The War On Israel and the Middle East
Posted By Frontpagemag.com On January 5, 2015 @ 12:50 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage { FrontPage Magazine - http://www.frontpagemag.com -}
Below are the video and transcript to the panel discussion “The War on Israel and the Middle East,” which took place at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
\The War on Israel and the Middle East---Video
Daniel Pipes: I’d like to make three geostrategic points in my few minutes, and I apologize in advance for having to leave, but the plane schedule is as it is. The first point is that — and this has been said before, I’d like to reiterate it — that Iran is a far greater threat than ISIS, and we are making an extraordinary mistake in joining with the Iranians against ISIS. Need one point out that ISIS has perhaps $5 million a day in oil revenue and 15,000 troops and, granted, a dynamism, but that Iran is a powerful state of 75 million people, an oil revenue in the hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, and an army of hundreds of thousands and, of course, a terror network and is building up their weapons? I would predict to you, ladies and gentleman, that ISIS, which appeared so suddenly, will disappear suddenly as well because it has so many enemies, it is so overextended, it is trying to do so much at the same time that it is going to collapse before very long and it is going to disappear as a state whereas Iran is going to be a longer lasting entity.
Let me also predict that the real importance of ISIS, Islamic state, ISIL, Daesh, call it what you will, lies not in this sizeable state that now exists between Bagdad and Turkey but rather in the resurrection of the idea of the caliphate. The last executive caliph with power was in the 940s — 940s, not 1940s — a long, long time ago. Yes, the institution of the caliphate continued until 1924, but it was meaningless. It was just a title. The actual caliphate, executive caliphate, disappeared over a millennium ago and then suddenly, this man who calls himself Caliphate Ibrahim resurrected it on June 29, 2014, and this has sent a frisson of excitement through the Muslim world, and this has created the notion of a feasible caliphate once again after having been gone for a millennium, and this is important. I can well imagine other groups taking up this same standard and demanding that they be accepted as the caliphate. I can further imagine that states such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and even Iran in its own Shiite way taking up the claim of caliphate and so this turns Islamist politics into an even more radical direction than it has been in the past and therefore is a very negative development, but that is an idea, and the notion that the U.S. government should be working with Iran against ISIS is madness, just simple madness.
Iran is the ultimate enemy, which is my second point. Iran is of course the ultimate enemy today. The acquisition by Iranian leadership of nuclear weapons will not only change the Middle East but will change the world. Other tyrants have had nuclear weapons — think of Stalin and Mao — but there’s something different about this group of tyrants in that they’re thinking about the end of days. They’re apocalyptically minded. They have ideas that, were they to deploy nuclear weapons, they would bring forward the days of the Mahdi, the Dajjal, and the other sequence events leading to the day of resurrection, so they are even more dangerous. Now, I could have a nice seminar extending for hours on whether they actually would deploy nuclear weapons or not, but I don’t want to find out, and I suspect you don’t either. It is absolutely imperative that they be stopped from doing that and that would not be easy because the Iranian leadership, like the North Korean leadership, is absolutely determined to get nuclear weapons and will pay whatever price is necessary. In North Korea it was mass starvation. In Iran, it will be economic deprivation and other problems, but they’re going to go ahead and while computer viruses and targeted assassinations and bombings, which have been taking place, will certainly slow things down, they cannot stop it. The only way to stop it is through use of force against the Iranian nuclear installations.
So, that I think is all pretty clear, but I’m going to go beyond that and say that when the happy day comes that the Islamic Revolution of Iran is overthrown — and that is a prospect that is real; we saw one run up toward it in June 2009 and it was suppressed, but it wasn’t eliminated and there will be further attempts — and it is certain that one of these days, the Islamic Republic will collapse. When that happens, I suggest to you, the Iranian people who are sick of this ideological state will become quite friendly. Posts show that the overwhelming majority of Iranians hate their government and hate the Islam that their government is purveying. I think that Iranians will be good friends when that day comes.
In contrast, I think our great problem in the Middle East will be Turkey. Turkey, which is also a very substantial state of some 80 million people and which is in an important strategic location, has a real economy, an educated population. Turkey has approached Islamism – well, the Turkish leadership has approached Islamism — in a far more intelligent way than the Iranians. I call Khomeini, “Islamism 1.0,” and Erdogan, “Islamism 2.0.” Khomeini used revolution and violence and so forth and his successor rules despotically, but Erdogan, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the dominant figure of Turkish politics, is a far more clever figure who has won I think nine elections in 13 years of various sorts, parliamentary, referendum, residential, has tripled the size of the economy and is a figure of enormous importance and popularity in the country. He has a very strong base. This is a not a despotism. Now, granted, over time, he’s becoming increasingly authoritarian, autocratic, unpleasant, decisive, but he has won his place democratically, and he will last and his regime will last much longer than Khomeini’s, and I believe as one looks at 10-20 years in the future, it will be Turkey, not Iran, that will be our great problem and that we should be preparing for that today.
And the final point is about the Palestinians. We have seen an upsurge in violence against Jewish Israelis. There’s been more violence in the last month than the prior two years. There are many explanations for this. The collapse of the Kerry peace negotiations, the Hamas war on Israel this summer, the European acceptance of the so-called “Palestine,” but I think there’s a more profound point going on that one can see here, which is that since 1920, almost a century ago, with the appointment by the British high commissioner of Hajj Amin al-Husseini to the Muftiship of Jerusalem, the default position of the Palestinian leadership for these 94 years has been rejectionism. That is to say, no acceptance of anything Zionist or Israeli, absolute rejection of the whole thing. Husseini was such a rejectionist that he actually influenced Hitler, recent research shows, towards the Final Solution. The Nazi solution was to push Jews out, but Husseini, as the potential recipient of Jews in Palestine, said no, kill them, and this is something that had an impact on the Nazi leadership.
So, that is the virulence of the Palestinian attitude towards Jews, Zionists and Israel. It was reflected by Yasser Arafat until he died almost two years ago today and since then, it is reflected by Mahmoud Abbas. It is the default position. Now, when in need, when weak, Palestinian leaders such as Arafat and Abbas have been accommodating. The Oslo Accord would be one good example, but when they’re not in need, they revert back to this rejectionism, and of late in particular because the outside world says to both the Palestinian Authority and to Hamas, “We will reward you, no matter what you do. You can kill Jewish Israelis through missiles from Gaza or through car jihad in Jerusalem and you will not pay a price. We will give you money, we will give you arms, we will give you recognition. You don’t have to worry about a thing.” As a result of getting this message that anything they do against Israel and Israelis is all right, the Palestinians have happily reverted to their rejectionist default position and that’s what we’re seeing today. So, I think the blame for this lies in Sweden, in the Obama administration, in the United Nations and elsewhere. It is we, the West, who are saying to the Palestinians, “Go ahead. There’s no price to be paid. We might admonish you in some minor way, but we will reward you nonetheless for this.” So as long as we, the outside world, say to the Palestinians go ahead, they will go ahead. They will do what they’ve been doing for nearly a century. I see Jamie coming. I better stop. Thank you for coming.
Ken Timmerman: Well good morning. What a great weekend we’ve had together. It’s been really lovely to be here with you, get to know some of you that I did not know before. I do a couple of things in addition to what Jamie mentioned to you in that introduction. I work an awful lot on Iran and I’m going to talk to you about Iran this morning. I lecture on Iran at an outfit run by the Pentagon called the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy. It’s based in Quantico. We have members of the intelligence community from all 16 branches, organizations of the intelligence community who come in to learn more about Iran, and I’ve been doing this for about the past three years. It’s called the Iran Threat Seminar. And the good news is that the further along we get in these training sessions for younger and some older intelligence officers, the more they seem to know, and the more they know that they don’t know about what’s going on inside Iran. So there is a great thirst I’m finding in the intelligence community, especially in the military courses, to learn about Iran, to learn about Iran’s designs, the designs of the leadership in the Islamic Republic, their goals, who they are, what they are, what they want, where they see themselves going. And they’re not getting it from the academic community that is certainly for sure.
And another thing that I do, I work with victims of terrorism. I have helped a lawsuit called Havlish v. Islamic Republic of Iran. This is the 9/11 case. Ten years ago when I first came out, in my book “Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran,” when I first came out with the information about Iran’s direct, material involvement in the 9/11 attacks, people scoffed at that. They did not believe it, even though the clue was actually in the 9/11 Commission Report itself, which talked about Iran helping the highjackers go in and out of Afghanistan through Iranian territory without getting their visas stamped. Well, I’m happy to report to you that two years ago, December 2011, a district court judge in the State of New York awarded a $6 billion judgment to the families of 9/11 victims against Iran. And so now my job is to be kind of an international Robin Hood and go find the assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran and turn them over to the victims of terrorists in satisfaction of that judgment and we’re in the process of doing that. Yes we are. I have a great picture actually with some of the widows, some of the 9/11 widows, a couple of months ago on the anniversary in New York, with our hands on the building on 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue that belongs to the Alavi Foundation, which is branch of the Islamic Republic of Iran government. Well, that’s our building. We had our hands on the building. We’re going to get it next year.
The third thing I do is, for many years as pro bono activity, I’m the president and CEO of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran. We own the web site Iran.org. With a little money, a little help, we will become Iran.gov. We have not had enough of either yet. I happen to believe that if the United States had helped the three million people who were in the streets in 2009 waving signs in English just to make sure that the CNN cameras would capture them, “Obama are you with us?” If we had helped those people then we would today be dealing with a type of Iran that Daniel Pipes just described in the future, a post-Islamic Republic Iran, a pro-American Iran, a nationalist Iran that sees its role in the region as a force of good and of technology and of moderation and not this radical regime that for the past 34 years has seen its mission as spreading Islam, not just through the Middle East but throughout the world.
The Iranian regime sees itself as a global power. This is something that people don’t understand very well. They say, well, they have this tiny army. Their air force is grounded. They can’t get spare parts. Whenever they go up against the United States in a military confrontation, as they did in 1987 and 1988, well, in 12 hours we sunk a third of their navy. It’s true. We did. We sunk a third of their navy in 12 hours. They are not a conventional military force. But they have understood something that we have not. They have understood asymmetrical warfare. They have understood unconventional warfare. They have understood the power of subversion and the power of terror attacks. That is not by accident that Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is the preeminent state sponsor of terrorism because that is their foreign policy. Their foreign policy is terrorism. Okay? And it has been for the past 34 years.
Now when I say Iran sees itself as a global power, what do I mean? They see themselves as an active player in every Muslim country in the world from Malaysia to, get this, Venezuela. All right? They are working on the ground in Malaysia in the banking system, in the community, building mosques, building organizations. They have an intelligence network, which is second to ours, in fact, in many cases they are better and more numerous than our intelligence community. They certainly have more operatives around the world. In Benghazi, which is the subject of my latest book, “Dark Forces,” and I think there’s still a few copies outside if anybody wants them. In Benghazi at the peak they had about a hundred Quds Force officers on the ground during the uprising and against Khadafy.
The Quds Force is the overseas expeditionary arm of the Revolutionary Guards. Okay? These are their professional terrorists. These are the people that they sent to Afghanistan to help the Taliban. I’m sorry, Iran is a Shiite nation. That’s right, they’re not supposed to help the Taliban who are Sunnis. Right? Well Sunnis and Shiites get along just fine when it comes to killing Americans and killing Jews and the Iranians have showed that again and again and again. The Quds Force has their people in Mexico. They have their people in Venezuela. They have their people, as I said, 100 of them on the ground in Benghazi creating anti-Khadafy militias, notably Ansar Al Sharia, and later on directing those militias to attack the United States in our consular facility and the CIA annex. The people asked me, well, why would the Iranians want to do that? What is their goal? Well, the goal is they see themselves as a world power. Who is their enemy? We are their enemy. And they will attack us anywhere they possibly can. When they see a power vacuum, when they see the United States weak, when they see a vulnerability, they will attack us. And they won’t even hesitate to send their terrorists right into our nation’s capital in Washington, DC, as they did not a long time ago when they tried to blow up the Saudi ambassador at the Watergate Hotel Restaurant. Okay? They are not afraid of us. They are not deterred by us.
Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Quds Force, is proudly walking through the streets of Arbiel in Northern Iraq as if he were the prime minister talking to our diplomats, working out deals of how they are going to cooperate with us against Daesh, the Islamic State, ISIL or ISIS, however you wish to call it. So they see themselves as a global power. They see us as the enemy. They attack us wherever they possibly can. In Libya, they saw our vulnerability, and as I describe in “Dark Forces,” their purpose was number one to show that they could attack America anywhere. Number two, to discredit our support for freedom in Libya and three, turn Libya into a failed state and drive the United States out. Guess which one of those objectives they did not achieve? None of them. They achieved all four of their objectives. It was a success. We have never fought back. In fact, we have never fought back against Iran for any of the attacks that they have made on this country.
I got my first taste of this in Beirut in April, 1983, when I was a young reporter on the ground and was interviewing Camille Chamoun, the former president of Lebanon, on one side of town we heard a boom. I ran downstairs and got in a taxi and the taxis inevitably know what’s going on, so they took me immediately to the scene, and our embassy in Beirut was still smoking. People were hanging by cables from the seventh floor swinging in the dust in the smoke. The Marines were dazed. A young press officer came out of the dust, his name was Ryan Crocker, and told us that the ambassador was alive. He had been able to climb down the back by climbing down the wreckage of his desk from the seventh floor. The Iranians have been attacking us militarily through terrorist attacks ever since they took the hostages in 1979. We thought it was over when they turned them back, when they sent the hostages home, when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. For them it was just beginning. They attack us in Iraq. They attack us in Afghanistan. They attack us in Washington, DC, and they attacked us in Benghazi. They see themselves as a world power and they will attack us everywhere.
Let me say just a couple quick words about the nuclear deal because, it’s tremendously important. It is a tremendously bad idea for us to allow the Islamic Republic to maintain its nuclear weapons capability and that’s what Barak Obama is going to do. It is total insanity. He’s going to allow them to keep their centrifuges and he’s going to allow them to replace the centrifuges that they have with new generation centrifuges. What does that mean? That means that they’re going to be able to jump to nuclear weapons capability in a matter of weeks rather than months or even years. Iran will be able to break out of the nonproliferation treaty the day that they decide to do so and have a nuclear weapons arsenal, not one or two bombs, but an arsenal of six to ten bombs within three months. Within three months. That is what this deal will do for the Islamic Republic. It is a terribly bad idea. Please when you are contacting your members of Congress insist with them that they demand that the administration bring whatever negotiated agreement that they’ve got with the Iranians to Congress so it can be vetted in public. Congress will shoot this down, but they have to bring it before their committees.
So I’m very happy to take your questions later on. I was very glad to hear Daniel Pipes talk about the Caliphate, that was going to be another point I wanted to talk about, so I don’t need to talk about the Caliphate, but the Iranians and the Turks looking forward in ten years will be disputing the leadership of the Islamic Caliphate worldwide. It’s just beginning folks. It’s just beginning. Thank you very much.
Daniel Greenfield: Folks, I have a message for you direct from Secretary of State John Forbes Kerry. ISIS is not Islamic. There is nothing Islamic about the Islamic state. Do you know, according to John Kerry, who is responsible for ISIS recruitment? Guess. Israel, of course, Israel, because you’ve got all the yeshiva boys, they go through Ben Gurion airport, right away they head off to Syria and Iraq to kill Kurds because that’s how it works in Kerryland. But there’s a point to that. The great thing about Israel if you’re Obama or Kerry is that it can be a fall guy for just about everything. Obama broke the Middle East. He wrecked it, which takes a lot of work because the Middle East was kind of broken to begin with. Making it even worse the way that Obama did took actual work, and you have to give Obama credit for that. He actually managed to make the Middle East a worse place. Now there has to be a foreign policy cover up. Somebody has to take the blame for it.
Now the beautiful thing about the peace process is that it’s a Catch 22. Peace is actually impossible and Israel always takes the blame. The Saudis were the first to actually get this done because when the Saudis wanted something, when they were asked well you still have slaves. They abolished slavery, I believe, in 1962 or so. They would say because Israel is destabilizing the Middle East and because there’s all this destabilization in the Middle East, we can’t do these reforms; because it’s too unstable and it’s Israel’s fault. Why is the kingdom of Saudi Arabia as democratic as the Democratic Party? Again because Israel creates all this extremism. It feeds instability. It feeds all this recruitment of terrorists and because of that we can’t possibly democratize.
Why do we have no human rights? Again, same thing. It’s Israel’s fault. That has been the mantra for quite a while and it’s been incredibly successful. The Saudis were able to blame Israel for just about everything and hold out the idea that Israel was going to be the magic solution to everything. You turn the golden key. Israel makes peace with the PLO and suddenly the Middle East, everything in the Middle East, is nice now. The Sunnis and the Shiites get along. They hug each other without actually for once killing each other in the streets and everything works out. All the dictatorships become democracies. It was a really beautiful delusional vision for which Israel was the scapegoat. Now Israel is back to that function again. In term 1, Obama actually sort of did not focus on Israel, which was a good thing because Obama was too big for Israel back then. He had a much bigger foreign policy agenda. Presidents like to focus on Israel and the peace process because they want a Nobel Peace Prize. Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize for just basically showing up. He didn’t need another Nobel Peace Prize. So instead of actually focusing on Israel, instead of berating Israel — you’ve got to do the peace process thing — he worked around Israel. He was trying to transform the region. He was going to use Turkey as the model for transforming the Middle East. There would be a whole bunch of Turkey surrounding Israel. There would be a Turkey in Egypt. There would be a Turkey in Syria. There would be all these Muslim Brotherhood, political Islamic states and they would completely isolate and eventually crush Israel, but this would be a byproduct because Obama was a big, big deep thinker and he had plans for the entire region. And we know how that ended up. You can see half the Middle East is now on fire because of that.
Egypt and Tunisia, as I predicted, had counter revolutions of one kind or another, which reversed the Arab Spring so the Arab spring is dead. The parts of the Arab Spring that aren’t dead are basically consisting of people killing each other in the streets. In Syria and Yemen and Iraq — it’s really too many places to list because Obama does great work. You’ve got to give him credit for that. So Obama was too big for Israel in term 1, but now in term 2 the Arab Spring has collapsed. He’s a lame duck. He lost Congress and you know when presidents become lame ducks they turn to easy targets and Israel is a very easy target to beat up on. It’s easy to go after Israel because it’s an ally. It’s a friendly country, which means, if you’re a bully, that you can punch it in the face and get away with it. And that’s really what we’re seeing now. Obama needs somebody to blame for his current situation in the Middle East. And he’s going back to the same Saudi excuse that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, lack of a peace process, is destabilizing the region. When John Kerry tells Muslim leaders that ISIS recruitment is being fed by Israel what he’s really saying is that it’s not our foreign policy that’s at fault. It’s certainly not Islam because that would be Islamophobic. No, the problem is of course that Israel doesn’t make peace with the Palestinians, and the peace process is of course completely unworkable because the PLO is being awarded for not making peace with Israel. There is absolutely no incentive for them to make peace and there’s no reason for them to make peace. The entire premise of the peace process is counterintuitive. It’s that you set up a terrorist state, you give terrorists money and you expect the whole thing to work out. Obviously it’s never going to work out. It’s designed not to work out.
But the bigger problem in all that is that the people who champion peace processes, the great so-called “peacemakers” can’t ever actually admit that because they would look like idiots. For example, Clinton briefly admitted that it was Arafat’s fault that he went back to blaming Israel, because if after five years your big incredible conclusion is that Arafat is a terrorist, then people are going to laugh in your face. It took you five years to figure that out. You look like an idiot and it discredits the entire idea that you can negotiate with terrorists. It’s as stupid as taking a bath with a toaster oven, and you not only don’t deserve a Nobel Peace Prize, people should take away any sharp objects lying around your room so you don’t cut yourself. But you know, the big visionary ideas are counterintuitive like Obamacare or the peace process. With Israel and the PLO, even though they’re actually two Palestinians states, one Hamas state, one PLO state, and neither of them can actually get along with each other yet somehow they’re supposed to make peace with Israel. I don’t know exactly how that’s supposed to work, but again I’m not a deep thinker like John Kerry or Barack Obama. But again they don’t really believe that it’s going to work. They don’t expect it to work. What they want is a fall guy for the kind of mess that they’ve made across the region.
Right now Obama has no other policy in the Middle East. His big policies in the Middle East are gone. I mean if he tries to call for a new Arab Spring people are going to laugh in his face. China and Russia are just having fun at his expense these days. His only two goals in the Middle East now are to let Iran get a nuclear weapon and to constantly pressure Israel because it’s also a good way to weaken and distract Israel while Iran does get a nuclear weapon. Right now Israel has few options left because it’s stuck with the idea that if it somehow proves that it wants peace, that it’s willing to make every possible conceivable concession, then finally it’s going to prove that it’s the good guy and the PLO are the bad guys. And it doesn’t understand that it can never actually prove this. It can never actually prove its legitimacy, can never actually discredit the PLO no matter what the PLO does because the entire premise of the system is set up so that nothing the PLO does can be wrong because Israel is being used as the scapegoat for this entire mess. So whatever the PLO does in this last set of negotiations Israel was being told to release terrorists not in exchange for something, not even as part of the negotiations but as part of the negotiations to be able to negotiate. The PLO wanted preconditions for the negotiations or as one of their people said, we want to discuss the discussions and they want preconditions to discuss the discussions. They wanted to release terrorists before they were even going to discuss having a discussion and negotiating peace. That’s how much they want peace. Next time you read about the same concern-trolling New York Times article about how Israel doesn’t really want peace because it’s not willing to make the sacrifices the other side wants preconditions to have discussions about having the discussions about having peace.
But Israel did it. It released about 100 terrorists and of course meanwhile the PLO went to the United Nations. It tried to form a unity government with Hamas purely to sabotage the peace process and whom did John Kerry blame when he went to the Senate Foreign Relations Council? He blamed Israel of course. He said that Israel had failed to release the third batch of PLO terrorists on the day that the PLO wanted them released and that was that. Also they potentially built some houses in Jerusalem and that was that. And it’s Israel’s fault again. Israel faces this kind of Catch 22 because it’s still committed to the idea of proving its righteousness through the two-state solution and that’s a dead end. Caroline Glick I’m sure will talk about her book, “The Israel Solution,” as an alternative, but what I would like to say is that Israel can’t possibly prove its own legitimacy by showing its willingness to deal with terrorists. When you do that you discredit yourself.
There’s a Talmudic court case, which has two people arguing over a coat. Now one says that the whole coat is mine. The whole coat belongs to me. The other person says only half the code is mine. He’s a moderate. He’s legitimate. He’s willing to make some kind of compromise. And the second person, you would think he’s willing to compromise, so give him half the coat. Give the other guy half the coat so it would be a Solomonic decision. But instead the court case goes the other way. The guy who’s actually willing to compromise and willing to take half the coat only gets a quarter of the coat because he gets half his claim. When Israel accepts the premise of the two-state solution, accepts that the so-called Palestinians, which is a brand name for the local Sunni Arab Muslims, have a legitimate case that they’ve suffered, that there’s some sort of potential to work out a peace process with them, then Israel discredits itself. The other side never goes halfway. We’ve talked about the rejectionism earlier, when you reject the other side completely, when you reject 100 percent of the Israeli case then what you’re saying is that I am completely correct and believe it or not the world listens to that. Israel used to say we are 100 percent correct and Israel had a much better public image when it said that we are 100 percent correct. We are the original people of this land. We are the indigenous people. These are the Muslim conquerors. They are trying to kill us. We have the complete right to this land.
Ever since Israel tried to repair its public image with the peace process, with negotiations, with making all kinds of deals and saying that we accept the legitimacy of the other side, that the other side does not accept the legitimacy of Israel even by 1 percent, Israel has destroyed its own public image. Right now Obama has no foreign policy in the Middle East. His foreign policy in the Middle East changes every day, really. It’s bomb Syria. Don’t bomb Syria. No, wait, let’s bomb Syria. No, wait, don’t bomb Syria. There’s a red light. There’s a green light. There’s a yellow light. We’ll arm the rebels. No, we won’t arm the rebels. And this is actually happening. They’re doing this month by month and week by week. They’re completely changing everything nonstop. Only arm the moderate rebels who aren’t shooting at us right this minute. There’s a stupid new plan every five minutes.
The Israel plan, the obsessive John Kerry plan for Israel, is part of that same package, but it’s supposed to be a distraction. It’s the big shiny thing that Obama’s holding up to say that we don’t have to take the blame for this. It’s not our fault. It’s not Obama’s fault that he did his Cairo speech. It’s not his fault that he backed the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s not his fault that he decided to bomb Libya into pieces and turn it over to a bunch of Islamic militias aligned with Al-Qaeda. That’s not any of his fault. You know whose fault it is? Israel’s fault. Until Israel makes the conclusive case that it is completely in the right — not 50 percent in the right, not 60 percent in the right, not 40 percent in the right but 100 percent in the right — it is always going to be used as the punching bag and the scapegoat for Obama, for Kerry, for the PLO, for the Saudis and for every bunch of dictators from here to the Europe, to the United States, to the Middle East.
Caroline Glick: I’m not going to speak about Iran both because Ken and Daniel did a good job in covering the basic insanity of the Obama policy of trying to reach a détente with the genocidal terror state that is pursuing, actively, nuclear weapons and is the largest state’s sponsor of terrorism in the world and at war with United States, I want to talk about what’s happening in Israel today. And Daniel mentioned my book the “Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East,” and I’ll just start by saying the premise of my book is this: When you get down to brass tacks and you ask the Muslims of Israel and west of the Jordan River including Judea, Samaria what they think of Israel and whether they want to remain part of Israel, whether they want to be part of Palestine, you find that in poll after poll the majority of them want to be part of Israel and are much more interested in living under Israeli sovereignty than under PLO or Hamas sovereignty.
So who’s rioting right now and what’s happening? And I think that my book then says, okay, we cannot have a foreign hostile terror state operating inside of Israel’s historic heartland because the very existence of that PLO entity is a source of constant destabilization that makes peace impossible, that makes coexistence impossible between Israel, Israeli Jews, Muslims and so on and so forth because their only reason for existing is to destabilize the situation with the ultimate aim of annihilating Israel. So that as long as the PLO or Hamas, in that case, state is there in any form, has any power, has any power of the purse, has any arms whatsoever their only reason to exist is to destabilize and to make coexistence impossible. That is what they exist to do. They have never existed to do anything and they can never exist to do anything. It can never change. So my premise is, okay, we have to dissolve the Palestinian authority and Israel has to apply its laws to Judea and Samaria just as we applied our laws to Jerusalem in 1967 and to the Golan Heights in 1981. And the Palestinians who live in Judea and Samaria have to be offered permanent residency status like the residents of Jerusalem and the residents of the Golan Heights received and if they abide by Israel’s naturalization criteria then they’ll be eligible to apply for Israeli citizenship. The demographic time bomb is the Israeli bomb on the Palestinians because we’re out-producing them and we are having massive immigration. They are hemorrhaging immigration and their birth rates have plummeted to below three children per woman. And Israelis are having more than three children per woman, Israeli Jews. Imagine that: Jews know how to go forth and multiply.
Now this brings us to where we are today because a lot of Israelis including myself are saying, I’m saying to myself, and we’re all saying to ourselves, well, the concept of bringing these people into the Israeli body of politics seems more and more lunatic. Look at them. Look at what they’re doing. They’re running over 3-month-old babies and then cheering the people who are doing this. They’re attacking Jewish civil rights activists. Shooting them outside of the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in an attempted assassination and the people who are doing these shootings are then being lionized by their leadership as heroes.
So is this a mass movement and who is behind it? What is happening? Well, according to the Washington Post this morning, most of the rioters in Jerusalem are children. They are between the ages of 12 and 16 years old. They have been incited to go out onto the front lines and endanger their lives by the Palestinian authority media which is inciting them and by the Israeli Islamic movement, which is inciting them to go out and attack Israeli police officers, Israeli civilians, and we see, according to the report, that almost all of the rioting occurs before school and after school. So before 7:30 in the morning and between 4:00 and 6:00 in the afternoon, and then at 6:00 they go home and do their homework. So the thing is, is that is this a mass movement? No it’s not a mass movement. We’re not seeing tens of thousands of people rioting throughout the Galilee and the Negev or even in the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem. We’re seeing tens and up to hundreds rioting at any time. This isn’t a mass movement. According to polling data over the past two weeks a vast majority of the Israeli Arabs don’t support this. They’re not in alignment with this, but you are having this massive incitement going on among Palestinian society, among Israeli Arabs that is being carried out by the Palestinian authority media and by the Islamic movement in Israel, which is funded by Qatar increasingly to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.
So this is not a popular insurrection against Israel and it’s important for us to understand it, and it’s also important for us to understand that when we look at this thin layer of rioting Muslims, who are by in large children being incited by adults to go out and sacrifice their lives in order to advance the concept that Israel is demonic and child killing — we have to ask ourselves, what is this war? Who is fighting it and to what end? If this isn’t a popular insurrection what sort of an insurrection is this? What are we facing? What is this enemy system that Israel is trying to contend with? And more and more the growing consensus among Israeli thinkers is that we are not exactly facing a war with the Palestinians. The Palestinians are proxies. They are proxies for the Europeans. They are proxies for the International Left and the Europeans and the International Left are financing this war against Israel. All of the Palestinian NGOs and the Palestinian authority including the Palestinian media are funded to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars by the European Union, and by the way, by the United States government as well. They are not punished at all, at all for the fact that they are using their media to incite Jew hatred and the massacre of Jews and the annihilation of the Jewish state, which happens to be a Western democracy and in alliance with the United States. No payment whatsoever, no cost whatsoever for this.
To the contrary, America continues to increase and increase and increase its aid to the Palestinian authority, as do the European states and the European Union. Moreover, what we’re seeing is that the violence is being directed not only by the Palestinian authority media, but also by a consortium of Palestinian and, indeed, Israeli NGOs that are being financed to the tune of over 90 percent of each individual NGO’s budget by the European Union as well as by American nonprofit organizations, including the Ford Foundation and the New Israel Fund. So that this entire war is being foreign-funded by governments and by radical foundations that are paying to incite Palestinian violence against Israel and then to legitimize it in the international arena as a legitimate response to nothing at all that Israel never did. Oh, to building 200 apartments for Jews in Ramot, which is Jerusalem. We are looking at an optical illusion, when we look at people who are talking about a Palestinian conflict with Israel. This is a European proxy war against the Jews. That’s why I concur with Daniel’s view that Israel is the scapegoat. Israel is the scapegoat because the Jews are the scapegoat. We can do nothing right. We are responsible for everything. From the enslavement of the Yazidi girls and women by ISIS and to the fact that women aren’t allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia and to the fact that the Iranians are developing nuclear weapons and supporting terrorism all over the world and to the fact that people are unhappy because they’re mad at their parents in Galilee Arab towns because they’re 15 years old and bored.
We are responsible for absolutely everything bad that happens in the Middle East, that happens in the world. We are responsible. We have become a domestic political issue inside of Europe, which is why Sweden’s newly elected government, their prime minister, his first address, inaugural address in the European Parliament, he had to announce that his government was going to recognize the nonexistence state of Palestine because it is a domestic policy issue, not an international affairs issue because warring against Israel is a Swedish governmental policy, and we have to understand that this is the nature of the war. The Palestinians by and large if left to their own devices would be far happier living under Israeli rule and Israeli law than living under the law of the Palestinian authority, the PLO and Hamas.
And I’m just going to go back for a second because when we recognize that the nature of this war is not directly the Palestinians rejecting Israel and in fact fanning the flames as Edwin Black talked about in his book “Fanning the Flames,” the war that we’re seeing on college campuses is part and parcel of the war on the ground in Jerusalem and around Israel because the same forces are funding Students for Justice in Palestine that are funding Al Haq and all of these NGOs in Eastern Jerusalem and in the Galilee that are inciting Arab children to go out and endanger their lives and throw rocks, fire bombs and firecrackers at Israelis. It’s the same forces that are funding all of this. It is a unified battle so that when Students for Justice in Palestine and Adalah-New York are assaulting rabbis in Brooklyn who are coming out of a demonstration game between Brooklyn — what is their basketball team called, Nets? — Nets and Maccabi Tel Aviv, they’re being funded by the same people who are inciting Palestinian children in Jerusalem to attack Jewish drivers and Jews who are riding on the Jerusalem Light Rail. It’s the same forces. The people who are attacking students on U.S. college campuses are being funded by the same forces as the people who are attacking Jews at Gush Katif Junction and we’re not seeing this because we continue to believe the lie that this is about peace. Right? Daniel did a very good job explaining why there is never going to be any peace because the Palestinian national movement is dedicated to one goal and one goal only, the annihilation of Israel. If any Palestinian leader, whether it’s the head of Hamas or Abbas or anybody in between, we’re to recognize Israel’s right to existence, sign on the dotted line of any agreement whatsoever with the Jewish state, they, their family and everybody that they have a nodding acquaintance with would be dead the next day. There is no way that any Palestinian leader will ever sign a deal with Israel because to do so is to go against the very nature of the Palestinian movement, which is based on one thing and one thing only: The negation and annihilation of the Jewish stated.
So we have to recognize it and once we understand the nature of this war, and yes, the United States government, particularly under the Obama administration, is playing a key role in enabling this war to go on and to expand and to be worsened by the day. Once we understand the nature of the war that we’re facing and the system that is operating here, we can begin to put together strategies for actually fighting it because the same forces that are saying that it is illegitimate to voice pro-Israel sentiments on college campuses and be an Israeli shipping company sending goods in a cargo ship to the port of Oakland, California and interfering with legitimate commercial ties between the State of Israel and the United States of America and U.S. ports, those same people are fanning the flames of the war inside of Israel. Once we recognize that, we can develop a strategy for fighting it. We have to go after their tax exempt status. We have to go after these NGOs operating in the United States and in Israel and take action to curb their ability to infiltrate, incite and foment war against Israel and anti-Semitism in the Western world. We have to go after the source of the violence. The source of the violence, yes it’s the incitement in the Palestinian mosques and the Palestinian schools and every aspect of Palestinian society, but that incitement wouldn’t be going on if it weren’t financed by people in Europe and the United States.
Quite simply, they wouldn’t be able to do two-thirds of the things that they’re doing today if they weren’t getting money from the West that is fighting through them a proxy war against the Jewish people and the very notion that Jews have a right to freedom. That’s what this is about. We have to recognize it for what it is and we have to fight it as such. So thank you very much. I know that this group, this group is a group we can count on to go to the source. That’s what the David Horowitz Center does. That’s what all of us do in our individual lives and that’s what we have to do more of all the time. Go after them with lawyers, with lawsuits, with restraining orders, and with audits. So thank you very much.
Audience Member: Haven’t we helped Turkey, America helped Turkey, by giving them billions of dollars in financial aid in the last decade? And wouldn’t their country go down economically or fail economically if we hadn’t?
Daniel Pipes: Has the United States been responsible for this huge growth? No, we have not been. If any state is responsible for this growth it is Qatar. There is a huge amount of money going from Qatar to Turkey off the books in the tens of billions that is unaccounted for. No, American aid to Turkey is rather minor. It is, in the old days it was Saudi and Kuwaiti, now it’s Qatari money. But the Turks have a real economy. It’s not just living off of others. It’s been direct financial investment that has been, and hot money, that’s been going into Turkey and Americans have been only, the fed has had policies which have been helpful, but Americans have not been crucial, no.
Audience Member: In what way do you see Turkey as a threat in 20 years — aggressive expansion and undermining regimes, becoming a nuclear power — how does that compare to what the Iranian goals are?
Daniel Pipes: All of those. I think the nuclear buildup is going to come before too long. There’s already a conventional buildup that is impressive. But most profoundly there’s this notion of neo-Ottomanism. The Ottomans controlled out of Istanbul most the Middle East for centuries and the current prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, has this notion, not of reconquering, nothing so primitive as that, but of influencing, of having decisive cultural and political influence over the Balkans, the Near East and North Africa, and this is their aspiration and they’ve done very, very badly. It’s interesting that they were doing very well until about 2009 and now it’s a complete disaster. His slogan was no problems with enemies and in fact if you look all around — Iran, Iraq, Syria, Israel, Egypt, Cyprus — it’s nothing but problems with neighbors. So right now it’s at a very low ebb and maybe they will readjust, but long term the goal clearly is to be the dominant power of the Middle East, and nuclear, non-nuclear and economic and cultural and religious elements are all part of that.
Audience Member: If we hadn’t lifted the sanctions do you think the people of Iran would have revolted and turned over the administration and was it a mistake not to aid the 2009 revolution?
Daniel Pipes: It was appalling as Americans, who watched the chancellors and prime ministers and presidents of Germany, France and Britain all call for support of the rebels, of the demonstrators in Iran, and our president be mum on the subject. And so it could have made a difference, but I think it’s brewing. The antagonism towards the regime, this is something Ken knows very well, is developing and developing. There is a turn away from public life. There is a turn towards drugs and other forms of recreation. The Iranian people are really unhappy with their regime and in some way at some time something’s going to happen that’s going to lead to a rebellion that will overthrow that regime. I can’t of course tell you when and where but it’s imminent. It’s just out there waiting to happen. Let’s make this the last one. I’m sorry I have to run to the airport.
Audience Member: Would you speak to the Islamic government in Turkey’s attack on the judiciary and the military basically trying to eliminate any opposition?
Daniel Pipes: What Erdogan has done, I mentioned his increasing authoritarianism, is step by step take over the media, take over the judiciary just some months ago, take control of the military, the banks. One by one he’s taking over all the independent sources of power and one by one they’re falling to him. Now it hasn’t completely happened yet. There’s still a struggle in many ways. His primary enemy was his former ally, a man by the name of Fethullah Gulen, a religious leader who lives himself in exile in Pennsylvania. But everything, well, let me conclude on this: Everything that Erdogan has done in Turkey no matter how outrageous against the demonstrators in Gezi Park, against the minors who died in Soma, against the banks, against the media — one media company his government fined $2 ½ billion for some peccadillo. Everything he does plays to his base and they love it and he keeps getting elected. But the problem is that he thinks that he now has the Midas touch and can do no wrong and he’s doing the same thing abroad. And it’s playing much less well abroad and it’s leading him to one trouble after another, in particular in Syria, but also with the Kurds, also with Israel, also with Egypt. He’s just a few weeks ago started a new gratuitous problem in Cyprus where he is drilling in exclusive economic-zoned waters. So I think the real problems are going to come from international adventurism where this man who is so accomplished and arrogant in domestic affairs turns towards international affairs and fails. And I think there is a growing sense among neighbors and international powers that this is a dangerous man. This is an argument that was very hard to make a decade ago and quite easy to make today. Again, thank you so much. My apologies.
Audience Member: I have a two-part question for Caroline Glick, please. Do you think it’s basic anti-Semitism in Israel, not that it matters, but is it basic anti-Semitism or is it just trying to appease the Muslims in the country and that is the basis behind their recognizing Palestine? And the second question is who do you think would best serve Israel’s interest to be president of the Republican nominee? Thank you.
Caroline Glick: He got the answer to the second question last night, so he just wants me to say it publicly, which I’ll be happy to do, but, as to your first question, first of all I think that anti-Semitism is one component. I think that there’s never just one reason to be a Jew hater. I think that there are always different things that feed on to it, but definitely anti-Semitism, hatred of Jews, hatred of the notion of Jews having power, hatred of the notion that Jews should have freedom that goes back to the dawn of, to Egyptian mythology and hatred of Jews. They were the first ones to introduce the concepts of anti-Semitism to the world back in the time of the Pharaohs. You should read the Bible. But yes that plays an enormous role in it, but there are other aspects of it as well as I touched on the issue of domestic politics in Europe that is now increasingly being consumed by their Muslim minorities as we see in country after country. Geert Wilders was talking about his fight against that in Holland, but he’s having a fight. Now we also should remember that the Dutch handed over 95 percent of their Jews to the Nazis. So it’s not as though their country has a great record on that. Anne Frank was given up by Dutch Nazi collaborators, which is worth remembering.
Europe as a continent has an obsession with Jews. Yes, it’s true but they also have domestic political issues that have to do with their Muslim population. Economic considerations play a role in it with the energy markets and also European desire to out-Jew-hate the Americans, always be to the left of the Americans, so as bad as Obama’s going to be towards Israel, the Europeans have to one up him. So he says Israel is going to face a dangerous situation and he threatens if we don’t give up the store to the Palestinians and they say we’re going to enact a trade war against you, we’re going to label Jewish products in our stores. And so I think that it’s a multifaceted thing. Now I’m not, I think that the Republican field is extraordinary in terms of their support for Israel whether it’s Indiana Governor Mike Pence. I don’t know about Scott Walker but he’s sure awesome with the unions. I’d like to believe that he’d stand up for the Jews just as he’d stand up to the unions. Rick Perry is wonderful. Obviously, Michele, if you want to run again, I’ll write some nice things about you, but the one person that I’ve been thinking about recently is Ted Cruz. He’s been extraordinary, just extraordinary. He’s been willing to take it in the face time after time to stand up for Israel whether it’s the FAA flight ban, whether it’s his address to anti-Semitic Christians from the Middle East, who said first dump your Jew hatred and then we can talk. Nobody ever stood up to them before the way he did and he got it from Jewish organizations for doing so. So he’s not getting any support from the Jewish establishment in this country for being the most outspoken supporter and defender of Israel I think today in the Senate, and God bless him, and that’s the one I know the best aside from Michele, and I don’t know whether you’re running, and so I got to say God bless Ted Cruz.
Audience Member: I attend a private Jewish school and, actually, Ms. Glick’s nephew is one of my best friends.
Caroline Glick: Jonathan.
Audience Member: So I just had, my question is I’ve noticed that a lot of my fellow Jewish students try to be hip, peaceful and accepting and believe in the two-state solution as they call it. How can people such as myself and Jonathan and others convince them that that’s just not the way that we should be handling our affairs through peace?
Caroline Glick: So first of all my nephew and I’m sure all of his friends and debating partners are totally cool, so they don’t have to worry about doing anything to be cool. They just are cool. But aside from that, hey, look, that’s why I started Latma, which is an Internet web site that did, on web site, for four years we ran production of a satirical newscast called the Tribal Update, because I found that the most damaging weapon that the left holds in its arsenal is the ability to confer coolness on people. So that if they have the keys to social power and acceptability in determining what is and isn’t cool then what can we do? In order to stand up for what’s right you have to accept that you’re a dweeb and who wants to do that particularly when they’re young? So the idea was to end the social as well as intellectual terror that the left exerts against Israelis and against supporters of Israel and Latma was very successful in doing that and that’s why I’m so gratified that we just signed a broadcast contract for our show to be the flagship satire show for Israeli state television beginning on January 30 for a 12-week season.
So I think that the point that I’m making aside from blowing my own horn because why not really is that we can do it. It’s not, I wouldn’t say that it’s easy but the fact of the matter is that the claims that Obama makes and that Kerry makes and that the leftists make and Code Pink makes, that all of these icons of brilliance and coolness make are so stupid, right? I mean at their heart they’re evil, but they’re also just plain dumb and boring and these people are aesthetic, and I mean, look at Lena Dunham. Really, you want to look like her? You know what I mean? You just, there — it’s so easy to tear these people apart if you just start doing it. The problem is that people aren’t doing it enough, which is why what Truth Revolt is doing is also important just along the exact same lines. If you can take away their monopoly on the conferral of coolness to people then you’ve taken away everything. And that’s why the culture war is important, but it’s important also to focus the culture war on the most damaging aspect of the arrows in the left’s cultural quiver and that is the quiver that determines who is cool and who is not cool. And so I think that you and your classmates can do this first of all by not caring what people think and going your own way and doing it proudly and doing it happily and excitedly.
So I’ll just say one last thing: We were trying to figure out years ago how to develop back in the day a neoconservative-type movement in Israel that would have the kind of momentum and power that the neoconservative movement had in the United States, not necessarily with the same concepts and ideology, but the idea that you could have a neo-right-wing movement in Israel that was going to galvanize public support. And Midge Decter, who was one of the leaders of the neoconservative movement, she and her husband, Norman Podhoretz, were visiting Israel and my friend Ruthie who’s their daughter, Ruthie Blum, and we asked her and she said, have a lot of parties. Make it fun. Do a lot of drinking, whatever. But the point was — not you, drink orange juice. And milk. But the point is that have fun. Have fun, enjoy it. Don’t be mad all the time. You’re young, enjoy yourself and do the right thing and have a blast doing it because the more fun you have the more people will want to join you and if you’re always feeling like oh, I got to fight, I got to fight, you’re missing the point. It’s great fun to do the right thing. That’s why everybody joins the Boy Scouts. It’s great fun to be good. It’s great fun to fight the good fight. I enjoy it and I think that we all enjoy it. That’s why we’re here having a blast this weekend.
Audience Member: My wife and I are not Jewish, but we think the greatest leader in the world is Benjamin Netanyahu. And one of the panels, I think it was yesterday, somebody said that Putin is the only real leader in the world and Netanyahu was not even mentioned, and today at this panel he wasn’t mentioned. I don’t understand that. My question is why wasn’t he mentioned? And my second question is, after the way Obama has treated him in the last six years, how can any Jew in this country vote Democratic? Those are my two questions.
Caroline Glick: Why don’t you answer that question.
Daniel Greenfield: Well let me take the second question first. How can any Jew vote Democratic? We’re talking about, how can any Jew vote Democratic? We’re talking about a party that had Al Sharpton, who was responsible for the Crown Heights pogrom, at its convention and yet Jews went on voting Democratic after that. So it doesn’t surprise me that these people would vote Democratic because these people do not really have Jewish or ethnic or religious identification. These people are liberals first. They’re something else second. They’re something else third. They’re something else fourth and somewhere at the bottom of the list they’re Jewish. So they have no particular allegiance to Israel and that’s the big thing that groups like J Street are selling. They’re selling the idea that the new wave of youth is going to be detached from Israel. They’re going to have no affinity with Israel, so you might as well join the anti-Israel club. The reality is that American Jews are splitting into two groups. They’re splitting into more traditional Jews who are really conservative and they’re splitting into a more radical left that is actually anti-Israel, so we’re going to be seeing some interesting times and the American Jewish community is going to look less like the reliable liberal vote. They’re going to look a lot more like the way Americans do, the American Christians do, with the right and the left that is actually very far apart.
Caroline Glick: And regarding why we didn’t talk about Netanyahu, I didn’t think about talking about Netanyahu. Did you think about that?
Daniel Greenfield: Not really.
Caroline Glick: No? I mean he’s better than Obama, but let’s talk after he bombs Iran.
Daniel Greenfield: Let me phrase this in American terms. Netanyahu was a really great speaker, but in Israeli terms he’s kind of like Mitt Romney. He has a great presentation, but he’s not really nearly all that conservative. He’s not a bad guy certainly, but he’s not really all he should be, but he doesn’t really quite deliver. So people on the right are not going to be all that enthusiastic about him.
Caroline Glick: On the other hand, I have to say to his benefit there isn’t anybody who can compete with him in the Israeli leadership race today so I think he’ll probably be our prime minister at least for the next four or five years.
Daniel Greenfield: Or 40-50 years.
Caroline Glick: Something — until somebody comes up and says I put together a constituency that can beat you.
Audience Member: Hi, this is my first Restoration Weekend. I was amazed. I heard a lot of opinions and analysis here but this particular panel is the one in which I heard the most facts, the most relevant facts, the most incisive facts and that began with Pipes and carried right through and of course Caroline Glick’s observations were most astute. So this question is directed toward Caroline who was exceptionally on target and I know that there are some big voices and important individuals in the room listening to your response. You talked about money financing the flames. We are now paying, the United States alone is paying approximately $500 million a year to the PA. About 16 percent of that money is being fungibly financed into specific terrorist compensation and reward, and of course you address the issue of 501(c)(3) which is in the Tax Code. To the people in the audience who have an input into Congress what would you like to see done to the Tax Code on so-called charitable contributions and to America’s contribution to destabilize the peace efforts which are underway, the reconciliation to coexistence efforts in Israel? And thank you very much for your scholarship and your authentic facts.
Caroline Glick: He’s just saying that because I cited his awesome book, right? Look, I don’t think that Congress, I may be wrong, Congresswoman Bachmann can correct me, the gaps in my knowledge about it, but I think the Tax Code on non-profits is fairly good. The problem is that it’s not being applied to these organizations that are providing material support for terrorist organizations and it’s not that surprising since the United States government and U.S. taxpayers are giving material support for terrorist organizations by directly funding the Palestinian Authority, and you forgot to mention as well another around a quarter of a billion dollars a year in U.S. taxpayer money going to fund UNRWA, which is the UN dedicated relief works agency that funds all of the Palestinian refugee camps that are also terrorist training camps not only in Israel and Judea and Samaria and Gaza, but throughout the Middle East.
So the Americans are playing a huge role in this both from a governmental perspective and also in the perspective of 501(c)(3)s, but I think that, I don’t think in this Justice Department either you’re going to get scrutiny. But I do think that investigative work going after these groups, looking into their 990s, finding out where they’re getting their money — they’re tax exempt organizations; they have to produce their donors — find out where they’re getting their money from, expose them, make them toxic to sit with. Students for Justice in Palestine, the group that’s operating on campus that is trying to make it impossible for you to be Jewish and pro-Israel on U.S. college campuses, that is fomenting anti-Semitic violence on college campuses and throughout the world, is a hate group. It is a hate group and it should be outlawed on every single college campus. The fact that they still operate is a crime. They have to be investigated. I want to know, who do they get their money from? I want to know what their links are to terrorist organizations, and by the way, to organized labor, I want to know what politicians are supporting them. I want to know which politicians won’t condemn them and I want to make it toxic for people to be in the same room with them, let alone share a podium with them because they are a hate group. Start there.
You can start anywhere, but start there because they’re really a problem for Jewish kids. They’re intimidating Jewish students. They are denying Jewish students’ civil rights on campus, not to mention the right to act on campus in their own interests without fear of being beaten up. This has to end. And it can end. Again, even if Eric Holder or his successor won’t take action against them with the Justice Department, and Tammy Benjamin from the Amcha Initiative can certainly talk about what a difficult time she’s had getting the Justice Department to apply the laws to anti-Semitism on campus. The public can make it toxic for university campuses to allow these organizations to operate. Jewish university donors should be getting together with their fellow Jewish alumni and withholding all donations to their alma maters so long as those alma maters are allowing Students for Justice in Palestine and other hate groups to propagate and enact anti-Semitic policies on campus. It can be done.
Audience Member: Ken Timmerman, you were very quiet during the Q and A. Do you have two or three sentences?
Ken Timmerman: Don’t forget that the United States government is the premier sponsor of the Palestinian authority and of UNRWA. Caroline mentioned it, but it is very important to understand that the administration, over the vetoes and the refusals of Congress, has reinstated funding to the Palestinian Authority through executive action. I asked recently Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who is the chairwoman of the Middle East subcommittee of the house Foreign Affairs Committee, she works with Ed Royce who was here this weekend, why they were not cutting off all funding to UNRWA and she said we could never get that passed because the Democrats would never allow us to do it. So you have a Democratic Party who insists on helping the children, right, by funding a terrorist organization that allows terrorists in Gaza to put rocket launchers in UN schools, to use ambulances with a red crescent on them, the Muslim equivalent of the Red Cross, to use them to ferry ammunition to war zones, into combat zones, to bring in fighters with suicide vests in those same ambulances, and all of this is being funded with your dollars. It’s being funded with your tax dollars. So for those of you who have got a Democratic member of Congress who live in a district, who have the misfortune to live in a district with a Democrat representative, get on their backs and ask them why in the world they continue to vote to fund UNRWA and the Palestinian Authority.
Moderator: Ladies and gentleman, let’s give a hand of applause for this tremendous panel.
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://www.frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/the-war-on-israel-and-the-middle-east/
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