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Palestinians Deserve Better Than Their ‘Defenders’
JNS.org – The marchers in the streets chanting “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are not pro-Palestinian. They are anti-Israel, anti-American and anti-Western civilization. Palestinians are pawns in their political agenda, and they deserve better. These marchers, whether they are leftists, Palestinian nationalists or extreme right-wing Neturei Karta members, will fight Israel until the last Palestinian is dead, and then they will move on to the next weapon in their arsenal.
The Arabs living in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip have gotten a raw deal for the past 75 years. The surrounding Arab nations promised them that the “Zionist entity” and the Jews would be eradicated quickly. They believed those promises, even after Israel survived its 1948 War of Independence. After 1948, Palestinian Arabs were told to sit tight and wait by the Arab nations and the world. The U.N. even created an organization, UNRWA, whose sole purpose is to keep Palestinians angry and in permanent refugee status, so they can be used as a weapon against Israel.
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was created in 1964 while Judea and Samaria were annexed parts of Jordan and the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian military governance. It was created by the Arab League, which put Egyptian-born Yasser Arafat at its head. Its purpose was to be a centralized mouthpiece for the Arab world, using the Palestinian people’s pain and suffering caused by that world itself.
The people who are currently referred to as “Palestinians” were always seen as human weapons against the Jews by the Arab world, nothing more. During the 1937 Peel Commission hearings, Arab leader Auni Bey Abdul-Hadii said, “There is no such country [as Palestine]! Palestine is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country is part of Syria.” This was echoed 10 years later by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, representative of the Arab Higher Committee and ally of Adolf Hitler. “Palestine was part of the province of Syria,” he said. “Politically, the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity.”
This mentality continued into the PLO. PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein was quoted in a Dutch newspaper in March of 1977 saying, “The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel for our Arab unity.” Muhsein continued, “Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.”
This attitude towards the civilians of the areas under Palestinian Authority and Hamas control is ingrained. These entities do not care about their people. That is why Gaza is now in ruins instead of being a beacon of Palestinian ingenuity and resilience. When Israel left Gaza in 2005, it took all of the Palestinians’ excuses with it.
The world gave Gaza hundreds of billions of dollars, and the people the Gazans voted for and supported in large numbers took that money and used it to fight a war they lost generations ago. To this day, aid is being brought into Gaza and stolen. Eylon Levy of the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office said, “The IDF inspects the aid where it then enters Gaza, and international agencies are responsible for its distribution.” That international agency is UNRWA, which has more loyalty to Hamas than to Palestinian civilians.
It’s no wonder that Hamas steals aid from Palestinian civilians. They view it as a necessary contribution to the war effort, because they, their parents, their grandparents and their great-grandparents were promised that the Jews are just one battle away from being gone forever. This was and is a lie. Israel is not going anywhere.
This diseased mentality has spread throughout the West. A recent Harvard-Harris poll indicated how broken our educational system is. Of the 18–24-year-olds polled, 60% claim that the Oct. 7 attack, which they admit was genocidal, “Can be justified by the grievance of Palestinians.” 50% support Hamas over Israel. 53% believe that students should be told by universities that they are “free to call for genocide” of Jews. 67% believe that “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors.” 67% also favor an “unconditional ceasefire that would leave everyone in place” as opposed to a ceasefire that “should happen only after the release of all hostages and Hamas being removed from power.”
The scariest response from 18-24-year-olds was from the 51% who said they want “Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.” This is the influence of the “from the river to the sea” chants and decades of academic corruption. America’s Gen Z wants to see what the Arab world tried to do in 1948—a second Holocaust. Just as the Arab world has failed to do right by its youth, it is our failure that so many American youths are indoctrinated in lies and propaganda.
There can never be Palestinian prosperity as long as this mentality continues. Jewish people know better than anyone else when it is time to accept the reality of a situation. Just as millions of Jewish grandchildren of Holocaust victims have no right to Poland or Hungary, Palestinian grandchildren of the genocidists of the 1948 war have no right to Tel Aviv. To tell those grandchildren otherwise is to teach despair and hatred. Palestinians deserve better than that. Any true pro-Palestinian activist would be marching for the denazification of the Palestinian Authority. That is the only way the people they claim to be supporting can prosper.
The post Palestinians Deserve Better Than Their ‘Defenders’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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New Orleans Attack Puts Spotlight on Islamic State Comeback Bid
A US Army veteran who flew a black Islamic State flag on a truck that he rammed into New Year’s revelers in New Orleans shows how the extremist group still retains the ability to inspire violence despite suffering years of losses to a US-led military coalition.
At the height of its power from 2014-2017, the Islamic State “caliphate” imposed death and torture on communities in vast swathes of Iraq and Syria and enjoyed franchises across the Middle East.
Its then-leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, killed in 2019 by US special forces in northwestern Syria, rose from obscurity to lead the ultra-hardline group and declare himself “caliph” of all Muslims.
The caliphate collapsed in 2017 in Iraq, where it once had a base just a 30-minute drive from Baghdad, and in Syria in 2019, after a sustained military campaign by a US-led coalition.
Islamic State responded by scattering in autonomous cells, its leadership is clandestine and its overall size is hard to quantify. The U.N. estimates it at 10,000 in its heartlands.
The US-led coalition, including some 4,000 US troops in Syria and Iraq, has continued hammering the militants with airstrikes and raids that the US military says have seen hundreds of fighters and leaders killed and captured.
Yet Islamic State has managed some major operations while striving to rebuild and it continues to inspire lone wolf attacks such as the one in New Orleans which killed 14 people.
Those assaults include one by gunmen on a Russian music hall in March 2024 that killed at least 143 people, and two explosions targeting an official ceremony in the Iranian city of Kerman in January 2024 that killed nearly 100.
Despite the counterterrorism pressure, ISIS has regrouped, “repaired its media operations, and restarted external plotting,” Acting US Director for the National Counterterrorism Center Brett Holmgren warned in October.
Geopolitical factors have aided Islamic State. Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza has caused widespread anger that jihadists use for recruitment. The risks to Syrian Kurds who are holding thousands of Islamic State prisoners could also create an opening for the group.
Islamic State has not claimed responsibility for the New Orleans attack or praised it on its social media sites, although its supporters have, US law enforcement agencies said.
A senior US defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there had been growing concern about Islamic State increasing its recruiting efforts and resurging in Syria.
Those worries were heightened after the fall in December of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the potential for the militant group to fill the vacuum.
‘MOMENTS OF PROMISE’
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has warned that Islamic State will try to use this period of uncertainty to re-establish capabilities in Syria, but said the United States is determined not to let that happen.
“History shows how quickly moments of promise can descend into conflict and violence,” he said.
A U.N. team that monitors Islamic State activities reported to the U.N. Security Council in July a “risk of resurgence” of the group in the Middle East and increased concerns about the ability of its Afghanistan-based affiliate, ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K), to mount attacks outside the country.
European governments viewed ISIS-K as “the greatest external terrorist threat to Europe,” it said.
“In addition to the executed attacks, the number of plots disrupted or being tracked through the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Levant, Asia, Europe, and potentially as far as North America is striking,” the team said.
Jim Jeffrey, former US ambassador to Iraq and Turkey, and Special Envoy to the Global Coalition To Defeat Islamic State, said the group has long sought to motivate lone wolf attacks like the one in New Orleans.
Its threat, however, remains efforts by ISIS-K to launch major mass casualty attacks like those seen in Moscow and Iran, and in Europe in 2015 and 2016, he said.
ISIS also has continued to focus on Africa.
This week, it said 12 Islamic State militants using booby-trapped vehicles attacked a military base on Tuesday in Somalia’s northeastern region of Puntland, killing around 22 soldiers and wounding dozens more.
It called the assault “the blow of the year. A complex attack that is first of its kind.”
Security analysts say Islamic State in Somalia has grown in strength because of an influx of foreign fighters and more revenue from extorting local businesses, becoming the group’s “nerve centre” in Africa.
‘PATH TO RADICALIZATION’
Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 42-year-old Texas native and US Army veteran who once served in Afghanistan, acted alone in the New Orleans attack, the FBI said on Thursday.
Jabbar appeared to have made recordings in which he condemned music, drugs and alcohol, restrictions that echo Islamic State’s playbook.
Investigators were looking into Jabbar’s “path to radicalization,” uncertain how he transformed from military veteran, real-estate agent and one-time employee of the major tax and consulting firm Deloitte into someone who was “100 percent inspired by ISIS,” an acronym for Islamic State.
US intelligence and homeland security officials in recent months have warned local law enforcement about the potential for foreign extremist groups, such as ISIS, to target large public gatherings, specifically with vehicle-ramming attacks, according to intelligence bulletins reviewed by Reuters.
US Central Command said in a public statement in June that Islamic State was attempting to “reconstitute following several years of decreased capability.”
CENTCOM said it based its assessment on Islamic State claims of mounting 153 attacks in Iraq and Syria in the first half of 2024, a rate which would put the group “on pace to more than double the number of attacks” claimed the year before.
H.A. Hellyer, an expert in Middle East studies and senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies, said it was unlikely Islamic State would gain considerable territory again.
He said ISIS and other non-state actors continue to pose a danger, but more due to their ability to unleash “random acts of violence” than by being a territorial entity.
“Not in Syria or Iraq, but there are other places in Africa that a limited amount of territorial control might be possible for a time,” Hellyer said, “but I don’t see that as likely, not as the precursor to a serious comeback.”
The post New Orleans Attack Puts Spotlight on Islamic State Comeback Bid first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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US Plans $8 Billion Arms Sale to Israel, US Official Says
The administration of President Joe Biden has notified Congress of a proposed $8 billion arms sale to Israel, a US official said on Friday, with Washington maintaining support for its ally.
The deal would need approval from the House of Representatives and Senate committees and includes munitions for fighter jets and attack helicopters as well as artillery shells, Axios reported earlier. The package also includes small-diameter bombs and warheads, according to Axios.
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Protesters have for months demanded an arms embargo against Israel, but US policy has largely remained unchanged. In August, the United States approved the sale of $20 billion in fighter jets and other military equipment to Israel.
The Biden administration says it is helping its ally defend against Iran-backed terrorist groups like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.
The post US Plans $8 Billion Arms Sale to Israel, US Official Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Hamas Releases Proof-of-Life Video of Israeli Hostage Liri Albag
i24 News – The Palestinian terrorists of Hamas on Saturday released a video showing signs of life from Israeli hostage Liri Albag.
Albag’s family requested media not to share the video or images from it, asking journalists to respect their privacy at this moment.
Albag, 20, is a surveillance soldier stationed at the Nahal Oz base, was abducted on October 7 by Palestinian jihadists.
The post Hamas Releases Proof-of-Life Video of Israeli Hostage Liri Albag first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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