Eric Adler in the New York Press reveals a meeting between President Bush and a legal advisor for the PLO:
Diana Buttu has called Israel "the greatest abuser of human rights" in the world, claimed that the Jewish state is worse than South Africa under apartheid and characterized the Oslo peace process as a Zionist ploy to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. She isn't the kind of woman you'd expect to have the ear of President Bush. But you'd be wrong.In the October 12 number of the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler details "a private 30-minute meeting in the Oval Office with a group of Palestinian officials last week" held at the behest of undersecretary of state Karen Hughes. Buttu, a legal advisor for the PLO, was among those in attendance. The Post reports that Buttu was stunned to have direct access to the president, and found him conciliatory regarding her concerns about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Last year I attended the Fourth National Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement (PSM), where Buttu offered the keynote address, in which she claimed the "the corruption issue [in the Palestinian Authority] has been dealt with."
The PSM is a front-group for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), an organization dedicated to sending naïve youngsters to the occupied territories to engage in protests aimed at de-legitimizing the state of Israel. In a PSM workshopI attended, ISM co-founder Huwaida Arraf offered a recruitment session for her group, openly acknowledging that the ISM works with Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The impromptu chat was the work of Hughes, who had just recently finished her ridiculous five-day "listening tour" of the Middle East. ("I love all kids," she assured a Turkish audience in a typical speech. "And I understand that is something I have in common with the Turkish people.")
The meeting between Bush and Palestinian delegates such as Buttu makes clear that Hughes' "listening tour" has led to more pernicious results than her mouthing of a few ineffective platitudes in the Middle East. After concluding that many Muslims blame Israel for all the world's sins, Hughes set up a presidential get-together with a perverse fanatic. It's enough to make those concerned about the survival of Israel hope that Karen Hughes no longer plays a role in this administration's foreign policy.
We can see how well Palestinians use their "freedom" with what is going on in Gaza right now. I can't understand what this woman thinks she's doing.
Hughes is building an enviable track record. First, she is warned about ISNA, then goes to their hatefest and praises them. Then she vaunts off to the Middle East without doing any research on Islam. Now she has allied herself with extremists and arranges a meeting with Bush. Keep up the good work, Dhimmi Karen.
Pres. Bush is meeting in the Rose Garden now with the "paleo" leader. More talk about how Israel should give, give, give. Two democratic nations side by side, yada yada yada.
Last year I attended the Fourth National Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement (PSM), where Buttu offered the keynote address, in which she claimed the "the corruption issue [in the Palestinian Authority] has been dealt with."
She then added, "This corruption has been dealt with by buying off the corrupting officials. And we shot one." Misinterpreting the reaction of the non-plussed crowd, she then pretended to tap a non-existent microphone and asked "Is this thing on? Hel-LO, kufr. Bueller?"
Reporter Geoff
BBUH
This and many other foot-shooting exercises over at State reflects how undereducated, intellectually lazy and naive Condi atually is.
Fellow JWers,
I can unsay no harsh words that have been said about the naivete of the left, or the Palestinian's chosen methods of resistance. However we should not blind ourselves to what is actually going on. Knowledge of the day to day lives of the Palestinians and their experience under occupation, as well as the conduct of Israeli settlers and soldiers is necessary. Without this, one cannot understand what is going on. There is no reason not to hear what they other side has to say, as long as it is comes from a common moral ground. It is well worthwhile to read some of the reports at the ISM site:
http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/category/reports
Also, the graphic novel "Palestine" by Joe Sacco:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_(graphic_novel)
Also, the film "Gaza Strip":
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0329112/
The ISM is not just a bunch of deceivers, and it is not just taqqiya that they are disseminating. What they report on is actually happening. I have heard this from Zionist Israelis myself.
This does not mean we should excuse the hate, vitriol, fundamentalism, taqqiya, Jihad and other evil coming out of the Palestinian national movement. But to ascribe their entire grievance to imagination is absurd, and a sure path to failure of OUR movement. I daresay, we must decouple the Palestianian movement from Jihad in our OWN perspective if we are to weaken the global Jihad. This can only be accomplished through a dialogue with people like the ISM, rather than vilification of them.
Quijybo
There is cosmic justice -- Bush will inevitably regret meeting with this fascist scum...
After meeting earlier with other fascist scum ( "Abu" Abbas and Nabil Shaath in June of 2003) quotes by that fascist scum supposedly uttered by President Bush are now flooding the leftist hate-America-first press in Europe, and to a lesser extent here.
Their preposterous versions of this meeting, according to these fascsit Islamic propagandists, is that Bush told them that "God told me to invade Iraq and Afghanistan -- and so I did it..."
It is swill of the highest order, and solely designed to inflame the hatreds of Muslims, and instill in the leftist secular zealots a frenzy of America-bashing and anti-Christian frothing at the mouth -- which it has done nicely if anyone bothers to read the execrable likes of the BBC or alGuardian...
This President doesn't have a very easy job, and I hardly think he makes it easier by attempting to appease these Muslim vermin by touring terror promulgating mosques, alleging that Islam is a religion of peace, meeting with terrorist scum like Abbas, "King" Abdullah, or any other Muslim terror sympathizing filth...
If he meets with this filth, Mr Bush should not be surprised after the fact when some of their dirt rubs off on him...
" I daresay, we must decouple the Palestianian movement from Jihad in our OWN perspective if we are to weaken the global Jihad."
Quijybo, why don't you post your crap someplace else?
Yes indeed. Bush works in strange and mysterious ways, no one knows what the hll he is doing. He is like Ipsissimus, not explainable to the average person. They cant understand him, nor should they try. He is shrouded by the cloak of invisibility so sometimes we see him, sometimes we dont. We can only assume that he has a plan.
Kissing Saudis and playing dhimmi may be part of it. Pretending to be a Christian when he is actually a muslim, may be another part.
And opening the borders to the flood of illegals, was a stroke of genious only another ipsissimus can understand. Thats how I know I am not ipsissimus, I dont understand any of this, kissing Saudi's, brown nosing muslims in general, basically erasing the Mexican border and a host of other things. What's Geo up to?
We may never know, but Allah does and he aint talkin.
Quijybo:
There are many ill-informed Jews, whether they are pro-Israel or anti-Israel, who know very, very little about the ISM's origins, founding members and activities. An investigation of the ISM's US charity tax returns have shown that it and it's "local" counterpart, the PSM, are very closely associated with organizations identified as being directly linked to raising funds for terror organizations.
The ISM uses gullible, impressionable young people as human shields for bomb smuggling activities and worse. And, unfortunately, the MSM bought the Rachel Corrie story hook-line-and-sinker just as it did the Mohammed Al-Durra fraud and the Jenin massacre fraud. Nobody sets out to murder someone by deliberately backing a massive bull-dozer tank over them. Her accidental death was seized upon as a golden PR opportunity by the very people who cultivated her for martyrdom and exploited to the fullest.
Waterdragon,
I am SURE you are correct about ISM's origins; I do not need to do the research (I am not being sarcastic). I have read their reports. You can see quite clearly the situation the Palestinian population is in, the constant intimidation the settlers and IDF keep them under. If we focus only on the stupid propaganda that the PA, and the ISM produces, the big picture can easily be missed. Not everything the ISM produces is distortion. A lot of it is personal stories that are easy to connect with. If I were living under the conditions that the Palestinians are, I would be spoiling for a fight. I would be willing to lay down my life. I would not become a suicide bomber or target non-combatants, but I would not necessarily be looking for a nonviolent means of resistance.
I realize Rachel Corrie flirted with death, and I do not believe the bulldozer driver who ran her down did so with malicious intent. This is not what I am trying to say. I am not interested in the propaganda value of human tragedy, but the reality of it, and how it sustains the death cult, driving Muslims who would otherwise be on the sidelines into the fray.
The point that I want to make is that there are thousands of personal stories of horror that Palestinians have experienced. They are largely untold, incomprehensible to Americans. They oil the jaws of the Jihad machine, and until they are mitigated it will be impossible for Jihad's place in Islam to be questioned effectively, from the inside.
We have to get to a point where a rational, non-Jihad addled Palestinian would want to turn to nonviolence. A little separation, an end to the most onerous features of the occupation, are reasonable steps. Fearing that they will be interpreted as a sign of weakness only puts off what has to be done, in the interest of the values that all people should share.
Quijybo
P.S. MJ, I will post. Dialogue about these issues is critical to our victory over the global Jihad. I sincerely believe, as do the great thinkers like RS, Ali Sina and Irshad Manji, that most Muslims are decent human beings. Under the right conditions, Jihad will be defeated by Muslims themselves, and Islam will be reformed or disappear.
"we must decouple the Palestianian movement from Jihad in our OWN perspective if we are to weaken the global Jihad."
-- from a posting above
What does it mean to say that "we" must decouple the "Palestinian movement from Jihad in our OWN perspective" -- it is a Jihad, a Lesser or local Jihad, a Jihad animated by Islam, a Jihad that does not countenance an Infidel state in the midst of dar al-Islam. The invention of the "Palestinian people" out of local Arabs, the history of where those local Arabs came from, including the many who are the descendants of those who arrived from Egypt and Iraq in the 1920s and 1930s, or wholesale, moved by the Ottomans, from Muslim villages isolated when the tide of Islam receded in Bulgaria and elsewhere, or with the veterans of Abd el-Kader, or with the troops of Mehmet Ali (so much for those Arabs who were there from "time immemorial") -- well, it is they who believe, as do most Arab Muslims, that no non-Muslims, and when the interests of Arabs conflict, no non-Arab Muslims, have any rights whatsoever in the end.
The more one studies the land ownership, the demography, the history of the Ottoman vilayets and the one sanjak (Jerusalem) from which Mandatory Palestine was created, the less impressed one is with any claim by the local Arabs. It is they who constantly made life hell for the Jews who asked for nothing before 1948 except the right to escape the Nazis, or the horrors of life as dhimmis in Arab countries, and to settle, on land that was always bought and paid for, or after 1948, was land inherited by the successor state (Israel), to that which had formerly been in the control of the Mandatory Authority and, before that, in the possession of the Ottoman state -- and not in private hands, as Arab propagandists would have us all believe.
The Jihad against Israel should be correctly identified, and the one grievance one can have against Israel is that its people and leaders did not learn enough about Islam to properly identify either the sources of those who oppose their existence, but the principles that underly all Muslim treaties and agreements with Israel as with all other Infidel peoples and polities (the Treaty of al-Hudaibiyya), and in failing to understand Islam, and making their own case, they also helped Infidels in Europe remain unaware of what Islam was all about, at the very time when millions of Muslims were innocently being allowed in, to settle, behind Infidel (i.e. enemy) lines.
The notion that we should convince ourselves that a Jihad is not a Jihad because of the particular Infidel victim in question, is curious, and dangerous.
"Knowledge of the day to day lives of the Palestinians and their experience under occupation.."
-- from the same poster quoted from above
"Occupation"? What "occupation"? All the territories the Israelis now possess are theirs by legal right -- the right conferred by the League of Nations Mandates Commission, when it carefully defined the territory which would be set aside, from the vast territories in the Middle East that had formerly been in the control of the Ottoman Turks, as part of their empire, and that had been won by the Allies. An Arab State, a Kurdish State, and a Jewish state were all promised. The Arabs got their state -- no, in the end, they got far more than their state but rather, in 2005, 22 members of the Arab League, the most richly endowed with natural resources of any states on earth, enjoying the fruits of the greatest transfer of wealth in human history. The Kurds did not get their state, because by the time things had settled, Kemal Ataturk was driving a hard bargain and would not permit it. The Jews got the Mandate for Palestine set up for the express purpose of establishing the Jewish Nationial Home which would inexorably become, all parties realized, in time a Jewish state. It did not seem wrong then, and does not seem wrong now, that the Jews should have a state of their own. They asked only for the right to have no barriers put up to their immigation, and no barriers put in the way of their buying land. That was it. That was the sum total of what they demanded. Until the 1948 war, when five Arab armies attacked, not a single dunam of Arab-owned land (and remember that nearly 90% of the land, in any case, remained the possession of the state or the ruling authority, as in the Mandatory period) was appropriated. No one should dare to write about this subject without having done the research on demography, land ownership, and law.
The Israeli claim to the West Bank (as Judea and Samaria were carefully renamed by Jordan after 1948, in precisely the same way, and for the same reason, that the Romans, nearly two thousand years before, had renamed Judea as "Palestine" and Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina) is not that of a military occupier, though it is also that. The main legal and historic claim is that based on the League of Nations Mandate, which in turn, was based on a considerable historic and moral claim recognized by the educated leaders of the then-civilized world, who actually knew something of the history of the area, and were not nearly as misinformed as so many have been by the mass media, and the laziness and prejudcie of journalists today.
The notion of "occupation" of course evokes imagines of Occupied Paris, or Occupied Berlin, after the war. It implies no justification for the claims of the power with the military presecnce. But the claim of Israel to the lands it took in 1967 are based, for the Sinai, on the standard rules of post-war settlement, the rules which have obtained for centuries, whereby a victor in a war of defense keeps what he has won. If the Israelis chose not to, or were forced not to, exercise that right, it does not mean that the right did not exist. It did, and it applies even more forcefully to Gaza and the West Bank. But the claim there is not based merely on the successfull conquest of territory to which otherwise Israel had no claim. It did have a claim, a claim based clearly on the Mandate for Palestine -- and like all the other League of Nations Mandates, was formally accepted, taken over as it were, by the United Nations when it came into being. This is a matter of record. It cannot be undone.
Whatever else one wishes to say about the West Bank or Gaza, the word "occupation" is a tendentious, and cruel, misnomer. What it seeks to imply, what it seeks to implant in the minds of men, is clear: Israel has no rights here. This is nonsense. This is the very reverse of the truth. Read the Mandate, and the Preamble to the Mandate, for Palestine. Then read the records of the Mandates Commission -- and especially how they reacted when the British unilaterally announced that the terms of the mandate would not be applied to Eastern Palestine -- that is, the consolation prize given to Abdullah of the Emirate of Transjordan.
Read it, and understand it.
When the Arabs/Muslims speak of Occupied Palestine, bear in mind that what they really mean is that Israel itself, the state, sets on "occupied Muslim territory".
All other arguments and defenses merely play into Arab hands.
Then again you know that.
Second subject, speaking of Americans and Brits in Iraq as Occupiers. Another slander. The Allies occupied Germany and Japan after WWII, until the people themselves could establish their own democratic government and purge themselves of their totalitarian and militaristic ideology.
Iraq is well on the way, past the mid point, of having it's own government, and if I hear correctly the Americans must have Iraqi government approval for any operations, hardly an occupation. The other half of the equation, ridding the country of it's totalitarian and militaristic ideology ain't going to happen, all that has transpired is replacing a secular totalitarian and militaristic regime, with a sectarian totalitarian and militaristic regime.. and a regime that is by nature (Islamic Ideology) more hostile to Bilad al Kufr than even Saddams regime. Remember that Saddam was once "our boy in Baghdad" and an amicable partner in the (undeclared by us) war against Iran, did not Rumsfeld himself have friendly visits with Saddam? Did not the Reagan administration provide Saddam with the means,if not the actual gas, by which he gassed the Kurds?
Seems to me that he did.
Nariz:
Occupied Iraq may be, but by forces of liberation just as parts of Nazi Europe was occupied by forces of liberation.
It's not the kind of story the MSM would like to pick up on, but earlier this week I was listening to a CBC Radio rebroadcast of a Radio Prague reporter interviewing a doctor from Basra who was in the Czech Republic to receive some advanced medical training. The reporter kept trying to lead the doctor into complaining about how awful things are back home and the doctor just kept answering how happy most Iraqis are to have Saddam gone and that while things were very difficult, he expected things would be much better several years down the road.
As for past grevious errors in US foreign policy, is that to say that the current administration should be barred from taking out the SOB? Who else was going to do it? The Arab League/non-aligned nations dominated UN?
Quijybo tells us that "Palestinians" are suffering. Well, in war usually both sides suffer, and civilians on both sides suffer, especially when they are near the front. In the case of the Arab jihad on Israel, it was the Arab leadership, including Arafat, Mahmud Abbas, Hamas [Yasin, Rantisi, etc.] who chose to make Israeli civilians specific targets of attack, mainly of bombings, not only suicide bombings. Living in Jerusalem, I have heard two large bombs explode. The first time, I didn't realize what it was. The second time I had a sick feeling in my stomach, hoping that it was something else. In fact, 22 people --including children-- had been killed on a bus. So I believe it is right to restrain the people who are committing these atrocities or supporting them in any way. And if Arabs have to wait at checkpoints and be checked, so be it. I too have to wait at checkpoints and I too am checked and my family, including my wife and kids, are too. And if soldiers come to arrest a terrorist, they are doing the right thing.
And if Quijybo thinks Jews don't have a right to live in Judea & Samaria or Gaza or Jerusalem --that's why he calls them settlers-- then he is a racist or a Muslim/Arab supremacist, whatever his own origin may be.
If there is poverty among the Arabs in Gaza or Jenin, etc., then Quijybo and his friends should ask what happened to the billions given to the "Palestinian Authority" by the USA, EU, Japan, and various rich Arabs. Why weren't those billions used to improve living conditions for poor Arabs within the zones governed or misgoverned by the PA?
Getting back to the violence, the PA leadership also have incited their own youth --including pre-teen kids-- to provoke Israeli soldiers by throwing rocks, and even fire bombs at them, and to surround terrorist leaders as human shields. They know that if a kid gets killed throwing a fire bomb [such as a molotov cocktail], then Israel will be blamed for targeting children. When terrorist leader Salah Shehadeh was killed by Israel a few years ago, some kids surrounding him were killed too. But he was responsible for murdering dozens of Israelis, which was forgotten in all the hypocrisy over the dead human shields. It should also be pointed out that the Hague laws of war say that the presence of "protected persons" [such as women and children] in the vicinity of a legitimate military target, such as Shehadeh, does not rule out an attack on the legitimate target. So Israel was acting within the laws of war, yet the laws of war have been misrepresented in order to defend the terrorists and smear Israel.
Now if Quijybo wants to see how fake much or most of the "atrocity" reporting from the PLO/PA side is, then he should go on to the "seconddraft" website and see what was really happening at the Netzarim junction when Muhammad al-Dura was allegedly killed. He should also check out incitement on the "Palestinian Authority" TV and radio, in the PA mosques and schools, etc., on such sites as MEMRI, IMRA, CAMERA, NGO Monitor, etc. For historical accounts of oppression of Jews and Christians in Israel in previous centuries, when the whole country was under Muslim rule, he might look at the webblog http://ziontruth.blogspot.com . Quijybo should bear in mind that under Mamluk and Ottoman rule, Jews were the low man on the totem pole; they were at the bottom of the pecking order in Israel, even below the Christians who were fellow dhimmis. This is attested in much contemporary literature, travel accounts, pilgrim itineraries, from those times, written by both Jews and Christians.
Bush and his administration is becoming a disgrace to the nation, and I,m sorry I voted for him.