Let's start this week by talking about summer camp. "Summer camp?" you say. "What's that got to do with a serious blog like this?" Plenty, as it turns out.
To most of us, summer camp is a time for kids to get out away from the city and enjoy good times, healthy exercise, and fun learning, with nice campfire sing-a-longs in the evenings.
But for the would-be "Palestinians", it is apparently MUCH more serious. As you can read in this article, they apparently view this as the perfect opportunity to convince tender young minds that their main purpose in life should be to blow themselves up in some area where they will take lots of Jews with them. This goes beyond mere incitement; this is also child abuse!
In previous years, there have been summer camps in Gaza run by Hamas, the rulers there, and others run by the UN (their aiders and abettors). Nevertheless, the UN at least TRIED to have some traditional elements in their camps. This was MUCH too liberal for Hamas, so they have now shut down ALL of the UN summer camps.
In some ways, though, the situation in Fatah-controlled territories is even more insidious. After all, Hamas doesn't even make any PRETENSE of wanting peace or even co-existence with Israel. But Fatah supposedly IS willing to make some kind of a deal with Israel (although they have, of course, been refusing to negotiate at all until Israel FIRST agrees to all their most important demands). As the same article points out, Fatah has just named a summer camp after Dalal Mughrabi. In case you don't remember, she was the leader of the most lethal terror attack in Israel's history, which resulted in the deaths of 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children. If you think that's just ancient history, or "water under the bridge", the article reminds us that, just this week, the governor of the Jericho district of the Palestinian Authority told campers (those tender young minds!) that Mughrabi "should be a beacon for us in our activities." (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 16, 2012) Keep this in mind next time someone talks about the "moderate" Fatah!
Now we'll move on, to Syria, where Assad has been continuing to slaughter his own people. Not so surprisingly, they're beginning to fight back more seriously now. This has got to have Assad more than a little worried. But, as this article in The Daily Star, an English-language site in Lebanon, reminds us, his friend, Nasrallah, the head of Hizbollah, is still supporting him. Of course, Nasrallah owes him big time for all the missiles and other weapons that he shipped to Hizbollah (most of them, of course, originated in Iran, but Syria was the go-between). This is just a bit personal for me, since 2 of those missiles landed close enough to my house in Tsfat 6 years ago to break windows and cause other minor damage. Some of the missiles he fired at northern Israel that summer, of course, did MUCH worse than that!
But Nasrallah is certainly NOT Assad's only supporter. Russia, whose only naval base on the Mediterranean Sea is located in Syria, has also continued to back him. But, perhaps most absurdly of all, as this article points out, Syria is about to be "elected" (we use that word VERY loosely in the case of anything having to do with the UN) as a member of, wait for it, ... the Human Rights Council.
Unfortunately, this is pretty much par for the course for the UN these days. When the UN was established after World War II, there were many high hopes that it would succeed in bringing world peace after the failure of the League of Nations. But there were some fatal flaws, one of the most egregious of which was giving exactly one vote to each nation, no matter how big or small, important or unimportant, it was. Of course, there have been other faults, as well. Now, the UN has become worse than useless -- it's actually DANGEROUS to world peace! It really SHOULD be abolished completely, but there's not any chance at all of that happening anytime soon, I'm sure.
Finally, we move to Israel and the so-called "territories". Our last article is a continuation of one I talked about last week. The author, as he promised, continues this week with more clear thinking about the folly of the 2-state solution. One of his most interesting arguments has to do with the issue of building in disputed areas. This arises from the notion, often proposed, that the first issue to be resolved should be borders, or at least some agreement about which areas will definitely be included in Israel, which areas remain disputed, and which will definitely be part of a Palestinian state. Then, of course, Israel would be free to build as much as it wanted in the first case and not at all in the last. The middle set, though, is where the problem lies. Proponents of the 2-state solution generally say that Israel should not be allowed to build at all in these disputed areas either. But they do NOT say that there should be NO building by EITHER side in these areas. In other words, they essentially give them away at the very beginning! The other BIG problem, of course, is that no "Palestinian" is ever likely to agree to any of this anyway. Actually, maybe that's a good thing!
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