Greenfield - Palestine, Lies and Videotape

Daniel Greenfield
frontpage.com
07 September '11

http://frontpagemag.com/2011/09/07/palestine-lies-and-videotape/


Peace. We go to war in the name of peace. We maintain armies in the name of peace. And we turn a blind eye to murder and terrorism in the name of peace.

The promise of peace convinced Israelis and Americans to give Arafat a private army and control over an autonomous territory. And the fading promise of peace is why both governments still continue to appease the terrorists. All in the name of peace.

Over and over again, Israelis have sat at a table, shaken hands, drawn up maps, and walked away with bus bombings, attacks on malls and rocket fire at schools—and the cries of the left that they are to blame.

The left is in denial about what Palestine is; it is not a nationality, but a pretext for endless war. The “Palestinian” cause cannot be separated from the campaign for regional supremacy by Muslim states; it began as a way for Egypt and Syria to harass Israel, and it continues as a Saudi, Turkish and Iranian campaign to destroy Israel. The actors change, but the goal remains the same.

The UN can declare a Palestinian state, but it can’t reunify Gaza and the West Bank, or bring order to the feuding militia camps that pretend to be governments. The nations of the world can vote to recognize it, but they can’t make it self-supporting. Billions of dollars have already been wasted on the effort. And neither political support nor foreign aid will end the violence.

The justification for this is based around a myth that is at the heart of the left’s twisted version of history. The myth is that the Muslims never had a choice whether to engage in violence, terrorism or genocide. That they never initiate, only respond to what the Jews do. Whatever atrocities they commit, it is only because the Jews have done worse to them.

To sustain this myth, the left relies on two techniques. First, the regional context is stripped away and the Muslim-Israeli conflict is reduced to a conflict between Israel and West Bank and Gazan Arabs. Imagine a history of WW2 that only dealt with it as a conflict between Czechoslovakia and Sudeten Germans—that’s what the left has done by treating the pretexts for war as the causes of war.



One example is Avaaz, a left-wing organization conducting a pressure campaign for Palestinian statehood. Avaaz’s video lays the blame for the violence on Israel, compares Israel’s Foreign Minister to Ahmadinejad and presents the unilateral Hamas-Fatah state as a way to bring peace to the region. Viewers are not told that few things are more certain to bring violence than unilateral actions by a fanatical terrorist group whose covenant celebrates the genocide of the Jewish people.

Like its video, Avaaz is not what it seems. Unlike most organizations, Avaaz does not list its staff openly; instead it claims to practice “servant leadership” with staffers letting members decide what to do. Only when the tax returns for Avaaz are examined, does a clearer picture emerge of who is really in charge.

Avaaz’s tax returns mention only one paid employee, its president, Ricken Patel, who pulls down a six figure salary—not bad for a ‘servant’. Patel was also a co-founder of Res Publica, the organization that co-founded Avaaz.

The Chairman of the Board, Eli Pariser, is the president of MoveOn.org which also co-founded Avaaz, and along with Avaaz’s Secretary, Tom Pravda, is also on the advisory board of Res Publica. Patel and Pariser serve on the advisory board of J-Street, a Soros organization founded to undermine Jewish support for Israel.

What’s the difference between Res Publica and Avaaz? Avaaz looks like an international activist group, which is convenient when you want to appear to be a global movement, instead of a disguised branch of the same old American left-wing organizations.

Then once all the Muslim parties to the conflict have been hidden except for the militias in the West Bank and Gaza, the discrepancy in armaments is exaggerated to show that Israel has all the options, and the terrorists have none. To the left power is also agency, by focusing only on the differences in firepower and not the political options that both sides have, Israel is depicted as all-powerful, controlling not only Gaza and the West Bank—but even Washington D.C.

By ignoring Muslim colonialism and oppression of regional minorities—the left denies the context of the conflict and transforms the proxy armies of Sunni and Shiite regional majorities into the downtrodden and persecuted.

The left’s case for Palestine is built on these lies, funneled deceptively through networks of organizations that disguise them, dumb them down and present them as moral and ethical imperatives.

Res Publica gets the majority of its funding from the Open Society Institute, which makes Avaaz another disguised George Soros project, just like J Street. The Economic Times hails Ricken Patel as “The Man Who Gives You Your Voice”, but it’s not “your” voice, it’s Soros’ voice.

The organizations that promote the Palestinian narrative spend nearly as much time hiding behind front groups as the terrorists that they support. Their ideological deceptions are reflected in their structure, just like their clients, the PLO, a Syrian front group which denied any aspirations for statehood until it became politically convenient, and Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood whose ultimate goal is not a state… but a Caliphate.

They want statehood about as much as Soros wants to give you a voice. Their bid at the UN is only another way to fill their own pockets while undermining Israel on behalf of their bosses in Tehran and Riyadh. If the Muslim Brotherhood takes power in Egypt, it will absorb Gaza in all but name. And if Jordan falls, then the West Bank will end up joining whatever entity forms in its place.

The situation will revert to before the Six Day War, which the left claims deprived the Palestinians of a state. But there was no Palestinian state then because no one wanted it. The demand for it now is a matter of strategy, not national identity. Peace has become a more devastating weapon than war, and as long as princes and billionaires will pay to destroy Israel– there’s money to be made promoting peace. Just ask Ricken Patel or Yasser Arafat.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.


If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.