Abbas: Shalit Kidnapping 'A Good Thing'
by Gavriel Queenann
Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas went on record in Arabic saying he will never recognize a “Jewish state.” He also said the kidnapping and five year ordeal of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit was "a good thing."
The report came from Middle East Media Research Institute, who translated and posted an interview Abbas gave on Egyptian state TV last month.
“First of all, let me make something clear about the story of the Jewish state,” Abbas told Dream2TV on Oct. 23. “They started talking to me about the Jewish state only two years ago.”
“I’ve said it before and I will say it again: I will never recognize the Jewishness of the state or a Jewish state.”
In the same interview Abbas said the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was held captive for five years by Hamas militants, was a "good thing."
“They were able to keep him and hide him,” he said admiringly.
Shalit was ultimately freed in exchange for 1,027 security prisoners, including some 450 terrorists, last month.
Abbas, packaged as a moderate by media handlers and pro-Arab politicians in the West, has long said one thing in English and another in Arabic. Despite this, he signed a unity agreement with the Hamas terror organization – which maintains a genocidal posture towards Israel – earlier this year.
He has also repeatedly accused Israel of being responsible for stalled peace-talks while openly putting maximalist preconditions on his participation in negotiations that he knows will be wholly unacceptable to officials in Jerusalem.
In September Abbas violated the bilateral framework of the Olso Accords when he sought unilateral recognition of a PA state based on pre-1967 lines without consulting Israel or the US, both of whom are Oslo signatories.
Israel has called for negotiations to resume without preconditions from either side.
MEMRI is a Washington-based research group that monitors and translates Middle Eastern media.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Sunday, October 2, 2011
3. Egyptian Muslims Burn Coptic Church in Aswan Province
by Chana Ya'ar
Egypt is back to “business as usual” with the Islamic majority harassing and attacking its Christian minority.
A group of Muslims burnt down part of a church Friday – the Islamic Sabbath – in the village of Marinab, according to a report published in the daily Al Masry Al Youm. The village, situated close to the town of Edfu in the Aswan Governorate, is located some 800 kilometers south of Cairo.
Security sources said Muslims rampaged through the village in what appeared to be a pogrom, clashing with the Christian residents and destroying their shops. Central Security Forces cordoned off the village “to control the clashes,” according to the newspaper report.
Christian websites reported in September that a group of Salafi Islamists had threatened the Christians, warning them not to leave their homes in the village unless they first removed the church dome. Saint George's Church had been restored earlier in the month, according to the report.
A gang of Salafi Muslims boasted to a victim they were torturing in March, “We won't leave any Christians in this country,” according to a report published several months ago in the Wall Street Journal. The attackers were never arrested.
The phenomenon of Muslims attacking Coptic Christians in Egypt is not new. But during the Tahrir Square Revolution that unseated former President Hosni Mubarak in February, protesters claimed the “new order” would bring peace and equality between the country's majority and minority populations.
But although intentions may have been positive among the organizers, the rank and file have since returned to their roots.
Since the revolution, there have been numerous murders by Muslims visited upon the Coptic Christian community, which comprises about 10 percent of the 83 million-strong Egyptian population.
Comment on this story
by Chana Ya'ar
Egypt is back to “business as usual” with the Islamic majority harassing and attacking its Christian minority.
A group of Muslims burnt down part of a church Friday – the Islamic Sabbath – in the village of Marinab, according to a report published in the daily Al Masry Al Youm. The village, situated close to the town of Edfu in the Aswan Governorate, is located some 800 kilometers south of Cairo.
Security sources said Muslims rampaged through the village in what appeared to be a pogrom, clashing with the Christian residents and destroying their shops. Central Security Forces cordoned off the village “to control the clashes,” according to the newspaper report.
Christian websites reported in September that a group of Salafi Islamists had threatened the Christians, warning them not to leave their homes in the village unless they first removed the church dome. Saint George's Church had been restored earlier in the month, according to the report.
A gang of Salafi Muslims boasted to a victim they were torturing in March, “We won't leave any Christians in this country,” according to a report published several months ago in the Wall Street Journal. The attackers were never arrested.
The phenomenon of Muslims attacking Coptic Christians in Egypt is not new. But during the Tahrir Square Revolution that unseated former President Hosni Mubarak in February, protesters claimed the “new order” would bring peace and equality between the country's majority and minority populations.
But although intentions may have been positive among the organizers, the rank and file have since returned to their roots.
Since the revolution, there have been numerous murders by Muslims visited upon the Coptic Christian community, which comprises about 10 percent of the 83 million-strong Egyptian population.
Comment on this story
Friday, September 23, 2011
Friday, August 26, 2011
Agreeing with the Message -- Not the Man
This week Glenn Beck gave a very direct and profound message in Israel about courage and about his perception of the way our world is headed. I have presented part of this message below. As I think about the contrast between the man and this message, I couldn't help but think about the people who will cast this message aside because of the religious views of Glenn Beck. And yet, I wonder how many of these very same people support President Obama's friendship with, let's say, Reverend Wright, for example. Now here's a man that spews hate and who has done so for many years, yet many people have put that message aside in favor of his other messages that somehow resonate with them. I wonder to what degree Holocaust survivors questioned the religious beliefs and practices of the Righteous Gentiles before accepting their help?
Glenn Beck’s Message to a State in Peril
Posted By P. David Hornik On August 26, 2011 @ 12:32 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 23 Comments
On Wednesday night about 20 rockets were fired at southern Israel from Gaza, wounding a nine-month-old girl and damaging property. The barrage continued on Thursday night with another 15 rockets or so.
On the whole it was a rough week for Israel. On Monday, after four days of fighting with Gaza-based terror organizations sparked by last Thursday’s multipronged terror attack on southern Israel, Hamas—which is in charge of Gaza—claimed it was agreeing to a ceasefire. It proved shaky at best, with sporadic rocket fire continuing, and collapsed completely on Wednesday evening.
But that wasn’t all. On Sunday a young Egyptian carpenter named Ahmed al-Shahat became a national hero when, as Israel Hayom recounts, he
scaled 15 stories to the roof of the Israeli Embassy [in Cairo] in full view of dozens of police and soldiers, and replaced the Israeli flag flying there with an Egyptian one. Shahat threw the Israeli standard down at the crowd, which tore it up and set it on fire.Inspired, on Tuesday another crowd of Egyptians removed the Israeli flag from the home of the Israeli ambassador to Egypt and demanded that Egypt scrap its peace treaty with Israel—signed in 1979 with great, almost chiliastic fanfare. Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman conveyed a demand that Egyptian officials reinstate the flags; Cairo replied that “the masses won’t allow it.” For Friday there were plans for a “million-man march” against the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty in legendary Tahrir Square.
Those masses have been particularly enraged since three (or five, depending on reports) Egyptian soldiers died, apparently accidentally, in a firefight last Thursday after Israeli forces chased jihadist terrorists back into Egyptian Sinai. The terrorists had come from Sinai and killed eight Israelis in the multipronged attack.
Amid this onslaught of violence and hate, also on Wednesday Glenn Beck, a non-Jewish media personality, gave a speech beside the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Anticipated to be a huge event, in the end it drew only about a thousand people, mostly American Evangelical Christians; though it was also watched in Jerusalem’s Safra Square and by over 1400 viewing parties in 60 countries all over the world.
Beck’s message, in any case, was very different from those Israel has been receiving from its neighbors. He said:
In Israel, there is more courage in one square mile than in all of Europe. In Israel, there is more courage in one soldier than in the combined and cold hearts of every bureaucrat at the United Nations.And:
“Human rights,” they say. But who will they focus on? Libya? Syria? North Korea? No. They will condemn Israel. Tiny Israel. Democratic Israel. Free Israel. Israel, which values life above all other things.And:
The diplomats are afraid, and so they submit. They surrender to falsehood. The truth matters not. To the keepers of conventional wisdom, a sacrifice of the truth is a small price to pay. What difference does it make if we beat up on little Israel? These are the actions of the fearful and cowards.And:
And so I say that if the world decides it must know who will stand with Israel, who will stand with the Jewish people, so they know exactly who to condemn, who to target, let them know this. Condemn me. Target me. I will stand with Israel. I will stand with the Jewish people. And if they want to round us up again, I will proudly raise my hand and say “Take me first.”Beck also outlined his plan to start a worldwide grassroots movement to defend Israel against the UN and the “human rights” organizations. He said that in South America on Friday he would meet with “a group of nearly 5,000 local leaders from all over the continent and ask them to join me in standing in defense of Israel, the Jewish people and responsibility.”
Are Beck’s unique message and activities making an impression on Israel itself? Only to a limited extent. Some of the reasons have to do with Beck. His Protestant-revivalist style of oratory is quaint and foreign to most Israelis. Some Jewish Israeli religious leaders fear that his message is actually Christian.
More significant, though, is Israel’s left-dominated media’s hostility to Beck. In a discussion of the problem, Yisrael Medad and Eli Pollak quote, for instance, Tal Schneider of Israel’s Globes business daily: “It could be that he repels the Israeli public since he does not speak Hebrew, or because the Israelis and even the right-wingers among them are repelled by the extremist views of a foreigner and Christian who preaches hate and extreme racism.”
Similar calumnies—reliably blind to their own bigotry—have appeared on Israel’s Haaretz, NRG, and Ynet websites, though, as Medad and Pollak also note, the new, popular, right-leaning Israel Hayom daily gives Beck a fair shake (see a short, highly appreciative piece here).
But however much the people he is helping will know how much he is helping them, Beck, because of the profundity of his commitment, is certain to keep to his path. Informed Israelis will be aware of what a great—and greatly needed—friend they have.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Saturday, August 6, 2011
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