To stop it, American bombs are welcome, but what’s needed most is US leadership.
Kurds Need More U.S. Help to Defeat Islamic State: Masoud Barzani, Washington Post, Aug. 10, 2014 —Today the people of Kurdistan and Iraq are threatened by a fanatical and barbaric terrorist organization that wishes to dominate Middle East.
Hamas Could Have Chosen Peace. Instead, It Made Gaza Suffer: Dennis Ross, Washington Post, Aug. 8, 2014— In the winter of 2005, Ziad Abu Amr, a Gaza representative in the Palestinian Legislative Council, invited me to speak in Gaza City.
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