Christmas is the Time to Bash Israel

An example of using traditional Christmas themes to bash Israel is a Christmas card circulated by the Canadian NGO Palestine House showing Santa Claus denied entry into Bethlehem by the security barrier.

On the barrier is written the inscription, “This thing was not mentioned on the map. Is there another way to enter Bethlehem?” And Ireland’s Palestinian Solidarity Campaign is selling a Christmas card featuring a drawing of the three wise men denied entry into Bethlehem by the security barrier, while another features a redesign of the Madonna and child wrapped in a Palestinian flag.

Now of course, the Madonna was not a Palestinian Terrorist, and like Jesus, She was a Jew.

None of this, of course, is new.
And there will always be those who have their minds made up.
Israel however, is the only free nation in the Middle East...

God bless Israel!

Jimmy Carter, anti-Jew

by Lee Green

Jimmy Carter Distorts Facts, Demonizes Israel in Book

Former President Jimmy Carter has written an egregiously biased book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid and is currently doing numerous interviews to sell the book and its ideas. Carter is attempting to rewrite history, and in his alternate universe, Arabs parties are blameless and Israel is at fault for almost all the conflicts in the world. One gets the feeling after reading just a few pages that if he could have blamed Hurricane Katrina on Israel, he would have. His main messages are that Israel is badly mistreating the Palestinians and that the cause of the conflict is Israel's refusal to return to what he calls its "legal borders" (sic), the pre-67 armistice lines.

Because the Palestinian Arabs have been offered a viable state of their own numerous times, including with the same borders that Carter desires, but turned it down since it meant recognizing Israel's legitimacy and permanence and ending the conflict, Carter either ignores or mischaracterizes the offers. He never lets the facts get in the way of his "must blame Israel" theories. In Carter's twisted universe, it is the Arabs who have always been eager for peace, with Israel opposing it at every turn.

Almost every page of Carter's book contains errors, distortions or glaring omissions. The following list is just a small portion of the many problems in the book:

• Carter claims Israel has been the primary obstacle to peace, that Arab leaders have long sought peace while Israel preferred holding on to "Palestinian land" over peace, and that if only Israel would "[withdraw] to the 1967 border as specified in the U.N. Resolution 242...", there would be peace.

Aside from his obviously questionable opinions, Carter is factually wrong when he asserts that U.N. Resolution 242 requires Israel to withdraw to the 1949 armistice line that was in place until 1967. He has repeated this serious falsehood in many interviews, such as on the November 28 PBS NewsHour:

"The demand is for them to give back all the land. The United Nations resolutions that apply, the agreements that have been made at Camp David under me and later at Oslo for which the Israeli leaders received the Nobel Peace Prizes, was [sic] based on Israel's withdrawal from occupied territories."

He mischaracterizes UN resolutions and apparently has forgotten what he himself signed as a witness to the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, which states in Section A1c: "The negotiations [concerning the West Bank and Gaza] shall be based on all the provisions and principles of UN Security Council Resolution 242. The negotiations will resolve, among other matters, the location of the boundaries and the nature of the security arrangements."

To claim now that the very agreement he witnessed and signed specifies withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines is outrageous. [While the 1979 Camp David document again mentions UN Resolution 242, it makes no further mention of the West Bank or Gaza Strip. It instead deals with Israeli-Egyptian relations, and includes a map of the Israel-Egypt International Boundary (Annex II). Tellingly, no maps demarcating any boundary between Israel and the Palestinians are appended to the Camp David documents, Resolution 242, the Oslo Accords, or the "road map".]

UN Resolution 242 does not require Israel to withdraw from all the land to the "1967 border", since there is no such border. The "green line" is merely the 1949 armistice line and the drafters of 242 explicitly stated that this line was not a "secure border" -- which 242 calls for.

The British UN Ambassador at the time, Lord Caradon, who introduced the resolution to the Council, has stated that, "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial."

The American UN Ambassador at the time, former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, has stated that, "The notable omissions - which were not accidental - in regard to withdrawal are the words 'the' or 'all' and the 'June 5, 1967 lines' ... the resolution speaks of withdrawal from occupied territories without defining the extent of withdrawal." This would encompass "less than a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from occupied territory, inasmuch as Israel's prior frontiers had proved to be notably insecure."

The reasoning of the United States and its allies at the time was clear: Any resolution which, in the face of the aggressive war launched in 1967 against Israel, required complete Israeli withdrawal, would have been seen as a reward for aggression and an invitation to future aggression. This is assuredly not what the UN voted for, or had in mind, when it passed Resolution 242.

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Mandela was pro Israel

by JOEL B. POLLAK 23 Jun 2013

Don’t fall for the false claim that Nelson Mandela was anti-Israel! It is based on a hoax--a letter written by anti-Israel activist Arjan El Fassed more than a decade ago in the style of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s made-up letters from world leaders. The letter, purportedly from Mandela to Friedman, compares Israel to apartheid South Africa and has been quoted widely, including by Jimmy Carter. But it is a fraud.

Irshad Manji and I busted the fake "Mandela letter" in 2007. When the hoax was exposed, the perpetrator--"an Arab living in The Netherlands," Manji noted--admitted making up the letter for rhetorical purposes:

"There is no possible basis for Pollak to say I intended people to believe the memo was written by anyone other than myself. At the time, Friedman, a staunch defender of Israel, was famous for writing mock memos in the voice of the US president. In a clearly labelled spoof, under my byline, I published a mock memo from Mandela to Friedman on March 28 2001. Unfortunately, someone forwarded it on the internet without my byline, as I explained to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz."

In El Fassed's view, the analogy was nonetheless valid. But despite owning up to the "unfortunate" fact that the letter was made up, I suspect he was actually rather pleased at the extent to which it was taken seriously.

In truth, Mandela was pro-Israel throughout his life. As he revealed in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom,in the early 1960s Mandela studied the life of Menachem Begin and enlisted the aid of artist Arthur Goldreich, who had fought in the Palmach, Israel’s pre-independence army. In later years, Mandela continued to support Israel’s right to exist and never endorsed the false claim that Israel resembled South Africa in any way.

Mandela’s support for Israel was complicated by his party’s alliance with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and with its chairman, Yasser Arafat. The PLO had lent the African National Congress (ANC) a hand during its long years of exile, at a time that Israel entered an alliance of convenience with the South African regime (though Israel voted to condemn apartheid at the UN and later joined sanctions against South Africa.)

Therefore Mandela supported Palestinian statehood, and a two-state solution roughly along the 1967 boundaries. That position corresponds roughly to the left-wing outlook in Israel--and, indeed, Mandela enjoyed good relations with Israeli leaders during the era of the Oslo Peace Process in the 1990s.
He was never anti-Israel !