In this mailing:
- Khaled Abu Toameh: Extremism Escalating in the West Bank
- Shoshana Bryen: Courts Unravel Sanctions on Iran
- Michael Curtis: The European Union: What Was Not Said
Extremism Escalating in the West Bank
by Khaled Abu
Toameh
July 22, 2013 at 5:00 am
July 22, 2013 at 5:00 am
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The
thousands of demonstrators didn't forget to condemn the Palestinian Authority
for "selling out to Jews" instead of seeking Israel's destruction.
Unlike the U.S., Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas sees and hears
the voices of the extremists at Jerusalem's al-Aqsa Mosque, in the West Bank,
and in the Gaza Strip. This is precisely why Abbas will never agree to sign a
peace deal with Israel: it would turn him into the biggest traitor in the Palestinian
and Islamic world.
What happened at the al-Aqsa Mosque during last week's Friday prayers should
be sounding alarm bells in the U.S., Britain and France.After the prayers, during a demonstration in support of Egypt's deposed President Mohamed Morsi, thousands of Muslims began shouting slogans against the U.S., Britain, France and Israel
"Allahu Akbar, destroy the U.S., Britain and France!" the demonstrators chanted in scenes that appeared as if they were taking place in a remote Taliban-controlled village in Afghanistan.
But the protest did not take place in Afghanistan or Pakistan. It took place at the Aqsa Mosque during the holy month of Ramadan, during which Israel allows hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank to enter Jerusalem for Friday prayers.
Palestinians
demonstrate on Jerusalem's Temple Mount against the removal from power of
Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, July 19, 2013.
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But of course such demonstrations cannot occur without also shouting threats and slogans against Jews.
Why Jews? Because the declared goal of these extremists is to destroy Israel and establish an Islamic Caliphate.
It is frightening to see thousands of Muslims chanting, "Khaybar, Khaybar Jews -- the army of Mohamed will return!"
They were referring of course to the Battle of Khaybar, fought in the year 629, between Muslims and Jews living in the oasis of Khaybar in the Arabian Peninsula.
The Jews there were attacked after being accused by the Muslims of inciting hostilities among Arab tribes. The Jews finally surrendered and were permitted to live in Khaybar on condition that they gave one-half of their produce to Muslims.
The demonstrators at the Aqsa Mosque are hoping that the Muslims will again attack the Jews, this time in Israel, and force them to succumb, and either to leave or agree to live as a humiliated minority under the rule of an Islamic Caliph.
What is worrying is that some of these demonstrators were Israeli citizens affiliated with the Islamic Movement in Israel, headed by Sheikh Raed Salah. This movement, affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, has thousands of supporters among the Arab community inside Israel.
Two days later, on Sunday, the Islamic Movement organized another demonstration in support of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, this time in northern Israel.
The anti-Jewish demonstration in Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque is a sign of the growing power of Muslim extremists in the city and the West Bank.
This is a real and imminent threat not only to Israel and its Western allies, but also to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his loyalists in the West Bank.
This threat also explains why the Palestinian Authority rushed to condemn the extremists for using the Aqsa Mosque as a platform for "advancing outside agendas" -- namely that of the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamic groups.
The thousands of demonstrators did not forget to condemn the Palestinian Authority for "selling out to Jews" and accepting a two-state solution instead of seeking Israel's destruction.
The anti-Jewish and anti-American tirade came as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry resumed his efforts to force Abbas and the Palestinian Authority leadership to return to the negotiating table with Israel.
Even if Abbas agreed to return to the negotiating table, he would always be afraid of the extremists, who are expected to step up their attacks on him as the talks with Israel proceed.
Unlike Kerry, Abbas sees and hears the voices of the extremists at the Aqsa Mosque and other Islamic holy sites in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And this is precisely why Abbas will never agree to sign a peace deal with Israel: it would turn him into the biggest traitor in the the Palestinian and Islamic world.
Related Topics: Khaled Abu
Toameh
Courts Unravel Sanctions on Iran
by Shoshana Bryen
July 22, 2013 at 4:00 am
July 22, 2013 at 4:00 am
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For those
who hope that economic sanctions can cripple the Mullahs' race toward nuclear
capability, it is disheartening to find the European courts apparently neutral
between the West and those who wage war upon it.
Supporting sanctions against Iran is understood to be a position designed to
moderate Iranian behavior regarding the acquisition of nuclear capability. It
is the position of people and countries that do not want to contemplate
military action by either the United States or Israel. It is the position of
the European Union, the UN, Congress, the U.S. President, and Israel. As such,
giving sanctions as much backbone as possible seemed an unassailable position
-- until Iranians
began to sue in European courts to see the evidence against them. In a
pattern of behavior disconnected from the possibility that they are aiding the
Islamic Republic 's nuclear programs, European courts are
obliging them.If Iran's acquisition of nuclear technology is a legal problem, the theory is, Iran has the same rights in Western courts as an accountant accused of stealing from the firm. But if, as many believe, Iran is planning to acquire nuclear weapons for the war in which it claims it will engage with Israel and the West, its use of the Western legal system is Lawfare (coined by Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap; meaning "the use of the law as a weapon of war"). The Lawfare Project defines it as, "The abuse of Western laws and judicial systems to achieve strategic military or political ends." Those ends appear to include using Western companies as a conduit for technology and financing.
Proving the link between banks or commercial enterprises and Iran's nuclear program is frequently a matter of good intelligence, but European courts have no mechanism for keeping information secret once it is introduced, and European governments have been unwilling to compromise their information and their sources. Iran's Bank Mellat, one of the biggest private lenders, sued in the EU General Court to challenge a 2010 freeze of its assets. It won. The court wrote that the EU was, "in breach of the obligation to state reasons and the obligation to disclose to the applicant… the evidence adduced against it." The EU had "breached the bank's right of defense."
Iran's lawyers reveled in the wonders of courts in free countries.
Reuters quoted one Maya Lester, "who represents companies and individuals in litigation concerning European sanctions, including the Iranian central bank and the country's main tanker company, NITC," saying, "It may be politically embarrassing, but in terms of upholding the rule of law, what the European court has done is impressive and quite brave. It shows it to be a court upholding human rights ... which is not easy given how political Iranian sanctions are."
Mentioning Iran and human rights on the same side of the same sentence is awkward enough, but there is a second problem. British courts do, indeed, have a mechanism for closed testimony on national security matters. Bank Mellat sued in Britain to have restrictions lifted and the British government produced its arguments in secret. But the court not only sided with Bank Mellat, it slammed the government for using classified information. That it did not find the secret evidence compelling is fair enough. "It turned out that there had been no point in the supreme court seeing the closed judgment [which related to the secret intelligence], because there was nothing in it which could have affected [our] reasoning in relation to the substantive appeal." But the judges went further: "If the court strongly suspects that nothing in the closed material is likely to affect the outcome of the appeal, it should not order a closed hearing. Appellate courts should be robust about acceding to applications to go into closed session or even to look at closed material."
In other words, said the British justices, the court should have a presumption against hearing classified information from the government. Again, if a London accountant is accused of embezzlement, the likelihood of needing a closed session is remote; in national security cases, it is not -- but the judges admit no difference among defendants.
A lawyer for a group supporting the Iranians said, "Proud principles of open justice and the rule of law are casualties as the secret justice disease infects the highest court in the land. Today's chilling judgment brutally exposes the government's claims and lays bare its willingness to overstate the importance of secrecy to serve its own ends."
The U.S. government and several of its European allies are becoming concerned that the legal basis for sanctions on Iran may be coming unraveled, and well they should. But the problem of sanctions is not only the legal point, there are two others:
First, there is international collusion with Iran. Iran cheats and Western banks, governments and companies help it -- as do the Russians and the Chinese. New York State's attempts to uncover Iran's illicit money transfers by Standard Chartered Bank and its accomplice, the very well respected Deloitte & Touche, is instructive. A four-year investigation uncovered 60,000 secret transactions covering more than $250 billion dollars, and collusion in both the U.S. and the UK. Furthermore, some countries have financial interests in Iran that could be harmed. Sweden, for example, opposed the last round of sanctions because of an Ericsson telecom deal that provided the mullahs with more up-to-date technology to track the opposition through their cell phones. The volume of Germany's trade with Iran is 4 billion euros.
Second, although sanctions have caused serious economic dislocation for the people of Iran, there is little evidence that economic sanctions force governments to change their national strategy. People starved in North Korea, while the well-fed Kim Jong-Un's nuclear and missile programs continued apace, shipping in new, illegal, weapons and threatening neighbors. The Castro brothers have never missed even a cigar after decades of U.S. sanctions. Saddam and his sons lived palatial splendor even as the UN reported that 60,000 Iraqi children died annually as a result of sanctions-related medical and nutritional problems. And Russia, China, India and seven other countries have U.S.-supplied waivers on the purchase of Iranian oil, helping to provide Islamic Republic with hard currency.
Iran's nuclear program is outside UN inspection. Iranian "advisors," money and weapons make it party to the monstrous violence against civilians in Syria. It threatens the West with war and Israel with eradication both directly and with financial and military support to Hamas and Hezb'allah. Domestically, Iran has the world's second-highest (to China) capital punishment, including dozens of public hangings. Homosexual sex and adultery (based on men's testimony alone) are punishable by death, and women are subject to assault by "modesty police." Demonstrators have been shot in the streets.
Iran's interest in Western standards of law and justice goes no farther than its interest in using our laws against us. For those who believe -- or hope -- that economic sanctions can cripple the Mullah's race toward nuclear capability and possibly even aid in the regime's demise, it is disheartening to find European courts apparently neutral between the West and those who wage war upon it.
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center.
Related Topics: Shoshana Bryen
The European Union: What Was Not Said
by Michael Curtis
July 22, 2013 at 3:00 am
July 22, 2013 at 3:00 am
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The EU might
truly help the Palestinians by helping the development of the Palestinian
economy, and the introduction of the rule of law, equal justice under law,
transparent and accountable governance, a free press, and other human rights.
Sadly, however, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that the EU is not so
much interested in helping the Palestinians so much as in helping them to
sabotage Jews.
When it comes to matters of Israel and Palestine, the European Union (EU)
has made no attempts to mask its biases. The Europeans' June 28th announcement
of sanctions on Israeli products produced outside of the 1949 cease-fire line
serves as yet another example of how the EU's stances on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not only slanted, but profoundly unproductive.For more than thirty years the European Union (EU) has issued statements critical of Israel, and been supportive of the Palestinian cause. The EU Venice Declaration of 1980, the first statement it issued on foreign policy, while understandably supporting the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, asserted, however, the unacceptability of any unilateral initiative to alter the status of Jerusalem, proclaimed the need for Israel to end its control over those lands since 1967, and declared that Israeli settlements were an obstacle to peace.
What was not stated was that the only reason these lands became "occupied" in the first place was that in 1967, for the third time in twenty years, entire coalitions of Israel's neighbors – including Egypt, Jordan and Syria -- initiated wars against Israel (they initiated the earlier wars in 1947 and 1956); that under Jordanian rule, which lasted from 1948 until 1967, many parts of Jerusalem was not only prohibited to Jews, but, for example, Jordanians took gravestones from the holy Mount of Olives cemetery and used them as the floors for their latrines, and Jewish holy sites were desecrated.
What was also not stated was that since 1967, Israel has constantly sued for negotiations and peace, but as of the "Three Nos" of the Khartoum Conference of 1967 {No peace, no negotiations and no recognition), the Arab countries are the ones who have rejected all proposals, or else inserted the "poison pill" precondition of "right of return" -- a way of demographically overwhelming Israel with millions of Arabs, and therefore an assured deal-breaker. Finally, not stated is that according to the official Charters of both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, all of Israel is one big settlement -- to be destroyed and displaced by themselves, possibly in "stages." Maps currently show "Palestine" supplanting all of Israel, with the border running, as the Palestinians vow, "from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea."
The EU has been critical of many of the activities of Israel, including the alleged treatment of the Arab minority and of the Bedouins, but particularly and unrelentingly of the Israeli settlements, built upon land they think should be given to the Palestinians for a future Palestinian state, but on about 2% of which Israelis have started to live. Again, there has been no known discussion in the EU even of the reasonableness of expecting Israel to hold these disputed lands in perpetuity for people who not only reject every peace offer, but who are officially committed to destroying Israel.
On December 10, 2012, the EU nonetheless issued a statement: "[A]ll agreements between the State of Israel and the European Union must unequivocally and explicitly indicate their inapplicability to the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, namely the Golan Heights, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip."
As such, the EU's recent decision to ban all funding, collaboration, scholarships, research grants, and awards to "Israeli entities" in the West Bank and East Jerusalem should surprise no one. By its declaration, the EU unilaterally decided that the borders of Israel did not embrace:
- East Jerusalem, seized by Jordan in 1948;
- The West Bank, taken by Israel in a defensive war after having warned Jordan not to invade. Jordan, however, apparently nervous it would be left out of the spoils it imagined its neighbors would be gleaning, on the fifth day of the Six Day war attacked Israel, but were driven back;
- The Gaza Strip
- The Golan Heights, taken by Israel on the Sixth Day of the Six Day after Syria for years had been using the plateau to shoot down at Israeli farmers in the valley below.
As of now, the Palestinians have agreed to discuss holding discussions – apparently the best semblance of a peace negotiation that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry could come up with. If the Palestinians do eventually agree to enter to direct negotiations, they will likely continue to insist on a number of calculatedly deal-breaking preconditions, including a complete settlement freeze and acceptance of the ceasefire lines of 1949 as the borders of a Palestinian state.
With an economy accounting for 20% of world trade and with a number of liberal democracies among its members, the EU could be a major player in the Middle East. How is it that that Iran's nuclear proliferation, the rise of Islamism, and the increased role of al-Qaeda in regional conflicts visibly concerns the EU less than a few dunams of disputed land? The EU might truly serve the Palestinians by helping to develop the Palestinian economy and the introduction of the rule of law, equal justice under law, a free press, and transparent and accountable governance. Designating Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, while pressing for human rights, democracy, and stability in the Arab world, might be of primary concern to the EU, as well. Sadly, however, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that the EU is not actually interested in helping the Palestinians so much as in helping them sabotage Jews
Insisting that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the main security problem in the Middle East provides a convenient narrative, but conveniently overlooks the turmoil produced in Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and imminently by Iran, and the rising prominence al-Qaeda and its affiliates in the Middle East over the past years. It especially overlooks damage being caused by the countries promoting and funding this turmoil -- primarily Saudi Arabia, Iran and Qatar.
Still, all considerations of priority aside, is the EU's decision to sanction Israeli products produced beyond the 1949 ceasefire line at all productive? It is one thing to propose two states as the only feasible solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is quite another to attempt unilaterally to resolve the conflict by putting direct economic and political pressure on Israel.
The EU has done a great disservice to the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians by making it even more impossible than it already is for any peace to come into effect.
Related Topics: Israel
| Michael
Curtis
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