Bono’s compassion is real—but his Gaza remarks risk moral confusion between democracy and terror. Stephen Flatow responds

Bono’s compassion is real—but his Gaza remarks risk moral confusion

 

Bono, Wikimedia Commons

Bono’s compassion is genuine. But his recent Gaza comments dangerously blur the line between a democracy defending its citizens and a terror group targeting them.

As a bereaved father and terror victims’ advocate, I know that empathy is essential—but not when it comes at the expense of truth.

Read my response in Israel National News to Bono's comments here.

 Stephen M. Flatow

#Israel #Hamas #Bono #MoralClarity #IsraelUnderAttack #HumanRights #StopTerror #MiddleEastTruth #JusticeForVictims 

Macron’s Palestinian state push: A dangerous lecture from a country in disarray

France is burning, and Macron thinks Israel needs a lecture?

France’s President Emmanuel Macron has joined the chorus of Western leaders pushing unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state—another reckless move wrapped in the language of “peace.” But coming from a country gripped by riots, antisemitic violence, and rising insecurity, Macron’s lecture to Israel rings hollow.

© Rémi Jouan, CC-BY-SA, GNU Free Documentation License, Wikimedia Commons

In my new JNS column, I argue that Macron’s push isn’t about resolving the conflict—it’s about deflecting from his own political failures at home. Demanding concessions from Israel while ignoring Hamas’s terror is not statesmanship. It’s appeasement dressed as diplomacy.
👉 Read the full op-ed here

Stephen M. Flatow

#EmmanuelMacron #France #Israel #Hamas #PalestinianState #Appeasement #ForeignPolicy #Antisemitism #Zionism #MiddleEast #VictimsVoice #JNS #SecurityVsTerror #DoubleStandards

Fix your own country, Prime Minister Starmer

While Britain faces spiraling crime, growing antisemitism, and social unrest, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is more focused on pressuring Israel than fixing his own country. In his first major foreign policy moment, Starmer has threatened to recognize a Palestinian state if Israel doesn’t meet vague “peace” conditions—essentially handing Hamas a political victory.

Keir Starmer outside 10 Downing St.  Wikimedia Commons

In my latest op-ed for JNS, I challenge Starmer's warped priorities. How can a leader demand concessions from Israel while ignoring the terrorist entity on the other side? It’s not diplomacy—it’s dangerous moral failure.
👉 Read the full column here

Stephen M. Flatow

#KeirStarmer #Israel #UKPolitics #Hamas #Appeasement #Antisemitism #MiddleEast #PalestinianState #Terrorism #FixYourOwnCountry #ForeignPolicy #VictimsVoice #JNS #Zionism

Canada’s Dangerous Embrace of Appeasement

Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, has chosen to make his diplomatic debut not by supporting democratic allies or condemning terrorism, but by rewarding it. In announcing Canada’s recognition of a Palestinian state—absent peace, negotiation, or even Palestinian renunciation of Hamas—Carney has joined a growing bloc of Western leaders more interested in appeasement than in justice. His decision doesn’t advance peace; it emboldens terror.

 European Communities Audiovisual Services via Wikimedia Commons.

In my latest column at JNS, I explain how this move undermines not only Israel but the broader Western effort to deter radical Islamist violence. Recognition without conditions means handing a victory to those who use murder as a political strategy. Canada once stood firmly against that. What changed? Read the full op-ed here:
👉 Canada’s Dangerous Embrace of Appeasement

Stephen M. Flatow

#Israel #Canada #MarkCarney #PalestinianState #Appeasement #Terrorism #MiddleEastPolicy #JNS #VictimsVoice #Hamas #ForeignPolicy #PeaceNotTerror #JewishVoices #AlisaFlatow #Zionism

 Unity is Israel’s most powerful weapon

Its military victories have always depended on something deeper than airpower or intelligence: The unity of its people.

I write in my latest column on JNS.ORG:

The State of Israel has always lived by the principle that its survival depends not only on military might but on the unity of its people. A review of Israel’s modern military history—from the existential wars of 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 to more recent conflicts in Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and the 2025 strike on Iran—reveals a clear pattern: when Israeli society stands united, its military achieves clarity and strength; when it is divided, outcomes are murky, costly and inconclusive.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in the traumatic aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists launched a surprise attack on Israeli communities near the border with Gaza. In that darkest of moments, the deep divisions that had wracked Israeli society for months over judicial reforms and political polarization were, at least temporarily, set aside. The country responded with a surge of unity not seen in decades.

The answer to the question of Israeli successes on the battlefield comes down to "unity."

If Israelis can re-embrace that unity, then perhaps this war—born of unimaginable loss—can also mark the beginning of national restoration. 

The full column can be read here.

Stephen M. Flatow

 

Teaching terror to children, it's child abuse according to Hillary Clinton

 

Why Hillary Clinton called it ‘Palestinian child abuse’

At summer camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestinian Arab youths are being taught that all of Israel—Tel Aviv, Haifa, everything—is “occupied Palestine” and must be annihilated

By Stephen M. Flatow

It’s summertime!

“Summer-camp activities” for youth that present terrorists as role models at the
Palestinian Authority Security Forces’ Al-Istiqlal University. Credit: PMW.

For most children, that means campfires, nature hikes and outdoor games like “Capture the Flag.”

For kids in the regions governed by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, it means weapons training, skits in which the children pretend to kidnap and murder Jews, and lectures on the importance of destroying Israel.

Hillary Clinton once called it “Palestinian child abuse.” One glance at the campers’ daily schedule explains why.

The Central Hebron branch of Fatah—the major faction of the P.A.—has posted on its website dozens of photos and descriptions of their local “Buds of Construction and Liberation” summer camp. Instead of photos of smiling children holding popsicles or swimming in the camp lake, we see photos of smiling Palestinian Arab children holding AK-47 rifles. They’re standing in front of a giant banner showing P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas and his predecessor, Yasser Arafat.

Palestinian Media Watch, which translated the captions, points out that the banner also shows the official Fatah logo, including rifles, a hand grenade and the official P.A. map of the region, which labels all of Israel as “Palestine.”

Read the full column at jns.org

Whatever happened to the generation of peace - college students back Hamas

Palestinians vote for genocide -
What happened to the generation of peace?

Hamas won overwhelmingly in elections for the student council at a leading Palestinian Arab university last week. In other words, the young leadership of the Palestinian Arab community just voted for genocide.

 When I use the term genocide, I am not indulging in hyperbole. I am referring to the actual, legal definition of genocide, which is found in Articles II and III of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide: “Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”

“Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide

 That’s exactly what Hamas has been doing for decades, with thousands of rockets, flaming balloons, stabbings, bombings, sniper fire, suicide attacks and kidnap-murders.

And that’s exactly what Hamas has always advocated in its official charter, which Simon Wiesenthal Center has described as “a Fatwa (Muslim religious decree) for genocide.”

(photo credit: FLASH90)

So, when the students at Birzeit University elected Hamas representatives to 28 of the 51 student council seats, they were making a clear and unequivocal statement: they want to “destroy, in whole or in part,” the seven million Jews in Israel.

 This was supposed to be the generation of peace. The 1993 Oslo agreement was based on a Palestinian leadership commitment to raise their young people to embrace non-violence and peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state. They promised to change their old hate-filled textbooks so that Palestinian classrooms would become incubators of peace instead of training facilities for war.

 The fact that young Palestinian Arabs voted for a genocidal group shows that the Palestinian educational system has never changed. No new curriculum has been instituted. No textbooks have been changed. Palestinian Arab boys and girls have been raised since 1993 in the same way they were raised before 1993: to hate and kill Jews.

 LET ME say that again: to hate and kill Jews - not to hate and kill Israelis, and not to hate and kill settlers.

 The distinction is crucially important because it goes to the motives of Hamas and its voters. If their motive was simply to secure some territory and live in peace next to Israel, then many people would see some justification in Hamas violence against settlers.

 If, however, Hamas’s motive is simply to kill Jews, then their actions are genocidal. Nothing can justify it. And no surrender of territory will ever put an end to it.

 Obviously, not everyone who has been harmed in Hamas attacks has been Jewish. But, we know who they are trying to kill. And we know it for the simple reason that Hamas terrorists never try to murder Israeli Arabs.

 Israeli Arabs are Israeli citizens. So, if Hamas is against Israelis and not Jews, why don’t they ever attack Israeli Arabs?

 If Hamas’s grievance is against the policies of Israel and not against Jews, then they should be attacking Israeli Arabs, just as they attack Israeli Jews, but, they don’t.

 If they were merely against “Israelis,” Hamas newspapers, and radio and television programs would be inciting Palestinians to hate Israeli Arabs with the same vehemence that they hate Israeli Jews. They would be accusing Israeli Arabs of being evil and Nazi-like. Their political cartoons against the occupation would be showing Israeli Arabs as monstrous occupiers. Instead, their cartoons show occupiers with huge, hooked noses, side curls, beards and yarmulkes.

Hamas doesn’t plant bombs in supermarkets in Israeli Arab neighborhoods. They don’t machine-gun bus passengers in Israeli Arab towns. They don’t kidnap Israeli Arab teenagers from hitchhiking posts and murder them. The reason is simple, and there is no other plausible explanation, their goal is to murder Jews and that makes it genocide.

 It’s time to acknowledge the true nature of what Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists have been doing to Jews for more than a century. It’s not about politics. It’s not about policies. It’s not about territories or settlers. It’s genocide.

 That’s what the young leaders of the Palestinian Arabs voted for last week. That’s the sad and ugly reality that Israel and its supporters will have to confront in the years ahead.

 The writer is an attorney and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is the author of A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terrorism.

This post originally appeared on JPost.Com

 Emma Watson is right

 Hopefully, her declaration about the Palestinians will stimulate a serious conversation about the cruel occupation that the international community has been ignoring. 

“Free Palestine!” says actress Emma Watson.

 She’s right.

 The territories where the Palestinian Arabs live are indeed enslaved. They deserve to be freed from the tyrannical rule of their oppressors—Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

Emma Watson Wikimedia Commons

 The actress, best known for her role as Hermione Granger in the “Harry Potter” films, set off a firestorm in the world of social media with her Instagram post showing “Free Palestine!” banners and expressing “solidarity” with them. Hopefully, her declaration will stimulate a serious conversation about the cruel occupation that the international community has been ignoring.

The details concerning Hamas and the P.A., which I cite here, are all quoted from the latest reports by two strongly pro-Palestinian groups: Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. These are not “Israeli allegations.” They are what the Palestinian Arabs’ most vocal supporters are saying about the two Arab regimes that rule over 98 percent of the Palestinian Arabs.

 During the past year, “the Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and the Hamas de facto administration in the Gaza Strip continued to crack down on dissent, including by stifling freedoms of expression and assembly, attacking journalists and detaining opponents,” reports Amnesty.

 Human Rights Watch notes that the P.A. recently jailed journalist Sami al-Sai for the crime of “administering a Facebook page that had posted information about PA corruption.” Twenty protesters in Ramallah who dared to cry out against P.A. corruption were likewise jailed. Hamas recently arrested seven citizens for “participating in a video chat where they answered questions from Israeli civilians about life in Gaza.” And other Gazans were jailed for “weakening the revolutionary spirit.

Hamas also frequently executes citizens after “trials” that are “marred with due process violations,” reports Human Rights Watch.

 How do the P.A. and Hamas regimes treat those whom it arrests? “Palestinian security forces in the West Bank and Gaza routinely used torture and other ill-treatment with impunity. … Security forces in both areas used unnecessary and/or excessive force during law enforcement activities.”

 What about women’s rights in Occupied Palestine? Amnesty: “Women and girls faced discrimination in law and practice and were inadequately protected against sexual and other gender-based violence, including so-called honour killings.” Last year alone, “nineteen women died in the West Bank and 18 in Gaza as a result of gender-based violence.”

 Human Rights Watch points out that the P.A. “has no comprehensive domestic violence law.” Keep in mind that the P.A. has been ruling for 27 years. Nearly three decades in power and still no comprehensive domestic violence law.

 With regard to gay rights, Amnesty reports: “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people continued to face discrimination and lacked protection” at the hands of Hamas and the P.A. In Gaza, section 152 of the penal code “criminalizes consensual same-sex sexual activity and makes it punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment.”

 Citing local Palestinian Arab human-rights activists, Amnesty says that in the past year, there were numerous “violations of freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press,” as well as “158 cases in the West Bank and 118 in Gaza of the arbitrary arrests of opponents and critics.”

 Amnesty says that last year, the Palestinian Centre for Development and Media Freedoms “recorded 97 incidents of attacks against journalists, including arbitrary arrests, ill-treatment during interrogation, confiscation of equipment, physical assaults and bans on reporting: 36 in the West Bank and 61 in Gaza.”

 As for elections, the P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas is now in the 17th year of his four year-term and has repeatedly postponed parliamentary elections. In Gaza, too, democracy is a dirty word.

I realize that Emma Watson is an actress, not an expert on Middle East affairs. And in posting about “Palestine,” she might have just been going along with what she thinks all the cool young celebrities are doing.

 But perhaps the international uproar that she has provoked will inspire her to take a closer look at the implications of what she posted on Instagram. Because in raising the issue of freeing the Palestinian Arabs from their real occupiers, she’s actually on to something.

 Stephen M. Flatow, an attorney in New Jersey, is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terrorism.”

 

 

Once Again, Qatar Saves Hamas

by Stephen M. Flatow / JNS.org

The government of Qatar has again rescued Hamas.

Every time the Hamas terror regime in Gaza is on the brink of collapse, the Gulf state of Qatar comes riding in on a white horse like a knight in shining armor to ensure that Hamas will live to see another day. What happened to the “moderate” Qatar that American Jewish leaders were praising just a few years ago?

Photo by Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90.

This time, Hamas allegedly is running out of money to pay the salaries of its employees. If you don’t pay your employees, they don’t work. And if your workers don’t work, your gangster regime collapses. The collapse of Hamas would obviously be a good thing for Israel, the United States and modern civilization in general.

But once again, Qatar has jumped in on the side of the bad guys.

The new deal, according to media reports, will involve Qatar sending fuel to Gaza through Egypt. Hamas is then going to sell the fuel in order to meet its payroll.

That will keep Hamas in power so that it can continue firing thousands of missiles at Israeli kindergartens and kibbutzim near the Gaza border. And it can keep its cells in Judea and Samaria operating, so they can murder Jews there, too.

Qatar is already underwriting Gaza’s power plant and sending financial aid to 100,000 Gazans every month through a UN voucher system, which saves Hamas the expense of having to provide that aid. And it offered Hamas $500 million to rebuild after the 11-day conflict with Israeli in May—a conflict started by the terrorist organization and one that ended with the launching of more than 4,000 rockets at civilian populations in Israel. In short, Qatar is pretty much propping up the entire Hamas mini-terror state. 

Hamas is not the only terror gang supported by Qatar. Its close relationships with the Taliban and the Muslim Brotherhood have been well-documented. And a lawsuit now making its way through British courts charges that Qatar has sent hundreds of millions of dollars to the Al-Nusra Front, a Syrian-based affiliate of Al-Qaeda.

 And for those who are concerned about the rise of antisemitism around the world, it’s worth recalling that a report by the Anti-Defamation League found the official Qatari government media continues to publish editorial cartoons “which blatantly demonize Jews” and “draw on the worst kind of antisemitic themes.”

In addition, a review by MEMRI of textbooks prepared by Qatar’s Ministry of Education and used in its schools found that they “feature antisemitic motifs, presenting Jews as treacherous, dishonest and crafty, and at the same time as weak, wretched and cowardly.”

Moreover, the last international book fair in Qatar’s capital, Doha, featured antisemitic books such as “The Myth of the Nazi Gas Chambers” and “Lies Spread by the Jews,” and an Arabic translation of “Awakening to Jewish Influence in the United States of America” by white-supremacist leader (and former Ku Klux Klansman) David Duke.

This is all quite different from what we were told by the handful of leaders of American Zionist organizations who took all-expenses-paid trips to meet with the Emir of Qatar in his oil-rich Gulf kingdom in 2017-18. One Jewish official later admitted publicly that he was a paid, registered foreign agent of the Qatari government.

When the secret trips were exposed by journalists, the Jewish leaders defended their actions on the grounds that Qatar was becoming more moderate.

I don’t see anything “moderate” about Qatar hosting and sponsoring the world’s largest antisemitic media network, Al Jazeera.

I don’t see anything “moderate” about Qatar financing terrorist groups around the world.

And I don’t see anything “moderate” about Qatar rescuing and sponsoring a deadly terrorist regime along Israel’s southern border.

It’s time to take off the blinders and see Qatar for what it really is—a terror-funding outlet for antisemitic vitriol.

Stephen M. Flatow, an attorney, is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terrorism.”

 

Poverty doesn’t cause Arab terrorism

 The main cause of terrorism is ideology. That’s hard for Americans to comprehend because it’s so different from our own experience.

My column on jns.org.

Is poverty the root cause of Palestinian Arab terrorism?

That’s what U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken seems to think. At a press conference during his recent visit to the Middle East, Blinken argued that the forthcoming U.S. aid package to Gaza will defeat the terrorists.

“Reconstruction and relief for the people of Gaza” will “undermine Hamas,” he claimed. “I say that because Hamas thrives, unfortunately, on despair, misery, desperation, on a lack of opportunity.” If the United States provides “genuine prospect for opportunity, progress and material improvement in people’s lives,” then “Hamas’s foothold in Gaza will slip. We know that, and I think Hamas knows that.”

We know that? How, exactly? Usually, the way we know things is from past experience. We know something happened in the past, so we conclude that if we duplicate those conditions, that thing will happen again. If the billions of dollars in aid that the United States sent to the Palestinian Arabs in the past had led to a decrease in terrorism and the undermining of Hamas then, yes, it would be reasonable to conclude that we should do more of that. But in reality, the exact opposite happened.

With the signing of the Oslo Accords, America began sending $500 million annually to the Palestinian Arabs, including to Gaza, then ruled by the Palestinian Authority. That’s a total of $10 billion-plus from 1994 to 2006.

If anything would have “undermined” Hamas, that largesse should have done it. Yet somehow, all the “opportunity, progress and material improvement” that money brought didn’t convince the people of Gaza to reject terrorism. On the contrary, in the Palestinian parliamentary elections of 2006, the voters democratically gave Hamas a majority of the seats.

In June 2007, Hamas became the ruling regime in Gaza. Every few years since then, Hamas has attacked Israel, the Israelis have bombed Gaza, and the United States and the international community have rushed in with hundreds of millions of dollars in “humanitarian aid.” Yet that aid has never undermined Hamas. Fourteen years later, Hamas is still in power.

Certainly, it’s true that in the United States, poverty contributes to crime. The mistake that Blinken is making is to assume that the Mideast is similar to the American Midwest and that terrorism is just another form of crime. Neither of those assumptions is valid.

Viennese terrorist Kujtim Fejzulai

The main cause of terrorism is ideology, not poverty. That’s hard for some Americans to comprehend because it’s so different from our own experience. Most Americans are not ideological. American culture doesn’t accept political violence. The American government does not promote the use of violence. The religions that most Americans embrace do not espouse violence.

Contrast that with the Middle East, where Muslim fundamentalism actively encourages violence, and governing regimes such as the Palestinian Authority actively promote terrorism and glorify terrorists as heroes and martyrs. The Palestinian Arab public is inculcated daily through the regime-controlled media, with pro-violence messages. Children in P.A. schools absorb those messages daily in their classrooms. Summer camps in Gaza teach children to crawl under barbed wire with weapons, albeit fake ones, in their hands.

The stereotype that Palestinian terrorists are all single, unemployed young men who are lashing out because of their poverty is nonsense. Studies of suicide bombers, for example, have found that many were well-educated, employed, and family men and even women.

Remember the 415 Hamas terrorists whom then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin deported to Lebanon in 1992, in response to a wave of terrorist attacks against Israelis. The Chicago Tribune reported at the time that “many” of the deported terrorists were “businessmen, academics, lawyers [and] doctors.”

Likewise, the co-founder and longtime leader of Hamas, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, was a practicing pediatrician. By day, he treated Palestinian children; by night, he organized the murder of Israeli children. Rantisi, of course, is just one example of a successful, educated Palestinian Arab professional who chose to become a mass murderer.

There are countless others.

This applies to other Mideast terrorist groups as well. In 2016, the World Bank undertook a study of 4,000 foreigners who joined ISIS. Here were the report’s key findings:

• “These individuals are far from being uneducated or illiterate … 69 percent of recruits report at least a secondary education … a large fraction have gone on to study at university. Only 15 percent left school before high school and less than 2 percent are illiterate.”

• “Foreign recruits from the Middle East, North Africa and South and East Asia are significantly more educated than what is typical in their region.”

• “The vast majority … of [ISIS] recruits from Africa, South and East Asia and the Middle East … declared having an occupation before joining the organization.”

The authors of the study wrote that, as a result, their conclusion “is consistent with a number of other studies that come to a similar conclusion: poverty is not a driver of radicalization into violent extremism.”

Blinken is wrong. The Biden administration’s plan to send hundreds of millions of dollars to Gaza will not undermine Hamas. It won’t promote moderation. It won’t increase the chances for peace. It will just be throwing good money after bad.

Stephen M. Flatow, an attorney in New Jersey, is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terrorism.”

Child abuse at summer camp

Summer camp where war is taught.

Child abuse under a different name

In this column at jns.org I look at the summer camps being run by Hamas in Gaza and a sing-along in Turkey.  The affect on children will, in the long run, not be good.  In fact, it's child abuse.

Summer camp, a time for fun?

Many parents of my age remember striving to be able to send their children to summer camp. Now, as grandparents, we see our own children doing the same. I believed then, as I do now, that summer camp is a time when children make new friendships—many of which last into their adult years—grow emotionally and learn what we call “people skills.”

Somewhere in the boxes that accumulated over the years in our basement are videotapes of our five children at summer camp. We see our kids in various activities—playing baseball and basketball, jumping into the pool, holding the rabbits in the “nature shack,” and, the mother of all activities, “color war.”

Color war is a good kind of war; it’s bloodless, unless you bang your nose during a hotly contested rebound under a basketball hoop, and perhaps the most fun part of it is watching your child sing his or her heart out in the song competition. In the end, one team won, the other lost, and the war came to an end. You hope your child comes away with the lesson that competition requires teamwork, and that, in turn, builds character.

Videos have now emerged of children at summer camp practicing for war of a different sort. For instance, from Turkey there’s a video that has gone viral of a teacher prompting a group of young girls in a camp setting by shouting the word yahudiye—Turkish for “to the Jew,” which results in the children responding by raising their fists and shouting “death.”

The video is seemingly so disturbing within Turkey that a member of its parliament has demanded an explanation from the government as to how this could have happened.

Perhaps more chilling than the Turkish episode are the video scenes coming out of Gaza’s summer camps. No basketball contests or visits to the nature shack. No, instead we are treated to young boys going through military training, running obstacle courses and crawling under barbed wire with what appears to be live fire overhead. We are also shown images of these “campers” field-stripping rifles while blindfolded. This is done in all armies to simulate nighttime fighting conditions.

Perhaps we should be numb to this by now as we’ve been watching, thanks to the folks at MEMRI and Palestinian Media Watch, two decades’ worth of children’s shows on official Palestinian Authority television of children pledging to seek martyrdom when they are older as they “liberate” Palestine.

But we’re not numb, and the images coming out of Gaza are too disturbing to be cast aside as nothing more than daily Palestinian efforts to undermine Israel.

What are to make of all this?

First, let’s call this phenomenon of young children and teens being used for the purpose of instilling them with Jew-hatred and preparing them for death in war what it is: child abuse.

If you look up the definition of child abuse, you’ll see a thread running through the term as defined the United Nations, the United States and children’s aid organizations around the world. But they all boil down to this as succinctly stated by ChildHelp on its website:

“Child abuse is when a parent or caregiver, whether through action or failing to act, causes injury, death, emotional harm or risk of serious harm to a child. There are many forms of child maltreatment, including neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, exploitation and emotional abuse.”

Second, nothing good is going to come from this. Is Hamas planning to turn these teens into a child army as we’ve seen in Africa with gruesome results? Is Hamas planning to destroy a whole generation of young men in the way that Iran did during the eight years long Iran-Iraq war, when 95,000 Iranian child soldiers were made casualties, mostly between the ages of 16 and 17, and many younger than that?

I don’t have the answers to those questions, and I’d also like to know the answer to the question I have been asking for almost 25 years:

Where are the Palestinian parents who love their children and want to keep them out of harm’s way?

Stephen M. Flatow, an attorney in New Jersey, is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror,” available at Devon Square Press.

Israeli Officials Blast Jewish Visits To Qatar

Israeli Officials Blast Jewish Visits To Qatar

http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/israeli-officials-blast-jewish-visits-to-qatar/2018/03/08/

What are we to make of Jewish leaders who visit Qatar as the guests of the emir?  I'm opposed to such visits as my March 8, 2018 column in the Jewish Press makes clear.

It’s the Jewish controversy that just won’t go away. Nor should it.

Fully six months after Jewish leaders first began trooping off to Qatar, the op-ed columns of American Jewish and Israeli publications are still filled with lively commentaries on the affair.

And well they should be. Because this sordid episode has laid bare patterns of behavior among some Jewish leaders that need changing.

* There needs to be accountability. The members of these Jewish organizations should have been allowed to vote on whether their leaders should hobnob with an emir who finances Hamas.

* There needs to be transparency. Who went? How many times? Who paid their expenses? Do any of the visitors have business interests in the Gulf?

* There needs to be an open and honest discussion. The Jewish officials who went to Qatar need to stop responding to their critics with such extreme defensiveness. Cut out the name-calling and mud-slinging and threats of lawsuits. Discuss the issues calmly and seriously.

And please stop telling us the Israeli government secretly approved of the visits.

Have you ever noticed how people who want to defend indefensible behavior always seem to claim that unnamed “Israeli officials” secretly authorized their actions? Sorry, friends, blaming Israel is not going to get you off the hook.

Way back in November, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, told Forbes magazine that Israel did not approve of Jewish leaders going to Qatar.

Subsequently, a spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in Washington told Haaretz “that anyone who says [the Jewish embrace of Qatar] has won the blessing of the ambassador is not telling the truth.”

Then The New York Times reported: “The parade to Doha grew so large that Itai Bar Dov, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, issued a scolding. ‘We do not approve of these visits by the Jewish organizations to Qatar,’ Mr. Dov said.”

If that’s not enough, consider what two other prominent Israeli officials have said in recent days.

Acting Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely said that the spectacle of “self-appointed members of the Jewish community running to Qatar is an exercise of pure ego.”

According to Hotovely, “They never checked with anyone in the Israeli government. Qatar is responsible for the funding of Hamas and other terrorist groups that target us and our children. We are baffled by this development.”

Major-General (res.) Yaakov Amidror, who formerly served as Israel’s national security adviser, likewise takes a dim view of the Qatar pilgrimages. “I think it is a huge mistake for American Jewish leaders to go over to Qatar,” Amidror has said. “They are using these Jews, and their tremendous egos, to gain international legitimacy. What chutzpah for them to think that they have the power to change [Qatar’s] deeply entrenched views.”

Amidror, who has also served as head of the Israeli Military Intelligence research department, said that Jewish officials should have insisted, as a prior condition to visiting Qatar, “that Qatar stops its financial and material support for Hamas and other terrorist groups” and “Al Jazeera’s anti-Semitic and anti-Israel views be totally changed…. Otherwise, Qatar is just using these Jews and their tremendous egos as a cover to gain international legitimacy.”

Six months have passed since the American Jewish leaders’ romance with Qatar began. Qatar is still financing the mass murderers of Hamas. Senior Hamas fugitives are still being sheltered in Qatar. The Qatar-sponsored media outlet Al Jazeera is still filling the airwaves with anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda.

And so the controversy will continue, until the Jews who allowed themselves to be used by Qatar publicly acknowledge that they were wrong, and apologize to the members of their organizations and to the entire Jewish community.

The Trump administration just doesn’t get Gaza

My JNS.ORG column-

The Trump administration just doesn’t get Gaza

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-trump-administration-just-doesnt-get-gaza/

The Trump administration’s conference on the situation in the Gaza Strip this week “focused on the need for the Palestinian Authority to take control over Gaza,” a White House official told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. If that report is accurate, it means that the United States still doesn’t understand the basic problem in Gaza—or how to solve it.

The idea that Hamas is the “bad guy” and the Palestinian Authority is the “good guy” is a fallacy that began with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, and is still the mindset of too many people in Washington.

The attempts to distinguish between the “moderate” P.A. and the “extremist” Hamas always foundered on the reality that the P.A. regards Hamas as its brother, not its enemy. Brothers may quarrel from time to time—they may get into a scuffle now and then, or even try to kill each other—but they remain brothers.

The P.A. leadership promised, as part of Oslo, to disband all terrorist groups, seize their weapons and outlaw them—in short, to put them out of business. But here we are, 25 years later, and Hamas still has active terrorist cells throughout the P.A.-controlled parts of Judea and Samaria.

There’s no doubt that the P.A. has the means to eliminate Hamas in the territories; it has one of the largest per-capita security forces in the world. Yet it has never even outlawed Hamas. It has never made a real effort to capture its members or confiscate its weapons. It has not extradited a single Hamas terrorist to Israel, even though the Oslo agreement obligates it to do so.

Even The New York Times, a longtime cheerleader for the P.A., has occasionally conceded that Hamas and other terrorists roam free in P.A.-run cities. On March 23, 2014, the Times reported that Israeli troops were forced to enter the Jenin refugee camp in pursuit of terrorists because although Jenin is under the “full control” of the Palestinian Authority, “the Palestinian [security forces] did not generally operate in refugee camps.”

When the P.A.’s newspapers, television and radio glorify terrorists as “martyrs” and “heroes,” they don’t talk about only Fatah terrorists. They glorify Hamas murderers, too.

When the P.A. pays salaries to imprisoned terrorists and the families of dead terrorists, they don’t give out the payments only to Fatah members. They pay Hamas murderers and their families, too.

So there’s no reason for surprise that the P.A. boycotted this week’s conference on Gaza in Washington. No matter how hard the State Department crowd wishes it, the P.A. is not going to fight Hamas for control of Gaza. In fact, it’s not going to fight Hamas at all.

The solution to Gaza’s various ills is not to pump more international money into the region. That has been tried for decades, and it hasn’t worked. The solution is regime change. But a change from Hamas to the P.A. —even if it were possible and even if the P.A. were amenable to that— would not represent genuine change. It would mean replacing one corrupt, violent Palestinian dictatorship with another corrupt, violent Palestinian dictatorship.

Not every group of people with a grievance deserves, or is ready for, self-rule. Some have too little experience with the culture of democracy to establish and run a free society; the last thing the world needs is more dictatorships. Some are too violent to live in peace with their neighbors; that is the danger Israel faces.

For years, advocates of Palestinian statehood urged Israel to grant self-rule to the Arabs in Gaza. They claimed that if the Gazans were allowed to rule themselves, they would become peaceful neighbors since surely they wouldn’t want to risk losing their self-rule. It would be an experiment to see if giving them a fully sovereign state could succeed. Yitzhak Rabin took that risk (my family paid a high price for it) and then Ariel Sharon decided to take that risk.

The tens of thousands of rockets fired from Gaza at Israel over the years have demonstrated that the experiment was an abject failure. Gaza proves that the Palestinian Arabs are not yet ready for self-rule. Neither conferences in Washington nor handouts from the international community will change that.