Guess what? Israeli Checkpoints Stop Terrorists, not Elections.

Khaled Abu Toameh..
Gatestone Institute..
02 May '13..

Is it true that Palestinians cannot hold new elections because of Israeli security measures?

This is a claim, often made in the U.S., Canada and parts of Europe, is that the Palestinians have not been able to hold new presidential and parliamentary elections for the past five years because of Israeli army checkpoints in the West Bank, and that it will be impossible for the Palestinians to hold new elections in the future so long as Israel maintains checkpoints in various parts of the West Bank.

Another claim is that Israel is responsible for the fact that Palestinians enjoy no democracy in their two separate entities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

First, it is worth noting that such claims are often made by people living in the West, and not by Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

These people in the West like to think they are pro-Palestinian, but by their consistent distortion of facts, they seem in reality to be more anti-Israeli than pro-Palestinian. They never advocate against the repression and corruption that are actually stifling the Palestinians. Instead, they prefer to ignore the reality on the ground and often blame Israel for all that goes wrong in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Not surprisingly, many Palestinians seem to be much more pragmatic and realistic than the anti-Israel spokesmen sitting in Washington, New York and London.

The Palestinians know, for example, that were it not for the continued power struggle between Hamas and Fatah, they would have had free elections several years ago.

The Palestinians, moreover, know that Israeli checkpoints have nothing to do with restricting freedom of expression and voting. They are fully aware that the checkpoints are there to stop terror attacks and not democracy or reforms.

In the past, despite Israeli security measures and checkpoints, Palestinians did have free and democratic elections for the presidency and parliament.

Sultan Knish: The Kushnerites and the Whiny Left

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
10 May '11

McCarthyism is is one of the favorite words in the dictionary of the left. "McCarthyites" are awful people who get "brilliant and talented artists" who happen to sympathize with mass murderers fired from lucrative positions. The 'victims' of McCarthyism sympathized with Communist regimes where dissenting artists were tortured, imprisoned and executed. The victims of these victims went to the gulags. And the 'victims' lost out on a few movie deals.

Long after McCarthy's death, the left is still battling McCarthyism everywhere it finds it. Whenever an 'artiste' is called to account for supporting mass murderers, there the left rises in outrage against the latest manifestation of the scourge of decency. The insulting and outrageous idea that the cultural elite should be held accountable in some public way for the human consequences of their radical causes. To hold a leftist morally accountable for Stalin, Mao or Castro is McCarthyism. And the left's swarm against any such effort is Kushnerism.

Tony Kushner is the latest victim of McCarthyism, suffering the awful indignity of being briefly denied an honorary CUNY degree, after being caught supporting a terrorist regime whose victims, men, women and children lie in the hospitals and the cold dead ground. A moral reckoning that would seem petty to men, women and children murdered by the terrorist regime he supports..A brief delay for the reward of a lifetime of writing plays in which actors shriek at each other about Capitalism, AIDS and McCarthyism in between chardonnay breaks.

Poor Tony, with all his Tony awards, his Pulitzer, and his marriage to an Entertainment Weekly editor, forced to wait a few extra days to add a sixteenth honorary degree to his shelf. He may be the man that Steven Spielberg chose to rewrite the Munich Massacre into a morality play about the futility of fighting terrorism, he may be dubbed a "brilliant and talented artist" and the moral voice of Fire Island, but he almost lost out on an honorary degree from an institution known in New York to be just like home, because when you go there, they have to take you in

(Read full "The Kushnerites and the Whiny Left")

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Amnesty Water Report Falsehood #2

TS

CAMERA/Snapshots
1 November 09

My colleague Alex Safian has published an in-depth backgrounder refuting Amnesty International's broader claims of discriminatory Israeli water policies.

Meanwhile, Snapshots will continue to refute more detailed specific claims in the Amnesty Report ("Troubled Waters -- Palestinians Denied Fair Access to Water").

Falsehood #1 is here.

We find Falsehood #2 on page 4 of the Amnesty report:

The 450,000 Israeli settlers, who live in the West Bank in violation of international law, use as much or more water than the Palestinian population of some 2.3 million.

This statement is absurd for so many reasons.

1) There are some 280,000 Israelis -- not 450,000 as Amnesty states -- living across the Green Line, called either the West Bank or by the biblical terms Judea and Samaria. (Here, we are citing numbers from the anti-settlement group Peace Now, which if anything would exaggerate, not understate, the number of settlers.)

As Amnesty itself states on page 7 of the very same report: "Currently more than 450,000 Israeli settlers live in the OPT, about half of them in East Jerusalem." In other words, Amnesty cannot be relied upon to even accurately state the number of Jews residing in the West Bank, let alone complex data concerning water usages among the populations.

2) Is it true that 280,000 Israelis living in the West Bank consume more water than the 2.3 million Palestinians residing there? According to page 3 of the Amnesty report,

Palestinian consumption in the OPT is about 70 liters a day per person -- well below the 100 litres per capita daily recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) -- whereas Israeli daily per consumption, about 300 liters, is about four times as much.

For argument's sake, let's accept Amnesty's numbers for Israeli and Palestinian consumption. On the Palestinian side, 2.3 million people multiplied by 70 liters is 161 million liters a day. On the Israeli side, 280,000 people multiplied by 300 liters totals totals 84 million liters a day. So, which is larger? You got it, even according to Amnesty's own numbers, Israelis in the West Bank use half the amount of water that the Palestinian population uses -- not more.

3) There is evidence that Amnesty knowingly manipulated its statistics. The footnote on the page 4 falsehood, regarding the 450,000 Israeli settlers and 2.3 million Palestinians allegedly living in the West Bank, states:

This figure excludes the more than 200,000 Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem; though part of the OPT, East Jerusalem has been annexed by Israel.

Thus, while Amnesty was careful to make a distinction between Jerusalem and West Bank Palestinians, it lumped together Jerusalem and West Bank Israelis and passed them all off as West Bank residents.

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