Abbas to Obama: Make Israel Surrender

Oh, this could be entertaining. Our favorite moderate Dr. Mahmoud Abbas is calling on Obama to implement the so-called "Pan Arab Peace Initiative" that the Saudis first proposed in 2002. Let's have a looksie at how the AP reported it and the little detail that they keep leaving out:.

Abbas, who spoke at an economic conference in the West Bank town of Nablus, also asked Obama to endorse a pan-Arab peace initiative that offers full peace with Israel in return for its withdrawal from the West Bank, Gaza and parts of Jerusalem.

And that pesky "Right of Return." You can't forget about that, AP.

The "Arab Peace Initiative" was first proposed in 2002 by dozens of Arab countries that do not have ties with Israel. It requires Israel to leave the lands it captured in the 1967 Mideast War.

And to implement the "Right of Return," allowing itself to be flooded with millions of Arabs so that it no longer has a Jewish majority.

"We ask Obama to become immediately involved in the peace process, and to adopt the Arab initiative," Abbas said.

Abbas' call to Obama came after he appealed directly to Israelis by taking out full-page Hebrew-language newspaper ads Thursday that said the Arab initiative would bring peace to the region.

Yes, I think it's universally accepted that the destruction of Israel would bring peace to the Middle East and to the world as a whole.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the chief negotiator with the Palestinians over the past year, has welcomed the plan as a positive gesture, but says its positions on key issues such as final borders, the status of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees are unacceptable.

See that? Five paragraphs in, we learn that the Arab plan has something (though we are not told exactly what) to do with "the fate of the Palestinian refugees." This is awesome reporting. Why Tzipi Livni thinks this ridiculous PR stunt by the Arabs is a "positive gesture" is a total mystery to me.

"Instead of living in an island of peace it will live in an ocean of peace," he said.

An updated way of saying they want to drive the Jews into the sea, I guess.

However, a year of negotiations between Palestinians and Israel has not brought tangible results.

A more accurate statement would be that 15 years of negotiations have not produced tangible results, except lots and lots and lots of terrorism and deaths.

Abbas said Saturday that Israel's actions, such as continued construction of settlements and the West Bank separation barrier, contradict Israel's declared willingness to make peace.

"These acts truly make one wonder whether they (the Israelis) mean peace or not," he said. "Those who want peace don't do this. They don't build a wall or a settlement in our throats ... We are ready to stretch out our hands in peace, but all of these acts leave hatred in one's soul."

This is a joke. The separation barrier was built because the Arabs were inflicting so much terror on Israel and its population, not as part of some nefarious plan to defeat peace in the region. And the construction of settlements in Judea and Samaria have nothing to do with obstructing peace because the Arab goal has never been to create a nice, cuddly little state adjacent to Israel.

In any event, Abbas's words are especially loony and hypocritical given that he has explicitly stated on numerous occasions that the Arabs would never recognize Israel as a Jewish State.

Nice, way to stretch your hand out in peace there, eh, Mahmoud? Spare me.

The "Moderate" Mahmoud Abbas

I saw this a few weeks ago from the Middle East Media Research Institute and had to write about it. Some absolutely priceless statements are in there from Mahmoud Abbas. You know Abbas, right? He's the secular "moderate" peace-lover who is the Great Hope for ending the Arab/Israeli Conflict. Never mind the fact that Abbas was Arafat's number 2 guy in the PLO for roughly 40 years while they were conducting more terrorist attacks than Hamas could ever dream of. Never mind that the reason we call Abbas "Dr." is that he wrote a Ph.D thesis arguing: (i) that the Zionists collaborated with the Nazis; and (ii) that the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust was purposefully inflated to further Zionist aims.

Isn't that so cute and moderate? Don't you just want to pinch his cheek? And oh yeah, he probably personally financed the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre.

But back to the MEMRI article. See, the big difference between the PLO and Hamas is that the PLO recognized (say it with me now) "Israel's Right to Exist." This is the big thing preventing the US from dealing with Hamas -- they won't say those magic words. So yeah, the PLO will recognize the right of us Jews to live in Israel while Hamas won't. Um, not so much, according to a briefing our Peace Prince gave to a Jordanian newspaper at the end of February:

"Abbas stressed that he is opposed to the so-called 'Jewish state,' saying, We already rejected such a proposal at the Annapolis summit, last November in the U.S. [In fact,] the summit almost broke up over this issue. We were asked at the time [to agree] that the summit's concluding statement should refer to the Jewish state – but we categorically objected to this..."

Read that again so it fully sinks in. They will not recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Of course, this is not very surprising since PA negotiator Saeb Erekat said basically the same thing several weeks ago (with just as little coverage from the media). In January 2001, Faisal Husseini, another "moderate" the Israelis thought they could deal with, told an Egyptian newspaper that the Oslo Accords were a "Trojan Horse" and that the ultimate strategic goal remained the same: all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The goals of the PLO are what they always have been: declare a "Palestinian State" in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, and deluge Israel proper with millions of Arabs through the so-called "Right of Return" to take over the country demographically and ultimately unite the whole area as "Palestine" with a large Arab majority ruling over the Dhimmi Jews just like old times.

Abbas even has a nice "moderate" attitude when it comes to lobbing missiles at helpless civilians. They're not bad because killing civilians is bad. No, they're bad because they provide a "pretext" for Israel to hit back (note to Radical Islamists: terrorism often does make civilized people want to hit back).

In fairness to Abbas, it's perfectly rational and understandable for him not to be satisfied with a nice cuddly little state next to Israel. His family isn't from the "Occupied Territories." He was born in Safed, from where his family fled the fighting in 1948. So giving back the territory conquered in 1967 doesn't settle the issue for him at all. Nor does it settle the issue for the PLO, most of whom come not from Judea, Samaria or Gaza, but from families who also fled Israel proper from 1947-49.

Under the Palestinian Narrative, which Mahmoud Abbas wholly subscribes to, their land was stolen out from under them by foreign,imperialist, colonialist (insert further pedantic-sounding pejoratives here) Jews, they want it ALL back, and they're willing to fight for it for as long as it takes. Just read the PLO Covenant.

So why this "Palestinian State" business? Why this Trojan Horse? Well, during the Cold War, the PLO was heavily allied with the Soviets, and the Soviets taught them to say things the West wanted to hear. No more driving the Jews into the sea and destroying Israel. Now it's all about the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, about vindicating universally recognized human rights under (drum roll please) International Law (don't worry, we're not going there with this note). So in 1974, the Palestinian National Council passed what is known as the "Phased Plan." Basically, the PLO would take any portion of "Paleistine" it was offered and declare a provisional state. But the endgame remains the same -- use the "Palestinian State" as a launching point to take over the rest of the land.

THAT is the "moderate" philosophy of Mahmoud Abbas. And that's why the so-called "Two State Solution" is no less fictional than Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.

The Hamas "Coup" and Bizzaro World

Here is another article I wrote about the so-called Hamas "coup" in Gaza:

Media coverage of the Arab/Israeli conflict often offers us a glimpse into Bizzaro World, and this Reuters article is no exception. You see, in the Bizzaro World of the so-called Palestinian Authority, the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip earlier this year was, in the words of Husni Mubarak, a "coup against legitimacy." Palestinian "President" and Holocaust Denier (we'll deal with that another time) Mahmoud Abbas called on Hamas to "end its coup in Gaza," calling Hamas "an 'illegitimate party.'"

Of course, anybody with short-term memory will surely realize that what Hamas did in Gaza was not a coup -- in fact, it was quite the opposite. While Hamas is an evil, mass-murdering terror gang, the fact of the matter is that they won the PA elections in January 2006 overwhelmingly. No less of an authority than the great Jimmy Carter himself signed off on those elections as legitimate.

The problem was that Abbas's Fatah guys didn't like the results of that election and refused to give up their offices. So after numerous attempts at negotiations and intermittent violence, Hamas basically decided earlier this year to simply seize the power they'd won in the election by force. Whatever that is, it's certainly not a coup since it involves the (apparently) legitimately elected government seizing the very power it had lawfully won.

The problem is that the US and the West in general, having preached the virtues of democracy in the Arab world, were taken aback by this result. They sought to do whatever they could to keep Abbas and his particular terror gang in power since they are the "moderate" good Jew-killers who will bring peace in our time (as opposed to Hamas, who, as everybody knows, are the "radical" bad Jew-killers).

So the US is only too happy to put forth the Bizzaro World scenario where Abbas and Fatah are the "legitimate" rulers of the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas is unlawfully pulling off an insidious coup. It's as if those 2006 elections never happened. That way, you can pretend Abbas is the spirited leader the PA carrying the flag of peace while Hamas is the "fringe" extremist group obstructing peace with their dastardly coup. Quite brilliant, really.