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In this mailing:
Europe's and U.S. Complicity in Kidnapping and Violence
by Richard Kemp
• June 20, 2014 at 5:00 am
Just the day before the three
boys were kidnapped, the EU's foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton,
welcomed Hamas into the Palestinian Authority government while lambasting
Israel for detaining terrorists and and taking action to prevent Hamas terrorist
attacks from Gaza and the West Bank. Ashton, though never slow to condemn
Israel, took five days to denounce this kidnapping. Both her words and her
actions have legitimized and encouraged Hamas.
Both the U.S. and the EU have
paid the salaries of Palestinian terrorists by means of grants to the PA;
they also fund this propaganda and incitement.
Like every government, Israel has
an absolute duty to protect its citizens, and undermining this terrorist
threat is an essential part of that responsibility.
A
cartoon from Fatah's official Facebook page, depicting the three kidnapped
Jewish teens as rats.
The world has undergone gut-churning revulsion this week at the videos
of rows of kneeling young Iraqi men callously gunned down by Al Qaida
terrorists in Mosul. But time and again, in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank,
Hamas has shown itself to be just as capable of such brutal cold-blooded
killing. That knowledge has galvanized Israel's desperate hunt for those who
abducted teenagers Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach as they
hitchhiked home from their school in Gush Etzion a week ago.
As a member of Cobra, the UK national crisis management committee, I was
involved in British efforts to rescue our citizens kidnapped by Islamist
terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan. No modern-day military action is so
fraught: the odds are stacked against the captives, the whip hand is with the
captors, it is a race against time, and it becomes extremely personal.
Guarding American Interests in the Sunni-Shiite War
by Shoshana Bryen
• June 20, 2014 at 4:30 am
Either way, bottom line: no
nuclear Iran. The U.S. retains a still-vast ability to meet its national
defense priorities. The open questions are: the political skill to define
them, and the will to ensure that that the greatest threat to regional and
world stability -- Iranian nuclear capability - is stopped for good.
"The
game-changer in the long religious war now wracking the region is the
possible introduction of nuclear weapons by Iran."
The rapid (although not unpredicted) entry of radical Sunni jihadists
into Mosul, Tikrit and other largely Sunni areas of Iraq, and their movement
toward Baghdad, has prompted cries from left, right and center about the
failure of U.S. policies in the region. And failure it is, although not of
the "Bush should never have gone there," or "Obama should
never have withdrawn from there," or – perhaps most oddly, "If
Obama had only armed the 'moderate, secular opposition' in Syria, this never
would have happened" sort.
It is a failure to look back, look forward and look around. It is a
failure to ask the truly existential questions, "What can the United
States tolerate in the world – what MUST we tolerate because we are not
prepared to stop it?" and the corollary, "What can the United
States simply not afford – not now, not later, not ever – and how are we
going to keep truly intolerable things from happening?"
Has Abbas Lost His Credibility?
by Khaled Abu Toameh
• June 20, 2014 at 4:00 am
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri
said that Abbas's remarks [that his security forces were working with Israel
to find the three kidnapped Israeli boys] came as a "shock" to
Palestinians, who consider security cooperation with Israel a "national
crime."
"President Abbas does not
want to go down in history as a traitor." — Senior aide to Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas.
Palestinians have been
radicalized to a point where it has become dangerous to denounce the
kidnapping of Israelis or even refer to them as human beings.
Jibril
Rajoub, a member of the Fatah Central Committee and former commander of the
Palestinian security forces, is a leading contender to succeed Mahmoud Abbas
as PA president. (Image source: Palestinian
Media Watch)
Palestinian Authority [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas is being roundly
condemned by Palestinians for speaking out against the abduction of three
Israeli youths in the West Bank.
The attacks on Abbas are not only coming from Hamas and other radical
groups, but also from within his own Fatah faction, where some senior
officials are saying the time has come for the 80-year-old leader to retire.
The campaign against Abbas raises a big question about the prospects of
achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
If Abbas is now being condemned as a "traitor" for opposing
the abduction of the three youths and ordering his security forces to assist
in the efforts to locate them, what would have happened to him had he signed
a peace agreement with Israel?
That is perhaps the main reason Abbas was unable to continue with the
U.S.-sponsored peace talks with Israel, which ended in late April.
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