Free Republic

NOTE The following text is a quote: www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/statement-press-secretary-israel-s-announcement-gaza Home • Briefing Room • Statements & Releases The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release June 20, 2010 Statement by the Press Secretary on Israel’s announcement on Gaza The President has described the situation in Gaza as unsustainable and has made clear that it demands fundamental change. On June 9, he announced that the United States was moving forward with $400 million in initiatives and commitments for the West Bank and Gaza. The President described these projects as a down payment on the U.S. commitment to the people...

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas decided on Wednesday to reward all the activists on board the flotilla aid ships by giving them Palestinian citizenship. Abbas announced the decision during a speech before the Palestine Investment Conference, which was launched in Bethlehem. He also announced that the name of the conference has been changed to the Conference of Freedom after the Free Gaza flotilla. Abbas accused Israel of waging “state terrorism” and called on the UN Security Council, the Quartet and other international bodies to provide protection for the Palestinians and to work toward lifting the blockade on the Gaza Strip....

N. Korea's Kim likely to visit China from late April to early May BEIJING/JERUSALEM, April 24 KYODO North Korea and China are making final arrangements for a visit by North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to China from late April to early May, diplomatic sources said Saturday. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas plans to hold talks with Kim in China when Abbas visits the country on Friday and Saturday next week, the sources said. Abbas plans to attend the opening ceremony of the World Expo in Shanghai on Friday. If Abbas were to be able to meet Kim in Beijing, Kim's...

The world has gone mad—or at least, the American leadership has now formally joined the Islamist and international madness about “peace in the Middle East.” President Obama has just claimed that American “vital national security” is linked to finding—or even imposing—peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. South Africa’s revered Archbishop Emeritus, Desmond Tutu, has just praised the recent Berkeley student vote (which the university’s president later vetoed) to divest university money from companies that “profit from the injustice of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land in violation of Palestinian human rights.” Tutu writes that what he witnessed in occupied...

When the Oslo process began in 1993, one benefit its adherents promised was a significant improvement in Israel’s international standing. And initially, it seemed as if that promise would be kept: 37 countries soon established or renewed diplomatic relations with Israel; a peace treaty was signed with Jordan; five other Arab states opened lower-level relations. But 16 years later, it is clear that this initial boost was illusory. Not only is Israel’s standing no better than it was prior to the famous handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat on the White House Lawn in September 1993, it has fallen...

Palestinian Sources have announced today that the leader of Fatah/President of the Palestinian Territories has decided he will step down because of a lack of progress in peace talks. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will not seek re-election in polls next year, reports suggest. Officials from the Palestine Liberation Organisation told journalists in the West Bank that Mr Abbas "insists on not running" in the 24 January election. A aide to Mr Abbas said earlier a lack of progress in peace talks with Israel and failure to achieve reconciliation with Hamas could prompt such a move. But another aide said...

Israel has been placed on alert for the prospect of widespread Palestinian violence throughout the West Bank. Officials said Israel's military, police and intelligence services were ordered on high alert after the military has assessed that the ruling Fatah movement, in cooperation with elements within the Palestinian Authority, were organizing civil unrest as well as ambushes on Israeli soldiers and civilians. Officials said PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has been pressed by senior members of Fatah to approve what was termed a "third intifada," or uprising. "Abbas doesn't have to actually approve anything," the official said. "He just has to remain...

JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel's foreign minister says there's no chance of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for many years. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman says efforts to reach a final peace deal have failed since the first accord between Israel and the Palestinians in 1993. Lieberman says it's unrealistic to think a long-term agreement on ending the conflict can be reached at this time and that whoever thinks an agreement can be reached soon just doesn't understand the situation.

Canadian MP: Mahmoud Abbas Purveys Anti-Jewish Incitement ArutzSheva Israel ...He also met with PA officials and told them that "hate breeds hate." Saying that Hamas, with "their charter with its genocidal objective, anti-Semitic ... http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/127280

T.S. Eliot wrote memorably in The Hollow Men: Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the shadow. In the case of the peace process and all the great ideas for fixing everything in Arab-Israel relations, the shadow has been Palestinian leaders' unwillingness - and now also inability - to make a compromise agreement ending the conflict. Close examination of the movement's ideology, organization and structure shows why this is true. Many, or most, of the young guard prefer a deal with Hamas to one with Israel, and a return to...

JERUSALEM (AP) - President Bush, seeking to pull Israel and the Palestinians toward serious negotiations, said Wednesday that despite ongoing land squabbles and fears of violence he has high hopes that a Mideast peace pact can be achieved before he leaves office at the end of the year. "I come as an optimistic person and a realistic person - realistic in my understanding that it's vital for the world to fight terrorists, to confront those who would murder the innocent to achieve political objectives," Bush said as he began his first presidential visit to Israel. His first formal meeting was...

Brainchild of the KGB As Ion Mihai Pacepa, onetime director of the Romanian espionage service (DIE), later explained, the PLO was conceived at a time when the KGB was creating “liberation front” organizations throughout the Third world. Others included the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, created in 1964 with help from Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and the National Liberation Army of Colombia, created in 1965 with help from Fidel Castro. But the PLO was the KGB’s most enduring achievement. In 1964, the first PLO Council, consisting of 422 Palestinian representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved the Soviet blueprint for a Palestinian...

Western financial aid to the Palestinians has, I showed last week, the perverse and counterintuitive effect of increasing their rate of homicides, including terrorist ones. This week, I offer two pieces of perhaps even stranger news about the many billions of dollars and record-shattering per-capita donations from the West: First, these have rendered the Palestinians poorer. Second, Palestinian impoverishment is a long-term positive development. To begin, some basic facts about the Palestinian economy, drawing on a fine survey by Ziv Hellman, "Terminal Situation," in the Dec. 24 issue of Jerusalem Report: # Palestinian per year per-capita income has contracted by...

Will the real George W. please stand up? After seven years of fearlessly confronting evil, both rhetorically and militarily, the Bush Administration in Washington seems to have faded away, replaced instead by a meek shadow of its former self. Firm resolve has given way to disappointing frailty, as the shape and direction of US foreign policy increasingly resembles something taken straight out of Bill Clinton's playbook. Across the board, on nearly every major issue of the day, from Iran to Syria to North Korea, the Bush administration is in retreat, abandoning the principled stands of yesteryear and replacing them with...

Washington - Looking to the post-Bush era in American politics, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is attempting to enlist leading presidential candidates to support his renewed push for a settlement with the Palestinians. When Olmert was in the United States for the Annapolis, Md., peace summit, he took the opportunity to call each of the leading presidential candidates to brief them on the plans for engaging in final-status talks with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. “I found that all the candidates had a lot of good will toward Israel,” Olmert said later in a press briefing. “They were all very friendly...

When Did Mahmoud Abbas Become Mother Teresa? by Jack Engelhard In his meeting with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, President Bush cited Mahmoud Abbas as “a reasonable voice among the extremists.” Speaking on Fox TV, even Charles Krauthammer labeled Abbas as a nice guy. (Or words along those lines.) Therefore, Abbas is to receive all the money and weapons he needs to stay in business along the “West Bank” (before Hamas comes in to take that over as well, using all the American-provided firepower that it stole right under the nose of Fatah.This Hamas takeover of the "West Bank" is sure...

THE War on Terror is over.Or, at least, the West seems to be declaring it so. We've had enough. There's been too much hostility. Too many lives lost; too many civil liberties trampled on. Too many Muslims offended. So we're pulling out. We'll just have to "dialogue" more - and fight less. Who sees any chance of winning militarily, anyhow? We'll have to work things out "politically" instead - offering "flexibility" and a willingness to compromise with the enemy. Just one little problem: The enemy has yet to sign on to ending the war. They have no desire to compromise...

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will address the Israeli Knesset on Sunday evening as part of a congressional trip to the Middle East. The San Francisco Democrat is traveling with Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim member of Congress. They arrived in Israel on Friday. The lawmakers plan to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and to travel to the West Bank to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said Ellison's spokesman, Rick Jauert.

Why is bloody reality messing up our fake peace?By Diana WestFriday, February 2, 2007 I've finally discovered what they call "linkage" between the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But, instead of seeing any connection between what goes on inside Iraq and that fraudulent "peace process" -- by which the one party wanting "peace" (Israel) is gradually destroyed by the other party using "process" (the Palestinians) -- I see linkage in the overall American approach to the two war zones. Our strategy is identical. In both cases, it is based on a complete and willful suspension of disbelief. It...

David Bedein Holds Up Cover Of Abu Mazen's Book On Monday, the Israeli government issued vehement denunciation of the conference convened by the Iranian government in Teheran to promote the denial of the mass murder of the Jews in World War II, in an act of holocaust denial. Our news agency asked the spokespeople of the government of Israel if they would also denounce the leader of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, for the holocaust denial which has been an integral part of his legacy. However, the government of Israel would issue no such...