Yoram Hazony - Trump in the Middle East: Note Who Curses America, and Who Blesses It - National Review

Hazony says -

The administration’s foreign policy is a welcome break from the preexisting Washington consensus.

He's right!  Some excerpts-

President Donald Trump has promised that in the Middle East under his presidency, “there are many things that can happen now that would never have happened before.” Two speeches of the last ten days offer dramatic confirmation of the emerging reconfiguration of America’s relationship with Israel and the Middle East under his leadership. 

In a two-hour speech before the Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) last week, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, denounced the British, Dutch, French, and Americans for having conspired, ever since the 1650s, to create a Jewish colonial outpost that would “erase the Palestinians from Palestine.” As Abbas tells it, all this reached a climax on the eve of World War I, when the West realized that it was on the verge of collapse and that the Islamic world was “poised to inherit European civilization.” To put an end to this threat, the Western nations went about carving up the Muslim world so that it would be forever “divided, backward, and engulfed in infighting.” As for the United States, it has been “playing games” of this sort ever since then, importing, for example, the disastrous Arab Spring into Middle East.

More - 

But in the ensuing 30 years of talk, the only major agreements signed have been those the PLO leadership could find a way to fit into its narrative: Agreements such as the 1993 Oslo Accords, which could be portrayed as inflicting a bitter defeat on Israel and the West — and as a step on the road to ultimate triumph.

President Trump, Vice President Pence, and United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley are pioneering an alternative policy, which can be summed up in Haley’s words: “We’re not going to pay to be abused.” If players like the PLO, North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran (hopefully, Turkey gets added to this list soon) want to cultivate a civilizational hatred of America, double-talking while they give aid to global terrorism and conjure diplomatic scandals at the U.N. — well, then they don’t get to be allies. They don’t get funded. They don’t get grants of land, authority, and prestige. Those things will be reserved for actual allies.

For long decades, Washington has crafted policies based on the tacit assumption that America needs the PLO if it is to bring peace to the Middle East. In its effort to “balance” the demands of this extremist organization against Israel’s concerns, American policy inflated the PLO’s importance, and it learned to tolerate and even embrace an organization whose views have always been profoundly anti-Western, not to mention anti-Semitic.

Read the full article - National Review

Israel's blockade of Gaza is illegal - NOT!

Mitchell Bard addresses one aspect of the UN's Palmer Report, the legality of Israel's blockade of Gaza.

The 105-page report, which relied heavily on Israel's internal investigation into the incident as well as accounts from flotilla participants, concluded that Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip is consistent with customary international law, is legitimate due to the security threat posed by Hamas and does not constitute collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza.

Bard's posting comes on the heals of those who interpret the blockade as illegal.  To get the full import of the Palmer Report and Israel's blockade, read the full Myths and Facts report.

Moral Equivalency at the United Nations

The UN announced today that the military chief of United Nations peacekeepers in Lebanon discussed with senior Lebanese and Israeli military officials recent incidents in Lebanon's south.

"Commander Major General Claudio Graziano also reviewed the situation in the village of Ghajar, where Israel still occupies the northern part although it should have withdrawn in compliance with Security Council resolution 1701."

That's OK for starters.

You'll remember that Resolution 1701 increased the UN's military presence in south Lebanon, "and called for an end to hostilities, respect for the so-called Blue Line separating the Israeli and Lebanese sides, disarming militias including Hizbollah, and an end to arms smuggling."

Here comes the equivalence-

"Hizbollah has not disarmed, and last month Special Coordinator for Lebanon Michael Williams said sporadic rocket launches into Israel, almost daily Israeli flights over Lebanon, the active maintenance of an arms depot by Hizbollah and the apparently Israeli surveillance equipment left on Lebanese territory raised the spectre of a potential escalation."

So, is it Hizbollah's failure to disarm, sporadic rocket launches and arms supplies, or Israel's overflights and surveillance equipment that bring the "spectre of escalation?"

It seems to me that the UN has gone out of its way to equate Israel's defensive steps with Hizbollah's rearmament and rocket launches into Israeli territory. I think it's clear that the UN is bending over backwards to be "overhanded" when, in fact, it is not living up to its mandate to supervise the disarmament of Hizbollah and blocking its potential rearmament.

Read the full release here.

The UN's Ban Ki-moon honours courage of Palestinians

The boys and girls at the United Nations continue to defy logic when it comes to issuing news releases regarding the plight of Palestinian refugees.

A short while ago, the UN was beaming with pride as one of their top officials endorsed the "tradition" of Muslims caring for refugees. The only exception to this generosity is the Palestinian community that left Israel in 1948 and who continue to swelter in refugee camps set up in Arab countries.

Unlike Israel, which took in more than 650,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries immediately following the Independence War and immediately began a process to integrate them into the new country's society, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, herded the same number of Palestinians into camps in those countries.

60+ years later, the Palestinians are denied citizenship in their host countries, denied work permits, and basically treated as non-entities. For what purpose other than to foster anti-Semitism?

On June 30, 2009, according to a UN press release, "Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon paid tribute today to Palestinian refugees, who he said had shown great courage in the face of conflict, as well as to the efforts over the past 60 years of the United Nations agency tasked with assisting them."

Rather than ask for absorption of refugees, the UN lauds their courage. They should have the courage to insist on citizenship in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. They have been the pawns of the world's Arab and Muslim community for way too long.

The Myth of Zionism as Imperialism

Delegates at the UN and professors on university campuses worldwide brand the State of Israel the creation of a racist and colonialist European imperialism. This libel of the Jewish state betrays an ignorance of the history of the Jews and the story of the Zionist movement. From the beginning, the Zionist movement has been a foe of imperialism.

So begins an op-ed appearing in today's jpost.com, "The myth of Zionist imperialism"by Eli Kavon, a member of the faculty of Nova Southeastern University's Lifelong Learning Institute in Davie, Florida.

Kavon discusses the roots of Zionist thought and, importantly, asks the question, "If the Zionist founders of the State of Israel were, indeed, imperialists, what empire did they represent?" I'm sure that Zionism's opponents that come across this post will come up with something. But the fact remains that Israel is not a colonial or racist state.

Saudi King's Interfaith Conference - a Follow-up

Last week we wrote about the Saudi king's interfaith conference at the United Nations. Today New York Post writer Benny Avni weighs in with a column called UN Masquerade.

Recognizing that the "king won much praise last week for convening talks at the United Nations ostensibly meant to promote peace and 'religious tolerance'" Avni advises that

"if you take a close look at King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al Saud's agenda, some of it is hardly praiseworthy. In fact, if he gets any traction at the UN (or anywhere else), it'll mark a giant step backward for both peace and tolerance."

Writing about what he calls a "scary agenda," Avni points out that the king

"wants the world's moral blessing to restrict any and all speech about Islam,its adherents and regimes that promote them - except, of course, that which is approved by official censors. He also wants to throw the UN's moral weight behind punishments meted out to those who violate such restrictions, even if he doesn't say that explicitly.

"Meanwhile, Abdullah failed to make even the slightest gesture toward softening his own regime's brutal intolerance of other religions and cultures. Some parley on "religious tolerance."

Looks like the king is a wolf in sheep's clothing. Let's hope the world is smart enough to see through his latest PR stunt.

Read UN Masquerade