Hamas - At It Again!

For most fair minded and objective minds it would appear Arab failed leadership is more to blame for the plight of their people than tiny Israel's existence. Even Judge Goldstone has recanted his pathetic attempt to brand Israeli troops as murderers. Now if the Israeli left and their world wide brethren in the U.N. could only rise to a comparable level of realism and morality . (See 1 and 1a below.) --- Hamas , under direction from Hezballah, has chosen to initiate unprovoked attacks on Israel probably in order to evoke an Israeli response so Arab sympathizers can accuse Israel of attrocities thereby taking attention away from Arabs killing each other. (See 2 below.) --- Obama supported the elimination of school choice in D.C. as a pay off to his union education friends. This selfish action hurts mostly those fof his own race but you gotta do what you gotta do as a former president once said. Find out by clicking on PJTV.Com : PJTV Special: SOAR Subject: How Can Obama and the Democrats Oppose School Choice in Washington, D.C.? Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation talks to Alexis Garcia about school choice in the nation's capital. Washington, D.C. schools are among the worst in the nation, and among the most violent. President Obama gives lip service to education reform, yet allowed Congress to phase out an important voucher program in D.C.. Will the Scholarships and Opportunities for Results Act (SOAR) help DC students and parents? Will Boehner and the GOP successfully pass the SOAR act? --- One more PJTV.Com that is a must view entitled: Trifecta: Be All You Can Be: Trifecta Wants You To Join the Military. Hooah. This program suggests the benefits to society for those who enlist in the military and therefby gain educational experiences, learn discipline and are more likely to become better and more porductive citizens. The point of the exercise is would you encourage your son or daughter to join the military? Trifecta wants you to consider letting your kids join the armed services. Hear how military service could help cure many of America's social ills, and also improve our workforce. --- Dick -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1) Israel's left needs to wise up to Middle East reality How would the left have reacted had Juliano Mer-Khamis been murdered by Jews? By Ari Shavit It is not hard to imagine what would have happened had Juliano Mer-Khamis been murdered by Jews. The murder would receive a huge headline in Haaretz. Under the headline, five furious analyses would appear - one of them mine. The writers would harshly denounce the Jewish murderousness and urge a culture war against Jewish fanaticism. Others would demand not to repeat the mistake made after Baruch Goldstein's murderous rampage and to evacuate the settlements immediately. Others would demand to look into the goings on in the Hesder yeshivas, which offer Torah studies alongside military service, and the state-run religious education system. Selected racist quotes would be pulled out of primitive rabbis' writings, historic comparisons would be made to Emil Gruenzweig's murder and Yitzhak Rabin's murder and Martin Luther King's murder. Within a day Mer-Khamis would become an icon. On Saturday night thousands would gather holding torches to mourn the peace hero and rise up against the powers of darkness. Mer-Khamis' murder at the hands of Jews would rebuild the left, reunite it and send it to a new battle against murderous Jewish fascism. But Juliano Mer-Khamis was not murdered by Jews. So instead of a huge headline he got a story below the fold. Instead of five angry essays, he received only one (beautiful ) eulogy. Nobody talked about racism, fanaticism and fascism. Nobody spoke of education systems spreading hatred and about primitive clergy. Mer-Khamis did not become an icon and thousands of people did not demonstrate. Mer's murder raised neither protest nor outrage nor holy rage. The Israeli left, which knows exactly what to do with a murder by Jews, does not know what to do with murder by Palestinians. The murder of a peace hero by Palestinians has no place on the left's emotional and ideological map. The murder of a freedom hero by Palestinians is a dogma-undermining, paradigm-subverting event for the left. Mer-Khamis' murder by Palestinians is a murder doomed for repression. This is a deep, broad issue that goes beyond just the Israeli left. One of the outstanding characteristics of Western enlightenment in the 21st century is its inability to denounce forces of evil in the Arab-Muslim world. Western enlightenment likes to criticize the West. It especially likes to criticize the West's allies in the East. But when it runs into evil originating in the East, it falls silent. It does not know how to deal with it. It is easy to come out against pro-Western Hosni Mubarak, but hard to come out against the Muslim Brotherhood. It is easy to come out against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but hard to come out against Bashar Assad. The enlightened West is incapable of fighting Iran's Ahmadinejad as it fought against America's Bushes, South Africa's Botha or Serbia's Milosevic. The result is a long line of distortions. The blood of the Marmara flotilla fatalities is thicker than the blood of those who were murdered and hung in Iran. The blood of the people killed in Gaza is thicker than the blood of those killed in Damascus and Dara'a. A post-colonial complex makes Western enlightenment systematically ignore injustices caused by anti-Western forces. Thus it loses the ability to see historic reality as a whole, in all its complexity. It also makes it act unfairly and unjustly. It discriminates between different kinds of evil, different kinds of blood and different kinds of victims. It treats third-world societies as though they are not subject to universal moral norms. It is not yet clear yet who murdered Mer-Khamis. The motive could have been financial, personal, religious or cultural. But it is clear he was not murdered for being an occupier, or an oppressor or a settler. Mer was murdered because he was a free man, who spread freedom in a society that is not free. This is the hard truth we must deal with. This is the hard truth we must look at straight in the eye. The Western enlightenment and the Israeli left cannot continue to ignore the dark side of Middle Eastern reality. 1a)The United Nations has once again reared its anti-semitic head. The Executive Board of UNESCO has declared 2 of Judaism ' s holiest sites (Tomb of the Patriarchs and Tomb of Rachel) to be mosques and demand that Israel remove the sites from its National Heritage list. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ' s office decried the ludicrous nature of the UNESCO decision: The attempt to detach the Nation of Israel from its heritage is absurd. If the nearly 4,000-year-old burial sites of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs of the Jewish Nation - Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah - are not part of its culture and tradition, then what is a national cultural site? In cooperating with Arab efforts to erase Jewish historical ties to Israel , UNESCO is aiding and abetting those who hope to and obfuscate Israel ’s Jewish past and undermine Israel ’s Jewish future. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2)Savage missile blitz from Gaza sends a million Israelis to sheltersIsraeli tank in action against missile firing teams in Gaza Before dawn Saturday, April 9, Hamas inflicted its heaviest missile blitz yet on southern Israel. - acting now on guidelines from the Lebanese Hizballah. More than a dozen heavy Grad missiles were aimed at seven Israeli cities injuring 10 civilians. One exploded in the sand dunes of Palmahim, aimed at Israel's nuclear research reactor at Nahal Soreq. More missiles landed south of Kiryat Gat, Ofakim, Beersheba and Ashkelon. Sirens sent people running for cover in Gedera and Gan Yavneh. The two Iron Dome systems deployed last week intercepted six of the Grad missiles fired at Beersheba, Ashkelon and Ashdod. The IDF responded by targeting three senior Hamas commanders in an air strike in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younes. Friday night, April 8: More than 60 Hamas and Jihad Islami mortar shells and missiles hit Israeli towns, villages and farms on the Israeli side of the Gaza border Friday April 8 and injured a civilian. This heightened Israeli fury over Hamas's attack on a school bus Thursday, April 7, using a sophisticated Cornet anti-tank missile for the first time. A 16-year old boy was critically wounded. This attack was followed by 50 Palestinian rockets and mortar rounds, a blitz which had not abated by Friday night despite constant Israeli counteraction. A less obvious motive behind the mounting violence: Hamas is trying to establish new rules for the conflict on advice and directives coming from its Lebanese ally, Hizballah, to step up its barrage on Israel by 25 percent. The IDF is forced to respond to the resulting escalation in kind Intelligence sources report Hamas was advised by Hizballah to blitz Israel into relinquishing the 500-meter deep security strip the IDF established inside the Gaza border when Palestinian fire on Israel continued after it was temporarily reduced by the 2009 Cast Lead operation. Hizballah leaders are telling Hamas they should be able to bring their forward and firing positions right up to the Israeli border, a convenience enjoyed by HIzballah on the Lebanese-Israeli frontier ever since 2000 when Israel quit southern Lebanon. The IDF is fighting to hold on to this buffer zone to keep Palestinian terrorists back from breaching the border for direct attacks in Israel. The soldiers keep Palestinian gunmen from accessing this strip of land and impose restrictions on Gazan farmers seeking to till their fields in a strip which covers 15 percent of the enclave's arable land. (Farmers of the Eshkol district on the other side of the border are regularly targeted for attack.) Hamas is threatening to raise the cross-border violence until Israeli troops pull back to the border. Its anti-tank missile attack on the school bus Thursday was the opening shot of its battle for the buffer zone. The IDF's tactics for countering Hamas aggression remain unchanged, except in scale: In the last 48 hours, Israeli helicopters, mortars, tanks and naval units have been pounding the Gaza Strip while Hamas releases barrages of dozens of missile and mortar attacks on villages and towns - practically without pause. Israeli civilians were told to stay close to bomb shelters in the days to come. Schools, road traffic, public transport and businesses will function intermittently. Israeli military planners are still playing the familiar tit-for-tat game which never in the past stopped the aggression from Gaza. Military sources point to some notable differences in the current round.The Iron Dome system designed in Israel to intercept short-range rockets was experimentally deployed in the important towns of Beersheba and Ashkelon this week. Friday, the system intercepted three missiles aimed at Ashkelon, although it caught only one of several Thursday. The IDF importantly demonstrated it is fully capable of launching another major military campaign in the Gaza Strip. The broad scale of its land, sea and air reprisals since Thursday, April 7, was intended to remind Hamas and its allies, especially the Iranian-backed Jihad Islami, of the devastation wrought the enclave they rule by Israel's 2009 Cast Lead operation. A possible Cast Lead II was in the air after Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Thursday during a visit to Prague: Attacks on children cross a red line. Those who carry out such attacks should know that their blood is on their heads." On the other side of the ledger, the new rulers of Egypt are in the process of unraveling Hosni Mubarak's peace relations with Israel –and engaging in rapprochement with the Gaza and Damascus centers of the two radical Palestinian organizations.Since the Israeli government has not adjusted its policies to the new developments, its military tactics are operating in a vacuum and will have little deterrent effect. The current upsurge of Hamas-Jihad aggression will therefore continue. Military experts maintain tactics of massive firepower without ground operations have run their course. There is no way to wipe out the increasingly sophisticated heavy weapons arsenal Hamas has been allowed to amass from the air. So the half a million Israeli civilians of the Western Negev and the southern coastal towns must continue to live under their shadow instead of having normal lives. Often, many cannot make it to work and schools, places of business and traffic can operate only intermittently. Since Thursday, IDF operations have been sweeping across a broad front in the Gaza Strip from the old air field at Dahaniyeh in the south up to the northern fringes of Gaza City. In the south, Khan Younes and Deir al Balakh took the severest beating. The former went dark Thursday night after Israeli airborne and surface missiles knocked out the local electricity grid. In Deir Balakh, a Hamas base built deliberately near a hospital took an airborne rocket, a signal that all such facilities would no longer be immune from attack. In the Gaza City region, Israeli helicopters, tanks and naval ships bombed two main Hamas military installations – Abu Jerad and Rantisi. The Palestinians reported 10 killed, including the commander of missile operations at the Shati refugee camp, and scores wounded, thereupon loosing off 50 missiles and mortar rounds – as usual, against civilian locations. In Ashkelon, Iron Dome intercepted its first missile Thursday, but missed the rest – scoring a partial success For the first time in three years, Hamas appealed to Cairo to broker a ceasefire. Israeli did not bother to respond since the rulers of Gaza have violated every agreed ceasefire in the past. Hamas reached out to the new Egyptian regime following its moves towards a rapprochement and a Palestinian diplomatic initiative. Intelligence sources disclose that last week, the head of Egypt's intelligence services Maj. Gen. Mourad Mowafi visited Damascus. He obtained permission from Syria's beleaguered president Bashar Assad to meet Hamas' political leader Khaled Meshaal and Abdullah Ramadan Salah of the Palestinian Jihad Islami and hand them an invitation to visit Cairo. He then informed them that the new Egyptian leaders are willing to help negotiate Hamas' reconciliation with Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah on the following basis: Hamas would accept the two-state solution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict but Egypt would not press for the second part of the formula endorsed by Washington and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, namely that "the two states live alongside each other in peace and security." This amended formula would leave Hamas and the other radical Palestinian organizations free to continue their violent campaign of "resistance" against Israel while making peace with the rival Fatah and gaining a Palestinian state on the West Bank. These days, Hamas is sure it is on a win-win course and has little to fear from stepping up its war on Israel until it gets what it wants. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------