Tag Archives: foreign policy

What about a Palestinian’s right to freedom?

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This is the headline of a FoxNews op-ed by Faheem Younus, President of the Baltimore branch of Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA and a senior fellow at the University of Baltimore’s Hoffberger Center for Professional Ethics. It’s a fair question.

Younus asks us to

think of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict in terms of the movie “Shawshank Redemption,” which shows the quest for freedom of an innocent banker serving two life sentences under hopeless circumstances. The cast goes like this: the criminals are Hamas, the warden is Netanyahu, Andy—the banker convicted of murder—is your average Palestinian, and Shawshank is Gaza.

His strawman includes his claim that ordinary Palestinians—Gazans, actually—are prisoners of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Then Younus expands his claim:

But lately, the Palestinian’s moral right to exist has become a political wrong to list.

Recently, it has become evident that millions of innocent Palestinians will serve life sentences in this Shawshank, that there is no two-state solution, that their yearning for freedom is being swallowed by the biblical dream of a Greater Israel, stretching all the way from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.

Of course, Israel has made no such claim. Israel favors a two-state solution (which, of necessity, includes the Palestinians’ “moral right to exist”), having learned from the West’s colonial days, followed by general colonial independence and trade, that the path to prosperity, for Israelis and for Palestinians, including Gazans, is through states freely trading with each other.

While purporting to decry Hamas’ behavior, though, what Younus does not discuss is that when Hamas and Fatah merged under the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas’ leadership, the PA became a terrorist state. Younus denies this (without substantiation), and the PA’s initial rhetoric also denied it. The ensuing empirical facts, though, prove the terrorist nature of the unity government, this new PA. The PA launched their latest terror war just weeks after the unity government’s formation; it has pursued its terrorism with rocket attacks against Israel’s nuclear facility; it has pursued its terrorism with endless rocket firings into Israel with the sole purpose of killing as many civilians and children it can; it has pursued its terrorism by storing its rockets in hospitals, UN facilities (it’s impossible to believe the UN had no complicity in this), and private homes; it has pursued its terrorism through firing from these same homes and hospitals; it has pursued its terrorism by using Gazan civilians and children as personal shields in engagements with the IDF; the list goes on and on and on.

The ensuing empirical facts also include these two: the Fatah part of the PA has been utterly silent on this terrorism. Fatah’s silence is a deafening roar of approval of the PA’s terrorism. Also, Abbas has openly stated he agrees with the attacks.

Gazans—ordinary Palestinians—are not at all prisoners of Netanyahu or of Israel generally. They’re hostages of the terrorist PA, and badly abused by it.

As to that rejection of a two-state solution and a favoring of Younus’ mythical Greater Israel, this is what Netanyahu has said:

“If we were to pull out of Judea and Samaria, like they tell us to…there’d be a possibility of thousands of tunnels” being dug by terrorists to attack Israel, [Netanyahu] said. There were 1,200 tunnels dug in the 14-kilometer border strip between Egypt and Gaza alone…. “At present we have a problem with the territory called Gaza,” the Prime Minister said. But the West Bank is 20 times the size of Gaza. Israel, he said flatly, was not prepared “to create another 20 Gazas” in the West Bank.

The Palestinians do, indeed, have their own right to freedom. And to the prosperity that goes with freedom. The path to that, though, demands that the PA release these innocents from their bondage. The path to that demands an end of terrorist wars against Israel. The path to that demands a verifiable—and verified—removal of the PA from its avowed goal of the utter destruction of Israel.

Pivoting to Asia

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But on our heels, not our toes….

Last month, Commander US Pacific Command Admiral Samuel Locklear talked about the People’s Republic of China’s action of sending along a spy ship to shadow a RIMPAC exercise (to which the PRC also had sent four combatant ships at RIMPAC’s invitation to participate. Among other things, Locklear thought the spy ship’s appearance was good news.

It’s a recognition, I think, of acceptance by the Chinese that what we’ve been saying to them for some time is that military operations and survey operations in another country’s [maritime zones] are within international law and are acceptable.

As AEIdeas‘ Michael Auslin put it in that linked-to article, though,

…it is a far greater admission that Beijing views the United States with precisely the deep and enduring distrust that America’s senior military leaders have hoped to dispel….

Because, pivot.

UN Gaza Facilities and the Line of Fire

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UNRWA says another of its schools has been hit by Israeli fire.

UNRWA has been caught three times storing Palestinian Authority rockets in their facilities, “unused” or occupied by refugees, for later use in terror attacks on Israel. On one of those occasions, UNRWA carefully turned the cache over to the PA, and on another occasion, UNRWA authorities simply abandoned the facility and the refugees they were pretending to shelter. UNRWA’s disposition of the third collection of stored terror weapons is unknown.

On another occasion, a terrorist tunnel was discovered beneath a UNRWA facility.

The Palestinian Authority also is well known for firing its rockets from UN facilities as well as from private homes of Gazan civilians. The Palestinian Authority’s terrorists are well known for shooting at the IDF from within UN facilities, Gazan hospitals, Gazan private homes.

I have to ask. What weapons were you storing in this “school?” How many terrorists were in this “school” shooting at the IDF at the time of the Israeli fire?

I have to ask another: President Barack Obama, through his State Department condemned the attack.  Where is his condemnation of the Palestinian Authority and their terror war that created the conditions for this attack?

Equal Outcomes

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Because, moral equivalence.

Navi Pillay, outgoing (her six-year term is up) UN High Commissioner for Human Rights had this to say the other day:

[B]y putting and firing rockets within both heavily populated areas both sides were violating international law and therefore committing war crimes.

“Locating rockets within schools and hospitals, or even launching these rockets from densely populated areas are violations of international humanitarian law,” said Ms. Pillay, referring to Hamas, but added that doesn’t “absolve” Israel from disregarding the same law.

Because Israel is violating “international humanitarian law” by defending itself against these terrorists.

No, Israel, instead, must simply lie back and enjoy the fireworks—the terrorists have, in the eyes of this UN person, inured themselves against any more serious response than opprobrium for their terrorism by the simple expedient of using children and civilians as shields.

Never mind that such protections simply increase, drastically, the value of these hostages, and it makes it all the more likely that terrorists will use them and increase their usage.

This UN person went on:

[She] criticized the US for financing Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system at the same time that residents in Gaza were under bombardment.

“No such protection has been provided to Gazans against the shelling[.]”

Because the terrorists must have the same defenses, or the Israelis must be denied the full capacity of their own defenses.

Never mind, again, that the Israelis wouldn’t be “shelling Gazans” if the Palestinian Authority terrorists weren’t shooting from among those Gazans. Never mind the larger case that the Israelis wouldn’t be shelling anything, if the PA terrorists weren’t engaged in their attacks on Israel.

Obama’s “Peace Talks”

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This article is triggered by Gerald Seib’s recent piece in The Wall Street Journal.

A White House statement cited by Seib:

The President…reiterated the United States’ serious and growing concern about the rising number of Palestinian civilian deaths and the loss of Israeli lives, as well as the worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza[.]

Not a word about the primary cause of those Palestinian deaths, just the outrageous moral equivalence asserted between the terrorists’ assault on Israel and Israel’s defense against that assault, and through that the tacit implication (excuse the redundancy) that those Palestinian civilian deaths are Israel’s doing.

No harm to peace-making by Obama’s Cabinet there.

And this:

Meanwhile, Israel also was squirming over the talks between the US and five international powers and Iran over the Iranian nuclear program. As it became obvious that those talks were moving in the direction of an agreement that would leave Iran with a continuing capacity to enrich uranium, Israeli discomfort grew. When the talks were extended earlier this month for four more months, it grew further. A separate issue, yes, but one that affects the atmosphere.

No, this is not a separate issue; Iran’s nuclear weapons program and the Palestinian Authority’s terror war against Israel are inextricably intertwined. Let’s leave aside the fact that Iran is largely funding and almost exclusively arming the PA (apart from the latter’s primary industry of rocket-making within the Gaza Strip (itself supplied by inputs from Iran)). Iran has as its own goal, to use Iran’s words, of “wiping Israel from the map.” What does the Obama administration, and his Secretary of State (and Seib) think Iran will do with its uranium, enriched to weapons grade? The question answers itself: Iran will attack Iran with nuclear weapons, or supply the weapons to the PA (and/or other terrorist organizations in the region—Hezbollah comes to mind) for the purpose of seeing them used in Israel.

Iran’s nuclear weapons program is as much a threat to Israel’s existence as is the PA’s constant terror attacks. The PA is a client of Iran.

President Barack Obama, and his Cabinet, surely know this. From this, another question raises itself: what is the value—in fact, what is the purpose—of Obama’s “peace talk” efforts as they concern Israel and the Palestinian Authority?