The deadly tragicomedy at the UNHRC by Melanie Phillips

...The good news from this vignette is that Cameron seems now to realize Britain has a big problem with the FCO’s reflexive impulse to appease the Arabs at Israel’s expense. Yet consider: A British prime minister intent on outflanking his endemically pro-Arab foreign ministry in order to support Israel was forced publicly to adopt an anti-Israel position by Israel’s prime minister – and all because Britain and the West refuse to do what is needed to support Israel properly at the UN. Truly, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Melanie Phillips..
As I See It/JPost..
09 July '15..

When the Human Rights Council voted last week to back the report by Mary McGowan Davis on the 2014 Gaza war, the behavior of two council members in particular provoked protests in their home countries.

The report, which used skewed and selective reports falsely to condemn Israel for war crimes along with the true war criminal, Hamas, was a travesty. The resolution, which failed to blame Hamas for war crimes but accused Israel of such behavior not just last year but also in the 2008/2009 war, piled malice upon malice.

Only the US voted against the UNHRC resolution. Five countries abstained: Kenya, Ethiopia, Macedonia, India and Paraguay. But what caused a stir was that two countries, the UK and Germany, voted for it.

In Germany, this was denounced by the Christian Democratic Union party. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron was accused of hypocrisy. Only last April he had robustly supported Israel’s actions in Gaza, declaring there was “such a difference” between indiscriminate attacks upon Israel and its attempt to defend itself against them.

What’s more, the UK had also voted against Israel last May when, by 104 votes to 4, Israel was singled out by the World Health Organization as the only nation on earth to be condemned for violating health rights. Voting twice in support of motions designed to demonize, delegitimize and destroy Israel was behavior scarcely fitting one of its allies.

But then the story took off in a very odd direction. Stephen Pollard, the editor of Britain’s Jewish Chronicle, had a scoop which was as strange as it was sensational.

On the morning of the UNHCR vote, he wrote, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had personally called David Cameron and Angela Merkel and asked them to vote for the Israel-bashing resolution.

Perfidious Albion and Israel

Isi Leibler
Candidly Speaking from Jerusalem
31 March '11

http://wordfromjerusalem.com/?p=2887

British Jews who primarily interact with fellow Jews in their daily lives, and thus remain largely insulated from direct anti-Semitic confrontations, frequently underrate the impact of the relentless demonization of Israel on their standing in society. Others, who insist that the anti-Israeli onslaughts are unconnected to anti-Semitism, are simply in outright denial The principal barometer is the media which is now so consistently hostile to Israel that an occasional neutral or positive article is almost cause for celebration.

The poisonous atmosphere has now extended to the entertainment arena. In London, I saw the final episode of “The Promise,” a four-part drama series televised during peak viewing time on Channel 4, which encompasses the history of the Jewish state from its birth to modern-day Israel. I doubt whether any production in the Western world has ever related to Israel with such vile bias and venom. Virtually every Jew is demonized as a duplicitous and heartless monster.

The drama focuses on a British soldier who witnessed the Nazi death camps and subsequently served in the British mandatory forces when the state of Israel was born. His granddaughter, the heroine, witnesses Israeli brutality against peace-loving Palestinian women and children. It concludes with the aged former British soldier pontificating that despite the Nazi death camps, the creation of Israel was a terrible event which dispossessed the Palestinian people. The historical events are utterly distorted; rich Jews celebrate as innocent Arabs are butchered; a Jewish sniper deliberately murders a young Arab child and Israeli soldiers continuously abuse elderly Palestinians.

The Jewish director, Peter Kosminsky, had the gall to inform the media that the research undertaken prior to production demonstrated that overall, Israel had squandered the compassion it derived from the Holocaust and was now “isolated, feared and loathed in equal measure.”

Purim, and the patronizing paternalism of Presidents, Prime Ministers & “Progressives”

Israelinurse
CiF Watch
06 March '11

I’ve been organising our community Purim party for many years now and that means that from early January until Purim itself, our house gradually fills up with more and more painted scenery and enormous papier mache figures, sequins on every surface and glitter in the food. The excitement of the building preparations for the festival is, however, tempered with the apprehension of experience. Who can forget those awful post Oslo years when so many Purim celebrations were blighted by vicious terror attacks?

In 1996 over sixty people died in the eight days preceding Purim. I’d just finished constructing an enormous multi-coloured circus tent in our communal dining room when the news came over the radio of the bombing at the Dizengoff Centre in Tel Aviv in which 13 people were killed. The day before, 19 had died in a bus bombing in Jerusalem and the week before that one person had died in a bombing in Ashkelon, one in an attack in the French Hill area of the capital and 26 people had been killed in another bus bombing on the same line in Jerusalem.

In proportional terms, that would have been the equivalent to over 600 people murdered by terrorists in one week in Britain. On an American scale, it would have meant over 3,000 dead. Between the signing of the Declaration of Principles in September 1993 and the start of the second Intifada in September 2000, two hundred and sixty-nine people were killed in Israel by Palestinian terrorists. For Britain, that’s the equivalent of almost three thousand people and for Americans, over 13,500. Would either British or American governments have continued to engage in peace talks with an enemy which was taking such a toll on their civilian populations? Would their voters, their media or their politicians have allowed them to do so?

(Read full "Purim, and the patronizing paternalism of Presidents, Prime Ministers & “Progressives”)

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With friends like this, who needs enemies?

Melanie Phillips
http://www.spectator.co.uk
09 February '11

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/6684255/with-friends-like-this-who-needs-enemies.thtml

I have previously noted (here, here and here) that the Cameron government is shaping up to be one of the most hostile towards Israel in living memory. David Cameron himself and Foreign Secretary William Hague have consistently treated Hamas propaganda about casualty figures in any war with Israel as reliable, even though they are invariably a pack of lies, and have furthermore astoundingly replicated the Arab strategy of turning Israeli self-defence into aggression at every opportunity. While he was in opposition, Hague infamously condemned Israel’s behaviour during the 2006 war in Lebanon as ‘disproportionate’; Cameron himself condemned Israel for its ‘attack’ on the Turkish terrorist boat the Mavi Marmara and designated Gaza a ‘prison camp’.

Now Hague is at it again. With the Arab world convulsed by the unrest in Tunisia and Egypt and with the acute danger that such instability will result in the region lurching even further into Islamic theocratic tyranny, the British Foreign Secretary’s response is – to bash Israel. Never mind that the uproar in Egypt and Tunisia, along with the nervousness in Jordan and Saudi Arabia that their regimes may also be swept away by rising extremism, demonstrates the utter absurdity of the claim that regional tranquillity depends on resolving the issue of ‘Palestine’. Hague makes a point of declaring that the casualty of the unrest will be... the Middle East peace process.

Never mind that this process has stalled because Abbas and co won’t even negotiate. Never mind that even these so-called ‘moderates’ insist they will never accept Israel as a Jewish state, and thus refuse to renounce their nine-decade long war of extermination against the Jewish presence in the land. Never mind that they continue to incite their people and their children to hate Jews and murder Israelis. Hague knows that Israel is to blame. As the Times (£) reports:

The Middle East peace process is in danger of becoming a casualty of the revolutionary tidal wave sweeping the Arab world, and Israel is putting itself at risk by failing to compromise, William Hague told The Times yesterday. Speaking on an emergency peace mission covering five countries in three days, the Foreign Secretary issued a blunt instruction to Israel to tone down the belligerent language used by Binyamin Netanyahu, its Prime Minister, since the uprising and protests, which have spread from Tunisia to Egypt and beyond.

... Mr Hague responded to increasingly militaristic pronouncements by Mr Netanyahu, who has been urging his nation to prepare for ‘any outcome’ and vowing to ‘reinforce the might of the state of Israel’. The Foreign Secretary said: ‘This should not be a time for belligerent language. It’s a time to inject greater urgency into the Middle East peace process.’

Belligerent? Israel is currently petrified that, if Islamists come to power in Egypt and tear up its 30-year old peace treaty as the Muslim Brothers have said they will do, it will face the nightmare of a renewed threat of war from the south as well as from Iran/Hezbollah in the north and Iran/Hamas in Gaza. It will be thus encircled by truly ‘belligerent ‘ enemies. It will have to turn its entire military and strategic thinking upside down in order to defend itself against such a grim prospect – and yes, of course it will have to reinforce its defences. Even more young Israelis will have to be called up to army service and face the risk of death to prevent their country from being wiped off the map. For William Hague to represent the warnings by Israel’s Prime Minister that his country must now prepare itself for this terrifying eventuality as ‘belligerency’ is simply obscene.

Let us hear no more nauseating hypocrisy from Cameron or Hague about how they are Israel’s staunch allies. With ‘friends’ like these, who needs enemies?

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'Are We Too Critical of Israel?'

Daniel Halper
The Weekly Standard
03 August '10

That was the question debated by Douglas Murray and his interlocutors on the BBC. It makes for great television:



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What David Cameron Doesn't Know About Turkey

Turkey is sponsoring the jihadists, not guarding against them.


Michael Weiss
The Weekly Standard
29 July '10
Posted before Shabbat

Who said this?

Hamas are resistance fighters who are struggling to defend their land. They have won an election. I have told this to U.S. officials ... I do not accept Hamas as a terrorist organization. I think the same today. They are defending their land.

That would be Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking before an exultant crowd a few weeks ago in the city of Konya as a newly decorated defender of regional Islamism. This is the man whom David Cameron was out to please the other day when, in a speech delivered in Ankara, he referred to Gaza as a “prison camp,” assailed Israel’s raid on the Mavi Marmara as “completely unacceptable,” and insisted that despite the aura of hopelessness now clinging to Turkey’s agonized bid to join the European Union, it must join it whatever the grumblings from Germany and France. Brutal occupation of Cyprus, subjugation of a Kurdish minority in everything from politics to linguistics, and ongoing denial of the Armenian genocide are evidently Maastricht-compatible initiatives to the new British prime minister, considered even by his support base not to “do” foreign policy so terribly well.

That didn’t stop a fellow Conservative, MP Daniel Hannan, from encouraging Cameron’s Obama-like overture to an increasingly hostile and subversive ally: “Cameron's reasons for backing Ankara's bid for EU membership are solidly Tory: Turkey guarded Europe's flank against the Bolshevists for three generations, and may one day be called on to do the same against the jihadis.”

(Read full article)

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Fourth Try at a Two State Solution

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
26 July '10


At a joint press conference with Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron stated that we "desperately need a two-state solution". German Chancellor Angela Merkel is reportedly downbeat about the prospects for a Two State Solution, but insists that it is the only "reasonable solution". J-Street, the radical left wing anti-Israel group intimately tied up with the Obama Administration, has released an ad praising Congressman Joe Sestak, one of the "Hamas 54", for his support of a "Two State Solution". Alan Dershowitz responded with an Op Ed insisting that he had always been in favor of a "Two State Solution" and denouncing J-Street for daring to imply otherwise.


And with all that noise and clamor for a Two State Solution, people would be forgiven for assuming that this was something a little more feasible than flapping your wings and flying to Mars. They would be forgiven for assuming that because they are naive enough to believe that leading politicians wouldn't step forward to propose something completely insane, just because it was the same thing that had been proposed for the last 20 years, and proposing it again has become the thing to do. They would be forgiven for also assuming that the media would be able to fact check completely impossible proposals before they actually become de facto policy. And it's a sad testament to the current state of the policy debate, that they would be wrong on both points.

It is easy enough to understand why a "Two State Solution" not only didn't work then and won't work now, but why it makes absolutely no sense to propose.

The original Two State Solution was implemented back in the 1920's, when the British imported Abdullah, the Governor of Mecca, and gave him 76% of the territory of the Palestine Mandate, in exchange for his silence when the French invaded Syria. Yet turning over three quarters of the territory of the Mandate to Muslim rule did not bring peace. Arab pogroms of Jews continued throughout the 1920's. In a single week of August of 1929 alone, 113 Jews were murdered. (That is more than the number of Arabs who died in Jenin or Deir Yassin, yet you will find that the same "historians" who constantly mention those places, couldn't be bothered to care, let alone make noises about genocide and Arab colonialism.)

(Read full article)

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Proof that (our) new British Government is grovelling to Islamists

What was Winston Churchill’s definition of an appeaser again? “One who feeds the crocodile hoping it will eat him last.”


Douglas Murray
Telegraph.co.uk
03 June '10
H/T Robin Shepherd

I have just been forwarded an email from the UK government which suggests that the new administration does not merely feel blackmailed by Islamists but is also actively trying to placate them.

The Research Information and Communications Unit (RICU) is jointly funded and run by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Home Office and the department of Communities and Local Government. Founded in 2007, it officially forms part of the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism. It is the main conduit for Government in dealing with the disparate mass that it thinks of as “the Muslim community”.

Late yesterday the RICU sent out this message to its email list:

Dear all,
Both the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary made statements in the House of Commons today regarding the Israeli Navy’s interception of the Aid Flotilla to Gaza, and the subsequent deaths of a number of passengers. The attached factsheet provides details of these statements and further background and facts surrounding this incident.
We encourage you to share this unrestricted document with your contacts.
As ever we would appreciate your feedback on the format, content and timing of this document as well as suggestions on issues you would like it to cover. Please email …. with comments or if you would like to subscribe.
Kind regards,
Head, News Coordination Team
RICU

And what is it that it wishes its Muslim recipients to “share” with all their “contacts”? The attachment in question quotes at length the lamentable statements on the Gaza flotilla incident from David Cameron and William Hague. In case any aggravated Islamist isn’t yet getting this, RICU is at pains to reiterate in its “KEY POINTS”:

(Read full story)

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Just weeks before the election, British Conservative Party leader sets out pro-Israeli platform, or does he?

Robin Shepherd
Robin Shepherd Online
12 March '10

In an exclusive interview with Britain’s Jewish Chronicle, David Cameron — leader of the Conservative Party and a man who could be prime minister in eight weeks time — has set out an agenda which suggests he would take a much more pro-Israeli line than the current government should he come to power.

Cameron described as “feeble” the government’s handling of the universal jurisdiction procedures which have been used against senior Israelis saying, “We will keep pressing the government to make this right - and if they don’t, we will.” Islamist groups such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir — which openly calls for an Islamic state in Britain — would be banned and Islamist leaders would be prevented from coming to the UK. Cameron also said that Britain under his leadership would have voted against the Goldstone Report. The current government voted in favour.

The notion that the Conservatives would put Britain on a more pro-Israeli track is probably reasonable, but the devil lies in the detail. Consider, for example, Cameron’s explanation of his position on the Goldstone Report:

“The detailed allegations of human rights abuses… are serious and they do need to be fully investigated,” the Jewish Chronicle quoted him as saying. The Conservatives would have voted against the report because it “didn’t mention Hamas’s role in starting the conflict”.

(Read full post)
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