U.N. Issues 'Warning' To U.S. on Charlottesville - Joseph Klein

by Joseph Klein

Hypocrites lecture America on “hate speech.”

The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, acting under its “Early Warning and Urgent Action Procedures,” intervened in the ongoing controversy over the deadly violence in Charlottesville and the Trump administration’s response. The urgent warning procedure is supposed to short circuit the normal periodic country human rights review process, which takes place about every five years. It is to be invoked only in those situations that could “spiral into terrible events” and require immediate action, according to Anastasia Crickley, chair of the committee, which monitors implementation of the global convention on prohibiting racial discrimination.

The early warning procedure has been used only 20 times since 2003. It was invoked two times regarding Sudan in 2004 and 2005 without any specific condemnation of the Sudanese leaders for their racist incitements and ethnic cleaning. It was used twice to condemn a law in Israel, the UN’s perennial punching bag, which restricted marriage between an Israeli citizen and a person residing in the West Bank or Gaza. The procedure was used once before in 2006 regarding the United States when the committee criticized the U.S. government for not respecting the alleged rights of an Indian tribe. Moral equivalence was the UN committee’s calling card then and it remains so today.

Indeed, the UN committee was so anxious to pillory the Trump administration that it decided to lump the United States together with Burundi, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan and Nigeria as the only UN member states, out of a total of 193 states, meriting its “early warning” notice during the last decade.

 “We are alarmed by the racist demonstrations, with overtly racist slogans, chants and salutes by white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan, promoting white supremacy and inciting racial discrimination and hatred,” said Ms. Crickley. “We call on the US Government to investigate thoroughly the phenomenon of racial discrimination targeting, in particular, people of African descent, ethnic or ethno-religious minorities, and migrants,” she added.

The UN committee demanded that the “highest level politicians and officers” of the United States government “unequivocally and unconditionally reject and condemn racist hate speech and racist crimes in Charlottesville and throughout the country.” While not mentioning President Trump by name, he was the committee’s obvious target of criticism for not going far enough in “unequivocally condemning” the events in Charlottesville, as Ms. Crickley herself declared.

The UN committee also recommended that there be some constraints on the rights of free speech and assembly so that they are not abused to promote “racist hate speech” or used to destroy the rights of others to “equality and non-discrimination.” The committee chair, Ms. Crickley, elaborated on this point in remarks quoted by the New York Times.

“We believe it is time that the United States considered these matters and considered seriously that balance, between freedom of expression and hate speech,” Ms. Crickley said. “Whether freedom to publicly and collectively express neo-Nazi views and to chant racist hate speech in effect constitutes freedom of expression — I think that’s a question that needs to be seriously addressed in the U.S.A.”

This “question” has already been “seriously addressed” by the U.S. Supreme Court and resolved. No matter how odious and offensive the views of white supremacists, neo-Nazis or others may be, their expression is protected speech under the First Amendment unless it is calculated to incite imminent violence. Unlike other countries, including in Western Europe, the United States does not balance freedom of speech against other values such as human dignity as equivalents. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo expressed the primacy accorded to freedom of expression in the United States this way: “Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.”

Americans protected by the First Amendment do not need any lecturing from Ms. Crickley, her committee or the United Nations as a whole regarding the appropriate boundaries for free expression in the United States. That is a matter solely for adjudication by U.S. courts exercising their proper judicial authority under the U.S. Constitution. 

Ms. Crickley recognizes that her UN committee is not a "court of justice." Hallelujah! However, she claims that the committee has "moral authority" behind its decisions that the United States should respect. To the contrary, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination lacks even a modicum of “moral authority” in how it has applied its “early warning” process. Sudan provides a perfect example.

In its August 2004 early warning notice on Sudan, the UN committee simply took note of the UN Security Council’s prior resolution in July 2004 condemning acts of indiscriminate violence against civilians “by all parties to the crisis.” It ignored the fact that just one party, the racist Arab regime in Sudan, had embarked on a campaign of murdering, ethnically cleansing and enslaving millions of indigenous black Africans. Yet the specific complaint by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination against the regime in its 2004 early warning notice was its failure to provide the committee with information on the situation in Darfur that it had requested. The UN committee’s 2005 early warning notice regarding Sudan simply recommended “the deployment, without further delay, of a sufficiently enlarged African Union force in Darfur with a Security Council mandate to protect the civilian population.”

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination issued no further early warning notices calling out the Sudanese leaders for their continued racist statements and crimes. Ten years following its first early warning notice on Sudan, there were an estimated 429,000 enslaved citizens in Sudan. According to the Global Slavery Index, Sudan has the sixth highest prevalence of slavery in the world, which includes trafficking in persons and the abusive servitude of minority groups and migrant workers. Yet President Trump, not Sudan’s racist dictator, has alarmed the committee so much that it skipped over Sudan and decided to ring its warning bell against the United States instead.

The Trump administration should completely disregard what the United Nations has to say regarding the Charlottesville tragedy. Its human rights apparatus, including the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, is a living example of double standards on steroids. 

Joseph Klein is a Harvard-trained lawyer and the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom and Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations & Radical Islam.

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/267689/un-issues-warning-us-charlottesville-joseph-klein

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US envoy: Nuclear inspectors should have access to Iranian military bases - Reuters and Israel Hayom Staff

by Reuters and Israel Hayom Staff

"I have good confidence in the IAEA, but they are dealing with a country that has a clear history of lying and pursuing covert nuclear programs," U.N. envoy Nikki Haley says

The Bushehr nuclear power plant | Photo credit: Reuters

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley on Friday pressed the International Atomic Energy Agency to seek access to Iranian military bases to ensure that they are not concealing activities banned by the 2015 nuclear deal.

"I have good confidence in the IAEA, but they are dealing with a country that has a clear history of lying and pursuing covert nuclear programs," Haley told a news conference after returning from a trip to the Vienna-based U.N. agency.

"We are encouraging the IAEA to use all the authorities they have and to pursue every angle possible" to verify compliance with the nuclear deal, she said.

Haley visited the U.N. nuclear watchdog's headquarters as part of U.S. President Donald Trump's review of the Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, made by then-President Barack Obama in 2015.

The deal is designed to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons by imposing constraints on its nuclear program in return for the lifting of international sanctions on Tehran. The IAEA concluded that Iran secretly researched a nuclear warhead until 2009, which Tehran denies.

Iran's top authorities have rejected giving international inspectors access to their military sites and officials have told Reuters any such move would trigger harsh consequences.

"The JCPOA made no distinction between military and nonmilitary sites. There are also numerous undeclared sites that have not been inspected. That is a problem," said Haley.

Iran is suspected by the IAEA of conducting weapons-related activities at least at one military site years before the 2015 deal.

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a think tank, said that the deal sets out a process for the IAEA to request access to any Iranian site, and that it would be publicly known if such a request was made and rejected.

"The agency to our knowledge has not requested access to any site and been denied," he said. "Furthermore, the agency cannot and should not seek access to a site simply to test the Iranians' cooperation. They must have a legitimate reason."

Kimball charged that the Trump administration "is seeking a pretext" to accuse Iran of not complying with the deal, which Trump has repeatedly vowed to tear up.

Reuters and Israel Hayom Staff

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=44895

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The Canaan Falsehood - Melanie Phillips

by Melanie Phillips

Hat tip: Dr. Carolyn Tal

Arabs -- came from Arabia and most certainly were not around in the Biblical land of Israel

In the “Palestinians’” attempt to rewrite history and claim falsely that they and not the Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel, they have taken to claiming they have descended from the Canaanites. Since the Canaanites preceded the ancient Jews’ conquest of the land, that would make the Palestinians the rightful inheritors. 

Problem with this claim is that it is utterly ridiculous from all points of view. First off, it means the Palestinians aren’t Arabs. Which they are, by their own lights. Arabs, though, came from Arabia and most certainly were not around in the Biblical land of Israel. 

Second, there’s not a shred of evidence that the “Palestinians” were descended from the Canaanites. Nor is there any evidence they descended from any other unified people or tribe, for the simple reason they did not. The immediate forefathers of today’s “Palestinians” either considered themselves southern Syrians or just part of the Arab nation; many others immigrated to pre-Israel Palestine in the first half of the last century from a variety of non-Arab countries. And of course, since the invading Romans tried to erase the Jews’ claim to the land by giving Judea/Israel the meaningless name Palestina, there was never any such people as “the Palestinians”. 

The whole Canaanite heritage claim is merely another lie being propagated in order to rewrite the Jews out of their own history and conceal the fact that the Jews are the ONLY people for whom the land of Israel was ever their national kingdom. As Pinchas Inbari says in his JCPA paper Who Are the Palestinians:

“When one looks into what the Palestinians say about themselves, how each family describes its lineage, there is no trace of a ‘Canaanite’ ancestry. Most of the families find their origins in Arab tribes, some of them with Kurdish or Egyptian background, and there are even – by word of mouth – widespread stories of Jewish or Samaritan ancestry. Although one might have expected some effort to adduce a Philistine ancestry, there is almost no such phenomenon.

“In Nablus, there is a family named Kanaan – that is, Canaan. We asked members of the family about its lineage, and they affirmed that they had been Canaanites for 3,000 years. However, a look at the family’s website gave a different picture. It is indeed an ancient family – part of it Christian, indicating its pre-Islamic origin; but coming from Aleppo in Syria. From Aleppo, the family branched out to Damascus, Cyprus, and other places, including Nablus. Although the name may indicate Canaanite ancestry, the Canaanite forebears were in Syria, not in the land of Canaan.

“According to another source within the family, the clan originated in Homs,[23] Syria and became widely dispersed in the Middle East, apparently including Nablus, about 300 years ago. Despite the fact that the name suggests a Canaanite lineage, this source says the family’s origins lie in the ancient Arab Tamimi tribe.

“Thus, apart from the Kanaan family with its possible Canaanite ancestry coming from Syria, not Palestine, and its possible Arab origins, there is no direct or indirect evidence of the Palestinians having descended from the Canaanite people as they claim.”

The paper is an excellent and comprehensive demolition of this egregiously false claim. Do read it all.


Melanie Phillips

Source: http://www.melaniephillips.com/the-canaan-falsehood/

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Christians Who Libel Israel: The Iona Community - Denis MacEoin

by Denis MacEoin

British and other foreign aid money paid to the Palestinian Authority goes "into Palestinian schools named after mass murderers and Islamist militants, which openly promote terrorism and encourage pupils to see child killers as role models."

• "Why Gaza does not have bomb shelter[s]? Hamas took control of Gaza Strip in 2005 following Israeli withdrawal. However, hostilities never ended... Had Hamas built bomb shelters, the causalities would have been reduced. It seems Hamas does not pay much attention to the number of dead Palestinians." — Abdulateef Al-Mulhim, journalist, Arab News, 2014.
• Israeli soldiers do not set out to kill Palestinian children. Palestinian terrorists, however, knowingly and with malice aforethought, shoot, blow up, and slit the throats of Israeli children. You come from a Christian community, yet you appear to show compassion only for Palestinian children. If you do have feelings for Jewish children, I have never heard you say so.
• Israeli children are never taught to hate and kill Palestinians. Their schools inculcate peace-making and the Jewish ethic of tikkun olam, "repairing the world," making it a better place. No international body has ever shown otherwise. But there is a vast body of evidence showing that Palestinian teachers and leaders do the exact opposite. British and other foreign aid money paid to the Palestinian Authority goes "into Palestinian schools named after mass murderers and Islamist militants, which openly promote terrorism and encourage pupils to see child killers as role models."
• You have close connections to the Palestinian people and ought to have influence on them, to preach a Christian message of love and brotherhood. Are you willing to tackle them on their destructive use of children as cannon fodder and their educational system that turns little boys and girls into Jew-hating fanatics? Will you have the humility to apologize to the Jews of Israel for your unjustified accusations, to speak with them, to meet senior officers in their military, and to learn at first-hand how they work for eventual peace, however many times their efforts to bring it are thwarted by Palestinian rejection? I think you owe them that.

The Iona Community, about which I have written here before, is an ecumenical Christian fellowship in Scotland. Its headquarters are in Glasgow, but its main activities take place on the island of Iona in the Inner Hebrides, which is seen as a place for spiritual retreats. It has an international reputation for preaching love, a spiritual vocation, and fellowship among Christians. To me however it is also deeply anti-Semitic through its extreme hatred for the state of Israel and its one-sided support of the Palestinian narrative – according to the definitions of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and the US State Department.

The Abbey of the Iona Community, on the island of Iona, Scotland. (Image source: Akela NDE/Wikimedia Commons)

Earlier this year, Sammy Stein, chairman of Glasgow Friends of Israel, complained to the group about remarks made at a meeting addressed by Iona's Leader-Elect, Dr. Michael Marten. Marten had argued[1] more than once that Israeli soldiers routinely and deliberately shoot Palestinian children, while knowing that they are children. In a reply[2] to Mr. Stein, Marten and the Reverend Peter Macdonald, the community leader, asserted that Marten's statement had been true, and tried to back up their vilification by referencing a number of media and UN reports, including anti-Israel NGOs such as B'Tselem and Electric Intifada. I was asked to respond to their diatribe; the result is the letter below. Will Macdonald and Marten, take in what it says and find a more honest way to express Christian concern, not just for the children of Gaza and the West Bank, but for Jewish children murdered in their beds and at school by Palestinian terrorists?

Dear Rev. Macdonald and Dr. Marten,

Earlier this year, you co-signed a letter to Mr Sammy Stein, Chairman of Glasgow Friends of Israel, in which you cited sources and made statements regarding the belief that "Israeli military forces routinely attack children", regularly shooting and killing them. Mr Stein has asked me to respond to your letter, which I believe to be anti-Semitic under the most widely accepted definition of the term, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Definition, signed by and accepted by 32 countries, including the UK and the European Parliament, and therefore having force in the jurisdiction in which you live and act. I am not Jewish, but for most of a long life I have defended Israel as the only safe haven for Jews and Middle East Christians, faced on all sides by violent enemies and by the rapid 
recrudescence of vicious anti-Semitism across Europe as well as a centuries-old hatred of Jews across the Islamic world.

I would ask you not to make a knee-jerk dismissal of my arguments before you come to them, and I ask you to reflect on what I have to say and to pray about it. For I hope to show how far you stand as Christians from a fair, honest, and compassionate understanding of the sufferings endured by the people of Israel, whether they be Jews, Muslims or Christians. I say that because Israel is quite literally the only country in the Middle East and far beyond that provides freedom of religion and equal rights for all its citizens. As a former lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies, a Middle East historian, and the holder of a doctorate in Iranian Studies, I make that statement in the firm understanding that it is true.

The limited sources you cite in evidence of routine attacks on Palestinian children include several, such as B'Tselem and Electric Intifada, that are notorious as anti-Semitic and unreliable in the extreme. As an academic, I would not touch them with a bargepole. It is also vital to ask why you do not cite a single Israeli or pro-Israel source in an attempt to seek a balanced approach to the issue. When you wrote your letter, I believe you had already made up your mind and showed no interest in a more informed 

examination. Three of the sources you cite are dated from 2014, from the time of a war that was started by Hamas, disseminating information that was even then unreliable.

Yes, Palestinian children are often killed. The real questions are: why are they killed, who kills them, and whether the Israeli army, the Israel Defence Force (IDF), has a policy that leads to routine killings. Before going further, I assure you that no such policy exists or has ever existed. As I shall show, the exact opposite is true. I also want to ask why you do not once mention the frequent deaths of Jewish children by Palestinian terrorists. I shall return to that later, but I would like to know why your reported compassion for dead children recognises only Palestinian children, not Jewish boys and girls who have had their throats cut while asleep in bed or blown to pieces by suicide bombers seeking paradise by slaughtering Jews. Do you care about them at all? How far does Christian love extend?

In 2015, a body known as the High Level Military Group (HLMG) visited Israel six times in the wake of the 2014 war with Gaza, to which conflict several of your sources refer. The HLMG is made up of eleven former senior military personnel who issue reports on conflicts between democratic armies and terrorist organizations. These officials had held top positions in the US, British, German, Spanish, French, Indian, Australian and Colombian defence forces and were, they said, afforded a level of access to the Israeli military that was "undoubtedly in excess of what our own countries would afford in similar circumstances." They included a former chairman of NATO's Military Committee, Klaus Naumann, and sometime commander of British forces in Afghanistan, Col. Richard Kemp. All were from NATO and other democratic countries. Unlike yourselves and the commentators you cite, these are individuals of deep experience in warfare and in the command of soldiers in combat. Like yourselves, I am not a military expert, so I have a high appreciation of their insights into the IDF. I trust that you too will show respect for their conclusions.

Their 80-page report on the Israel Defence Force and its third war with Hamas in 2014 should surprise if not shock you with information that calls into question your portrayal of Israeli soldiers. It will only have such an import however, if your minds and hearts are open to the possibility that your judgement may be grossly distorted. You may also like to read and ponder on an article by this author, asking whether Israel committed war crimes in that war – an allegation which all the evidence, confirmed by the HLMG report, disproves.

In its report, the HLMG states:

We can further be categorically clear that Israel's conduct in the 2014 Gaza Conflict met and in some respects exceeded the highest standards we set for our own nations' militaries. It is our view that Israel fought an exemplary campaign, adequately conceived with appropriately limited objectives, displaying both a very high level of operational capability as well as a total commitment to the Law of Armed Conflict. The IDF not only met its obligations under the Law of Armed Conflict, but often exceeded these on the battlefield at significant tactical cost, as well as in the humanitarian relief efforts that accompanied its operation. (p. 11)

On the other hand, they say the following about Hamas, an internationally identified terrorist group that started this war as it did two earlier conflicts:

Hamas in turn not only flagrantly disregarded the Law of Armed Conflict as a matter of course as part of its terrorist-army hybrid strategic concept, but rather it abused the very protections afforded by the law for military advantage.
Embedding its entire military machinery in civilian locations and sensitive sites, including those of the United Nations, Hamas indiscriminately targeted Israeli civilians throughout the conflict with extensive rocket fire and willfully sought to draw the IDF into battle in a prepared urban stronghold amid the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, for which it located its operational headquarters in Gaza's main hospital.
It is important to note that Hamas's strategic concept actively seeks the death of its own civilians as an advantageous reinforcement of its strategy aimed at the erosion of Israel's legitimacy. (p. 11)

So high were Israel's standards that even the HLMG's rapporteur, Davis Lewin, was concerned that "Some of the precautions were so extensive they worried that they could become norms in international law in terms of having to fight their own battles elsewhere." It is Israeli policy to warn enemy civilians of impending attacks by dropping thousands of leaflets, making telephone calls, sending text messages, and even dropping projectiles called "knocks on the roof" to give residents advanced warnings to evacuate the premises. This practice alone makes Amnesty International's accusation of "callous indifference" to civilian deaths utterly indefensible. Giving advance warning of attacks is disadvantageous for the Israeli Air Force in two ways: it warns Hamas fighters and rocket-launching teams that they have been spotted and designated as targets, and it allows Hamas to order civilians to remain in buildings or go onto flat roofs to dissuade Israelis from firing. This policy of warning civilians of a coming attack is stated clearly in Israel's Manual on the Rules of Warfare (2006).

Hamas does the exact opposite, not just with its indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilian centers, but in its callousness regard for its own civilians, including children. There is overwhelming evidence that Hamas used human shields in various ways. Children have been used to protect fighters, who physically hold them or open fire right next to them.[3] Numbers of civilians have been ordered onto roofs, to remain in homes that may be targeted. Hamas places rocket launchers inside or directly next to civilian sites. There is much evidence that Hamas military structures, rocket launch pads, and command centers have been situated directly in or next to civilian dwellings, a church, hospitals,[4] mosques, and schools.[5] Even the UN has admitted this. If you will take the care to watch the videos I have linked to, you will see stark evidence of those crimes.

Does it not shock you to learn that Hamas fired rockets from 31 UN facilities, 41 hospitals, 50 children's playgrounds, 85 medical clinics, 248 schools, 331 mosques, and 818 other civilian sites. One report reads that "Hamas uses UN facilities, schools, children's playgrounds, water towers, mosques and countless other active civilian facilities as launching sites for rockets and attacks. In this operation [2014 war] alone, Hamas has launched above 1,600 rockets from civilian sites."

This is historically a deliberate Hamas policy, as is clear from a 2008 video of a speech by Fathi Hammad, the Hamas Interior Minister:

"The enemies of God do not know that the Palestinian people have developed their methods of death and death-seeking. For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, as do all the people living in this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahidin [i.e. the jihad fighters] and the children. This is why they have formed human shields [duruq bashariyya] of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahidin, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: 'We desire death, just as you desire life.'"

Read that again -- "they have formed human shields [duruq bashariyya] of the women, the children...." -- and you are outraged that Palestinian children are killed, and blame that on soldiers in an army that goes morally far beyond any other army in the world, and that puts its own troops' lives in danger in order to avoid hurting enemy civilians?
In your letter, you say nothing about Hamas or the Palestinian Authority which carry out or condone terror attacks, frequently inciting their own children to carry out stabbings or teaching them to become suicide bombers. As far back as 2014, Hamas killed 160 Palestinian children used to build terror tunnels, some of which ended under Israeli kindergartens. You say not a word about any of this.
It is a matter of record that Islamic terrorists use children from an early age as fighters and suicide bombers, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Syria, Iran, and elsewhere. Iran used children to explode landmines during its war with Iraq, and is still calling for young boys to fight in Syria. ISIS has used around 1,500 children (as young as seven) as fighters, suicide bombers, and executioners, putting them in harm's way and causing severe mental illness for any who may survive.

These things are well known across the world. I do not doubt that you condemn this. But Hamas, whom you do not condemn, is part and parcel of the international Islamic terrorist campaign against the West. Their use of children falls into the same category as that of the Taliban, ISIS, and other murderous criminal enterprises. Yet you criticize Israel whose soldiers fight to defend their people from this evil.

Israel builds bomb shelters to protect its civilians, including children, from Hamas rocket attacks. Most Israelis have a small shelter in their homes: "In 1951, three years after the State of Israel declared its independence, the country instituted a civil defense law requiring all homes, residential buildings and offices to be equipped with shelters or 'safe rooms'." In Sderot, however, close to the Gaza border, Jewish children have a mere 15 seconds to run from playgrounds to shelter. On July 2, 2016, in Sderot, a Hamas rocket landed directly in an early childhood development center. A 2012 study showed that almost half all pre-teen children living in Sderot suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Writing in Arab News in 2014, journalist Abdulateef Al-Mulhim asked a simple question:

"Why Gaza does not have bomb shelter[s]? Hamas took control of Gaza Strip in 2005 following Israeli withdrawal. However, hostilities never ended. In one of the conflicts around 1,500 Palestinians lost their lives and the Israeli side sustained few casualties. Undoubtedly, Israel is militarily more powerful than Hamas. Had Hamas built bomb shelters, the causalities would have been reduced. It seems Hamas does not pay much attention to the number of dead Palestinians

You do not even refer to these facts or mention other places inhabited by children, and instead blame Palestinian children's deaths on Israeli soldiers. This is morally irresponsible and reprehensible, and I do not hesitate to call you out for this transparent obliquity.

I mentioned above the many deaths of Israeli children at the hands of Palestinian terrorists who deliberately set out to take innocent lives. Allow me to mention just a few, and then to ask you why, to my knowledge, you have never condemned your Palestinian friends whose schools, television and radio broadcasts, political speeches, and religious sermons encourage their fellow citizens to go out to kill Jews, telling their own children that they should regard murderers as role models and aspire to carry out similar attacks once they are old enough.

In May 1974, three armed members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine entered Netiv Meir elementary school in Ma'alot in the Western Galilee and took over 115 people hostage. The victims were male and female student visitors from a religious high school together with escorts. Of the 115 hostages, 105 were children. The siege lasted two days, with demands made for the release of 23 terrorist prisoners. When IDF soldiers stormed the building, 25 hostages, 22 of them children, were killed, while 68 were injured. In the struggle, the terrorists killed children with grenades and automatic weapons. (For a full account of the massacre, see here.)

Between 2000 and 2005, the Second Intifada -- an outbreak of senseless violence targeting Jewish civilians -- hundreds of children were murdered in suicide and bus bombings, car shootings, and sniper fire. See Here for some of them. In March 2011, five members of a religious Jewish family, the Fogels, were slaughtered in their beds in Itamar by Hakim Awad, an 18-year-old Palestinian. He cut the throats of the father, and the mother, then proceeded to do the same to 3-month-old Hadas, 4-year-old Elad, and 11-year-old Yoav. Three other children, who were not at home, survived but were mentally scarred for life.

Last year, a 13-year-old Israeli girl, Hallel Yaffe Ariel, was stabbed to death while sleeping in her bed after a 19-year-old Palestinian man broke into her family home. Her mattress and the floor of her room were covered in blood.

Israeli soldiers do not set out to kill Palestinian children – the moral qualities of the Israeli military have been made clear above. Palestinian terrorists, however, knowingly and with malice aforethought, shoot, blow up, and slit the throats of Israeli children. You come from a Christian community, yet you appear to show compassion only for Palestinian children. If you do have feelings for Jewish children, you never say so.

Israeli children are never taught to hate and kill Palestinians. Their schools inculcate peace-making and the Jewish ethic of tikkun olam, "repairing the world," making it a better place. No international body has ever shown otherwise. But there is a vast body of evidence showing that Palestinian teachers and leaders do the exact opposite. British and other foreign aid money paid to the Palestinian Authority goes "into Palestinian schools named after mass murderers and Islamist militants, which openly promote terrorism and encourage pupils to see child killers as role models." Last summer, "a Gaza kindergarten graduation ceremony sponsored by the Islamic Jihad, featured children dressed in military fatigues, holding toy weapons, acting out attacks on an Israeli army base, firing mortar shells, planting explosive devices, kidnapping soldiers and even delivering mosque sermons that praise martyrdom." In 2012, senior Hamas commander Zaher Jabarin told Hamas' Al-Quds TV that Hamas labors "day and night" to educate Palestinian children in Gaza to become suicide bombers. In 2013, Gaza's Hamas-run al-Aqsa TV showed children singing the virtues of suicide attacks, and wishing to blow themselves up to "liberate" Jerusalem and Palestine.[6]

You have close connections to the Palestinian people and ought to have influence on them, to preach a Christian message of love and brotherhood. Are you willing to tackle them on their destructive use of children as cannon fodder and their educational system that turns little boys and girls into Jew-hating fanatics? Will you have the humility to apologize to the Jews of Israel for your unjustified accusations, to speak with them, to meet senior officers in their military, and to learn first-hand how they work for eventual peace, however many times their efforts to bring it are thwarted by Palestinian rejection? I think you owe them that. Surely, that is what Jesus would have done.

Yours sincerely,
Dr. Denis MacEoin

---

[1] Cited in private letter by Mr Stein and in letter signed by Marten, shared with author.
[2] Ibid.
[3] See also here.
[4] See also here.
[5] On all of these, see here.
[6] See also here, here, and especially here, where a Hamas fighter uses a little girl to fire a sub-machine gun at Israeli troops.

Denis MacEoin

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10895/iona-community-israel

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Netanyahu's Empathy for Trump - Caroline Glick

by Caroline Glick

Hat tip: Dr. Jean-Charles Bensoussan

Netanyahu is familiar with what Trump is experiencing.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump at Ben Gurion airport on May 23, 2017. (photo credit:KOBI GIDEON/GPO) 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was attacked by the media for not jumping on the bandwagon and condemning US President Donald Trump for his response to the far-right and far-left rioters in Charlottesville earlier this month. It may be that he held his tongue because he saw nothing to gain from attacking a friendly president. But it is also reasonable to assume that Netanyahu held his tongue because he empathizes with Trump. More than any leader in the world, Netanyahu understands what Trump is going through. He’s been there himself – and in many ways, is still there. Netanyahu has never enjoyed a day in office when Israel’s unelected elites weren’t at war with him.

From a comparative perspective, Netanyahu’s experiences in his first term in office, from 1996 until 1999, are most similar to Trump’s current position. His 1996 victory over incumbent prime minister Shimon Peres shocked the political class no less than the American political class was stunned by Trump’s victory. And this makes sense. The historical context of Israel’s 1996 election and the US elections last year were strikingly similar.
In 1992, Israel’s elites, the doves who controlled all aspects of the governing apparatuses, including the security services, universities, government bureaucracies, state prosecution, Supreme Court, media and entertainment industry, were seized with collective euphoria when the Labor Party under the leadership of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres won Israel’s Left its first clear-cut political victory since 1974. Rabin and Peres proceeded to form the most dovish governing coalition in Israel’s history.

Then in 1993, after secret negotiations in Oslo, they shocked the public with the announcement that they had decided to cut a deal with Israel’s arch enemy, the PLO, a terrorist organization pledged to Israel’s destruction.

The elites, who fancied themselves the guardians of Israel’s democracy, had no problem with the fact that the most radical policy ever adopted by any government, one fraught with dangers for the nation and the state, was embarked upon with no public debate or deliberation.

To the contrary, they spent the next three years dancing around their campfire celebrating the imminent realization of their greatest dream. Israel would no longer live by its sword. It would be able to join a new, post-national world. In exchange for Jerusalem and a few other things that no one cared about, other than some fanatical religious people, Israel could join the Arab League or the European Union or both.

From 1993 through 1996, and particularly in the aftermath of Rabin’s assassination in November 1995, the media, the courts and every other aspect of Israel’s elite treated the fellow Israelis who reject- ed their positions as the moral and qualitative equivalent of terrorists. Like the murderers of innocents, these law-abiding Israelis were “enemies of peace.”

As for terrorism, the Oslo process ushered in not an era of peace, but an era of unprecedented violence. The first time Israelis were beset by suicide bombers in their midst was in April 1994, when the euphoria over the coming peace was at its height.

The 1996 election was the first opportunity the public had to vote on the Oslo process. Then, in spite of Rabin’s assassination and the beautiful ceremonies on the White House lawns with balloons and children holding flowers, the people of Israel said no thank you.

We are Zionists, not post-Zionists. We don’t like to get blown to smithereens on buses, and we don’t appreciate being told that victims of terrorism are victims of peace.

Trump likewise replaced the most radical president the US has ever known. Throughout Barack Obama’s eight years in office, despite his failure to restore America’s economic prosperity or secure its interests abroad, Obama enjoyed the sycophantic support of the media, whose leading lights worshiped him and made no bones about it.

In one memorable exchange after Obama’s June 2009 speech in Cairo, where he presented the US as the moral equivalent of its enemies, Newsweek editor Evan Thomas told MSNBC host Chris Mitchell that Obama was “kind of God.”

Obama’s job, Thomas explained, was not merely to lead the US as his predecessor Ronald Reagan had done. Obama was above “provincial nationalism.” His job was to teach morality to humanity.

In Thomas’s words, “He’s going to bring all different sides together... He’s all about ‘let us reason together’... He’s the teacher. He is going to say, ‘Now, children, stop fighting and quarreling with each other.’ And he has a kind of a moral authority that he – he can – he can do that.”

The American Left’s adoration of Obama was so all-encompassing, and its control of the mainstream US media so extensive, that it never occurred to its members that the public disagreed with them. They were certain that Hillary Clinton, Obama’s chosen successor, would win.

In 1996, the Israeli elite greeted Netanyahu’s victory with shock and grief. The “good, enlightened” Israel they thought would rule forever had just been defeated by the unwashed mob. Peres summed up the results by telling reporters that “the Israelis” voted for him. And “the Jews” voted for Netanyahu. His followers shook their heads in mildly antisemitic disgust.

Their mourning quickly was replaced by a spasm of hatred for Netanyahu and his supporters that hasn’t disappeared even now, 21 years later.

The media’s war against Netanyahu began immediately. It was unrelenting and more often than not unhinged. So it was that two weeks after his victory, Jerusalem’s Kol Ha’ir weekly published a cover story titled, “Who are you, John Jay Sullivan?” The report alleged that Netanyahu was a CIA spy who went by the alias “John Jay Sullivan.” It took all of five minutes to take the air out of that preposterous balloon, but the media didn’t care – and it was all downhill from there.

Netanyahu, the media insisted, was a crook. He incited Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. He may even have been the assassin. His wife, Sara, was mean to nannies. She was a bad mother. She was ill-mannered in general and probably crazy.

Any prominent politician or luminary who entered Netanyahu’s orbit was demonized and libeled. Authors who dared to have dinner with him, journalists who dared to write anything half- way supportive of him, were effectively excommunicated from their professional cliques.

His advisers and cabinet ministers found them- selves under criminal investigation over nothing, and so did Netanyahu and his wife.

Every action his government took that could in any way be interpreted as a step toward weakening the elite’s control of the country brought bombastic headlines day after day, accusing Netanyahu of seeking to undermine the rule of law.

Every disgruntled cabinet minister, every slight- ed aide who publicly criticized Netanyahu, was given instant celebrity and star-for-a-news-cycle status.

The dovish commanders of the IDF and the Shin Bet were openly disloyal to Netanyahu in every - thing relating to the peace process with the PLO. Every attempt Netanyahu made to abandon his predecessors’ blind and misplaced faith in PLO chief Yasser Arafat was immediately leaked to the media. “Security sources” blamed Netanyahu for terrorist attacks.

When the Mossad bungled the assassination of Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal in Amman, it was Netanyahu’s fault. When Arafat used Netanyahu’s authorization of the opening of a new entrance to the Western Wall tunnels to unleash a terrorist offensive against Israel that left 15 Israelis dead in a week, then-Shin Bet director Ami Ayalon blamed Netanyahu at a live press conference.

The purpose of the leaks and the misdirection was to box Netanyahu in with no option other than to continue his predecessors’ failed policy of appeasing and empowering Palestinian terrorists.

Just as the notion that Netanyahu – the man who rejected their post-Zionist euphoria and insisted that there would be no new Middle East – had beat- en their savior Peres blew the Israeli elites’ minds to bits, so the US elite has still refused to come to terms with the fact that Donald Trump, the man they view as nothing more than a nouveau riche vulgarian, beat the anointed successor of their idol Obama.

So they hate him and cannot stop demonizing him. Whether it’s Obama’s director of national intelligence James Clapper, who insisted that the Muslim Brotherhood is a “largely secular organization,” saying that Trump is insane, or Bob Costa from CNN calling him a white supremacist and antisemite, there is no lunatic depth the American Left will not plumb to attack, demonize and dehumanize Trump and his supporters.

So how is a leader to respond to this sort of onslaught? Netanyahu for his part gave up fighting at some point in his first term. Faced with the implacable animosity of an empowered elite that boxed him in at every turn, Netanyahu decided to try to give them what they wanted in the hope of surviving in office.

He made a deal with Arafat and Bill Clinton at Wye Plantation. He handed Hebron over to PLO control. He surrendered government control over selection of the attorney-general to a committee controlled by the elites and so sank Israeli democracy into the hole it is still in.

Since 1997, unelected lawyers unaccountable to elected officials have the power to dismantle democratically elected governments, essentially at will.

Netanyahu got nothing for his efforts. The media, prosecution, state bureaucracy and security services continued to wage political war against him until, with the help of the Clinton administration, they overthrew his government in 1999 and brought Ehud Barak to power. Barak presided over a government so radical that the Rabin-Peres government looked hawkish in comparison.

Before Israel could move past its elites, the fruits of their radical policies first had to be ingested. In the event, the fruits of those policies were 1,500 Israelis killed in the Palestinian terrorist war and the emergence of strategic threats and repeated wars from post-withdrawal Gaza and Lebanon.

Today it is clear that Trump is wrestling with how to proceed in governing, as the American elites openly seek his political and even personal destruction. One day he tacks to the establishment in the hopes of appeasing those who hate him, and the next day he embraces his supporters and repeats his campaign pledges to “drain the swamp.”

The lessons of Netanyahu’s first term – and to a degree, his subsequent terms in office as well – are clear enough and Trump would do well to apply them.

You cannot appease people who want to destroy you. And you cannot succeed by embracing the failed policies of your predecessors that you were elected to roll back. The elites who reject you will never embrace you. The only way to govern successfully when you are under relentless assault is to empower your supporters and keep faith with them.
www.CarolineGlick.com


Caroline Glick

Source: http://www.jpost.com/opinion/column-one-netanyahus-empathy-for-trump-503351

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Charlottesville: A Counterfactual for Jews - Jay Michaels

by Jay Michaels

You are not being threatened by punks in white polo shirts parading under tiki torches. Waiting for you at the bottom of the slippery slope are the masked, black-clad Antifa

According to Messrs. Bing and Google, there are no statues of Theodor Herzl in the U.S.  Still, it’s not inconceivable that there exists one somewhere, or, on some university campus, at least a bust of the founder of political Zionism. He was a popular figure in ‘50s, when Americans across the political spectrum celebrated the founding of Israel. 

Now let’s say the town or university, under pressure from CAIR, BDS, BLM, Students for Justice in Palestine, the Muslim Student Association, and other teachers’ pets and their engagé sponsors, decides to remove the statue or bust. This dead white male was a colonialist, an imperialist, and a racist, and should not be honored by a tolerant, multicultural community. His presence is creating a hostile environment. 

So a group of Jewish and other students organize a rally in front of the bust to protest its removal. Leftist thugs vow that they will not let the rally take place. Racism is not protected speech. 

Again, this is not inconceivable. In California alone, and just during the past year, mobs have forced the cancelation of talks by Charles Murray, Heather MacDonald, Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter, and Milo Yiannopoulos, and on campuses across the country events sponsored by Jewish organizations have been disrupted and Jewish students intimidated. 

The attacks at U.C. Irvine have been particularly egregious. 

Those demonstrating against the removal of the bust would have a right to expect that their rally would be protected by campus security and local police. They would expect to be permitted to hear what their speakers had to say. The First Amendment is still on the books. It prohibits “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” and guarantees “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” 

Imagine, then, that, though a federal judge has ordered that the event proceed, less than half an hour before it’s to begin, the police declare a state of emergency and order everyone to disperse. The reason? Protestors have been trying to push their way into the park and break up the rally and some of the Jewish students have defended the entrances. The police, who have failed to secure the park or keep the counterdemonstrators behind barricades, then force the students on to a street filled with counterdemonstrators. The cops disappear and the Jewish students have to run a gauntlet of black-clad, masked fascisti armed with bats and sticks, pepper spray, flamethrowers, bottles, and balloons of urine and dye. Some of those attending the rally are injured. None of the pogromchiks are arrested. 

Would this be a scandal in the Jewish community? Would we hear denunciations of the police from the ADL, Hillel, the American Jewish Committee, and the local Federation? Probably. 

But this outrage would likely inspire nothing more than a tepid response from university administrators or city fathers. There would be lamentations about the absence of civility, perhaps proposals for a dialogue between the two sides, and maybe a warning, as was issued after chanting demonstrators interrupted an Israeli film, chased away latecomers, and blocked the exits. Suspensions? Don’t count on it. 

But at least the media that covered the event would not confuse victim and perpetrators. The Jews would not be blamed for the violence when their rally was disrupted. And if a particularly sensitive and compassionate university president expressed regret for the violence on both sides, he would not be vilified. 

Celebrating the perpetrator is, of course, the stock in trade of progressives -- from Trayvon Martin, the Horst Wessel of the left, and Michael (“the Gentle Giant”) Brown, to successful murderers Mumia Abu-Jamal and the legions of assassins from the PLO, Hamas, Hizb’allah, et. al. 

What you have to do in this country to exonerate the would-be killer is show that the victim was guilty of a thought crime. Remember the desperate and expensive attempts to find some racist content in the tape of George Zimmerman’s 911 call? 

So here’s the message to my fellow Jews: 

I won’t insult your intelligence by disassociating myself from the views of Unite the Right rally participants. 

The First Amendment, however, does not apply only to speech that is unobjectionable. What would be the reason for it if this were the case? The only speech that’s prohibited was, once upon a time, that which posed a “clear and present danger.” Nearly fifty years ago the bar was raised: now only speech that is calculated to provoke “imminent violence” is excluded from protection under the First Amendment. 

Though “kill the Nazis,” chanted by the Antifa and their friends, might meet that test, nothing said by the Unite the Right marchers does. “White lives matter” doesn’t. “Blood and soil” doesn’t. And “Jews will not replace us,” into which “You will not replace us” morphed, doesn’t. Whether this refers to a nefarious plan by the Jews to give up birth control, or a plot to abandon the professions and go into truck-driving and dry-wall construction, or a conspiracy by the Elders of Zion to import more immigrants into the country, it does not pose the threat of imminent violence. 

Because we didn’t hear the speeches in Charlottesville, we don’t know what their leaders believe, or how representative the sometimes imbecilic and offensive cherry-picked sound-bites from interviews are. 

What you didn’t hear at the rally were chants calling for the destruction of Israel. 

Go on any campus during “anti-apartheid week” and you will. 

We are told ad nauseum that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. Except it is. Nearly 45% of the world’s Jews live the historic homeland of the Jewish people. For over a millennium, Jews, both in Europe and the Islamic world, were subject to arbitrary fees, confiscations, humiliations, expulsions, and, periodically, arson, robbery, rape, and murderous attacks. 
Jews, in turn, regarded themselves in exile, and knew they were tolerated only as long as rulers found them useful. Then, after they were granted civil and economic rights in Western Europe, their success triggered a new wave of anti-Semitism, despite their wish to assimilate and become merely Germans, Frenchmen, etc. of the Hebrew persuasion. The Holocaust was only the culmination of centuries of persecution, as were the pogroms, beginning with the Iraqi Farhud of 1941, that drove 800,000 Jews from lands in the Middle East and North Africa where they’d lived for 2,500 years. But the most compelling argument for a Jewish nation with a Jewish army is not what the Germans did, but what the British and Americans didn’t do between 1941 and 1945. 

If you identify with the fate of the Jewish people, you want to see Israel survive and prosper. Of course, just as Christianity attracted talented and ambitious converts, who were sometimes among the most zealous opponents of the Jews, so the dominant religion du jour has attracted numerous converts. Jews who demonize Israel are always welcome by the radical left. 

Our Kulturträgers loathe Jewish nationalism only a little less than they loathe Western European and American nationalism. If you support Israel, be prepared to be labeled a hater and a racist. These labels exclude you from the protection of the First Amendment.   

You are not being threatened by punks in white polo shirts parading under tiki torches. Waiting for you at the bottom of the slippery slope are the masked, black-clad Antifa, with sticks, mace, blowtorches, bags of urine, and bottles of concrete. And their violence will be applauded, or at least defended, by clergy, professors, entertainers, journalists, and politicians with advanced views. 

Jay Michaels

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/08/charlottesville_a_counterfactual_for_jews.html

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Arpaio Pardoned, RINOs melt down - Patricia McCarthy

by Patricia McCarthy

What on earth has happened to the moral and political sensibilities of Paul Ryan, John McCain, Jeff Flake, Jeb Bush, etc.?

What on earth has happened to the moral and political sensibilities of Paul Ryan, John McCain, Jeff Flake, Jeb Bush, etc.? All of those RINOs who are attacking President Trump for pardoning Joe Arpaio are simpering, whining traitors to the party they allegedly represent. They should declare themselves Democrats and be done with the masquerade. 

Perhaps they should remind themselves of all the criminals and thugs that President Obama pardoned, or that President Clinton pardoned. Trump made it clear at his rally in Phoenix that he was going to pardon the beleaguered sheriff. The audience there was thrilled, as were the millions of people watching on television, the citizens who want our immigration laws enforced. If there was ever anyone who deserved a pardon, along with Scooter Libby, it is Joe Arapio. This was a no-brainer! The man has enforced both federal and state laws for his entire career. Arpaio was found in contempt of court after a Clinton-appointed judge, Susan Bolton, ordered him to stop enforcing the law, detaining people he suspected (or knew) to be illegal immigrants. It was the judge who broke the law as so many of our activist judges have over the last decade. They do not want laws that protect our borders enforced. Such judges are traitors to the nation as well. 

How have we come to the point at which the Republican leadership in Congress is so consistently on the wrong side of their stated principles? They have made common cause with the likes of the odious Sen. Chuck Schumer and the rest of the left. They despise Trump. That is clear to everyone. They intend to continue their sabotage of the president, even if it means they lose their majority, even if it means they contribute to the further takeover of the country by the totalitarian left. They are apparently just fine with the increasing restriction on free speech and the failure to identify Antifa and BLM as the terrorist groups they are. They seem to be fine with the criminal nonsense perpetrated by the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

They seem to be fine as well with the many corruptions, past and ongoing, by the Clintons, the Obama holdovers and the crimes of George Soros since they are not interested in getting to the bottom of their many crimes. They are not bothered by the Robert Mueller witch hunt being conducted by him and his band of leftist brothers bent on taking Trump and/or anyone in his inner circle, down and out. We all know by now that these traitorous Republicans will cheer if Mueller finds something to tarnish the President. Do they not realize the contempt the millions of Americans who voted for Trump feel for each and every one of them? If they do and they do not care. They do not honor their oath of office to represent the people who elected them and to uphold the Constitution. 

Most Republicans who voted for Romney and Ryan in 2012 now realize why they did not win: they were and are utter wimps, willing to subjugate themselves to the prevailing media sentiment. This is the tragedy of our time. We are assaulted by a corrupt media conglomerate twenty-four hours a day. They are, as Trump says, purveyors of fake news. The DNC is now a mere appendage to the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc. CNN is pathetic; it has transformed itself into the Jerry Springer Show, broadcasting a relentless parade of angry slaves to identity politics who only see people not as individuals but as units to be categorized by race, class, and a myriad of newly-minted genders. This is the cabal to which the Republican leadership has attached itself. They are cowards. Their constituents are disgusted with them all and these turncoats deserve their derision.

Patricia McCarthy

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/08/arpaio_pardoned_rinos_melt_down.html

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US envoy: UNIFIL chief 'blind' to illegal arms trafficking - AP and Israel Hayom Staff

by AP and Israel Hayom Staff

Head of peacekeeping mission in Lebanon says UNIFIL has "no evidence" of Hezbollah stockpiling illegal weapons in the area

UNIFIL vehicles in Lebanon | Photo credit: AFP

U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley sharply criticized the U.N. peacekeeping commander in Lebanon on Friday, saying he is "blind" to the spread of illegal arms and reiterating a call for the force to do more about it. 

With the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon's peacekeeping mission up for renewal next week, the United States has been pressing to step up efforts to tackle what Haley describes as a "massive flow of illegal weapons" to Hezbollah-dominated southern Lebanon, where neighboring Israel has long complained that the terrorist group operates with impunity.

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres is expected to visit Israel this week, where officials are likely to broach the issue of the Shiite terrorist group's armament efforts.

UNIFIL Commander Maj. Gen. Michael Beary pushed back this week on U.S. and Israeli criticism, saying his force has no evidence of weapons being illegally transferred and stockpiled in the area, and that "if there was a large cache of weapons, we would know about it."

"Gen. Beary says there are no Hezbollah weapons. That's an embarrassing lack of understanding of what's going on around him," Haley lashed at the Irish general, saying there was ample evidence, including Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's own boasts.

Beary "seems to be the only person in south Lebanon who is blind to what Hezbollah is doing," she said, adding that his view of the situation "shows that we need to have changes" in the mission.

Asked about her comments, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the organization has full confidence in Beary's work and noted that the debate over the mission would play out in the Security Council.

Guterres told the Security Council in a letter that he intends to look at ways for the peacekeeping force to "enhance its efforts," but he stressed that it's primarily the Lebanese military's responsibility to ensure the south is free of unauthorized weapons.

The UNIFIL peacekeeping mission dates back to 1978, and was expanded after the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah so that peacekeepers could deploy along the border with Israel to help Lebanese troops extend their authority into the south for the first time in decades.

Haley has said the United States wants "significant improvements" to the peacekeeping force, though she said Friday that doesn't mean changing the overall mandate but rather some language.

"It's time the Security Council puts teeth in the UNIFIL operation," she said. "We don't need to be giving terrorists a pass."

Discussions are ongoing, and it's not clear how keen the council will be on the U.S. approach.

Israel's Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon urged the Security Council to give the peacekeeping force a wider mandate. 

"UNIFIL cannot remain blind in the face of Hezbollah's dangerous armament in southern Lebanon. I urge the Security Council to approve a more effective mandate for UNIFIL, which will deal with the threats posed by Hezbollah," he said.

Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said that the mandate should be renewed as is and added that other countries had voiced the same view during a council discussion.

French Deputy Ambassador Anne Gueguen, whose country is in charge of drafting a proposed renewal, said it was "of paramount importance for the stability of Lebanon and the region, and in the best interest of all, that UNIFIL keeps its mandate and is in a position to fulfill it."

AP and Israel Hayom Staff

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=44897

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