Arab Regimes Terrified by Israel's Freedoms

by Giulio Meotti • January 16, 2018 at 5:00 am

A prominent Tunisian-born French movie producer, Saïd Ben Saïd recently issued one of the frankest denunciations of anti-Semitism in the Arab world. The real culprit, he argued, was the prevalence of anti-Semitism fueled by Islamic extremists across the Middle East. Ben Saïd was forced to pull out of an Arab film festival last year because he had worked with Israelis.
A Lebanese director, Ziad Doueiri, did something even "worse": he filmed some scenes on Israeli land!
"No one can deny the misery of the Palestinian people, but it must be admitted that the Arab world is, in its majority, antisemitic. This hatred of Jews has redoubled in intensity and depth not because of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but with the rise of a certain vision of Islam". — Saïd Ben Saïd.

Because Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri filmed some scenes in Israel, when he returned from the Venice Film Festival, Lebanese police arrested him at the airport, interrogated him for three hours, and accused him of "collaborating with Israel". (Photo by Vivien Killilea/Getty Images for Palm Springs International Film Festival )

Fifty years have passed since many Arab countries were humiliated by Israel in 1967 in a war the Arabs started, with the explicit goal of destroying the Jewish State and throwing the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea. Today, Israel has solid diplomatic relations with two of these countries -- Jordan to Egypt -- while Saudi officials speak with their Israeli security counterparts about the Iranian threat.

But although the Middle East is engulfed in a new wave of internal destabilization, and Iran has recently experienced a new wave of protests in which people chanted "we don't want an Islamic Republic", the great taboo for the Arab and Muslim world is still that of cultural exchanges with the hated "Zionists".

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The Terrorism Jobs Program: Pampering the Palestinians Must End
Threatening Terror is Not a Way to Earn a Living

by Nonie Darwish • January 16, 2018 at 4:30 am

Palestinians need to start taking responsibility for their own existence and stop relying on the world to take care of them while they use the money freed up -- by the international community -- to launch jihad and intifadas.
No entity should forever be permitted to devote its resources to terror while the world is expected to owe them everything: financial support, jobs, citizenship, and even building the infrastructure that they keep destroying. The moral of the story is that if you do not want to lose wars, it would be better not to start them.
The longer financial aid and the pampering of Palestinians continue as an "insurance policy" ostensibly to prevent terrorism, the longer the suffering, dependence, terror and conflict will go on. It is time for Palestinians to learn that threatening terror is not a way to earn a living.

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who wanted peace in return for Egypt's retrieving the Sinai Peninsula, was accused by Palestinians of treason and assassinated by Islamists in 1981, supposedly for having signed a peace deal with Israel. Pictured: Anwar Sadat funeral procession in Cairo, Egypt, October 9, 1981. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

A British woman, Kay Wilson, apparently realized that when a Palestinian terrorist "plunged a knife into her chest", left her for dead and then murdered her friend, it was British taxpayers who had paid for it.

"Is the UK funding the terrorists who tried to murder me?", she asked.

Yes, it is. "According to data collected by Israel's Defense Ministry, the PA spent a total of 1.237 billion shekels ($358 million), or about 7% of the PA's total annual budget, on terrorist stipends last year."

International payments to Palestinians that are used to pay terrorists in jail, as well as their families, serve both as a "reward for bad behavior" and also as a powerful incentive for youths to become terrorists.

They are a jobs program.

Some Palestinians are complaining that Arab countries are discriminating against them, and even going as far as calling themselves victims of "shameless Arab Apartheid" against Palestinians.

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Politicizing Proliferation Policy

by John R. Bolton • January 16, 2018 at 4:00 am

Throughout his presidency, Barack Obama pursued a North Korea policy called "strategic patience": a synonym for doing nothing. Then, during the presidential transition, Obama blithely advised President-elect Trump that Pyongyang would be his most serious foreign challenge. How convenient that reality "changed" for the worst just after Obama departed the White House. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

North Korea's apparently rapid progress last year in both its nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs raises entirely legitimate concerns about U.S. intelligence capabilities. The New York Times recently reported that, as the Obama administration ended, intelligence-community analysts estimated that Pyongyang was over four years away from mastering the complex science and technology necessary to deliver thermonuclear weapons on targets within the continental United States.

Then, seemingly overnight, North Korea was igniting thermonuclear weapons and testing missiles that could hit the lower 48. The Times calls this an intelligence failure, certainly a serious matter. But the real reason was actually much worse.

Evidence in the Times report indicates that President Obama's team dangerously politicized intelligence gathering and analysis, as senior officials strove to support their preconceived notions of the North's true progress.

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