Who exactly do the Trump Peace team think represents the Palestinians?

Who exactly do the Trump Peace team think represents the Palestinians?

I have a question.
The Trump Administration is about to unfurl a new peace plan between Israel and the Palestinians.
It will be done in stages beginning with an economic workshop in Bahrain attended by most of the major Arab states, Israel, and the United States.
My question is, who represents the Palestinians?
This is the BIG question that was never asked in the past by the international diplomatic community in their failed efforts at peacemaking. It is not being asked of the Trump team as they set about introducing a new deal to solve an unsolvable problem.
It is unsolvable because the body they think represents the Palestinians does not represent them.
The BIG mistake of the past couple of decades was to assume that the Palestinian Authority represents the Palestinian people.
Wrong!

Mahmoud Abbas does not represent the majority of the Palestinians, even though he says he does.
The last time the Palestinians called for national elections Hamas won the majority vote.
That's why, in 2007, a Palestinian civil war erupted in the Gaza Strip when Fatah came to impose  Palestinian Authority rule and the victorious Hamas struck back at the PA attempt to usurp power in Gaza.
So I ask again, this time to the Trump team and all those naive diplomats supporting their efforts. Who you do think represents the Palestinians?
This is a vitally important question, don't you agree? After all, you want to be negotiating with the partner who can deliver the peace you are seeking.
In this case it won't be Mahmoud Abbas.
It won't be Mahmoud Abbas because if anybody noticed, at the end of 2018, Mahmoud Abbas dissolved the Palestinian Legislative Council.
Why did he do it?
Because, according to the Palestinian Constitution, if the President of the PA, currently Mahmoud Abbas, was unable to continue in his role due to ill health, removal, or death, the Speaker of the PLC  is duty bound to replace him with the leader of the largest political faction - which is Hamas.
In other words, Hamas is one cough away from usurping power by default over the Palestinian Authority.
So may I ask one final time. Who do the peacemakers assume speaks on behalf of the Palestinians?
If they guess Mahmoud Abbas, they would be wrong.
This is the reason Mahmoud Abbas is refusing to participate in the Trump peace plan. He knows he represents nobody but his immediate coterie of family and friends in his kleptocracy.
That's why, according to Human Rights Watch, hundreds of people are being interred in detention camps in Jericho for challenging his corrupt rule with at least twenty eight cases of torture at the hands of their Palestinian jailers.
The reason the Trump plan is going nowhere is because there is no Palestinian leader willing or able to deliver the goods.
It may be the best solution for the Palestinians but that is not an issue, not for the unelected Palestinian Authority, and certainly not for Hamas, the Palestinian popular choice, who are adamant that they will never make peace with Israel because all of "Palestine," from the river to the sea, belongs to them.
Surely, based on these factors, the Trump team should be negotiating with Hamas.
Good luck with that. It will have even less success than trying to negotiate with Mahmoud Abbas who is incapable of delivering the goods, even if he wanted.
 
Barry Shaw is the International Public Diplomacy Director at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. 

In Iceland, hate prevails from their Nazi SS past to their Eurovision BDS Nasties.

The nasty appearance of the Icelandic group, Hatari, singing “Hate will prevail” in the Eurovision 2019 Song Contest in Tel Aviv is nothing new for Iceland.

The group’s ingratitude to Israel, whose soldiers had protected them when Israel was bombarded by over seven hundred Palestinian rockets as they were rehearsing for the show, was greeted by global boos and condemnation as they unfurled their ‘Palestine’ banners at the televised Final, a gesture that angered the European Broadcasting Union who may sanction Iceland for their political provocation.

Their gesture fell flat and became a stain of shame on Iceland.

But political provocation and the propagation of hate is nothing new to the cold Arctic island of Iceland. Iceland has shown a consistent disdain for Jews and for Israel going back to the 16^th century and the “Passion Psalms” of Icelandic clergyman, Hallgrimur Petursson. They are full of expressions of malice toward the Jews as in;

“The righteous Law of Moses

The Jews here misapplied,

Which their deceit exposes,

Their hatred and their pride.”

Hatred and the pride dwelt entirely among the Icelanders who generally met no Jews until a few Jewish refugees, fleeing the Holocaust, arrived on their shores and found a very chilly reception.

Although a few arrived in the 19^th century as traders and merchants they were greeted by the anti-Semitic first president of the University of Iceland, Bjorn Olsen, who wrote about one trading firm, “Jewishness radiates from all of their activities. The firm wears various disguises, but Jews are always recognizable by their voice.”

It tuned out that the Jews he scathingly smeared from his academic ivy tower were, in fact, Christian Danish merchants.

In 1933, a Nazi Party was formed in Iceland. It became the National Socialist Party with connections to the German Nazi Party. As with the 19^th century university president and with Adolph Hitler, they invented tales of Jews and Jewish conspiracies everywhere. 

Jews were expelled or fled Iceland, usually for refuge in Scandinavian countries.

A celebrated Icelandic writer, Halldor Kiljan Laxness, wrote demeaning and as ungratefully as the Hatari group in Tel Aviv, about “the Jewish girl with the hooked nose” who obtained for him tickets for the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

Other cultural Icelandic anti-Semites included Gunnar Gunnarson who met Hitler at his chancellery in Berlin on March 20, 1040. He was photographed coming out of that meeting accompanied by Heinrich Lohse, who was to become the ReichsKommisar and the butcher of the Jewish ghettos of Latvia. 

It is shocking that today; Icelandic cultural advocates are persistently petitioning the Nobel Academy of Sweden to posthumously award Gunnarson their award for literature.

Bjorn Sveinn Bjornsson, the eldest son of the first President of Iceland, was one of several hundreds of Icelanders that joined the infamous Waffen SS. Some served as SS Totenkopf concentration camp guards and were directly engaged in the genocide of six million Jews. Bjorn Bjornsson reached the rank of SS Untersturmfuhrer, or second lieutenant before heading the Nazi propaganda machine based in Denmark. He personally acted like the Icelandic Lord Haw Haw, William Joyce, a member of the British Union of Fascists and a British traitor who broadcast Nazi propaganda from Germany. Joyce was captured after the war and executed for his war crimes. Bjornsson avoided such justice due to the intervention of his mother and the protection of the Icelandic government.

In May 1945, Danish partisans took control of Denmark and arrested the remaining SS troops in the country. Bjornsson was taken captive, but the Icelandic authorities stepped in. His mother, the first lady of Iceland, intervened. During the winter of 1946, Bjornsson was suddenly released without a trial for his war crimes, and he was smuggled back to Iceland on an anonymous fishing boat.

As with Joyce, Bjornsson personally broadcast Nazi lies in which he portrayed the Nazis not as the evil aggressor but as the savior of his people and the world.

One recording exists. It was recorded in 1942 from the Caucasus in which he spoke about the evils of the Soviet Union and the saving graces of Nazi Germany.

There was a short diplomatic thaw when the Icelandic representative to the UN General assembly, Thor Thors, who had a personal sympathy for the creation of a Jewish State, voted for the Partition Vote of 1947. Transjordan and Israel, as well as Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon were established as a result of the various Mandates and this vote.

There is little evidence that the writer, Halldor Laxness, moved away from his personal anti-Semitism but he did move away from National Socialism by adopting the Socialism of the Soviet Union from which he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1952.

Laxness referred to Bjornsson as “one of the worst Icelandic men who ever existed. A man who allowed…all sorts of vile acts against the Danish people, while wearing the uniform worn by members of a specific murder club.”

In the book, ‘Islenskir Nasistar,’ the brothers, Illugi and Hrafn Jokulsson, document the many Icelanders who joined the fight on the side of Nazi Germany. In their book they recount Bjornsson producing a radio program of cultural segments. One of these segments promoted music entitled ‘The Murder Symphony’ which was described as expressing “evil and sadism” beyond anything played during those Nazi years.

Barry Shaw is the author of ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS, and Anti-Semitism,’ an examination of Jew-hatred at the heart of every aspect of Palestinian support. He is also the International Public Diplomacy Director at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.

https://www.amazon.com/Fighting-Hamas-BDS-Anti-Semitism-violence/dp/1508595534/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=fighting+hamas%2C+bds%2C+and+anti-semitism&qid=1558684328&s=gateway&sr=8-1  

The Hill of Evil Counsel

One of Israel's leading archeologists, probably the most knowledgeable person on the subject of Jewish heritage in the Holy Land through tons of evidence dug out of the ancient earth of Israel by this world leader in archeology, Gabriel Barkay, recently pointed out that although the international diplomatic community led by United Nations organizations would carve parts of Jerusalem away from Israel sovereignty it is important to know history.

Jebl Mukaber is a neighborhood of Jerusalem which they demand must become a part, even the capital of, a future Palestine.

They do not tell you that Jel Mukaber has a tradition of being the place, mentioned in the Book of Genesis, where Abraham journeyed with his son, Isaac, from the biblical Beersheba, "looked and saw the place from afar."

It was the place, as written in the Holy Bible, where Abraham bound Isaac as a sacrifice to the Lord. Hardly an Islamic tradition.

To emphasise the Jewish heritage, on the slopes of Jebl Mukaber is the opening of a tunnel, 400 meters long, which was part of an aqueduct built some 2,2000 years ago, during the Jewish Hasmonean dynasty, which channeled water from Solomon's Pools to the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, water that was needed for the daily service in the Jewish Temple.

Jebl Mukaber is part of what is referred to as the Holy Basin. Chronologically this holy site existed before Jesus. It existed before Mohammad was born or dreamed of a distant holy place.

Atop the ridge of Jebl Mukaber is a compound known as Government House. This served as the Middle East HQ for the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization. During the Mandate period it served as the seat of the British High Commissioner.

Barkay tells us that, according to Christian tradition, this ridge was the location of the palace of Caiaphas, the high priest were the decision to crucify Jesus was made.

In Christianity this site is known as the Hill of Evil Counsel.

Given the erroneous decisions made by the United Nations General Assembly, UNESCO, UNHRC and their stiff-necked resolutions to carve this traditional part of Judeo-Christian heritage away from Israel, this location is justly named.

Barry Shaw is the International Public Diplomacy Director at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. He is the author of '1917.From Palestine to the Land of Israel."

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/154230010X?pf_rd_p=2d1ab404-3b11-4c97-b3db-48081e145e35&pf_rd_r=8NEV6A9WXMW7YFPG7M5X

Don't eat Mars bars, BDS. Eat your heart out instead.

About a decade ago I wrote an article that went viral on the social media. It was called 'If You're Going to Boycott Israel - Do it Properly!' It was designed to expose the hypocrisy of the BDS idiots who order others to do what they don't do themselves.

We had a prime example of that last week when Palestinian leader, Jibril Rajoub, demanded that Atletico Madrid boycott Israel in a forthcoming football game because Israel must be isolated. Yet Rajoub quietly checked into Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv for an urgent medical treatment. Hypocrisy, par excellence!

That's why I wrote the best-selling book 'BDS FOR IDIOTS,' available on Amazon as a fun read and manual for pro-Israel activists. I call it "a seriously funny humiliation of BDS idiots."

In that vein, I invite BDS fanatics to throw away their Mars bars, because Mars has now partnered with Israeli academic institutions, including the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Weizmann Institute for Science in Rehovot, and the Technion in Haifa in support of Israeli start-ups and the development of new Israeli companies.

Mars see the clear benefits to their company and its millions of happy customers of collaborating with Israeli innovation. They have also partnered with JVP, but that's not the ridiculous Jewish Voices for Palestine. Mars have joined with Jerusalem Venture Partners to take their company into the next generation of brand leaders, and they are doing it in partnership with Israel.

So, don't eat Mars bars, BDS. Eat your heart out instead!

https://www.amazon.com/BDS-IDIOTS-BOYCOTT-ISRAEL-honestly/dp/152372157X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=21YZCKIPX30QS&keywords=bds+for+idiots&qid=1558088923&s=gateway&sprefix=bds+for+idiots%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C284&sr=8-1-spell

The hypocrisy of Palestinian leaders and BDS is shameless.

The hypocrisy of Palestinian leader, Jibril Rajoub, knows no bounds.
He is typical of the Palestinian elite. Shameless hypocrisy.
Rajoub is number 2 in the Palestinian Authority and constantly promotes and glorifies Palestinian terror.
As Minister of Sport and Chairman of the Palestine Football Association he is constantly pestering FIFA and major football clubs to boycott Israel. He is currently on a campaign to prevent Atletico Madrid coming to Israel to play a friendly game.
Rajoub is one of the PA leaders who prevents Palestinian Arabs coming to Israel to receive medical treatment. he does so out of his anti-normalization campaign that Palestinians should have zero contact with Israelis.

But guess what. Jibril Rajoub is undergoing a series of medical treatments for a serious condition at Ichilov Hospital in ISRAEL!     This hypocrisy is regularly on view both in the kleptocracy of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, and also in the brutal control of Gaza by Hamas.
When will the world wake up to the fraud and corruption of this politically split and morally bankrupt regime?
By the way, this behavior is typical of the BDS activist who call on everyone else to boycott Israel but are the first to communicate with their personally owned Israeli technology.
In total, it's typical of everyone connected with the anti-Israel movement. Fraud from end to end.

Barry Shaw. International Public Diplomacy Director. Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.

He is author of 'Fighting Hamas, BDS, and Anti-Semitism' available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.

The Ghost of Soviet KGB Ideology Within American Politics.

The Ghost of Soviet KGB Ideology Within American Politics.

After losing the 2016 Presidential Election, the inner circle of the United States government known as “Deep State” has been pursuing a disinformation campaign at the highest level in order to take down, at any cost, the current duly elected President of the United States.

The premise is built around the allegation that Trump, and those surrounding him, colluded with Russia to win the election.

At an estimated cost of $25 million, the Special Prosecutor has mulled over millions of pages of documents, investigated hundreds of key people and is about to wind up its investigation.  There is much speculation that Robert Mueller’s team will come up empty handed of any evidence implicating Donald Trump with Russian collusion.

But undoubtedly the Russians, or more precisely the former Soviet Union, have impacted the American psyche and are winning the disinformation campaign they launched over fifty years ago against both the United States and Israel.

Unfortunately, this disinformation campaign is now being conducted by Americans in power against America.  In doing so, they are doing the Soviet bidding.

When you hear the new radicals of the Democratic Party bang on against their own country and its leaders, when they adopt the propaganda of radical regimes, when we hear allegations against Israel couched in anti-Semitic terms, you can be sure that they are ideologically colluding with the ghost of the Soviet KGB.

To quote former KGB chairman, Yuri Andropov, in a conversation he had with General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking defector from the former Soviet Union to the United States in 1978.

“We could nurture a virulent strain of American-hatred, grown from the bacteria of Marxist-Leninist thought…We have only to keep repeating our themes that the United States and Israel were ‘fascist, Imperial-Zionist countries bankrolled by rich Jews.”

Andropov went on to say, “Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidel’s occupation of its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our characterization of the US Congress as a rapacious Zionist body aiming to turn the world into a Jewish fiefdom.”

Who can say that what we are hearing from Ilhan Omar and others do not accurately reflect the KGB playbook from way back in the 1960’s?

This is the emerging dialogue being heard in the US Congress.

This is the indoctrination coming out of American campuses. It is the language we are beginning to hear from the new graduates of the campus industry of Soviet-style indoctrination, graduates that are emerging as the new generation influence and opinion makers.

It began in the early 1960’s after the Arab armies failed to destroy Israel. The Communist Soviet Union entrusted the KGB to embark on a global campaign to destabilize the United States and Israel through propaganda and terrorism.

The KGB was heavily involved in support of wars of national liberation in the Third World in order to disrupt the influence of the United States. The KGB relied heavily of their intelligence service not only to spy on their adversaries, but also to train their selected candidates in the arts of destabilization through disinformation and the skills of terrorism.

Many leading Cuban, African, and Palestinian revolutionaries were brought to the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. This ivy league campus was the finishing school for top terrorists, including Arabs who would promote the Palestinian agenda to chip away at the legitimacy of Israel and eventually replace it. Yasser Arafat was there. He came as an Egyptian from Cairo and left as a Palestinian revolutionary. Mahmoud Abbas was trained in Moscow and left as a KGB spy, known as ‘Krotov” in Damascus. The notorious Ali Hassan Salameh graduated from the KGB school at Patrice Lumumba University as head of the Black September Palestinian terror group to supervise the Olympic Games massacre of the Israeli athletes. Overly ambitious, Salameh, with the strategic help of the KGB, almost succeeded in bringing down the plane carrying Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, over Rome Airport. He was eventually tracked down and killed by the Israeli Mossad in Beirut.

An integral part of the Soviet disinformation campaign in support of the Palestinian cause was to use language against Israel that we are familiar with today.

As part of the Cold War between the United States and Russia, the Soviet Union brought a 1965 United Nations resolution condemning Zionism as “colonialist and racist” to deflect from the international attention it was getting over the plight of Soviet Jews who wished to leave for Israel.  At that time, the Soviet Union was under pressure from the United States in the UN Security Council over their support for Syrian border clashes with Israel.

The Soviet resolution failed, but the KGB persisted and, with the help of the Arab and Islamic bloc then under the Soviet influence, the United Nations General Assembly proposed a second anti-Israel resolution condemning Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. UN Resolution 3379 was passed in November 1975.  It took until December 1991 for this fraudulent resolution to be revoked.

In the early 70’s, the KGB launched Operation SIG, an international smearing campaign to fan the flames of Arab resentment against the United States and Jews represented by Israel.  It was launched in the Arab world to portray America as an imperialist Jewish fiefdom financed by Jewish money and run by Jewish politicians with the aim of America and he Zionists subordinating the Islamic world. The KGB sent four thousand agents into Middle East to spread their anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda campaign.

All this was disclosed by Ion Mihai Pacepa.  Pacepa recalls a conversation in which the KGB chief, Andropov, said, “We need to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world and turn this weapon of emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States. No one within the American-Zionist sphere of influence should any longer feel safe”

Surely the echoes of this threat are alive and growing on the campuses of America, on the streets of America in pro-Palestinian (read ‘anti-Israel’) rallies, and, more worryingly, in the halls of Congress where CAIR, the NGO with strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, have been emboldened by the introduction of their candidates to positions of power as high as the US Foreign Affairs Committee.

Nothing effective has been done to counter this surge of anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic ideology which is wrapped up and protected under the brand of intersectionality politics making it impenetrable to any form of criticism by intimidation campaigns that carry the same Soviet-style accusations of racism and oppression of minorities.    

One thing is certain. The enemies of traditional America and Israel feel they have the tailwind to progress their agenda and to fundamentally change political thinking and policy within the United States government.

And it will be done following the old Soviet-KGB playbook.

Barry Shaw is the International Public Diplomacy Associate at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. He is the author of ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS, and Anti-Semitism.’

What is so special about this Yom Ha'Azmaut (Israel's Independence Day), coming so quickly after 700 enemy rockets?
What is Independence Day if not part of Jewish history.
But why is Jewish history different from other nations histories?
If history is a list of chronological facts and information, our history is a continuous story, a remembrance.
Remembrance is identity, and our Independence Day, following on after Holocaust Day and Remembrance Day commemorating our fallen soldiers and terror victims, is part of that identity.
The Bible is not just a chronological list of facts and information. It is our special story. A long chapter in our story.
And we are the next chapter in the continuation of that story.
We are living that mission. To fix the world, even as our enemies continue to try to destroy us.
It is the greatest story that mankind has ever known.
Yom Ha'Azmaut Sama'ach!

Inaccurate mainstream reporting in wartime damages Israel. It has to stop.

Accuracy is essential when reporting claims of Palestinian casualties during Palestinian-induced wars.
But accuracy is always the missing ingredient in the mainstream media.
Instead they offer bland reporting damaging to Israel such recent reporting of 20 Palestinian killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza including women and babies, which leaves the readers with a totally wrong impression.
Their inaccurate reporting leaves Israel's reputation destroyed as part of their collateral damage. It has to stop!
They should do what I do. Pause, then look for hard facts and evidence to identify the casualties. That's when the truth begins to emerge.
I have three sources for my facts. The Palestine Ministry of Health. The Meir Amit Intelligence & Terrorist Information Center and, surprisingly, from the Palestinian terror organization who love to glorify their "martyrs."
In the latest round of Hamas and Islamic Jihad initiated violence Palestinian civilian deaths, including women and babies, were killed by misguided Palestinian rocket fire. The majority were terrorists accurately targeted by Israeli return fire.
What is incredible and should be lauded by the press was the remarkable lack of collateral damage resulting from the massive tonnage of Israeli air and ground attacks against hundreds of terror targets destroyed throughout the Gaza Strip,included many high rise building in civilian areas that acted as terror centers and infrastructure.
The Intelligence & Terrorist Information Center even names the terrorists and identified their affiliations. This is the basic work we expect, but do not get, from professional journalists. Instead, they prefer to sensationalize their reporting for emotional effect, thereby becoming mouthpieces of the terrorists.
This type of sloppy reporting has to stop.
If they want to add one more element of truth to their reporting they should accurately reflect of solid fact. Terrorists target Israeli civilians. Israel targets terrorists.
If this was their headline they would be accurate in every incident of Palestinian rocket fire and Israeli response.
https://www.terrorism-info.org.il/en/identities-palestinians-killed-recent-round-escalation-initial-report-updated-may-7-2019/
Barry Shaw, International Public Diplomacy Director at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. Author of 'Fighting Hamas, BDS, and Anti-Semitism.'