Livni says, "All indirect support for Hamas, even via discussions about opening the [border] crossings or about the humanitarian situation, only weakens those parties that are interested in reaching a [diplomatic] agreement." True. The only problem with her statement is that she likely believes, or is compelled to say publicly, that Fatah is one of those parties interested in a peaceful settlement that will allow Israel to continue to exist indefinitely. Fatah will happily sign an agreement, but that will not end the jihad against Israel even for its part.
"U.S. to announce new aid plan for West Bank, Gaza," by Barak Ravid for Haaretz (thanks to Sr. Soph):
The United States plans to announce tens of millions of dollars in new aid for the West Bank and Gaza next week to ease the humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian territories, U.S. officials said on Friday.The funds will be channeled through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, which handles U.S. and other assistance for food, health, education and other areas, said U.S. officials, who declined to provide the exact figure as the official announcement will be made during a trip to the region next week.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will meet with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice while both are in Japan next week. The meeting was requested by Rice. It is particularly surprising because Rice is due to come to Jerusalem for a working visit the following week....
Government officials predicted that the meeting would focus on the situation in the Gaza Strip, and said that Rice probably wanted to express her concern over the humanitarian situation there.
General William Fraser, the U.S. envoy responsible for monitoring implementation of the road map peace plan, visited Israel this week and met with officials in the Prime Minister's Office, the defense establishment and the Foreign Ministry. Fraser's job is to determine whether both sides are fulfilling their obligations under the road map's first stage, which includes evacuating illegal settlement outposts for Israel and fighting terror for the Palestinian Authority. [...]
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni responded to these sentiments at two different diplomatic meetings Thursday, one with the Romanian foreign minister and one with the EU envoy for the peace process, Marc Otte.
"Europe must understand that Hamas is not an organization that is interested in setting up a Palestinian state," she told her Romanian counterpart. "It is not seeking rights for the Palestinians; it wants to deprive others of their rights."
"All indirect support for Hamas, even via discussions about opening the [border] crossings or about the humanitarian situation, only weakens those parties that are interested in reaching a [diplomatic] agreement," she said. "The Palestinian people has no future with Hamas, and Israel will continue to fight the terror that Hamas perpetrates."
At her meeting with Otte, Livni was even blunter. "Israel wants to advance the diplomatic process, but we cannot allow ourselves to close our eyes to the difficult reality of terror in Gaza," she said. "The international community's desire to see a change on the ground sometimes leads it to ignore the reality and is liable to [lead it to] push for compromises that those who live here cannot permit themselves. Europe ought to understand that it is either Hamas or the moderates."
Quran 9:29 working just fine.
Hand over the jizya! And a bit more humility, if you know what's good for you!
Fithy kuffars.
I can't wait for Olmert and his band of liberals to get booted. As for Condi, she is officially a lame duck. Why are these people making policy?
Why do we persist in aiding and abettting the enemy?
The answer to the question: "are Western elites in cahoots with the islamists?" is now established fact. Yes they are.
The follow-on questions now are: "why are Western elites in cahoots with islamists; to what ends will this alliance be driven; and who or what are the main driving force(s) behind it?"
Somebody dedicated me this video entitled Black 'Stone Dance With Miss Pigmillah'
I am a little proud of it and I think, it is nicer to get, than a bucket of flowers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxfQCrJjihE
Enjoy your week-end
If at first giving money to jihadis who are killing you and your friends and then dancing with your body parts does not convince them to stop their murderous rampage, then try, try again. And then try again. And then try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try again. And then try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try again.
[Repeat several billion times, while humming the tune of the Rolling Stone's "Sympathy For The Devil"]
....but you old folks had better not expect to get your Social Security checks....you see, we will run out of funds for you.
If the US makes every 'Palestinian' rich, and secures for them their own country, they will be happy and content then, wont they?
I know if Bush made me rich and gave me my own country, I would be really happy, so how can I blame Abbas and company, for draining the cash cow?
By Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, Feb 8,2008
For the first time, the Bush Administration plans to give $150 million in cash directly to the Palestinian Authority (PA) Treasury, as part of a $496.5 million “aid” package, including $410 million for development programs. This added to the $86.5 million for CIA “security training,” which Congress authorized in April 2007.
The CIA has apparently assumed the Palestinian terrorist-training role previously held by the former Soviet Union. Since 1994, the CIA armed and trained thousands of Palestinian “security forces,” who subsequently joined every Palestinian terrorist organization…
Palestinian violence has escalated since the 1994 PA establishment and PA officials have produced an unbroken record of unfulfilled promises and outright deception. Yet President George W. Bush in his January 28 State of the Union Address, reassured the Palestinians that “America will do, and I will do, everything we can to help them achieve…a Palestinian state by the end of this year.”
Nevertheless, U.S.-favored PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who in 1957 with Yasser Arafat co-founded the al Fattah terrorist group, assumed the role of his predecessor. Like Muslim Brotherhood, Marxist–trained Jihadist Arafat, neither does Abbas “recognize that confronting terror is essential to achieving a state where his people can live in dignity and at peace with Israel,” as President Bush declared.
Abbas remains committed to the organization’s reason d’etre–destroying Israel and expelling the Jewish people from the region. Despite public Fattah-Hamas leadership disagreements, branding one another “murderers and thieves,” Abbas arranged on Jan. 30 to give Hamas $3.1 billion of $7.7 billion that international donor community pledged last December in Paris.
Abbas’ support for Hamas is not new. In Feb. 2007, He announced, “We must unite the Hamas and Fattah blood in the struggle against Israel as we did at the beginning of the intifada.” He stated this en route to Mecca to meet with the Saudi King, and Hamas terror chiefs Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh. The Saudis pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in “humanitarian aid ”–which, like previous pledges, they failed to deliver.
In the wake of 9-11, President Bush delivered a line that has rankled lefties ever since:
"You are either with us or you are with the terrorists.”
That line never bothered me. I just wish the President would have lived up to it. Instead he has been doing the opposite.
We're with the terrorists.
How to commit national suicide - support your enemies, give them money, give them lands, recognize their illegal states and wait.
What we see now is result of decades of wrong foreign policy. While Bin Laden was recruiting, training and organizing Al Quaeda, Bill Clinton helped to establish two muslim coutries in the Balkans. Instead of fighting the enemy he fought against friends. Direct consequence of this policy is 9/11, five of hijackers were jihad veterans from Bosnia where they were supported by the State Department:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYYbCq6tg5c
Now the USA is supporting Arab barbarians in Judea and Samaria with predictable result - new 9/11 in near future. Meanwhile, Bush administration is completely ignoring and devastating relationships with most important countries in the world:
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/story.html?id=327919
Wake up America, 2001 was already too late
Who in our government still doesn't understand the direct correlation of Palestinian aid with terrorism? Please remind them of the Camera study here: http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=118&x_article=1411
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, over and over and over and over !
This Israeli government, like its predecessors, and like the American government and its predecessors, seems incapable of thinking clearly about what it is that motivates the Arab Muslim opposition to Israel. That opposition began with the first stirrings of Zionism -- for the very idea that Jews might not exist as submissive dhimmis, and the early Zionists did not know a thing about Islam, and their attitude, even toward the then-overlords of the area, the Turks, was not that of traditional dhimmis. The Arab Muslims were opposed to the Jews before the Mandate period, during the Mandate period (1922-1948), during the period of Israel's statehood when there was not a single Jewish soldier or civilian (they had been pushed out by the Jordanians and the Egyptians, when not killed outright) in both Gaza and in what the Jordanians renamed the "West Bank" (apparently the terms Judea and Samaria, though they had been in constant use in the Western world for two thousand years, and were good enough for Jesus, were not good enough for the Muslim Arabs who, like the Romans re-naming Judea as "Syria palaestinorum" to re-naming Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina for the same reasons, the Arabs too wished by changing venerable topoynms to efface the Jewish connection to the land), and they oppopsed it, for the same reasons -- reasons based on Islam, from 1967 on.
The only thing that changed was that the Arabs managed, by inventing, or "constructing," to use a shop-worn academic term, an (implausible) separate "Palestinian identity," to present what had always been, and remained, and would always be, Arab Muslim opposition to the Infidel nation-state of Israel based on the impossibility of contemplating that land once possessed by Muslims, land in the middle of Dar al-Islam, could conceivably be accepted, in the long run, even if in the short run, in order to win over Western public opinion(and to make many Israelis themselves confused about the justice of their own claims, and to begin to think that it really was a case of "two tiny peoples" etc. -- which Israelis of the less hard-headed variety, or the kind who like to be morally pure, as they see it (too morally pure for common sense, or for survival)--have allowed themselves to be taken in by.
And the same is true of other Western governments. Those in Western Europe were ill-inclined or incapable of analyzing the threat to Israel properly, especially since the government of Israel was unable to do so itself. It would have required people whose entire professional lives had been spent assuming that the Arab opposition to Israel was limited in its demands, and even if those demands seemed fantastical and outrageous, nonetheless it was still believed that if those demands, or something like those demands, were met, then the Arab Muslim opposition to Israel, over time, would dissipate. The usual peace-processors – the dennis-rosses and aaron-millers – all so confident in their smug notion of “what the end result will look like” or, as they liked to express it, “everyone knows pretty much what the final result should look like” (millers and djerijians galore love this “everyone knows” inflection) – without once coming even dimly to the realization that just perhaps this conflict did not have a “solution” or rather, from the viewpoint of Arab Muslims, a “solution” could only be arrived at once Israel, by degrees, had been reduced to the status of a permanent “dhimmi” state, existing – if at all – only on Arab Muslim sufferance, and it is hard to imagine, given the affront to Arab and Muslim sensibilities, of it ever being accepted, unless Islam itself changes, or the mind-set of Muslims changes, or if Israel can permanently remain not merely stronger, but equally important, as obviously stronger than those who would wish to destroy it.
How can those who have spent the past ten or twenty or thirty years of their lives in peace-processing that, in turn, is based on simple, or willful, ignorance of Islam, manage to learn what they should have learned long ago, even if what they learn forces them to recognize that their own professional lives, their busy shuttle-diplomacy and meetings, and papers, and conferences, were in the end, doomed to failure, just as all those visits of Yassir Arafat to the White House during Clinton’s reign, were doomed to lead – would necessarily lead – to failure, for Arafat was unwilling even to go the smiling route of his successor in Fatah, who wanted to ensure that the tap of Jizyah would be turned on again, so that he and his cronies might enjoy it, and build their villas in southern France and castles in Spain, and give their children expensive Western educations, for they are no fools.
The Ambac dealings didn’t even make Drudge. Ambac, MBIA, and others insure municipal bonds. A good percentage of these municipal bonds were structured by bond lawyers whose due diligence included making assumptions about continued revenue from builders fees (7% growth forever) and rising property values. Expect to see a large wave of municipal bankruptcies in the years to come. Investment banks have the most to lose because they hold the municipal bonds.
The insurers’ stock price has dropped 90% in the last year because of reality. The banks now plan a bailout of the insurers to keep them solvent so that the banks’ portfolios don’t lose value. Ambac was up 16% yesterday. But it’s all a house of cards.
Turning full circle, sucks to be dependent on late-term jizya.
Wonderful. More U.S. tax dollars to those who wish to destroy us, our way of life, and our allies.
I don't recall the U.S. helping Germany and Japan during WWII, only afterwards. Am I missing something here?
"I just wish the President would have lived up to it."
Posted by: Mackie
Maybe he should have said, "You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists, or we will be with the terrorists."
It's not as catchy, but I think that is what he meant.
If the US government is going to throw money - I guarantee that I am a more moral party than the so called "government" of the Palestinians. C'mon, I pay taxes! I promise not to buy AK-47s or explosives with it!
Why can't I be the suckee rather than the sucker?
Why is Rice concerned about 'humanitarian issues'? The world is crazy, and Congress ought to try to curb the expenditure of billions of tax dollars on the Palestinians who can only survive by begging help, aid and welfare from the West. We have tried to bribe them into collusion, so now let's starve them into submission.