Dry Bones: Hamas

Christians United for Israel Launches National Ad Campaign

Amazing!   Thanks to Christians United for Israel, Americans will finally learn what Hamas stands for, something The New York Times never dared quote to its readers

Article 7 of the Hamas Charter reads:

The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.

Article 7 is taken from Hadith Bukhari Volume 4, Book 52, Number 177:

Narrated Abu Huraira: Allah’s Apostle said, “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him

Article 13 of the Hamas Charter reads:
There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.

Help! American politicians are idiots!

Nancy Pelosi, former Speaker of the House, second in the United States presidential line of succession, after the Vice President:

“And we have to confer with the Qataris, who have told me over and over again that Hamas is a humanitarian organization. Mbe they could use their influence to–”

Crowley jumped in, stopping Pelosi,  asking her to clarify that statement, “The U.S. thinks they’re a terrorist organization though, correct? Do you?”

Pelosi did not actually speak a word in response to that question. Instead she uttered, “Mmm hmm.”

Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State:

 “I’m not a military planner but Hamas puts its missiles, its rockets in civilian areas, part of it is Gaza is pretty small and it's densely populated.


Apparently, it  is not only that Gaza is densely populated, but some people in Washington DC are pretty dense themselves 

Houston, we have a problem – the US president sides with Hamas against Israel!

The alternative reality out of a Robert Harris novel has become our only true reality. There is no more doubt –  the US President sides with an organization whose Charter calls for the killing of Jews.    

 Article 7 of the Hamas Charter:

The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.

What now?  Will Congress just sit there and do nothing and watch as the Obama administration goes against the very values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution?

It is just too shocking. It will take time to understand the magnitude of the disaster that has struck the US and Israel.  Especially when you see senators and congressmen continuing their usual everyday routine, going about their usual partisan concerns, like mesmerized, oblivious to the fact that a 8 magnitude Richter scale earthquake has just hit.

Our world: Israel, Hamas and Obama’s foreign policy

By  CAROLINE GLICK  

Americans need to be alarmed by what Obama’s actions on behalf of Hamas reveal about the general direction of American Middle East policy under his leadership.

President Shimon Peres with US President Barack Obama at the White House 

When US President Barack Obama phoned Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Sunday night, in the middle of a security cabinet meeting, he ended any remaining doubt regarding his policy toward Israel and Hamas.

Obama called Netanyahu while the premier was conferring with his senior ministers about how to proceed in Gaza. Some ministers counseled that Israel should continue to limit our forces to specific pinpoint operations aimed at destroying the tunnels of death that Hamas has dug throughout Gaza and into Israeli territory.

Others argued that the only way to truly destroy the tunnels, and keep them destroyed, is for Israel to retake control over the Gaza Strip.

No ministers were recommending that Israel end its operations in Gaza completely. The longer our soldiers fight, the more we learn about the vast dimensions of the Hamas’s terror arsenal, and about the Muslim Brotherhood group’s plans and strategy for using it to destabilize, demoralize and ultimately destroy Israeli society.

The IDF’s discovery of Hamas’s Rosh Hashana plot was the last straw for any Israeli leftists still harboring fantasies about picking up our marbles and going home. Hamas’s plan to use its tunnels to send hundreds of terrorists into multiple Israeli border communities simultaneously and carry out a massacre of unprecedented scope, replete with the abduction of hostages to Gaza, was the rude awakening the Left had avoided since it pushed for Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.

In other words, in their discussion Sunday night, Netanyahu and his ministers were without illusions about the gravity of the situation and the imperative of winning – however defined.

But then the telephone rang. And Obama told Netanyahu that Israel must lose. He wants an unconditional “humanitarian” cease-fire that will lead to a permanent one.

And he wants it now.

And by the way, the eventual terms of that cease-fire must include opening Hamas-controlled Gaza’s borders with Egypt and Israel and ending Israel’s maritime blockade of the Gaza coast. That is, the cease-fire must allow Hamas to rebuild its arsenal of death and destruction quickly, with US political and financial support.

Until Obama made the call, there was lingering doubt among some Israelis regarding his intentions. Some thought that US Secretary of State John Kerry might have been acting of his own accord last Friday night when he tried to force Israel to accept Hamas’s cease-fire terms.

But then Obama made his phone call. And all doubts were dispelled.

Kerry is just a loyal steward of Obama’s foreign policy.

Obama is siding with Hamas, and its Muslim Brotherhood patrons in Qatar and Turkey, against Israel, and its Sunni Arab supporters – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.

It is Obama who demands that Hamas have open borders so it can resupply, and receive billions of dollars – starting with an immediate cash injection of $47 million from US taxpayers – so it can pay North Korea for more missiles and import building materials to reconstruct its tunnels.

The fact that the US’s current preference for genocidal, Jew-hating jihadists over the only liberal, pro-American, stable US ally in the Middle East is a White House position, rather than that of a rogue Secretary of State was actually exposed even before Obama’s phone call.

Sunday CNN’s Candy Crowley interviewed Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes. She asked him what the administration thinks Israel can do to prevent civilians from being killed in Gaza beyond what it is already doing. Rhodes replied, “I think you can always do more.”

In other words, Rhodes said that no matter what precautions Israel takes to try to minimize Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza, the administration will never be satisfied. The White House will never acknowledge that Israel is in the right, or that it is fighting a moral war against a barbaric foe. And since the administration will never be satisfied, Israel can expect to be condemned by various UN bodies, including the Security Council, because no matter what it does to try to earn the support of the administration, it will never receive such support.

The discovery that the Obama administration is entirely in Hamas’s corner hit all of Israel hard. But it hit the Left the hardest. Few on the Right, which recognized Obama’s hostility from the outset of his presidency, were surprised.

As for political leaders, the government cannot risk giving the administration justification for its anti-Israel policies, so senior ministers have all said nothing.

Consequently, the harshest criticisms of the administration’s pro-Hamas position were heard from quarters where rarely a peep of criticism for Obama has been heard.

The Israeli Left went ballistic.

Haaretz, the far-left broadsheet that has seldom taken issue with even the harshest rejections of Israel’s rights, went bananas after its reporter Barak Ravid received the details of Kerry’s cease-fire agreement. As Ravid put it, Kerry’s document, “might as well have been penned by Khaled Mashaal. It was everything Hamas could have hoped for.”

Ravid continued, “What Kerry’s draft spells for the internal Palestinian political arena is even direr: It crowns Hamas and issues Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with a death warrant.”

And that is really the crux of the issue. The crowd at Haaretz is far more wedded to the PLO and Mahmoud Abbas than it is to the government of Israel. And the administration’s support for Hamas exposed the PLO as an irrelevance.

As the paper’s Amos Harel wrote the next day, Kerry’s pro-Hamas behavior convinced the Egyptians and other actors that the administration is “continuing its secret love affairs with the Muslim Brotherhood in the region.”

The Left understands that the administration’s behavior has destroyed it.

Leftists can no longer say that Israeli territorial withdrawals will win it international support.

They can no longer say that Israel will receive US support if it places the security of Palestinian civilians above the security of its own civilians and military forces.

They can no longer say that the PLO is the answer.

The Israeli Left has been Obama’s ace in the hole since he first ran for office, fresh from the pews in Jeremiah Wright’s anti-Semitic church. They were the grease in the wheels that legitimized the administration’s anti-Israel pressure group J Street. They were the ones who could be counted on to tell the US media and the American Jews that Netanyahu is to blame for Obama’s hostility.

Yet, rather than backtrack, and try to save the Israeli Left, the administration doubled down on Monday, releasing a series of statements condemning the Israeli media’s condemnations of Kerry’s pro-Hamas position.

By Monday afternoon, the administration went so far as to say that by criticizing Kerry, Israel’s media were endangering their country’s alliance with the US.

In other words, through his actions, Obama demonstrated that his “love affairs with the Muslim Brotherhood in the region,” are so central to his foreign policy calculations that he is willing to destroy the Israeli Left in order to strengthen the Brotherhood.

And this leads us to the larger point about Obama’s foreign policy, which his Sunday night telephone call to Netanyahu revealed. As rattled as Israelis are over Obama’s decision to support Hamas against Israel, Netanyahu made clear in his remarks Monday night that Israel has no choice but to keep fighting until we defeat this barbaric enemy.

Netanyahu didn’t mention Obama, but it was obvious that he was respectfully refusing to hand Israel’s head on a platter to Hamas’s friend in the White House.

And while it is hard for Israel to ignore Obama, it is impossible for Americans to ignore him. He runs their foreign policy.

Americans are the ones who need to be most alarmed by what Obama’s actions on behalf of Hamas reveal about the general direction of American Middle East policy under his leadership.

For the past five years, Americans from all quarters have concluded that the manifold failures of Obama’s Middle East policies – from Iraq to Iran, Libya, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and beyond – owe to a combination of Obama’s personal disinterest in foreign affairs and his presumed preference for withdrawal and isolationism over engagement.

Obama himself has often encouraged this perception with his endless golf games and his talk about fighting “the war at home.”

Obama’s open, public engagement in Hamas’s war against Israel shows that the popular assessment is wrong.

Obama is as involved in the Middle East as all of his immediate predecessors were. He is personally leading US policy on every front. Kerry is not an independent actor.

The problem is that in every war, in every conflict and in every contest of wills that has occurred in the Middle East since Obama took office, he has sided with Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, against America’s allies.

Under Obama, America has switched sides.

Creating freedom without anarchy, order without tyranny

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks 

By Jonathan Sacks

  

Nine days from now Jewish communities around the world will sit in collective mourning on Tisha b’Av, the day of Jewish tears. So many tears. For the destruction of the First and Second Temples. For the defeat of the Bar Kochba rebellion. For the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 and Spain in 1492. For the day on which Himmler was given the go- ahead for Die  Endlösung ,“The Final Solution,” that is, the extermination of the Jews of Europe.

Yet as one of the generation born after the Holocaust, whose identity was shaped in the wake of the Six Day War, I believed that Tisha b’Av and its sensibility belonged to the world of my parents and theirs. It was not ours. They were ha-zorim be-dim’a and we were be-rinah yiktzoru. They had sown in tears so that we could reap in joy.

This has made the past three weeks very difficult indeed for Jews around the world but above all for Am Yisrael be-Medinat Yisrael. After the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers and a Palestinian teenager, rocket attacks from Hamas intensified. The result was a sustained assault of a kind no country in the world has had to face: worse than the Blitz in World War II. (At the height of the Blitz, on average 100 German missiles were launched against Britain every day. On average during the present conflict Hamas has been firing 130 missiles a day against Israel.) We felt the tears of the injured and bereaved. We felt for the Palestinians too, held hostage by Hamas, a ruthless terrorist organisation.

Much of the world has condemned Israel for fulfilling the first duty of any government anywhere: to defend its citizens from an attack on their lives. What is the alternative in a situation in which Hamas was storing missiles in schools, placing rocket launchers besides hospitals and mosques, using ambulances to transport terrorists, placing entrances to tunnels under apartment blocks, and using an entire civilian population as human shields? As Colonel Richard Kemp, a former commander of British troops in Afghanistan, wrote in The (London) Times on Friday 25 July, Israeli uses “the most sophisticated and comprehensive means of avoiding civilian casualties yet employed by any army in the world.”And as Princeton political philosopher Michael Walzer has argued, it is “a central principle of just war theory that the self-defense of a people or a country cannot be made morally impossible.”

The worldwide tide of protest was not merely against Israel. It was, according to the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Italy, also against Jews. Did anyone think that 120 years after the Dreyfus Trial and seventy years after the Holocaust the cry of “Death to the Jews” would once again be heard in the streets of France and Germany? But it happened. The new anti-Semitism is not the old anti-Semitism, but it tells us that the world’s oldest virus of hate has mutated again. The tears of Tisha b’Av have not yet ended.

My concern here, however, is not with the political, moral and legal issues of what constitutes a just war, but rather with the intense spiritual question that arises for us at this time of year in the context of Jewish history as a whole. Why so much suffering for so long? Have we not lived long enough in the valley of tears? “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?”

We are neither prophets nor the children of prophets, but sometimes we must stand back and ask ourselves, what is the meaning of this hour? What does it tell us about the Jewish destiny and fate? There may be no single answer. Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are complex phenomena. But this is my answer after many years of questioning.

At the beginning of time God created the universe in a burst of energy that eventually gave birth to stars, then to planets, then to life. Among the millions of forms of life that eventually emerged was one different from all the others: Homo sapiens, the only life-form known to us capable of asking the question, “Why?”

On this one being, God bestowed the highest token of His love, setting His image and likeness on every human individual regardless of colour, culture, creed or class. He invited humanity to become His “partners in the work of creation,” calling us to create what He himself had created: freedom and order, the order of nature and the freedom that allows humans, alone in the universe, to choose between good and evil, healing and harm.

What the Torah tells us early on is how humanity failed. They did so in two ways. They created freedom without order. Or they created order without freedom. That is still the human tragedy.

Freedom without order was the world before the Flood, a state of anarchy and chaos that Thomas Hobbes famously described as “the war of every man against every man,” in which life is “nasty brutish and short.” That is the world today in Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Mali, the Central African Republic and other conflict zones elsewhere, a world of failed and failing states and societies wracked and wrecked by lawlessness. That is freedom without order, what the Torah calls a “world filled with violence” (Gen. 6: 13) that made God “regret that he had made man on earth, and it grieved Him to his very heart” (6: 6).

But the alternative was a world of order without freedom, epitomised in the Torah by the Tower of Babel and Egypt of the Pharaohs, civilizations that achieved greatness at the cost of turning the mass of humanity into slaves. That too is an affront to human dignity, because each of us, not just some of us, are in the image of God.

Having seen these two kinds of failure, God called on one man, Abraham, and one woman, Sarah, and said in effect: I want you to be different. I want you and those who follow you to create, out of a tiny people in a tiny land, a nation that will show the world what it is to sustain both order and freedom; what it is to build a society on the threefold imperative of love, love of God “with all your heart, with all your soul and all your strength,” love of our neighbour “as yourself,” and love of the stranger, a command reiterated in the Torah, according to the sages, 36 times.

I want you to become the people who keep the laws of tzedek and mishpat (justice and    law), chessed and rachamim (grace and mercy), not because of the coercive power of the State but because you have taught your children to hear the voice of God within the human heart. I want you to show the world how to create freedom without anarchy and order without tyranny. That has been the Jewish mission for the better part of 4,000 years.

The result was that Jews found themselves, time and again, in the front line of the defence of humanity. Where there is freedom without order – anarchy – everyone is a potential victim. Jews played no special part in this history. But where there is order without freedom – imperialism in all its guises – Jews have often been the primary targets because they are the people who more than any other have consistently refused to bow down to tyrants.

That is why they were attacked by the empires of the ancient world, Egypt Assyria and Babylon; of classical antiquity, Greece and Rome; the Christian and Muslim theocratic empires of the Middle Ages; and the two greatest tyrannies of the modern world, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. The face of tyranny today is radical political Islam in the form of Al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, Islamic Jihad, Hizb at-Takrir, Hizbollah and Hamas that are creating havoc and destruction throughout the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia. They constitute a real and present danger to the liberal democracies of Europe also. And despite the fact that Israel is an almost microscopic element in this global disturbance, it is once again in the front line.

Why? Because Jews throughout history have recognised tyranny for what it is, and have refused to be intimidated by power, threat, terror and fear. Somehow, in the most dangerous region of the world, Israel has created a society of freedom and order: a free press, free elections and an independent judiciary on the one hand, and constant innovation in the arts and sciences, agriculture, medicine and technology on the other.

Israel is not perfect. We believe – the Hebrew Bible is the most self-critical national literature in all of history – that no one is perfect, that “There is no one on earth who is so righteous that he does only right and never sins” (Ecclesiastes 7: 20). But today’s Israel has been doing what Jews have been charged to do since the days of Abraham and Moses, to create freedom without anarchy and order without tyranny. And if that puts Israel on the front line yet again, there is no nobler cause in which to be so.

Moses’ words ring out today with as much power as they did thirty three centuries ago: “Choose life so that you and your children may live.” If Hamas were to do that one thing, the Palestinians of Gaza would have peace. Innocent lives would not be lost. Palestinian children would have a future. Because Israel did make that choice, it has created a society of order and freedom while all around it rage the godless fires of chaos and terror.

So although yet again we will shed tears this Tisha b’Av, let us at least thank God for the courage and greatness of the people of Israel. For, knowing what we know of history, we would surely rather have the state of Israel and the condemnation of the world, than, God forbid, no state of Israel and the sympathy of the world. And as we read the last line of Eichah, let us be fully aware of what those words have come to mean in our time:

הֲשִׁיבֵ֨נוּ יְקֹוָ֤ק׀ אֵלֶ֙יךָ֙ וְֽנָשׁ֔וּבָה חַדֵּ֥שׁ יָמֵ֖ינוּ כְּקֶֽדֶם:

You brought us back, O God, and we returned. Help us to renew our days as of old,” in peace, speedily in our days, Amen.

The day the penny dropped in Israel on Kerry and Obama

It is not that John Kerry is officially a persona non grata  in Israel.  But since last Friday his standing in Israel is such that all the diplomatic niceties among Israeli politicians would not be able to bridge the chasm he has created. Even if by some miracle he does come uninvited the attitude towards him would  resemble what one has towards a halfwit - polite with concern for the handicapped.

With regards to Obama the attitude would be different.  After all,  the office of the president of the US commands respect by itself and yet it has finally dawned on the majority of Israelis that Obama is not America,  and that a terrible aberration has taken place with the leadership of the country Israelis usually  admire.   How is it possible that Obama in effect  sides with  Hamas and is insisting on a cease-fire  to which 86 percent of the Israelis are opposed?  He is an enigma one has to acknowledge exists,  but whose absurd policies they know the Israeli leadership cannot accept and which will have to be ignored if Israel is to survive. 

But all in all, Israelis have come together like I have not seen for a long time. The steady flow of well wishers visiting wounded soldiers at  hospitals is amazing.  One has to witness  it to understand the magnitude and scope.  Mountains of cakes, goodies and cards  attest to a deep link the population has to the soldiers fighting in Gaza. Israeli flags have popped up on buildings and cars  although it is not Independence Day.

I get a feeling that Israelis are saying to the world -  we are going to fight our own battles and will not listen to you for we know who we are and what we are fighting for and this time we see through your hypocrisy.    

John Kerry should resign

When Ha’aretz, the left-wing Israeli paper, comes up with the headline “Kerry's cease-fire draft revealed: U.S. plan would let Hamas keep its rockets”, you know that something is very, very wrong.

The Middle East policy of the Obama administration has become insane!  One can only look at the US and wonder - how is it possible that despite all the checks and balances built into the US political system we have an administration that sides with Hamas whose Charter, Article 7, reads: "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him."? Article 13 of the Hamas Charter reads: There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.

Either John Kerry screwed up on his own, in which case he should resign, or this was explicit Obama policy, in which case Congress should consider impeachment.

  

Barak Ravid, writes in Ha’aretz. Excerpts:

The press conference U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry convened together with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shukry was one of Kerry's most embarrassing incidents since taking office. And there were quite a few in the last year and a half.

A few hours before the press conference began, the Israeli security cabinet ministers unanimously rejected Kerry's cease-fire plan draft. Kerry, as is his wont, seemed and sounded as if he came from a parallel universe. He claimed to have never presented Israel with a formal offer for a cease-fire, slammed the Israeli media's "mischievous reports" and promised that Netanyahu's office will issue a clarification.

As if that wasn't enough, Kerry claimed he made significant progress in the cease-fire talks and said, deadpan, that the disagreements with Israel are purely on matters of terminology. Reality, of course, was completely different. If anything happened on Friday it was another deep crisis in trust between Israeli senior cabinet members and the American secretary of state.

The draft Kerry passed to Israel on Friday shocked the cabinet ministers not only because it was the opposite of what Kerry told them less than 24 hours earlier, but mostly because it might as well have been penned by Khaled Meshal. It was everything Hamas could have hoped for.

The document recognized Hamas' position in the Gaza Strip, promised the organization billions in donation funds and demanded no dismantling of rockets, tunnels or other heavy weaponry at Hamas' disposal. The document placed Israel and Hamas on the same level, as if the first is not a primary U.S. ally and as if the second isn't a terror group which overtook part of the Palestinian Authority in a military coup and fired thousands of rockets at Israel.

On Saturday, the State Department distributed photos of Kerry's meeting with Qatar and Turkey's foreign ministers in Paris. The three appear jovial and happy-go-lucky. Other photographs show Kerry carousing romantically with the Turkish foreign minister in the pastoral grounds of the U.S. ambassador's home in Paris, as if the Turkish official's prime minister didn't just say a few days ago that Israel is 10 times worse than Hitler.

The secretary of state's draft empowered the most radical and problematic elements in the region – Qatar, Turkey, and Hamas – and was a slap on the face to the rapidly forming camp of Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, who have many shared interests. What Kerry's draft spells for the internal Palestinian political arena is even direr: It crowns Hamas and issues Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with a death warrant.

It's not clear what Kerry was thinking when he presented this draft. It's unclear what he had in mind when he convened the Paris summit. It can only be seen as surreal. Along with foreign ministers from Europe's major nations Kerry greeted with regal honors Hamas' Qatari and Turkish patrons, ignoring what Israel, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority might have had to say.

Kerry isn’t anti-Israeli; on the contrary, he's a true friend to Israel. But his conduct in recent days over the Gaza cease-fire raises serious doubts over his judgment and perception of regional events. It's as if he isn't the foreign minister of the world's most powerful nation, but an alien, who just disembarked his spaceship in the Mideast. For a few moments Friday one could not avoid recalling the things Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon said about Kerry, and admit that despite the fact that it wasn't appropriate, he may have had a point.

If Kerry did anything on Friday it was to thwart the possibility of reaching a cease-fire in Gaza. Instead of promoting a cease-fire, Kerry pushed it away. If this failed diplomatic attempt leads Israel to escalate its operation in Gaza, the American secretary of state will be one of those responsible for every additional drop of blood that is spilled.