Terrorism gets a pass from the Biden Administration

Why does the Biden administration oppose Israel’s anti-terror actions?

The White House denies that Palestinian NGOs are connected to terrorism despite a mountain of evidence. 

The Biden administration is claiming that Israel has not provided evidence that the seven NGOs whose offices it closed down last week were tied to a terror group. Yet there is a mountain of publicly-available evidence proving the existence of such ties—and some of it comes from the U.S. government itself.

Dawson's Field Hijacking

The administration was clear in its support of the NGOs. U.S. State Department Spokesman Ned Price said the administration “voiced our concern” about Israel’s actions. Disputing Israel’s assertion that the groups were connected to the terrorist organization the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Price claimed that “we don’t have that information yet.”

For anyone who has forgotten, the PFLP was a pioneer of the infamous airline hijackings of the 1960s and 1970s. More recently, its bloody record included the murder of an Israeli cabinet minister in October 2001 and the massacre of five rabbis in November 2014, including American citizens, in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood.

If Ned Price and other Biden administration officials are genuinely interested in learning about NGO ties to the PFLP, they should start by picking up the phone and calling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Read the complete column at JNS.ORG

 There's no such thing as a Palestinian terrorist

Readers of the NYTimes and Wash Post, note: The 6 escaped prisoners called "militants" by your media murdered innocent civilians.

My latest column at Israel National News

Which of the following actions by "ideologically-motivated" Palestinian Arabs should be considered terrorism?

 (A) Placing a bomb at a bus stop in downtown Tel Aviv, killing an Israeli teenage girl.

 (B) Kidnapping an Israeli teenage boy and shooting him point-blank in the head.

 (C) Throwing flaming bottles of gasoline at Israelis, in order to burn them alive.

 (D) Firing automatic weapons at Israeli civilian buses.

 The answer, according to the New York Times and the Washington Post, is “(E) None of the above.”

Fatah Terrorists

The terrorist attacks listed above were just a small sample of the violent crimes against civilians committed by the six Palestinian Arabs who recently escaped from an Israeli prison. Yet in the coverage of the escape by America’s two most prominent and influential newspapers, the word “terrorist” never appears.

 According to articles by the New York Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Patrick Kingsley, the murderers are “prisoners,” “militants,” or simply “the six men.” Kingsley’s computer keyboard appears to be incapable of producing the word “terrorist” when Palestinian Arabs are involved. Maybe the tech support folks at the Times should have a look at his laptop. Clearly something is malfunctioning when no act of Palestinian Arab violence, no matter how heinous, is considered terrorism.

 Even when Kingsley gets around to describing the crimes they committed, he cannot bring himself to admit that it was “terrorism.” The six were “convicted or accused of militant activity,” he writes. No, they weren’t. The Israeli prosecutors’ bills of indictment did not use euphemisms such as “militant activity” to cover up the nature of the crimes, as Kingsley does. They were indicted for terrorism and murder.

 What about the terrorist groups to which the six belong? Kingsley of the Times re-brands them, too. Five are members of Islamic Jihad, the terrorist gang that has murdered hundreds of Jews, including my daughter, Alisa, in 1995. Kingsley labels them simply “a militant group.”

 The sixth escaped terrorist was a leader of—here’s how the Times puts it—“the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group loosely linked to Fatah, the secular political party that dominates Palestinian institutions in the West Bank.”

 What’s all this gobbledygook about being “loosely” linked to Fatah? Why do Kingsley and the Times come up with these kinds of verbal gymnastics, instead of acknowledging the indisputable fact that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade is part and parcel of Fatah?

 Because Fatah is chaired by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. Acknowledging that Fatah sponsors terrorism would force the Biden administration to end all relations with the PA. So, the PA and its sympathizers play a game in which they pretend that Fatah doesn’t really control the Al-Aqsa terrorists.

 If you doubt that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades are really part of Fatah, don’t take my word for it. Consider what sources that are not friendly to Israel have to say on the subject.

 The official BBC News profile of the Brigades states: “The al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades is an armed Palestinian group associated with Yasser Arafat's Fatah organisation.” Perhaps the BBC has no choice but to admit the truth, because it was its own team of journalists which in November 2003 uncovered the fact that Fatah was paying $50,000 monthly to the Brigades.

 National Public Radio has described it as “Fatah’s armed militant wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades.” A Council on Foreign Relations report on the Brigades found that they are “aligned with Fatah” and “affiliated with former Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat’s Fatah faction.”

 A June 2005 study by the U.S. government’s own Congressional Research Service reported: “On December 18, 2003, Fatah asked the leaders of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to join the Fatah Council, recognizing it officially as part of the Fatah organization.”

 How about the Palestinian Authority itself? What do PA leaders say about the Al-Aqsa gang? In June 2004, then-PA Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei openly declared in an interview with the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper: “We have clearly declared that the Aksa Martyrs' Brigades are part of Fatah. We are committed to them, and Fatah bears full responsibility for the group." (Jerusalem Post, June 20, 2004)

 The New York Times’ coverage of the escaped terrorists has been bad enough—but the way the Washington Post has handled the story has been even worse.

 Post correspondent Ellen Francis called them “prisoners” and “fugitives”—not even “militants,” much less “terrorists.” In her reporting, Islamic Jihad is not even “a militant group” (as the Times calls it)—it’s just “the Islamic Jihad movement.” And Fatah is not even mentioned by Francis—it’s merely “the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.” Readers of the Post were not given the slightest indication as to what those two groups are all about.

 Earlier this summer, a poll by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, at Oxford, found that just 29% of Americans trust the news media. The United States placed dead last, out of 46 countries surveyed, in media trust.

 Perhaps the blatant attempts by America’s two most influential newspapers to cover up the nature of Palestinian Arab terrorism might help explain why so many people distrust the media.

 

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

Captions worth a thousand words, but don't tell the truth

 Captions worth a thousand words

Unfortunately, caption writers editorialize

My latest column on Israel National News

Captions worth a thousand words

The art of writing anti-Israel skewed photo captions is another step on the slippery slope unobjective journalists and their anti-Israel editors have chosen to slide down.

 By Stephen M. Flatow

 If a picture is worth a thousand words, what are the words under the picture worth?

 Plenty—to those who want to turn international public opinion against Israel.

 The Reuters news agency recently distributed a dramatic photo of—according to its caption—“a Palestinian jumping next to a barricade with tires during an anti-Israel protest over cross-border violence between Palestinian militants in Gaza and the Israeli military.”

 Wow. How many facts can you distort in a single caption?

 Let’s start with the phrase “a Palestinian.” The young man in the photo is not just “a Palestinian.” For starters, he’s wearing the kind of headdress favored by Palestinian teenagers who are hoping the Israeli police won’t be able to identify and arrest them. That’s not a Covid mask. Law-abiding citizens don’t wrap their entire faces in cloth. Of course, the fact that he’s leaping through the air should make it obvious that he was not just an innocent civilian out for a stroll.

 And how about all the black smoke billowing behind him? It’s obviously the scene of a riot. The caption calls it a “barricade of tires.” They’re not just a “barricade.” They’re on fire—which is why there’s so much smoke. Palestinian Arab mobs roll flaming tires at passing Israeli automobiles. They burn piles of tires in the middle of roads in order to force Israeli motorists to slow down, so they can ambush them with rocks and firebombs.

 They should be called “Palestinian terrorists.” Or at least “Palestinian rioters.” But certainly not just “Palestinians.”

 Why were they rioting that day? According to the caption-writer at Reuters, it was a “protest over cross-border violence” in Gaza. In other words, the rioters with the flaming tires were actually peace activists. They were violently protesting against violence!

The Reuters editors evidently don’t consider Hamas or Islamic Jihad to be terrorists, even though they are on the official list of terrorist groups maintained by the United States and other governments around the world. And even though they fire rockets into kindergartens and blow up buses—including the one on which my daughter Alisa HY”D was riding in 1995. No, they’re just “militants.” Never “terrorists.”

 And, finally, there is the caption’s outrageous characterization of the Gaza wars: “cross-border violence between Palestinian militants in Gaza and the Israeli military.” Are they kidding? Hamas fires rockets; Israel shoots back. That’s “cross-border violence?” In the 1941 version, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, America shoots back, and the Reuters caption reports “naval clashes between Japanese militants and the American military.”

 An even worse photo caption came out of the Middle East last week, courtesy of the Jerusalem-based “Flash 90” photo service. It read: "Palestinian worshippers gather rocks to throw at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem's Old City."

 Have you ever been to a synagogue--or a church, or a mosque, or a Hindu temple—where the congregants worshipped by trying to stone their neighbors to death? I haven't.

 A cynic might say: Yes, whoever wrote that caption actually got it exactly right, because these violent Palestinian Arabs have made a religion out of trying to murder Jews—they "worship" with rocks, knives, guns, and bombs.

 But that would be letting the caption-writer off way too easy--and missing an important lesson.

 The Flash 90 photo showed five young men, two of then wearing the classic rioters’ face-masks. While the caption claimed they were "gathering rocks," two of them are clearly poised to throw the rocks and we can assume the others were doing likewise.

 Anybody with even minimal knowledge of Israeli history—or just a modicum of common sense—knows that a rock, when hurled at a person or an automobile's windshield, can maim and even kill. We know that because it's happened so many times. By my count, at least 14 Israeli Jews, and two Israeli Arabs mistaken for Jews, have been stoned to death by Palestinian Arabs since the 1980s. Thousands upon thousands more have been injured, some of them permanently maimed, in such rock attacks.

 So, when young Arab men are “gathering rocks to throw,” as the young men in the Flash 90 photo were doing, they were doing so with the full knowledge that they were engaged in attempted murder. Of course, they were not trying to murder fellow-Arabs. They were throwing the rocks at Israeli Jewish police officers. Meaning, they were trying to stone Jews to death.

 Why would caption-writers call a riot a “protest,” describe Israeli self-defense against Hamas aggression as “cross-border violence,” and characterize rock-throwers as “worshippers”? And why would their editors approve such language?

 It can’t be that they don’t know the difference between riots and protests, between aggressors and victims, between terrorists and worshippers. So that leaves just one plausible explanation: Hostility to Israel and sympathy for the Palestinian Arabs. They may claim to be responsible editors and objective reporters and caption-writers, but in reality they have a political agenda. Their agenda is to hurt Israel.

 And the captions under the photos—the captions that, in their own way, help shape public opinion—are just another vehicle for achieving that despicable goal.

The captions may be seen here and here.

 Stephen M. Flatow is a vice president of the Religious Zionists of America, an attorney in New Jersey 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 Terror,” and an oleh chadash.

Archaeology is the Palestinians' most dangerous enemy

Palestinians’ most dangerous enemy is … archaeology

 The mikvah was the latest in a series of discoveries in Israel during the past year, each of which contradicted the Arab propaganda narrative.

 

(October 6, 2020 / JNS) Pundits will tell you that the most dangerous enemies of the Palestinian Arab cause are the Gulf kingdoms that have decided to recognize Israel, or the European countries that are moving their embassies to Jerusalem, or the American politicians who refuse to keep underwriting the Palestinian Authority’s debts.

I disagree. I say that the Palestinians’ most formidable foe is … archaeology. 

Excavated mikvah at bottom of photo

A 2,000-years-old mikvah (ritual bath) was recently uncovered in the Lower Galilee. Most people probably would never have heard about the discovery if not for the dramatic photos of the entire structure being carried by truck to a nearby kibbutz for preservation.

 

The remarkable sight of a truck-borne mikvah, however, also makes one pause and reflect on the remarkable implications of the archeological find.

 It means that 2,000 years ago, the residents of the Lower Galilee were practicing the exact same religious rituals that Orthodox Jews throughout the world practice today. Those Galileans, in other words, were Jews. They weren’t “Palestinians.” The word “Palestine” had not yet been invented. They weren’t Arabs or Muslims—the invasion of the Land of Israel by Muslim fundamentalists from the Arabian Peninsula was still 600 years in the future.

 The news of the ancient mikvah must have been quite a disappointment to Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas. On Sept. 25, he told the U.N. General Assembly: “The Palestinian people have been present in their homeland, Palestine, the land of their ancestors, for over 6,000 years.”

 Those meddling archaeologists and their discoveries keep getting in the way of Palestinian propaganda!

The airborne mikvah ready to travel

 To make matters worse for Abbas, the directors of the excavation were Walid Atrash and Abd Elghani Ibrahim. You can tell by their names that they are not exactlyodox Jews. The P.A. will have a hard time getting anybody to believe that Atrash and Ibrahim are agents of a Zionist conspiracy.

 The mikvah discovery was just the latest in a series of archaeological finds in Israel during the past year, each of which contradicted the Palestinian Arab propaganda narrative.

 In the Givati Parking Lot excavation in Jerusalem, archaeologists discovered Hebrew-language inscriptions dating back 2,600 years. One was a stone seal with the words “belonging to Ikkar son of Matanyahu.” The other was a clay seal impression that read “belonging to Nathan-Melech, servant of the king.” They weren’t in Arabic. And the names weren’t Yasser or Mahmoud.

 Elsewhere in Jerusalem, archaeologists uncovered a 2,000-year-old paved road that was used by Jews who made the annual pilgrimage to the capital at the time of the festivals of Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot. It wasn’t used by Arabs, or Muslims or “Palestinians”—because there weren’t any of them around in those days.

 Meanwhile, excavators from the University of North Carolina discovered two stunning mosaics at the site of a 1,600-year-old synagogue near Huqoq in northern Israel. One depicts a scene from the exodus of the Jews from ancient Egypt. The other shows images based on verses in the Torah’s book of Daniel.

 Note that the mosaics do not show scenes from the Koran. There is nothing Arabic of Islamic or “Palestinian” about them. They are Jewish, they are situated in Israel, and they are 1,600 years old.

 Every new archaeological discovery about the ancient Jews constitutes another stick in the spokes of the wheels of the Palestinian Arab propaganda machine. Every physical fact in the soil of the country shatters the P.A.’s lies. Every stone or seal or shard of pottery reminds us who are the real indigenous people of the Land of Israel.

 

 

 

Stephen M. Flatow is a vice president of the Religious Zionists of America, an attorney in New Jersey and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. His book, “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror,” is now available on Kindle.

News from Gaza reveals Palestinian values

Three news stories came out of Gaza this past week, and at first glance, they might appear to be unconnected. But taken together, they reveal important truths about Israel and the dangerous neighborhood around it.

The first news item, courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch, concerns a prominent Muslim religious authority in Gaza encouraging men to beat their wives.

Hassan al-Laham, a leading mufti in Gaza, declared that when Muslim men find their wives to be troublesome, they should first "warn them politely." But if the problem continues, then “Allah created a solution for this…hitting—hitting that does not make her ugly.” The mufti continued: “The Prophet [Muhammad] said: ‘Do not hit the face and do not make her ugly,'” he continued. “In other words, not hitting that will bring the police and break her hand and cause bleeding, or hitting that makes the face ugly. No….The hitting is not meant to disfigure, harm, or degrade. The hitting will be like a joke. He will hit her jokingly.”

It should be noted that Mufti al-Laham's endorsement of wife-beating was broadcast on some obscure Hamas or Islamic Jihad television station, but on official Palestinian Authority TV (on February 8, 2016).

The second news item from Gaza, reported by the Associated Press on February 16, concerns the United Nations' Mideast envoy, Nikolay Mladenov. While touring Gaza, Mladenov complained that "only a third of funds pledged by international donors" after the 2014 Gaza war has actually been received.

The third piece of Gaza news comes from the Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army, General Gadi Eizenkot. He held a press conference to reveal that Hamas is actively building new tunnels from Gaza to Israel, in order to stage kidnappings and other terrorist attacks. He said that Hamas' tunnel-digging is so extensive and dangerous that the Israeli army has re-enforced to "concentrate considerable engineering and intelligence efforts to combat this threat."

What do wife-beating, international stinginess, and new tunnel-digging have to do with each other? Everything.

After the last Gaza war ended, the Obama administration pressured Israel to permit Hamas to import construction materials for "humanitarian purposes." Various countries pledged large amounts money to "build homes." And pundits assured us that homes and jobs and foreign aid would encourage the emergence of a peaceful, modern, civilized society in Gaza.

It all turned out to be a lie. And of course Israel is left to deal with the real-life consequences of what everyone demanded.

Most of the countries that made pledges have not delivered. They talked big about the "suffering" of Gaza, but they don't really care. They just wanted to make Israel look bad--calculating, correctly, that their complaints would get lots of publicity and their failure to pay up would get little or no publicity.

As for the "humanitarian aid" that has reached Gaza, part of it has been used for building terror tunnels, not homes--exactly as Israel warned. Yet that has not resulted in the Obama administration reducing its annual aid package to Gaza.

And the wife-beating? A horrifying reminder that Palestinian society--whether the portion run by Hamas, or the portion run by the Palestinian Authority, which broadcast the mufti's sermon--continues to embrace values that are vastly different from those of the civilized world.

Homes and jobs and international donations will not make a whit of difference until Palestinian culture enters the modern world. Until then, Palestinian violence --against women, against political dissidents, and most of all against Israel-- will continue to be a way of life. No peace process or international peace conference or Israeli concessions will change that cruel reality.

 

This column first appeared on Israel National News.

Teaching Palestinians to hate Israel and Jews does not bode well for the future

A recent study of Germans who grew up during the Nazi error has determined that the hatred inculcated in them then still resides in them today.


Palestinian children are being taught that Jews are evil and Israel must be destroyed.  A frightening parallel to pre-war Germany.


Here's my latest commentary:
What German and Palestinian kids have in common

With the Oslo dream shattered, Israel must do the creative thinking

Every now and then, the editors of Israel's Haaretz newspaper get it right.

An op-ed by Shlomo Avineri, whom many would call a member of Israel's left wing society, succinctly addresses the bottom line of the Palestinian's position regarding Israel.  He writes

Oslo’s sponsors saw the conflict as one between two national movements and believed – as did I – that direct negotiations between Israel and the PLO could find a solution to the territorial and strategic issues that were the cornerstones of the dispute. It wasn’t easy to convince Israelis, even those in the Labor Party, that the other side was a national movement – one that admittedly had terrorist facets but was fundamentally entitled, just like the Zionist movement, to exercise national self-determination.

We were wrong.

The Palestinians don’t think this is a conflict between two national movements. From their perspective, this is a conflict between a single national movement – the Palestinian one – and a colonialist, imperialist entity that is destined to vanish from the world. Therefore, the analogy that appears in Palestinian textbooks is Algeria: not the West Bank as Algeria, but all of Israel as Algeria. And the Israelis will disappear one way or another, just as the French settlers in Algeria did.

Well, that's all good, but his column then veers towards the bogeyman of Israel's politics--the settlements.  He has a proposal for his left wing colleagues, pay people to leave the West Bank, but he then fails to address his own realization that the Palestinians want all of Israel.

Nice try Mr. Aveneri

Read the full column here.

Nairobi and other things

It's kind of hard to write about the terror in Kenya.  The disregard for any sanctity of life by the terrorists who perpetrated this act and the people who sent them are beyond words.

At the same time, we see the Palestinians gearing up for a new round of violence directed against Israel.  Two murders of soldiers during the past week, continued incitement in the Palestinian media, and total silence from Palestinian leadership, do not bode well for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

Was Rabin right in telling me that the PA leadership is nothing but a bunch of terrorists?  Where are the moderate voices in the West Bank that condemn violence and the glorification of murder?

Well, that's all I have to say right now.
Stephen M. Flatow

Conrad Black - A Better Two-State Strategy Beckons for Israel

Conrad Black, in the New York Sun, about the Palestinian exploitation of their plight, shot in their own foot so to speak and how Israel should react.

The fact that even reasonable people and countries have been gulled or worn down by this latest campaign of sophistical anti-Semitic trickery leads me to think that Israel should declare a Palestinian state: a narrower West Bank, a deeper Gaza, a clear access between them, the Christian and Muslim sites in Israel maintained by Americans, Germans, Indonesians and Malaysians, a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, as long as the main city is intact as Israel’s capital; the right of Palestinian return to the new Palestine and no negotiations about anything with anyone who does not recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

Read the full column- A Better Two-State Strategy Beckons for Israel

Israeli Police detain 'flytilla' activists. Why not try Syria?

So called pro-Palestinian activists do not not have the courage to challenge dictatorships, so they are determined to invade Israel.  The movement arriving by air is called a "flytilla" and I tip my hat to the flexibility of the English language for coming up with that phrase.

Seriously, does any country have to allow entry to folks calling for its demise?  I think not. What do you think, I'd like to know.

Read the full article from JPost Police detain 'flytilla' activists

Alisa Flatow Memorial Scholarship Fund

Are the Palestinians getting fed up being used as cannon fodder? Cartoon criticizes leadership

Palestinian Media Watch has released a story with a cartoon that is critical of Palestinian leadership that puts Palestinian citizens in danger.

You can see the cartoon and its accompanying article here - PA cartoon criticizes Palestinian leaders for deaths in Gaza - PMW Bulletins

It's a small comment on the fecklessness of the PA leadership, but maybe it's a start to bigger things.

Stephen M. Flatow  alisa flatow

From israel today - Young Palestinians seek violence, indifferent to 'occupation'

It breaks the heart.  I'm serious.  It breaks the heart because a new poll indicates that Palestinian youth are willing to kill and in turn be killed because Israel exists. Alisa Flatow

A poll conducted among young Palestinians aged 18-30 recently had some surprising and unsurprising results that can be seen as the outcome of both reality on the ground and the libelous education to which Palestinian children are subjected.

You can read the full story here.

We know that poison is being fed to Palestinian kids through schools, textbooks, dedications in honor of murderers, and the like.  It begs the question, don't Palestinian parents value the lives of their children?

That's what I think.

Stephen M. Flatow

Lake Failure - an editorial from The New York Sun

We tend to not remember that The New  York Sun remains on the Internet. This editorial was posted on September 24, 2011 in response to the Palestinian effort to have the United Nations to declare a state of Palestine.

(For the young, Lake Failure is a parody on the name of the community in the suburbs of New York City that hosted the United Nations at the end of World War II.)

Call it Lake Failure — and what a bitter sea it is. This was reflected in the crabbed remarks of the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. After delivering his request for the recognition of a Palestinian Arab state, he treated the world to yet another speech of rejection of Israel. He’d already, at a meeting Friday of 200 representatives of the Palestinian Arab community in America, made it clear that the Palestinian Arabs would never recognize a Jewish state. “They talk to us about the Jewish state, but I respond to them with a final answer: We shall not recognize a Jewish state,” Mr. Abbas was quoted by ynetnews.com as telling the meeting.

You can read the full editorial here, Lake Failure.  What do you think?

stephen flatow alisa

Defeat the So-called Unilateral Declaration of Independence

SPEAK OUT IN OPPOSITION TO THE PALESTINIAN

UNILATERAL DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.

SIGN THE PETITION THAT WILL BE SENT TO THE UN.

On September 20, the Palestinians are going to the United Nations to pursue unilateral statehood recognition. Israel does not oppose a Palestinian state, only its unilateral declaration. The Israeli government is dedicated to mutually negotiated resolutions that result in two states for two peoples, living side by side in peace and security. Both the United States and Israel believe that unilateral action will not lead to peace, but will instead complicate any peace process and possibly lead to violence.

• A UN resolution will not resolve the core issues - including borders, Jerusalem, the status of refugees, or the sharing of water.

• The Palestinian Authority recently signed an agreement with Hamas, a terrorist organization that calls for the destruction of Israel and continues to fire rockets into Israeli towns and schoolyards.

• A unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood is counter to all internationally accepted frameworks for Mideast peace, which all call for a mutually negotiated and agreed upon resolution of the conflict and prohibit unilateral action by either side.

Mahmoud Abbas must sit down at the negotiating table instead of standing up at the UN.

Sign the Petition - Now

Well, that's what I think.


stephen flatow alisa udi

Hamas and the arts

Reuters is reporting on the Hamas crackdown on film makers who do not toe the line.

"Cinema in Gaza is like writing on rocks with your fingers," says Palestinian writer-director Sweilem Al-Absi.

OK, I'm good with that analogy.

While Hamas has been investing heavily in Internet and television news, it is not too pleased with the work of Gazan film makers.

"Such was the case with "Masho Matook" ("Something Sweet"), a 2010 short film directed by Khalil al-Muzzayen, which depicts the interaction between Israeli troops and soccer-playing Palestinian children in once-occupied Gaza.

"Though the video vignette was submitted to the Cannes Film Festival, Hamas banned its screening locally, citing a four-second scene where Israeli soldiers appreciatively eye a comely Palestinian woman who breezes past them, her hair uncovered."

The Hamas answer is that the clip in question was "out of context."

If you add a free film industry to a free press as one of the signs of democracy, Hamas and its hold on the people of Gaza come up short.

Read the full article.

Flatow Gaza Hamas Reuters

Brandeis University students embarrass themselves

The Brandeis University student newspaper the Justice, is just chock full of nonsense. My college didn't have a regularly run student newspaper back in the day, so I can only wonder how much stupidity it would have published. Of course, in the 1960s we were concerned about civil rights, the war in Viet Nam, and nothing much else.

Ah, but the students on the Brandeis campus have much to be concerned about, especially the view espoused by two fringe but very vocal groups covered in this article appearing in the Justice: Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace present three generations of Palestinian refugees - News You have to read this tripe to believe it.

But, give them credit, they got the story printed. What a bunch of idiots.

Well, that's what I have to say. Stephen M. Flatow

On the air waves - Palestinian Hate, U.S. Silence

An op-ed I have written discussing the continuing trend in the Palestinian Authority to pay tribute to mass murderers is now circulating in the Jewish press throughout the United States. As a result, I've been invited by Jay Bernstein of Shalom USA radio in Baltimore to be his guest on the opening segment of the Sunday morning radio program at 8:30 AM. You can hear the interview on the web here.

Here's the op-ed as it appears on-line:

Palestinian Hate, U.S. Silence

There they go again. Palestinian Media Watch reports that the official Palestinian Authority newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, announced Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's plan for an upcoming fencing tournament for youth named after terror chieftain Abu Jihad. You read right. Salam Fayyad, the man who is constantly touted by Western leaders as a "moderate" and a "peace advocate," is heading up a tournament that glorifies mass murderer Abu Jihad.

A founder and longtime leader of Yasir Arafat's Fatah movement, Abu Jihad (real name: Khalil al-Wazir) had a long resume of atrocities on his resume, including planning the hostage-taking at the Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv in 1975 in which eight hostages and two Israeli soldiers were killed, until his career was cut short by an assassination in 1988.

Funny: The U.S. media played up ex-president Bill Clinton's warning about the dangers of hateful rhetoric here in America on the anniversary of Oklahoma City. But our pundits and policymakers don't seem to worry much about the PA's far more active promotion of violence.

PA newspapers, radio stations and school textbooks routinely characterize Jews as insects, animals, terrorists, Nazis and demons.

During Vice President Joseph Biden's visit to the region last month, the PA named a public square in the El Bireh neighborhood of its capital city, Ramallah, after the notorious terrorist Dalal Mughrabi. She was one of the leaders of a terror group that murdered Gail Rubin - a relative of the late former senator Abe Ribicoff - and 37 Israeli bus passengers in another attack devised by Abu Jihad.

That outrage was drowned out in all the furor over the Israeli announcement of construction in an East Jerusalem neighborhood the PA has its eyes on. Eventually, the Obama administration expressed some mild disapproval of the PA action. But while anger over the Israeli building generated lists of specific U.S. demands for Israeli concessions, the response to the Palestinians contained no demands, no deadlines, no consequences of any kind.

The square in Ramallah and the fencing tournament join a long list of schools, summer camps, streets, and computer centers named after terrorists in PA-controlled territory.

Assistant Secretary of State Philip Crowley said last week that the PA's policy of publicly glorifying terrorists "must end." Good words, but where's the beef? The deadline? The consequences for not going along?

Crowley made his statement the day after President Obama signed an order to continue U.S. financial aid to the PA - now more than $500 million a year.

"The words we use really do matter," Bill Clinton said last week. Yes, they do. The words of the Palestinian Authority - on its street signs, in its newspapers, on the banners at its fencing tournaments - really do matter. When will the Obama administration take meaningful steps to change them?

Stephen M. Flatow is founder of the blog Terror Victims' Voice. His daughter Alisa was murdered by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza in 1995.