Speedy's Media: Flotilla Won’t Bring Peace

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Flotilla Won’t Bring Peace

Gaza flotillas fill no great humanitarian void, clearly designed to provoke Israel

by Jason Edelstein

Another round of “Flotilla Activism” aimed at inciting greater tension in the Arab-Israeli conflict is scheduled for this week. Just like last year’s infamous flotilla incident that resulted in nine deaths, the latest crop of flotilla participants – a fringe group of extremists working alongside terrorists – is more concerned with their own PR and promoting hate, violence, and chaos, rather than with working with Israelis and Palestinians to find peaceful solutions to the conflict. Hence, it is all the more shocking that several European government-funded groups are either publicly supporting or participating in this stunt.

Like other tactics before, the flotilla is a continuation of the “Durban Strategy” to isolate Israel internationally. Numerous NGOs are contributing to the strategy’s implementation. This includes the Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolitions (ICAHD) - funded by the European Union (EU), Spain, and the governments of the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland via the NGO Development Center (NDC) – and the Alternative Information Center (AIC), which is funded by Diakonia (Sweden), and ICCO (the Netherlands).

Additionally, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) is supporting the flotilla. It is funded by the European Union and by the governments of Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway; NDC, and numerous private organizations, including Ford Foundation (USA), International Commission of Jurists (Sweden), and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSI - US). Why European governments are lending support to this anti-peace initiative is incomprehensible.

Ironically, many of these individual governments, along with the EU, have voiced their strong opposition to the flotilla. The EU Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid Kristalina Georgieva has declared, “We are not in favor of attempts to help people in this way. One needs to work with the authorities in Israel in order to transfer humanitarian aid via the formal channels…” Similarly, Dutch Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal told Parliament on April 28, 2011: “The Dutch government will unambiguously say that we are against this flotilla…”

No crisis in Gaza
Furthermore, under international law, UN member states, as mandated by UN Security Council Resolution 1373, must “prohibit their nationals or any persons and entities within their territories from making any funds, financial assets or economic resources or financial or other related services available” for terrorist activities.

Clearly, then, European funding of NGOs participating in the flotilla is contrary to government policy and to common sense. The individual governments and the EU should therefore freeze funding to these NGOs and launch investigations regarding their funding of NGOs active in these activities.

In addition to these government-funded NGOs, the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which led the 2010 flotilla and is also centrally involved this year, has a history of supporting “armed struggle” and initiating violent confrontations with Israeli soldiers. Regarding these provocations, co-founders Huwaida Arraf and Adam Shapiro once wrote that deaths from Palestinian “resistance” are “no less noble than carrying out a suicide operation. And we are certain that if these men were killed during such an action, they would be considered shaheed Allah.”

In other words, peace and humanitarian aid are not the primary motivation of flotilla organizers – partly because there is no need for a humanitarian mission to Gaza.

As reconfirmed by Mathilde Redmant, deputy director of the Red Cross in Gaza, on April 21, 2011, “There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza.” Humanitarian aid reaches Gaza through multiple routes, including the hundreds of tons of goods that Israel trucks in each week. Additionally, Israel has agreed to deliver any humanitarian aid to Gaza after inspection at the border.

The flotilla, therefore, fills no great humanitarian void, but is clearly designed to provoke Israel and expand the Durban process. And now, taxpayer Euros are funding this activity that contradicts Europe’s policies vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict. European governments should ensure that funding does not go to groups that work against peace.

Jason Edelstein is communications director of NGO Monitor

Ynet News

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Favorite Quotes About Israel & Palestine

REMEMBER: ISRAEL IS BAD!
ITS EXISTENCE KEEPS REMINDING MUSLIMS WHAT A BUNCH OF LOSERS THEY ARE.

1) "Who can challenge the rights of the Jews to Palestine? Good Lord, historically, it is really your country."
~ Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, Mayor of Jerusalem, in 1899. ~

2) "We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement.... We will wish the Jews a hearty welcome home... our two movements compliment one another."
~ Emir Faisal, a leader of the Arab world, in 1919. ~

3) Throughout his authorized biography (Alan Hart, Arafat: terrorist or peace maker) Arafat asserts at least a dozen times:
"The Palestinian people have no national identity. I, Yasser Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with Israel."
~ Yasser Arafat ~

4) “We plan to eliminate the state of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion. . . . We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem.”
~ Yasser Arafat ~

5) "Peace for us means the destruction of Israel. We are preparing for an all out war, a war which will last for generations.
~Yasser Arafat~

6) "The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel. For our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of Palestinian people, since Arab national interest demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism".
~ Zahir Muhse'in, Member PLO Executive and the hoax of "Palestinian" identity - March 31, 1977 interview with the Amsterdam-based newspaper "Dagblad de Verdieping Trouw"~

7) "There is no such country as Palestine. 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented. There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria. 'Palestine' is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it".
- Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, Syrian Arab leader to British Peel Commission, 1937 -

8) "There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not".
- Professor Philip Hitti, Arab historian, 1946 -

9) "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria".
- Representant of Saudi Arabia at the United Nations, 1956

10) Concerning the Holy Land, the chairman of the Syrian Delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in February 1919 stated: "The only Arab domination since the Conquest in 635 c.e. hardly lasted, as such, 22 years".

11) " There is no Palestinian nation! There is an Arab nation, but no Palestinian nation. This was invented by the colonial powers. When are the Palestinians mentioned in history? Never."
~ Azmi Bishara, former Arab Knesset member, on Israel television. ~

12) "There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent (valley of Jezreel, Galilea); not for thirty miles in either direction... One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings. For the sort of solitude to make one dreary, come to Galilee... Nazareth is forlorn... Jericho lies a mouldering ruin... Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and humiliation... untenanted by any living creature... A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds... a silent, mournful expanse... a desolation... We never saw a human being on the whole route... Hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil had almost deserted the country... Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes... desolate and unlovely...".
- Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad", 1867 -

13) "In 1590 a 'simple English visitor' to Jerusalem wrote: 'Nothing there is to bescene but a little of the old walls, which is yet remayning and all the rest is grasse, mosse and weedes much like to a piece of rank or moist grounde'.".
- Gunner Edward Webbe, Palestine Exploration Fund, Quarterly Statement, p. 86; de Haas, History, p. 338 -

14) "The land in Palestine is lacking in people to till its fertile soil".
- British archaeologist Thomas Shaw, mid-1700s -

15) "Palestine is a ruined and desolate land".
- Count Constantine François Volney, XVIII century French author and historian -

16) "The Arabs themselves cannot be considered but temporary residents. They pitched their tents in its grazing fields or built their places of refuge in its ruined cities. They created nothing in it. Since they were strangers to the land, they never became its masters. The desert wind that brought them hither could one day carry them away without their leaving behind them any sign of their passage through it".
- Comments by Christians concerning the Arabs in Palestine in the 1800s -

17) "Then we entered the hill district, and our path lay through the clattering bed of an ancient stream, whose brawling waters have rolled away into the past, along with the fierce and turbulent race who once inhabited these savage hills. There may have been cultivation here two thousand years ago. The mountains, or huge stony mounds environing this rough path, have level ridges all the way up to their summits; on these parallel ledges there is still some verdure and soil: when water flowed here, and the country was thronged with that extraordinary population, which, according to the Sacred Histories, was crowded into the region, these mountain steps may have been gardens and vineyards, such as we see now thriving along the hills of the Rhine. Now the district is quite deserted, and you ride among what seem to be so many petrified waterfalls. We saw no animals moving among the stony brakes; scarcely even a dozen little birds in the whole course of the ride".
- William Thackeray in "From Jaffa To Jerusalem", 1844 -

18) "The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is of a body of population".
- James Finn, British Consul in 1857 -

29) "The area was underpopulated and remained economically stagnant until the arrival of the first Zionist pioneers in the 1880's, who came to rebuild the Jewish land. The country had remained "The Holy Land" in the religious and historic consciousness of mankind, which associated it with the Bible and the history of the Jewish people. Jewish development of the country also attracted large numbers of other immigrants - both Jewish and Arab. The road leading from Gaza to the north was only a summer track suitable for transport by camels and carts... Houses were all of mud. No windows were anywhere to be seen... The plows used were of wood... The yields were very poor... The sanitary conditions in the village [Yabna] were horrible... Schools did not exist... The rate of infant mortality was very high... The western part, toward the sea, was almost a desert... The villages in this area were few and thinly populated. Many ruins of villages were scattered over the area, as owing to the prevalence of malaria, many villages were deserted by their inhabitants".
- The report of the British Royal Commission, 1913 -

So the concepts "Palestinians" and "Palestinian People" and "Palestinian nation" and "Palestinian national self-determination" and "historical Palestine" are all hoaxes to facilitate the Arab terrorist destruction of Israel. What does that tell us about what possible solutions to the conflict may work?..and what does it tell us about what will NOT work?

Favorite Quotes About Jordan IS Palestine

Here are several quotes from "officials" in the so-called Palestinian community.
LET THEM SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES!!!!

1) "We are the Government of Palestine, the army of Palestine and the refugees of Palestine."
~ The Prime Minister of Jordan, Hazza' al-Majali, August 23,1959 ~

2) "Palestine and Transjordan are one, for Palestine is the coastline and Transjordan the hinterland of the same country."
~ King Abdullah, at the Meeting of the Arab League, Cairo, 12th April 1948 ~

3) "Let us not forget the East Bank of the (River) Jordan, where seventy per cent of the inhabitants belong to the Palestinian nation."
~ George Habash, leader of the PFLP section of the PLO, writing in the PLO publication Sha-un Falastinia, February 1970

4) "Palestine is Jordan and Jordan is Palestine; there is one people and one land, with one history and one and the same fate."
~ Prince Hassan, brother of King Hussein, addressing the Jordanian National Assembly, 2nd February 1970 ~

5) "There is no family on the East Bank of the river (Jordan) that does not have relatives on the West Bank ... no family in the west that does not have branches in the east."
~ King Hussein, addressing the Jordanian National Assembly, 2nd February 1972 ~

6) "We consider it necessary to clarify to one and all, in the Arab world and outside, that the PALESTINIAN PEOPLE with its nobility and conscience is to be found HERE on the EAST Bank The WEST Bank and the Gaza Strip. Its overwhelming majority is HERE and nowhere else."
~ King Hussein, quoted in An-Hahar, Beirut, 24th August 1972 ~

7) "The Palestinians here constitute not less than one half of the members of the armed forces. They and their brothers, the sons of Transjordan, constitute the members of one family who are equal in everything, in rights and duties." (Quoted by BBC Monitoring Service)
~ King Hussein, on Amman Radio, 3rd February 1973 ~

8) "There are, as well, links of geography and history, and a wide range of interests between the two Banks (of the River Jordan) which have grown stronger over the past twenty years. Let us not forget that el-Salt and Nablus were within the same district - el-Balka - during the Ottoman period, and that family and commercial ties bound the two cities together."
~ Hamdi Ken'an, former Mayor of Nablus, writing in the newspaper Al-Quds, 14th March 1973 ~

9) "The new Jordan, which emerged in 1949, was the creation of the Palestinians of the West Bank and their brothers in the East. While Israel was the negation of the Palestinian right of self-determination, unified Jordan was the expression of it."
~ Sherif Al-Hamid Sharaf, Representative of Jordan at the UN Security Council, 11th June 1973 ~

10) Past "President Bourguiba (of Tunisia) considers Jordan an artificial creation presented by Great Britain to King Abdullah. But he accepts Palestine and the Palestinians as an existing and primary fact since the days of the Pharaohs. Israel, too, he considers as a primary entity. However, Arab history makes no distinction between Jordanians, Syrians and Palestinians. Most of them hail from the same Arab race, which arrived in the region with the Arab Moslem conquest."
~ Editorial Comment in the Jordanian Armed Forces' weekly, Al-Aqsa, Amman, 11th July 1973 ~

11) "With all respect to King Hussein, I suggest that the Emirate of Transjordan was created from oil cloth by Great Britain, which for this purpose cut up ancient Palestine. To this desert territory to the bast of the Jordan (River)., it gave the name Transjordan. But there is nothing in history which carries this name. While since our earliest time there was Palestine and Palestinians. I maintain that the matter of Transjordan is an artificial one, and that Palestine is the basic problem. King Hussein should submit to the wishes of the people, in accordance with the principles of democracy and self-determination, so as-to avoid the fate of his grandfather, Abdullah, or of his cousin, Feisal, both of whom were assassinated."
~ Past President Bourguiba of Tunisia, in a public statement, July 1973 ~

12) "The Palestinians and the Jordanians have created on this soil since 1948 one family - all of whose children have equal rights and obligations."
~ King Hussein, addressing an American Delegation, 19th February 1975 ~

13) "How much better off Hussein would be if he had been induced to abandon his pose as a benevolent 'host' to 'refugees' and to affirm the fact that Jordan is the Palestinian Arab nation-state, just as Israel is the Palestinian Jewish nation-state."
~ Editorial Comment in the publication The Economist of 19th July 1975 ~

14) "Palestine and Jordan were both (by then) under British Mandate, but as my grandfather pointed out in his memoirs, they were hardly separate countries. Transjordan being to the east of the River Jordan, it formed in a sense, the interior of Palestine."
~ King Hussein, writing in his Memoirs ~

15) "Those fishing in troubled waters will not succeed in dividing our people, which extends to both sides of the (River) Jordan, in spite of the artificial boundaries established by the Colonial Office and Winston Churchill half a century ago."
~ Yassir Arafat, in a statement to Eric Roleau ~

16) "Palestinian Arabs hold seventy-five per cent of all government jobs in Jordan."
~ The Sunday newspaper The Observer of 2nd March 1976 ~

17) "Palestinian Arabs control over seventy per cent of Jordan's economy."
~ The Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram of 5th March 1976 ~

18) "There should be a kind of linkage because Jordanians and Palestinians are considered by the PLO as one people."
~ Farouk Kadoumi, head of the PLO Political Department, quoted in Newsweek, 14th March 1977 ~

19) "Along these lines, the West German Der Spiegel magazine this month cited Dr George Habash, leader of one of the Palestinian organizations, as saying that 70 per cent of Jordan's population are Palestinians and that the power in Jordan should be seized." (Translated by BBC Monitoring Service)
~ From a commentary which was broadcast by Radio Amman, 30th June 1980 ~

20) "Jordan is not just another Arab state with regard to Palestine but, rather, Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan in terms of territory, national identity, sufferings, hopes and aspirations, both day and night. Though we are all Arabs and our point of departure is that we are all members of the same people, the Palestinian-Jordanian nation is one and unique, and different from those of the other Arab states."
~ Marwan al Hamoud, member of the Jordanian National Consultative Council and former Minister of Agriculture, quoted by Al Rai, Amman, 24th September 1980 ~

21) "The potential weak spot in Jordan is that most of the population are not, strictly speaking, Jordanian at all, but Palestinian. An estimated 60 per cent of the country's 2,500,000 people are Palestinians ... Most of these hold Jordanian passports, and many are integrated into Jordanian society."
~ Richard Owen, in an article published in The Times, 14th November 1980 ~

22) "There is no moral justification for a second Palestine."
~ The Freeman Center (September 3, 1993) ~

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Thursday, June 30, 2011

Flotilla Won’t Bring Peace

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Thursday, June 30, 2011

Flotilla Won’t Bring Peace

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Israel Should Make Peace With Whom? Click HERE for more information

Israel Should Make Peace With Whom?

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