I had to laugh at BBC Middle East reporter Jeremy Bowen’s take on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt on the BBC News website:
Unlike the jihadis, it does not believe it is at war with the West. It is conservative, relatively moderate and non-violent. But it is highly critical of Western policy in the Middle East.
Bowen completely ignores the fact that Mubarak has been suppressing any whiff of Islamism, fearing just the sort of uprising from the extremists that the pro-democracy activists are now engaged in. He misses the point that the Brotherhood is patient and lies low, even now, to later pounce and develop a new highly dangerous, anti-Western, anti=Israel and anti-Christian policy when it can wield power and influence over the people.
The contrast between Bowen’s apparent laid back attitude to the threat of the Brotherhood and his views on the Netanyahu government in Israel as ‘right-leaning’ is marked.
Bowen ignores the effect on Israel of a Hizbullah/Iranian proxy in Lebanon, Iranian-backed Hamas in Gaza, Al Qaeda linked Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and, no doubt, a terrified King Abdullah in Jordan who, at least, can flee to Britain should the worse come to the worse.
Will the Palestinians in the West Bank then be emboldened to raise a third intifada and oust Palestinian Authority President Mohmoud Abbas, replace him with Hamas and bring more international outrage on Israel’s head for defending itself?
Meanwhile, in Damascus, President Assad lies waiting for his big chance to seize back the Golan.
Bowen seems somewhat sanguine about the Domesday scenario since he ignores it completely.
Maybe he is easily fooled by the term ‘Brotherhood’,
One thing is almost for certain; the Muslim Brotherhood will have some place in the Egyptian government.
Will the Brotherhood be to the new Egyptian government as the Nazis were to Weimar Repuplic in the 1930’s?
The world now knows that Helen Thomas, doyenne of the White House press corps was interviewed earlier this month (see full video below).
Thomas, of Lebanese extraction, said that the Jews should ‘get the hell out of Palestine’. When asked where they should go, she said they should go back to Germany, Poland, America and elsewhere. She was subsequently sacked from Hearst newspapers for her remarks.
Now, Helen Thomas is quite entitled to object to the Israeli presence in the West Bank and to settlements. What she appeared to be guilty of was saying that Jews should leave Palestine (and it is not clear what she meant by ‘Palestine’) and return to two countries which were largely responsible for the deaths of 6 million during the Holocaust.
This is insensitivity to put it mildly. If she were implying that Jews as settlers should leave Palestine/the West Bank, then why did she not say they should settle in Israel rather than ‘get the hell out’. There was a clear implication that she did not believe Jews have the right to settle even in Israel and that they are ALL settlers from Europe, America and elsewhere.
Helen Thomas’s remarks were echoed by a fellow Lebanese, as reported in the Jerusalem Post in an article about the Lebanese all woman flotilla which now, apparently, is not going to sail after all (see here).
In an interview with Hizbullah’s al-Manar television station,
Yasser Kashlak, a Syrian businessman of Palestinian descent who heads the “Free Palestine Organization” and is funding this boat, as well as another that is to carry journalists and parliamentarians, said …. that he was more and more optimistic that one day these same boats would take “Europe’s refuse [the Jews] that came to my homeland back to their homelands.
“Gilad Schalit should go back to Paris and those murderers go back to Poland, and after that we will chase them until the ends of the earth to bring them to justice for their acts of slaughter from Deir Yassin until today.
So the Jewish people are ‘Europe’s refuse’ and should somehow go back, presumably even those who have lived in Israel/Palestine uninterrupted for hundreds of years.
But Mr Kashlak, like Helen Thomas, conveniently failed to mention that in 1948 and subsequently as many as 900,000 Jews from Arab states were expelled or forced to leave due to persecution, and stripped of their property, businesses and money simply for being Jews. Approximately half of all Israelis are of Mizrahi Arab descent.
Many of them, naturally, fled to Israel. So does Mr Kashlak expect these Jews and their descendants to return to Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Syria? Does he think these countries would accept hundreds of thousand of Jews? If not, where would he like them to go? But he is going to chase them to the ends of the Earth anyway, which seems a bit silly. Why expel them and then chase them, why not just murder them in their homes in Israel.
He wants Gilad Shalit to go back to Paris. I’m sure Gilad Shalit would be happy to go anywhere at the moment, but he can’t as he is being held as a prisoner of war by Hamas without access to the Red Cross in direct transgression of the international laws that Hamas and Hizbullah are so keen to accuse Israel of breaking.
So for those who would deny the Jews their rights to self-determination in their ancestral homeland the choice is clear: exile or extermination. And if you chose the former, we’ll come after you anyway. This should not be surprising when Hizbullah, like Hamas, is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and all Jews.
You can find the Hizbullah ‘charter’ here. But here’s a taste of it:
Therefore our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no cease fire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.
We vigorously condemn all plans for negotiation with Israel, and regard all negotiators as enemies, for the reason that such negotiation is nothing but the recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Therefore we oppose and reject the Camp David Agreements, the proposals of King Fahd, the Fez and Reagan plan, Brezhnev’s and the French-Egyptian proposals, and all other programs that include the recognition (even the implied recognition) of the Zionist entity.
Sounds a tad uncompromising to me. Oh well, maybe Hamas can do better:
“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).
“The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. “
“There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”
“After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.”
…
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Muslim).
Well, that, if anything is even worse. They want to murder all Jews. But that’s genocide! So let’s send humanitarian boats to help them achieve their objectives by breaking the maritime blockade and letting in arms and missiles.
On Tuesday the Israel Defense Force (IDF) released a video in black and white, using night vision and taken by an unmanned drone.
The video followed a series of explosions in a residential area near Tyre in Southern Lebanon.
The video clearly shows rockets being transferred by truck from the site of the explosion to another location.
UN Security Council Resolution 1701 forbids arms to be brought into Southern Lebanon following the war between Israel and Hizbullah in 2006.
Today the Jerusalem Post has a story about Hizbullah’s release of a video taken on the ground and showing a similar exercise to that witnessed by the Israeli drone but claiming that the objects being moved were metal posts.
Just as the Palestinians have a wonderful film industry which fabricates evidence against Israel on a regular basis, Hizbullah now appear to be bidding for their place at the Cannes Film Festival.
Why would anyone take a video of metal posts and doors (so they also claim) being moved?
Why is the film taken in the daytime when the drone video was at night?
Why are there UNIFIL soldiers in the Hizbullah video and not not the IDF video?
The very fact of this blatant fabrication is an indicator of guilt.
Now the Lebanese want to report the IDF to the UN for breaching 1701! If Israel witnesses explosions of munitions in an area which is supposed to be free of munitions it has a right to investigate. And what does it find? Hizbullah are stashing rockets which can reach many parts of Israel.
And what does the UN do? Nothing. What does the pathetic Lebanese government do? Nothing. No international outrage. Nothing. Well no change there then. Just continue pillorying Israel for defending itself.
Outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has dropped a very big hint that earlier this year, probably January, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) bombed a convoy of illegal arms on its way to Gaza from Tehran via Sudan and Egypt.
As with the alleged bombing of a Syrian nuclear plant the countries involved are reluctant to admit anything happened because it shows them up for what they are – terrorist states.
It seems there as a cosy little alliance of murderers and genocides (both actual and aspirational) consisting of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Sudan.
A Sudanese minister, Mabrook Mubarak Saleem told an Arabic news channel that many had been killed in the air strike. Arutz Sheva reports:
a Sudanese spokesman claimed that “more than 100 people” had been killed in the air raid, which he termed “a genocide, committed by U.S. forces.”
When asked how he knew the attackers were American, the spokesman said: “We don’t differentiate between the U.S. and Israel. They are all one.”
This man’s contempt for the word ‘genocide’ in whatever language he was using is an indication of the mentaliy of these atrocious people in the Sudanese government who make Mugabe look like a benevolent democrat.
Meanwhile his government is committing genocide in Darfur supported by the Iranian axis of evil.
Meanwhile Iran WANTS to commit genocide in Israel.
Meanwhile Hamas WANTS to commit genocide in Israel.
Meanwhile Hezbollah WANTS to commit genocide in Israel.
What an attractive little group of murdering, Jew-hating, fanatical, tyrannical, warmongers they are.
Hey, maybe we can talk to them and persuade them to talk about peace and reconciliation.
Hey, maybe they are really quite nice people with a grievance.
Hey, maybe if we gave the Palestinians a homeland they’d all settle down and turn to stamp collecting.
Hey, maybe if we gave the Palestinians a homeland they would pursue democracy, peace, education, equality for all their citizens, including women; maybe they wouldn’t teach their children to hate, to glorify murder, to corrupt their own religion.
Hey, maybe if we gave the Palestinians a homeland they wouldn’t continue in their stated objective of destroying Israel.
Hey, maybe Iran really is just developing a nuclear energy programme.
Hey, maybe they wouldn’t dream of threatening Israel and the West with a nuclear weapon.
Hey, maybe Israel isn’t a terrorist state after all.
Hey, maybe Israel is the front line against these these monsters.
Hey, maybe we can learn from Israel how to defend the free world.
