Yet more evidence of the fact that it is virtually impossible to distinguish moderate Muslims from those more inclined to, or at least approving of, violence. From WND, with thanks to all who sent this in:
JERUSALEM – A Palestinian official who publicly claims to support Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives this week gave a speech in Arabic in which he praised suicide bombers, blasted "filthy [Israeli] occupation," and declared Jerusalem is Palestinian land.Qadura Faras, a Palestinian Legislative Council member and lawmaker from the ruling Fatah party, has been a vocal proponent of the Geneva Initiative, a private peace proposal drafted in 2003 by a group of extreme leftist Israelis, Palestinians and Europeans calling for an immediate Palestinian state in Gaza, Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.
Faras appears on a video featured on the official Geneva Initiative website with a message of peace toward Israelis:
"It is always asked, do you [Israelis] have a partner on the other side. I am telling you with full sincerity, we are ready to reach an inclusive agreement with you, which will promise us freedom and liberty and statehood, and will promise you the thing we know you are sensitive to, which is your full right to live in peace and security."
But Israel-based Palestinian Media Watch reports Faras this week conveyed a different kind of message in a speech to a group of Palestinians.
According to the Al-Hayat Al-Jadida Palestinian newspaper, which covered Faras' Arabic-language address, the Fatah official "emphasized the continuation of the struggle until the freeing of all of the Palestinian territories from the filth of the occupation, and establishing the independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. Fares blessed the prisoners behind bars, and in particular mentioned the imprisoned fighter, "The Sniper" Tha'ir Hamed, who carried out the ... operation that led to the killing and injuring of several of the occupation soldiers."
Hamed was involved in terror attacks that killed 10 Israelis.
The only thing we can possibly hope for is that this man is genuine in what he says to the Israelis, and that before an Arab audience he felt compelled to keep them onside by regurgitating the same stupid old rhetoric. We've seen in Northern Ireland that politicians with violent factions behind them often have to keep up the rhetoric of resistance in order to carry their own people with them into a peace process.
The difference though, is that Catholics in Northern Ireland were never exposed to the rhetoric of weekly sermons demanding the death of the filthy protestant occupiers who were the enemies of Christ. The rhetoric in Irish Nationalism was always political, never based on the manipulation of religious absolutism and the literal demonisation of their enemies as the enemies of God.
What hope has poor Israel got of ever overcoming such ingrained, religiously-institutionalised hatred? In the short term, perhaps they should simply strengthen the barrier and withdraw behind it.
It really makes NO difference whether he believes in what he is saying or not. If those who do disagree with most of the jihadist teachings fail to act then they do not count.
I am really starting to be of the opinion that there are no truly moderate and peaceful Muslims as if they do not believe in moderation and pacifism sufficiently to defend it then they are NO better than the jihadists.
The only possible means to a nonviolent future for all of islam is if these "moderates" take control of their religion fro once and for all and change it and I see no evidence for this.
Does anyone else?
Zathras your point is well made. I should have made it more clear that, even if his truthful opinion is that peace is the forward rather than the more arabic views he expresses to an arabic audience, he is still guilty of contributing to that cumulative hatred of Israel and of Jews, and therefore of incitement to murder and to terrorism.
Given that UN resolution 242 after the Six Day War called on Israel to return territories occupied in war alongside a guarantee that Israel's borders and integrity would be respected and that Israel's legal status would be acknowledged without force or threats of force hanging over it, Mr Faras's threats to continue the armed struggle are just one more reason why Israel would be perfectly entitled to maintain occupation of the West Bank, as well as reoccupying Gaza.
Ultimately though, what would that achieve? I sincerely think that the future for Israel lies in withdrawing unilaterally behind a barrier of some sort, and keeping the beasts out, while letting the Palestinians screw their own country up for all the world to see, as they have begun to do in Gaza.
I also agree with you that 'moderate' muslims who do nothing to counter this virus are as morally culpable as the jihadists. To return again to the Northern Irish experience, the vast majority of Nationalists in the province always claimed to be against the IRA's more barbaric activities throughout the thirty years of the campaign against the British, but it was only when the Nationalist community actually began to withdraw its previously unspoken tolerance of the murders carried out in its name that the IRA went to the negotiating table and gave up the struggle. And what made the community turn against the terrorists? It told the IRA to stop the war because the unionist terror groups started to outkill the nationalists. Unfortunately the arithmetic of murder found a solution.
Israel has no such arithmetic to turn to - for the reason that the world does not allow it to fight back in kind against these animals.
Religion_of_peas,
Thought I will copy a good op-ed from a liberal writter in Haaretz (to my taste very left newspaper in Israel). It has a pretty interesting answer to your question: What chance has Israel to survive?
http://news.haaretz.co.il/hasen/spages/669170.html
It has been suggested that suicide bombings were a total failure. Maybe not.
True, as far as its stated objectives were concerned, the people who invented suicide bombing accomplished nothing.
They had hoped to see Israel, to paraphrase Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, collapse as weakly as a spider's web under pressure. They had advertised the suicide bomber to crowds in Jenin and Jabalya as the sole Palestinian defense against attacks by U.S.-made IDF weaponry. They had argued that the shahid salvaged Palestinian honor.
All they managed to salvage, in the end, was Zionism.
Think back. The 1990s, the decade of false dawns, nearly killed this country. The Oslo delusion of peace combined with the NASDAQ illusion of wealth-beyond-measure, to divide and alienate Israelis as never before.
Members of the secular left suddenly imagined themselves to have become citizens of the world, shackled no longer by tradition, parochialism, patriotism. Ultra-orthodox in their non-conventionality, cool to the point of anethesia, their antipathy to Zionism bordered on the physical.
The very mention of Zionism had become a joke. The Hebrew words Tzionut [Zionism] and Tziniut [cynicism] had become interchangeable.
The religious right steamed down the opposite path. Betrayed by Oslo and Yitzhak Rabin, the very man who had brought them Greater Israel in 1967, many on the right plunged into a mindset that implied that settlements were the only genuine Zionism, and that Israel had been better off when the world had kept the whole country in diplomatic quarantine in the 1970s and 80s
As Palestinian armed groups vied with one another for the title of most vicious, least scrupulous, most likely to kill innocents ? as terror gangs turned Palestine into Columbine by teaching children to worship weaponry and the death it manufactures, an unfamiliar sensation was felt across Israel. Unity. A renewed sense of mutual responsibility. A return to caring for one's neighbor, and for the stranger in distress.
In this place, where the banality of violence and the venality of leadership have rendered shock as rare as awe, suicide bombings shook Israelis back into caring about Israel.
For the first time in decades, a genuine consensus was felt in this country, a mass movement of the heart, identifiable not by the colors red, orange, or yellow, neither by round spectacles or head-coverings, dismissible neither by ethnic, religious nor class categorization.
There was quiet courage in this movement of the Radical Center, this breaking of tribal bonds that dictated voting, thinking, medical care, soccer allegiance. There's a quiet defiance in telling extremists that they can no longer speak and act in the name of the People as a whole.
For my Palestinian friends, this word:
At this point you hardly need to be told that suicidal policies are, well, self-destructive. But it might be prove instructive to see the effect that the last suicide bombing of 2005 had on this country.
It was Hanukkah, and a young IDF officer stood between a young Jihadist and the celebrating children next to whom the bomber planned to detonate his 33 pounds of explosives.
The day after the bomber hit the detonator at that last-minute checkpoint, killing himself, the officer, a Palestinian taxi driver, and another Palestinian, the headlines in Israel referred to the slain second lieutenant Binamo by his first name only, as if his loss was felt by nearly every household in Israel. Because it was.
This is the lesson that Palestinians would be well advised to learn about the people on this side:
You have made a new kind of martyr hero in the Holy Land, the kind who keeps the shahid from making Jewish infants and Jewish mothers into martyrs against their will.
You have demolished your cause by restoring our faith in the concept that there are those who believe strongly in the elimination of the Jewish people by violent means.
You may believe that you invented steadfastness and stubbornness. Think again.
Now is the time to decide. Hamas listens to public opinion. Make it known. You have a choice. You can play with your guns, or you can have a country.
There is a new kind of Israel, a better one, in fact, for which, perversion of perversions, we have the suicide bomber to thank.
This Israel will be harder to defeat that the enemy you faced five years ago. You have only yourselves to thank. You and your bomber
They're all moderate while they're unable to kill you.
Once the guns (mortars, rockets, and eventual Iranian nukes) arrive the masks come off.
Richard the Lionheart, thank you for the link, and for a fantastic summing up. I can add nothing to what you've said, it echoes my own thoughts exactly, and adds many more. Thank you.
What is also irking the muslim governments and clerics is that memri tv is constantly translating their broadcasts...
And other bloggers are translating whats going on in their countries into english, german, french, whatever..
Then posting it on the internet for all to see...
This exposure of the plans and activites is really an eye opener for the west and infidels as we can actually see and hear what the muslims are saying about the west...
I dont believe anyone except for the leftists and peacenicks believe anymore the
Islam is tolerant and peaceful crap..
Not with all the evidence thats available online...
So the only thing the islamo faschists have left is to deny or dismiss the evidence as either all false (even though they said it on video) or its all a misunderstanding...
When someone hits me then tells me over and over again I am going to hit you again then kill you...
I dont care how much they state there so tolerant..
I am going to be ready to defend myself..
The only possible means to a nonviolent future for all of islam is if these "moderates" take control of their religion fro once and for all and change it and I see no evidence for this.
--- posted by Zathras
No evidence that the Unicorns are willing to becalm themselves, or no evidence that the Unicorns actually exist?
I saw a Unicorn once. But that was after a quart of Old Crow, and the Science Editor for the local paper said that that doesn't count then.
The Israeli people were presented with the monstruous Oslo accords as a fait accompli. Rabin and his Labor Party ran on a platform in 1992 explicitly rejecting negotiations with the PLO. In fact, Peres and/or Beilin had already negotiated with pro-PLO Arab politicians in Israel, making promises to aid the PLO if the Arab vote supported them. Rabin-Peres-Beilin's anti-national camp ["Left"] got fewer votes in the fateful 1992 elections than Yits'haq Shamir's national camp [led by the Likud party]. However, because more national camp votes were lost due to the failure of several small national camp parties to get over the threshold [minimal # of votes required to be counted at all; at that time probably 1.5 %], than were lost on the anti-national side, then Rabin-Peres-Beilin got in. The rest, sadly, is history. Eventhough representing a minority of the electorate, Rabin, etc., pushed through their pro-PLO program and we got the monstrous Oslo accords. The Israeli people did not know about the negotiations until after the accords were initialed in Oslo. The Knesset voted on the accords although their actual, specific text was not made known to the members of Knesset. People were told that Oslo only applied to Gaza and Jericho. So Oslo was anti-national and anti-democratic. Yet the foreign press almost universally enthused over Oslo. Check out a French fool named Jean Langellier in LeMonde, who claimed that the Israeli people had changed as evidenced by the vote. This was an insult to our people. It also showed how superficial so many journalists can be.
Now we have gangsters like Fares pretending to be "peaceniks" for the Jews and the outer world, while talking jihad among their own. Erase the PLO/PA! There is and cannot be and ought not be any peace with them!!