Why Palestine Fails

November 16, 2023 By Michael Widlanski

Before creating another “Palestinian state,” let’s consider its chance of success. We’ve had several different Arab states in and around Palestine. All failed, some disastrously.  Will yet another Palestinian state envisioned by Anthony Blinken or some think tank become just one more “failed state,” indeed a state destined to fail? Yasser Arafat’s PLO operates a corrupt and failing state-in-waiting on Israel’s eastern flank, in an area commonly called “the West Bank.”  It has failed in everything but terror for 30 years.

Well-meaning Israeli leftists, backed by well-meaning U.S. think-tanks and State Department officials, believed Arafat and the PLO had become “moderates.” They gave them Gaza and the West Bank, offering them a ready-made Palestinian state. The PLO-Israel agreements of 1993-95 -- were meant to bring an era of peace.  Instead, they brought an era of terror: 2,000 Israelis were murdered in less than a decade. From Day One, the PLO violated all pacts with Israel, smuggled weapons, staged terror attacks........To Read More....

After Biden Sent $1B to PLO, Israeli Deaths Rose 900%

Daniel Greenfield February 16, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

When Secretary of State Blinken met with PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas, he boasted of the over billion dollars in aid that the Biden administration had programmed for the terrorist territories.

That aid has come with a very heavy price.

In Feb 2019, President Trump’s total cutoff of aid became official. That year, 10 Israelis or people in Israeli controlled areas were killed in stabbings, shootings, rocket and other attacks, down from 12 the previous year, and 15 in 2017, and 16 in 2016.

In 2020 however only three Israelis were killed.

These numbers reflected the diminished capacity of the Islamic terrorists. The reduction in numbers was not due to the pandemic. 2020 still saw attacks, including firebombings, rocket launches and stabbings, but the success and lethality rates for these attacks were lower.

The numbers turned around dramatically once again in 2021.

In April 2021, the Biden administration restored aid to the PLO. Terror incidents, reflecting attack attempts, shot up sharply from 91 in February and 89 in March to 130 in April.

By May, major fighting resumed with 13 Israelis, including two children, killed.

By the time the year was over, 17 people in Israeli areas had been killed. The over 400% increase in deaths was only the beginning. In 2022, 31 Israelis or people in Israeli areas were killed, up from only 3 in 2020, for a massive 900% increase in casualties since the restoration of foreign aid to the terrorists. This was the worst death toll since 2015 under Obama.

But in January and the first half of February of 2023, 10 Israelis have already been killed, including a 6-year-old boy and an 8-year-old boy.

Three times as many have been killed in a month and a half of 2023 as in all of 2020. That’s a 233% increase over 2020 in just a fraction of a year, but it’s also a marked month-to-month escalation from 2022 which featured no attacks at all in January or February. More people have already been killed by terrorists in 2023 than through most of March in 2022.

What a difference a billion dollars makes.

While the media has tried to portray the terrorism as “lone wolf” attacks, they’re crowdsourced violence of the kind that Al Qaeda and ISIS helped innovate. But the PLO’s version is unique through its ‘Pay-to-Slay’ program which rewards terrorists, regardless of their formal affiliation, including ISIS and Hamas members, with salaries and payments for their families.

Terrorists are paid based on the length of their prison sentence. That means successful killers can earn $2,000 to $3,000 a month in a part of the world where the average salary is around $700 a month. It’s five times more profitable to be a terrorist than a teacher.

The Palestinian Authority calls for the murder of Jews, praises it and then rewards it.

Muhammad Al-Lahham of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, which runs the political movement behind the terrorists of the Palestinian Authority, was caught on video praising the “patriotic conscience” of a terrorist who had killed a rabbi taking his 2-year-old son for a walk in 2022.

The Trump administration cut off aid to the PLO’s Palestinian Authority and Congress passed the Taylor Force Act banning funds from going to finance Pay-to-Slay.

Throughout all this, PLO leadership have been consistent in refusing to stop financing terrorism.

“We will neither reduce nor prevent [payment] of allowances to the families of martyrs, prisoners and released prisoners, as some seek, and if we had only a single penny left, we would pay it to families of the martyrs and prisoners,” Abbas had bragged. By “martyrs”, he meant those Islamic terrorists who were killed while carrying out terrorist attacks.

Despite this, the Biden administration had restored aid and rebuilt diplomatic relations. Biden and Blinken have met with Abbas. And while they have attacked Israel over everything from letting Jews pray on the Temple Mount (due to Jewish prayers offending Muslim sensibilities) to democratic judicial reform that will limit the unilateral authority of pro-terrorist judges, Biden and Blinken have had nothing to say to the terrorists about the program funding the murder of Jews.

America First Legal, under Stephen Miller, filed suit against the Biden administration on behalf of the parents of Taylor Force: a non-Jewish Afghanistan war vet murdered in Jerusalem.

“The Biden Administration is well aware that the PA pays Palestinian terrorists to injure or kill innocent Americans and Israelis in Israel. Yet, in blatant violation of the Taylor Force Act, a federal law that prohibits the government from sending American taxpayer dollars to the PA until it stops supporting terrorism, President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken have resumed payments to the PA after the Trump Administration had stopped these payments in compliance with the Taylor Force Act,” America First Legal declared..

“The Taylor Force Act, named after our son, was passed by Congress and signed by President Trump to stop this Pay to Slay. Yet the Biden Administration has resumed payments to the PA notwithstanding its Pay to Slay program,” Stuart Force, Taylor’s father, said.

The Biden administration’s decision to fund the Palestinian Authority has consequences beyond Israel. Islamic terrorism is a global threat and has been a reliable killer of Americans abroad.

“Robbi and I call upon President Biden to stop sending fungible taxpayer dollars to the PA that will end up funding terrorism,” Stuart Force appealed.

And the latest wave of violence shows just how ‘fungible’ that money is.

The massive uptick in successful terrorist attacks is not a coincidence. The numbers become more significant when we distinguish between so-called “lone wolf” attacks which are most directly impacted by ‘Pay-to-Slay’ and rocket attacks by other terrorist groups. 14 people were killed in direct terrorist attacks in 2018. That number dropped to 5 in 2019, the year Trump cut off aid to the PLO. By 2020, it fell to 3, in 2021, the year Biden restored aid, it rose to 4 and then shot up to 32 in 2022 reflecting the ‘slow burn’ effect of fungible aid money being taken away and then restored within a government bureaucracy even if it’s run by and for terrorists.

As the Biden administration continues pumping money into the terrorist entities occupying parts of Israel, the violence is drastically increasing. 2023 is already on track to top 2022 which had the worst numbers since 2015. The level of Islamic terrorism is returning to that of the Obama administration and that means that we can expect an even higher death toll in Israel.

The billion dollars in aid is a factor, but an even bigger factor is that the Biden administration, like its Democrat predecessor, has made no secret of its support for the Palestinian Authority. And the Biden administration has gone even further with its diplomatic support for the PLO regime and its pressure on Israel. The latest murders are the work of a terrorist group that knows that Washington D.C. has its back and will intervene to protect it from Israel.

The Biden administration’s decision to appoint Hady Amr, an open supporter of Islamic terrorism and opponent of the Jewish State, as its key liaison to the PLO, who was inspired by the intifada, has consequences, and dead bodies in Jerusalem are among the most obvious ones.

Islamic terrorism runs on money and foreign support. The Biden administration has provided both. The Palestinian Authority spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on Pay-to-Slay.

The pipeline of terror may end with a 6-year-old boy lying dead on a Jerusalem street but it begins with cash coming out of Washington D.C. The attacks of September 11 cost Al Qaeda about half a million dollars. The cost to the PLO of killing that little boy, his brother and a newly married man going to spend the Sabbath with his wife’s family probably comes out to about $30,000 a year. Or $10,000 per dead Jewish person. That’s a fraction of the millions of dollars in foreign aid which could be used to finance hundreds and thousands of more murders of Jews.

$10,000 to kill a six-year-old boy, another $10,000 to kill his 8-year-old brother. Thanks to the financiers of murdering Jews in the Biden administration, the terrorists have the cash.  And we’re the ones providing it. 

 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s Favorite BDS Group Mourns an ISIS Terrorist

Daniel Greenfield July 14, 2022 @ Sultan Knish Blog

When Baraa Lahlouh, an Islamic terrorist, was recently buried, he was draped in what the Agence France-Presse (AFP) misleadingly described as "a flag showing the seal believed to have been used by Islam’s Prophet Mohamed".

The wire service neglected to mention that it was more specifically The Associated Press, as documented by CAMERA, distributed photos of the burial while neglecting to describe the ISIS flag. Along with burying a terrorist, they buried the lede.

The growing presence of ISIS in Israel and its overlap with the established Islamic terrorist groups like the PLO and Hamas has forced the media into new extremes of evasiveness.

Former PLO official Hanan Ashrawi accused Israel of an "extrajudicial assassination".

The PLO's Foreign Ministry responded to the shooting of the ISIS terrorist by calling it a "hideous crime" It falsely accused Israel of "war crimes" against "defenseless Palestinian citizens."

WAFA, the PLO's news agency, charged Israel with "cold-blooded murder" in which, according to the terrorist outlet, the ISIS terrorist and his comrades were "ambushed and shot dead in cold blood".

The PLO’s support for ISIS terrorism against Israeli Jews is nothing new.

In March, an ISIS terrorist carried out an attack at a shopping mall in Beersheva that killed four Israelis including a rabbi who ran a soup kitchen and who left behind four children.

Mohammad Ghaleb Abu al-Qi’an, the Islamic terrorist, had previously tried to join ISIS.

Al-Hayat al-Jadeeda, the PLO's official paper, praised the ISIS terrorist as a "martyr" and PA TV featured a poster of the ISIS terrorist as a “martyr”. Hamas celebrated the attack as a "heroic operation" and an Al Jazeera personality, an arm of the Qatari regime which backs Hamas, posted a message, “Four [dead]. Blessed are your hands".

That same month, two Islamic terrorists opened fire at a bus stop, one of whom had previously tried to join ISIS. They released a video featuring an ISIS flag and pledging allegiance to the ISIS caliph.

After the attack, ISIS issued an official statement boasting of, “12 infidel Jewish forces killed and wounded in a sacrifice attack carried out by soldiers of the Caliphate in northern Palestine.”

Hamas praised the "valor and courage" of the attack. Another Al Jazeera personality, Ahmed Mansour, celebrated the ISIS attack for having “killed and wounded many occupation soldiers [and] was a painful blow in the heart of Israel and of its Arab Zionist allies."

The Palestinian Authority made no official statement, but is likely to make payments to the families of the terrorists under the ‘Pay-to-Slay’ program. That program was at the center of the debate over continuing foreign aid by the United States to the PLO and its Ramallah regime.

Even as ISIS is becoming part of this terrorist landscape in Israel, Biden is preparing to visit the terrorist-occupied territories inside Israel to meet with PLO dictator Mahmoud Abbas and assorted terrorist leaders.

The administration is already undermining israel by running a shadow consulate to the terrorists.

It has also poured hundreds of millions into PLO territories with official numbers topping $500 million. The unofficial numbers are likely to go well beyond that half a billion dollars.

And, as noted by Mark Goldfeder of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, the shadow consulate is "designed to help facilitate that aid... also illegal under the 2018 Taylor Force Act" which bans "any assistance that directly benefits the PA unless and until the PA stops paying terrorists to kill American and Israeli citizens". And the PA/PLO won’t stop doing that.

The growing presence of ISIS in Israel benefits from the ‘Pay-to-Slay’ program funding attacks against Israel as well as the larger infrastructure of terrorist media and organizations maintained by the PLO. And, much as the Biden administration continues to funnel nearly $1 billion in “aid money” into Afghanistan despite the Taliban takeover, the same is true of terrorism in Israel.

Unlike the PLO, Hamas, and the Taliban, ISIS remains so horrifyingly unacceptable that the Biden administration and the media can only handle its existence by entirely ignoring it.

The whitewashing of Baraa Lahlouh’s burial in an ISIS flag by evasively describing it as the seal of Mohammed has become typical. Pro-terrorist sites like Electronic Intifada denounced the death of the ISIS terrorist as an "extrajudicial execution". And they were not alone in spewing anti-Israel hate while refusing to even mention the ISIS elephant in the terrorist room.

The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) mourned the ISIS terrorist and his comrades, “Laith, Baraa, and Yusuf“ as "young men with entire lives ahead of them.”

“They should be here today, but due to Israel’s relentless and deadly violence against Palestinians, their loved ones will never see or hold them again," IMEU complained.

The organization is a 501c3 non-profit. Propagandizing on behalf of a terrorist buried in an ISIS flag would seem to run counter to the non-profit regulations that never seem to be enforced against the enemies of this country, only against its patriots and its defenders.

IMEU has been funded in the past by the Soros network, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Tides Foundation, and the Foundation for Middle East Peace. Leading leftist funders are now kissing cousins with apologists for ISIS terrorists. And it does not just stop there.

IMEU was just cited by Rep. Rashida Tlaib in her Nakba resolution attacking Israel's existence.

Tlaib has a longstanding relationship with IMEU with both the BDS group and the anti-Israel politician promoting each other. And, in the process, Islamic terrorism, including ISIS.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Tags: ISIS, Islamic terrorism, Israel, recent

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Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Cente

 

The PLO Antisemitic Riots and Jihadization of American Cities are an Immigration Issue

Daniel Greenfield May 27, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog

(Editor's Note:  The original post has a video that was removed by YouTube for violations they make up as they go along, and anyone who exposes the truth of what's going on over there. RK)

In 2015, The Atlantic ran a cover story titled, "Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?"

In 2021, the question is whether it’s time for the Jews to leave New York and Los Angeles.

The magazine cover story mentioned Malmo. Most stories about antisemitism in Europe reference the Swedish city whose Jewish population dropped from 3,000 to barely 800. Current estimates are that Malmo will have no Jews left by the end of the decade as its population flees Muslim mob violence, firebombings, and random assaults: including 100 aimed at its sole rabbi.

“I hear students shouting in the hallway about killing Jews,” a public school teacher described. Firebombs are routinely thrown at Jewish institutions. Mobs have torn down gates to try to smash their way inside. A Swedish journalist who conducted a hidden camera investigation of what happens to anyone visibly Jewish was harassed within moments of sitting down to eat.

Americans who wondered how this could happen in Europe are now seeing it at home.

There’s nothing confusing about ‘how’ or ‘why’. Or as a CBC article about Malmo gingerly put it, “Anti-Semitism in Malmö reveals flaws in Swedish immigration system”. There are equally big flaws in our immigration system and too many Jewish groups have wasted time on outreach instead of working toward immigration reform to stop the ‘Malmoization’ of New York and LA.

Estimates of the size of the Muslim population in the United States doubled since 9/11.

Islamists claim that there are over 750,000 Muslim settlers in New York City, making up around 9% of the population, and operating hundreds of mosques across the five boroughs. Those numbers may be overstated, but there’s no denying that there are far more Muslims now. And much of the growth has happened at the lower end leading to a large young male population.

The viral videos of antisemitic attacks by mobs of young Muslim men are the outcome.

Like many European cities, New York City now has a large, angry population of young Muslim men who are looking to lash out. And Jews are an easy target. When Waseem Awawdeh was arrested over a vicious assault on a Jewish accountant, he declared, “If I could do it again, I would do it again,” and then received a hero's welcome on his release.

New York City now hosts the largest Muslim population in the country. Los Angeles, the scene of more antisemitic mob attacks, hosts another of the country’s largest Muslim populations. Before 9/11, there were less than 100,000 Muslims in Los Angeles County. Even accounting for Islamist overestimates, the number has grown significantly.

Like NYC, LA is becoming ‘Malmoized’.

There are still enough Jews in both cities that the Democrat politicians offer token condemnations and ask the local police to make a few arrests. As the demographics continue to shift away from Jews and toward Muslims, they’ll react the way that Ilmar Reepalu, Malmo's former mayor did, when he blamed Israel for the antisemitic attacks on Jews by Muslims.

The AOC crowd already echoes this type of rhetoric on social media. And George Soros, who funds much of the American Left, had made this exact argument two decades ago. “Attitudes toward the Jewish community are influenced by the pro-Israel lobby’s success in suppressing divergent views,” the former Nazi collaborator had argued.

But that’s only to be expected of an antisemitic movement. American Jews however spent a generation watching European Jews being driven out and did little with that time. After all these years of consuming articles about the fate of the Jews of Paris, Berlin, and Malmo, they went on supporting mass Muslim migration because they were told it was the right thing to do.

When President Trump tried to implement a ban on travel from Muslim terror states, the ZOA became the only Jewish organization to file a Supreme Court brief in defense of the move.

The ADL signed on to every HIAS push against the move to protect Americans from Islamic terror, alongside anti-Israel groups like J Street, Soros' Bend the Arc, and T'ruah. HIAS, T’ruah, and Avodah, a feeder group for the anti-Israel movement funded by Steven Spielberg, showed up to a Linda Sarsour protest. Rallying for Muslim migration mattered more than antisemitism.

While Orthodox Jews stayed out of the protests, not counting Uri L’Tzedek, a component of the heretical leftist Yeshivat Chovevei Torah crowd, the Orthodox Union’s Nathan Diament put out a shameful statement comparing Syrian migrants to Jews fleeing the Nazi Holocaust.

Fortunately, the National Council of Young Israel took a stand, calling the obscene analogy “highly offensive to those Jews who survived Nazi persecution.”

As I wrote at the time, “when one of Diament’s migrants attacks Jews, they will not be able to say, ‘Our hands did not shed this blood and our eyes did not see it.’” Now the blood is being shed and the OU is co-signing letters calling for an antisemitism monitor as if the problem lies in a lack of monitoring rather than the inevitable crisis of Islamist immigration and demographics.

American Jews have followed the same failed strategy as European Jews.

"After two Muslim teenagers attempted to set fire to Malmo’s synagogue last March, HaCohen and Barakat telephoned their school principal, then visited the class the next day to discuss the incident. 'We did not point out the kids,' Barakat says, explaining they used the time to give a lesson about anti-Semitism, rather than punish them,” a Time Magazine article cheerfully notes.

The suicidal hobby of handing out lessons about antisemitism to synagogue burners continues.

Integrating the fight against antisemitism into broader leftist movements against bigotry has failed miserably because the central premise of intersectionality and anti-racism is that some people, privileged white people in general and Jews in particular, deserve to be hated.

The collapse of a liberal middle class into dueling Marxist and Fascist youth mobs is mainstreaming antisemitism in America the way that it already has in Europe. But the heavy lifting will still be done by young men whose parents came here from Iraq, Pakistan, or Gaza that we’ve seen assaulting random Jewish people in New York and Los Angeles.

The cries of “Kill Jews, Free Palestine” are not a horrid aberration: they’re the new normal.

The one thing that could have stopped this and perhaps still might would be for American Jews to be willing to say the unspeakable: that some people belong in this country and others don’t.

The idea that immigration should be a mutual social contract instead of a suicide pact is profoundly alien to everything that millions of Americans, Jews and Christians, have absorbed over the years. Beyond the Christian churches and HIAS which lobby to resettle more Islamists in America, much of the country is wedded to the idea that we must take anyone who comes.

But when we take anyone who comes, then we’re the ones who get taken for a ride.

While our streets are filled with the homeless and unemployed Americans are dying of drug overdoses at record rates, churches and temples lecture their parishioners on their moral duty to bring more Iraqis, Syrians, and Pakistanis to America. But 9/11 and the occasional terror attack in a major city are just the appetizers of Islamist demographic colonization.

The next stage, mob violence by what the European press carefully calls “angry youths”, is now underway in New York and Los Angeles. It won’t stop there. The era of the “lone wolf” Jihadi hasn’t ended yet, but the future of Islamic terror in America will be group attacks, like those in Bataclan in Paris, and more routine riots and mass assaults abetted by their leftist allies.

Jews in New York City are the easiest targets, but as the Swedes or the French could tell you, or the Poles and the Czechs, it rarely ends there.

Muslim violence isn’t a response to oppression or persecution. It’s a supremacist theological mission to colonize and subjugate non-Muslims as numerous Jihadis have told us at their trials.

We chose not to take them at their word.

Israel is not the issue. Just as Mohammed cartoons, a teddy bear with the wrong name, or false reports of a desecrated Koran were not the real issues at the heart of other Muslim rampages.

When thugs and terrorists want to beat and kill people, they can always find an excuse.

Listening to their excuses and taking them seriously is almost as dumb as visiting their countries or letting them inside your country long enough for them to kill you. If we want to survive, we’re going to have to stop being dumb. Otherwise we’ll learn to live and die like they do in Malmo.

It happened in Europe. Now it’s happening here.

If American Jews want to stop antisemitism, they need to stop importing it from the antisemitic capitals of the world. Really fighting antisemitism means fighting antisemitic immigration.

Or investing in bulletproof windows while educating synagogue burners about antisemitism.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Tags: Antisemitism, immigration, Islamization, recent 

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Ce

 

Biden’s Anti-Israel 'Point Man' Behind Plan to Fund Terrorists

Daniel Greenfield April 12, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog

“I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada,” Hady Amr wrote a year after September 11 while working with an anti-Israel group.

A few years later, the Beirut-born extremist had become an advisor on Muslim relations to the World Economic Forum before heading up Brookings' Doha Center for Qatar. The tiny Islamic tyranny is allied with Iran, Al Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s a backer of Hamas.

The Obama administration appointed Amr as the Deputy Head of USAID's Middle East Bureau which put him in a key position to direct taxpayer money from an organization already notorious for funding pro-terrorist and anti-Israel groups.

A decade after Amr had responded to the death of a Hamas leader by ranting that "there will be thousands who will seek to avenge these brutal murders of innocents", the Obama administration made him a Deputy to its Special Envoy for Israeli Palestinian negotiations.

Amr decamped back to Brookings during the Trump administration, becoming one of Biden’s big bundlers, joining his transition team and getting picked as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. Within two decades of praising the intifada against Israel and a decade of working for a think-tank deeply compromised by its pro-Hamas regime sponsor, the foreign radical had climbed to a pole position in setting the Biden administration’s policy on Israel.

Politico described Amr as “the key U.S. official dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian issue.” The Times of Israel called him, “Biden’s point-man on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Biden’s point man didn’t waste much time.

On February 1st, it was reported that Amr had spoken with Minister Hussein al-Sheikh of the Palestinian Authority. Al-Sheikh, a member of the PLO Central Council and of the Central Committee of the Fatah Party, had praised the top terrorist Hmeid family as a "fighting family" whose members had murdered at least 10 Israelis, and promised aid to it.

In response to efforts to get the PLO to stop rewarding terrorists, Al-Sheikh had declared that, “If we have one dollar, we will spend it on the families of our martyrs and prisoners.”

Al-Sheikh described his conversation with Amr as "positive."

In late February, Al-Sheikh wrote a letter to Hady Amr claiming that all the terrorists, including Hamas, had committed to "peaceful popular resistance" against Israel. A Hamas official however boasted that, “the Palestinian voter will vote for those who trampled the Zionists' heads underfoot, and wrote the loftiest verses of victory with their blood and body parts.”

On March 1, Hady Amr and his team delivered their memo, The US Palestinian Reset and the Path Forward, which called for resuming aid to the terrorists, abandoning pro-Israel moves by the Trump administration, and doubling down on building a terrorist state inside Israel.

A militant anti-Israel activist from Beirut was not only defining an anti-Israel foreign policy, but, as foreign policy expert Elliot Abrams noted, the memo repeatedly used British spellings for words like "programmes", “normalise”, and “emphasise”, driving home the point that Americans were no no longer in charge of their own foreign policy even on a simple linguistic level.

The memo's reset "with the Palestinian people and leadership” was advanced by Amr's contacts with figures in the PLO and Fatah terrorist movements, and called for an immediate resumption of the foreign aid pipeline to the terrorist territories, including UNRWA, which has served as a front for Hamas operations, beginning in late March or early April”.

The timing held up perfectly with the State Department announcing approximately $250 million in aid to the terrorist territories in early April closely following the timetable of Amr’s memo.

“Israel strongly opposes renewing funding for UNRWA, an anti-Semitic agency that incites against Israel,” Ambassador Gilad Erdan, Israel’s representative to the UN, tweeted.

Ambassador Erdan was understating the case. UNRWA schools are routinely staffed by Hamas supporters who preach the murder of Jews and Americans, and has produced top terrorists. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist group working for UNRWA have used its facilities and signage to transport weapons, and terrorists, and to store and fire rockets at Israel.

The funding is “consistent with who we are as a people. It also happens to be what's consistent with what's in our interest,” Ned Price, Biden’s State Department spokesman, falsely claimed.

The $150 million for UNRWA is crucial to the strategy of restoring funding to the terrorist areas without violating the Taylor Force Act. The law, named after an American veteran murdered in Israel by an Islamic terrorist funded and celebrated by the PLO, banned further foreign aid to the terrorist entity until it stopped funding terrorists. The PLO, including Abbas and his pal, Al-Sheikh, have vehemently refused to stop funding further terrorist attacks.

The Biden administration is claiming that its funding is indirect and therefore not in violation of the Taylor Force Act even though it blatantly violates its intent. But this is an administration packed full of Obama vets who oversaw shipments of foreign currency to Iran on unmarked cargo planes in order to dodge the law against providing money to Iran’s terrorists.

Aside from UNRWA, much of the remaining cash will be funneled through USAID.

“Given the absence of USAID activity in recent years, engaging civil society actors will be critical to regaining trust and goodwill with Palestinian society,” a congressional notification argued.

Why does the United States have to pay to regain the “trust and goodwill” of terrorists?

When Price was asked about a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that showed that USAID had not vetted the second level of grants for terrorist connections, he retorted that it “found no cases of U.S. funding going to parties, providers on the ground who failed vetting."

Of course that’s the point. There was no vetting and therefore there were no findings.

The Biden administration has made it clear that it intends to violate the Taylor Force Act up and down while claiming ignorance, and insisting that it’s not in violation because it claims it isn’t.

And the result will be more terrorism.

According to Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon, a non-public State Department report admitted that the PLO had spent $342 million on subsidies for terrorists and their families. In this non-public report, the State Department admitted that the PLO was funding terrorists, that it had not ended calls for violence, and was not committed to peace, but that the aid would come anyway.

The cash began flowing even before Biden officially took office. The $2.3 trillion omnibus bill Congress passed in December which was sold as coronavirus relief for small businesses, also included $250 million in funding for "Palestinian dialogue and business" over 5 years.

The Alliance for Middle East Peace was the heaviest lobbyist for the pigout. ALLMEP is an alliance of many anti-Israel organizations, some strongly supportive of BDS.

The $250 million will be administered by USAID which already funds anti-Israel groups.

All those millions are a down payment on a bigger set of Biden administration anti-Israel goals.

The Amr memo had also called for, “rolling back certain steps by the prior administration that bring into question our commitment or pose real barriers to a two-state solution, such as country of origin labelling”. These are euphemisms for reversing the Trump administration’s pro-Israel measures such as ending the punitive restrictions on Israeli agriculture and villages.

The ban on labeling products imported to the United States as ‘Made in Israel’ that are grown by Jewish farmers in those parts of Israel claimed by the Islamic terrorists is likely next on the agenda. The Amr memo had also implicitly called for reopening the PLO office in Washington D.C. and a diplomatic mission to the PLO in Jerusalem. Those are also likely to come.

The Trump administration had created pro-Israel facts on the ground, while the Biden administration intends to restore the anti-Israel status quo in foreign policy one step at a time.

After first emphasizing coronavirus relief, the cash spigot has been turned on for UNRWA and USAID. The money and the political support that comes with it will bolster the PLO and advance anti-Israel narratives, including BDS, in Israel and around the world at taxpayer expense.

But the worst is yet to come.

And the Al-Sheikh letter falsely claiming that Hamas is ready to be peaceful is the next step.

In 2019, Amr had co-written an article arguing that the United States should lay "out the terms of a three-way Hamas-Israel-PA/PLO deal now" and "build an international consensus around it."

That would mean the Biden administration and its point man developing a plan to legitimize Hamas, gaining the support of the Europeans and the Russians, and then imposing it on Israel.

Hamas, according to Amr and his co-authors, would offer Israel nothing more than a cease-fire, while Israel would have to “incentivize” by “offering a significant move” on peace.

That means more territorial concessions, including Jerusalem, and freeing more terrorists.

A year after 9/11, Hady Amr, Biden’s future “point man”, wrote that he was “inspired by the Palestinian intifada.” And through him the Biden administration is also inspired by the intifada and its war to destroy Israel and turn it into another Islamic territory ruled by the terrorists.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Tags: Biden, Israel, Middle East, recent 

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

 

You Can Quit Because You Took Jeffrey Epstein's Dirty Cash And Still Be The Hero of a Spielberg Movie

Daniel Greenfield January 13, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog

In November 2020, filming began on Oslo: an adaptation of the revisionist history Broadway play about the fake peace process between Israel and the PLO terrorist organization.

That same month, the man at the center of both the play and the movie, Terje Rød Larsen announced that he was stepping down as president and CEO of the International Peace Institute after it was revealed that he had taken a $130,000 personal loan from Jeffrey Epstein.

The International Peace Institute is closely linked to the United Nations and its honorary chair is usually the UN Secretary General. The notorious pedophile didn’t just give Larsen money, he also pumped $650,000 into the UN-linked group through his “foundations'' and the Norwegian paper that broke the story published emails showing that Larsen’s people were trying to move money from IPI back to Jeffrey Epstein. "For forms sake we should send it to Jeff, however I am sure we will get it back many fold!" Larsen appears to have written in one email.

It was 2016. The date on the original loan was in 2013. All of this took place years after the original Epstein case and his conviction. The ex-UN diplomat knew whom he was dealing with.

But the Epstein scandal didn’t stop Oslo from being produced by Steven Spielberg anyway. Or HBO from moving forward with plans to air a story about a disgraced Jeffrey Epstein associate.

Neither HBO nor Spielberg are strangers to revisionist history or anti-Israel propaganda.

Spielberg’s most infamous movie, Munich, equated the terrorists murdering Israeli civilians with the Israeli operatives trying to stop them, and was the work of screenwriter Tony Kushner who had declared that he wished Israel had never existed. HBO has been responsible for a litany of anti-Israel flicks, most recently, Our Boys, which was protested by the families of terror victims.

But Oslo is awkward because a man linked to the world’s most notorious pedophile is its hero.

Oslo, the original play, was born when Terje Rød Larsen modestly proposed it to director Bartlett Sher who is also directing the HBO movie. The director and the diplomat are good friends.

“We were part of a historic event which we have waited twenty years to see written about,” is how Larsen pitched his story.

The “historic event” has been written to death. The so-called peace agreement has killed more people than many actual wars. The real problem was that the story was fading away. And, most particularly, Larsen’s starring role in the story which is key to his fame and his career.

The premise of Oslo is that Larsen and his wife, Mona Juul, who still serves as the Deputy Permanent Representative of the Norway Mission to the United Nations, got the “warring sides” to make peace by seeing each other as human beings for the first time. And it’s nonsense.

The true story of Oslo is how Israeli lefty radicals double-crossed their own country and government, violated laws against doing exactly what they were doing, made repeated concessions to the terrorists, and then presented a hoax of a peace agreement.

Arafat, the PLO, and the entire terrorist movement built around a fake ‘Palestinian’ nationality, never made peace, never recognized Israel, and were not going to stop killing Jews.

What was the whole thing really about? Long before Epstein, Larsen had been accused of trading cash for a Nobel Peace Prize. Kåre Kristiansen, a member of the Nobel Committee, alleged that Larsen got $100,000 from the Peres Center, a project of Israel’s notoriously corrupt left-wing foreign minister, to ensure that Shimon Peres would receive a Nobel Peace Prize.

The Norwegian government had been pumping millions of kroner into the Peres Peace Center which was writing a very large check to Larsen. Meanwhile Larsen was also sitting on the board of governors of the Peres Peace Center which was giving him an award and a big check.

The diplomat claimed that he had informed the Norwegian government to which it responded, "no one in the Foreign Ministry has known about these sums of money." There were also suggestions that it would investigate the role that Mona Juul, Larsen’s wife, who was also getting the prize money, had played in getting those millions of kroner to the Peace Center.

In 2002, a conservative Israeli government bounced Larsen, who was being billed as ‘Mr. Peace’, after he falsely accused Israel of having “lost all moral authority” while it was fighting the Islamic terrorists behind the Passover Massacre of thirty people: most of them senior citizens.

Larsen’s false claims of an Israeli massacre in Jenin that was “horrifying beyond belief”, “a shameful chapter in Israel’s history”, and rife with “the stench of death” were disproven. Even the UN’s own report found that 52 died, most of them terrorists, along with 23 Israeli soldiers.

Two years later, the PLO declared ‘Mr. Peace’ persona non-grata making Larsen’s unwantedness in the region about the only thing that the Israelis and the terrorists agreed on.

A few years later, it was discovered that all of the ‘Oslo Files’, the papers related to the so-called negotiations, had vanished from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The twists and turns in the search for those documents, and why they went missing would make for a much more interesting story than the tedious nonsense of Sher directing another glamorization of Larsen.

There are plenty of interesting angles to Larsen’s story that Spielberg and Sher won’t touch, but the real truth about Larsen is that his story matters much less than the devastation of Oslo. The backchannel wasn’t a triumph of peace, but a dirty leftist political trick that wrecked Israel’s security, touched off decades of intense violence in the region, and cost thousands of lives.

Oslo is another one of the same stories that the elite tell each other. Larsen and Sher got to know each other because their daughters attended the same Manhattan private school. Larsen and J.T. Rogers, the playwright, then met up at an “Upper West Side haunt” for drinks. Oslo did well on Broadway by way of being touted by the New York Times, and will be an HBO movie.

There is one giant hole in Oslo’s story about the power of Norwegian diplomats who send their kids to Manhattan private schools to make peace. There wasn’t and isn’t any actual peace.

The only meaningful peace accords in the region that led to normalization weren’t made by Larsen, Clinton, Peres, and Rabin, but by Trump, Netanyahu, and conservative leaders. Oslo is nostalgic peace porn from the elites who failed miserably, though not at getting rich or getting a lot of people killed, calculated to obscure the real world triumphs of Trump and Netanyahu.

Jeffrey Epstein thrived in these same elitist circles and was plugged into the same networks. When Larsen, previously earning around half a million a year as head of the IPI, needed $130,000, he was there to lend it to him. And provide cash and connections for countless members of the elite, trading favors, offering introductions, and palling around with everyone.

Oslo isn’t about Israel or Islamic terrorism. Like everything the decadent cultural industry of our country makes, it’s about that incestuous world whose key players all send their kids to the same private schools, hang out at the same bars, and agree on the same basic things. They’re also very good at not seeing things like abused teenage girls or thousands of dead people.

If Bartlett Sher wanted to make a truly relevant and groundbreaking play, he would tell the story of Jeffrey Epstein’s network and of the girls he abused, some of them the same age as his daughter. But that play, unlike his theatrical smears of American foreign policy in Afghanistan and the Middle East, would never be put on, and would be quickly sunk by the New York Times.

And Spielberg, and the rest of the gang, along with HBO, wouldn’t turn it into a movie.

The real life players and their fictional counterparts in this world give each other awards and good reviews. They write about the world, but the only world they know is their own, and despite the dictum of writing what you know, they have little interest in writing about the horrors in their own world, when they can write about how their friends brought peace to the Middle East.

Oslo unintentionally explains why the professional peacemakers failed so miserably. It wasn’t only Jeffrey Epstein’s abused girls they couldn’t see, but the limits of their own corrupt hubris. They promise to solve the problems of the people who aren’t as famous and connected as they are, but fail horribly every single time, only to spin those failures as historic successes.

And if the New York Times says so, it must be true.

The true story of Oslo is a tale of corruption, death, and bloodshed. It’s about the price that ordinary people paid when the elites got their way. It’s about Jewish senior citizens murdered while celebrating Passover, schoolgirls blown up on buses, and children shot in the head. It’s a million miles away from the world of Off-Broadway plays and Manhattan private schools, skyscraper boardrooms and Brentwood mansions that spawned Oslo’s revisionist history.

The violence unleashed by Oslo’s empowered terrorists in Israel fell heaviest on working class people riding the bus to their jobs or commuting to cheaper homes in Judea and Samaria.

While Oslo films in Prague, the terrorism continues in Israel. And Jeffrey Epstein’s old associates look forward to being able to watch Oslo’s message that the elites know best while paying no attention to the terrorism, to Larsen’s scandals, or to their own corruption.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

This article first appeared exclusively at Front Page Magazine.

 

Tags: entertainment industry, Israel, recent 

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

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