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June 2016

Who were the 1948 Arab refugees? Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Contrary to conventional “wisdom,” most Arabs in British Mandate Palestine – and most of the 320,000 1948 Arab refugees – were migrant workers and descendants of the 1831-1947 Muslim immigrants from Egypt, the Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, as well as from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, North Africa, Bosnia, India, Afghanistan, etc.. Britain enticed Arab immigration and blocked Jewish immigration.

Thus, between 1880 and 1919, Haifa’s Arab population surged from 6,000 to 80,000, mostly due to migrant workers. The eruption of WW2 accelerated the demand for Arab manpower by the British Mandate’s military and its civilian authorities.

Moreover, Arab migrant workers were imported by the Ottoman Empire, and then by the British Mandate, to work in major civilian and military infrastructure projects. Legal and illegal Arab migrants were, also, attracted by economic growth, which was generated by the Jewish community beginning in 1882.

According to a 1937 report by the British Peel Commission (featured in the ground-breaking book, Palestine Betrayed , by Prof. Efraim Karsh), “during 1922 through 1931, the increase of Arab population in the mixed-towns of Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem was 86%, 62% and 37% respectively, while in purely Arab towns such as Nablus and Hebron it was only 7% and a decrease of 2 percent in Gaza.”

Irrespective of occasional Arab emigration from British Mandate Palestine – due to intra-Arab terrorism, which has been an endemic feature in the Middle East – the substantial wave of Arab immigration from 1831-1947 triggered dramatic growth of the Arab populations in Jaffa (17 times), Haifa (12 times) and Ramla (5 times).

JUNE 3, 1967 PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON’S RESPONSE TO ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER LEVI ESHKOL

Dear Mr. Prime Minister:

I am grateful for your letter of May 30./2/ I appreciate particularly the steadfastness with which the Government and people of Israel have maintained a posture of resolution and calm in a situation of grave tension. All of us understand how fateful the steps we take may be. I hope we can continue to move firmly and calmly toward a satisfactory solution.

Our position in this crisis rests on two principles which are vital national interests of the United States. The first is that we support the territorial integrity and political independence of all of the countries of the Middle East. This principle has now been affirmed by four American Presidents. The second is our defense of the basic interest of the entire world community in the freedom of the seas. As a leading maritime nation, we have a vital interest in upholding freedom of the seas, and the right of passage through straits of an international character.

As you know, the United States considers the Gulf of Aqaba to be an international waterway and believes that the entire international maritime community has a substantial interest in assuring that the right of passage through the Strait of Tiran and Gulf is maintained.

I am sure Foreign Minister Eban has reported to you the written statement which I had prepared and from which Ambassador Harman made notes during our meeting of May 26./3/ The full text of that statement is as follows:

“The United States has its own constitutional processes which are basic to its action on matters involving war and peace. The Secretary General has not yet reported to the UN Security Council and the Council has not yet demonstrated what it may or may not be able or willing to do although the United States will press for prompt action in the UN.

“I have already publicly stated this week our views on the safety of Israel and on the Strait of Tiran. Regarding the Strait, we plan to pursue vigorously the measures which can be taken by maritime nations to assure that the Strait and Gulf remain open to free and innocent passage of the vessels of all nations.

“I must emphasize the necessity for Israel not to make itself responsible for the initiation of hostilities. Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go alone. We cannot imagine that it will make this decision.”……

The ‘War On Salt’ Is Bad Policy Based on Bad Science Enough is enough with the federal nanny state. By David Harsanyi

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, one of the few openly authoritarian organizations functioning in the United States, once sued the Food and Drug Administration for refusing to regulate Americans’ salt intake. No worries: This week, the Obama administration finally embraced CSPI’s junk science and allowed the FDA to set new “guidelines” to “nudge” companies into treating a perfectly harmless ingredient as if it were a dangerous chemical.

Health and Human Services secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell explained that pressuring private companies into lowering sodium levels is “about putting power back in the hands of consumers.” Of course, consumers already have an array of bland, low-sodium choices, if they desire. But in progressive-speak, limiting people’s choices is the same as giving them power. According to our government, consumers’ having too many choices means “the deck has been stacked against them.”

The good news is that the FDA is almost always wrong about everything. The bad news is that these guidelines set an incredibly ridiculous precedent that allows our intrusive government to mislead Americans with bad advice.

But let’s concede the point for a moment and say that sodium is killing you.

If you’re one of those last starry-eyed idealists, you may ask yourself: “What governing principle empowers the Obama administration to launch crusades that ensure that every citizen is living salubriously? What principle authorizes the state to control how salty my soup is?” Life is a killer, after all. If Washington, D.C., can regulate the amount of ingredients in foods — not poisonous ingredients, or instantaneously unhealthy ingredients, or even hidden ingredients, but ingredients that the CSPI has decided to whine about — what can’t it regulate? And if salt is worthy of all this attention, why is the Obama administration allowing citizens to commit mass suicidal acts by ingesting sugar? Or dairy? Or bleached white flour? Or canola oil?

Henchman’s Appeal Leaves Hillary on Hook The former secretary of state’s ‘everybody does it’ defense falls flat. By Deroy Murdock

In a communique to donors (who else?) Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta tried to exculpate his candidate’s lawbreaking in the E-mailgate scandal. Alas for Hillary, Podesta’s attempt at exoneration has more holes than a golf course.

“ . . . we know that our opponents will continue to try to distract us with attacks,” Podesta wrote on May 28. But State Department Inspector General Steve Linick is no right-wing Clinton hater. The man behind last week’s brutal report on Clinton’s misdeeds was appointed by President Obama. Linick also served as an assistant U.S. attorney, starting in 1994 — during the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton.

“Secretary Clinton has said her use of a personal email server was a mistake,” Podesta asserted.

A “mistake” is when one hits “reply all,” and dozens or hundreds of people unwittingly receive an embarrassing e-mail meant for one person.

E-mailgate was no such casual gaffe. It was a deliberate and planned conspiracy in which Hillary evaded standard State Department procedures, installed an outlaw personal computer server in the basement of her Chappaqua, N.Y., mansion — 267 miles northeast of Foggy Bottom, and then reportedly paid aide Bryan Pagliano $140,000 to maintain that illicit equipment. Pagliano’s supervisors, the IG discovered, “were unaware of his technical support of the Secretary’s e-mail system,” including “during working hours.”

After leaving State, Hillary had her server shipped to a facility in New Jersey associated with Platte River Networks, a Denver-based firm that lacked the security clearance to handle such sensitive gear. She then had the company try to wipe the server clean.

Some “mistake.”

“She believed she was following the practices of other Secretaries,” Podesta further claimed.

Will Regulators Continue to Get Away with Murder? Wrong-headed regulation not only kills innovation — it actually costs lives. By Henry I. Miller

President Obama has been traveling around the country touting the robustness of the nation’s economy during his two terms. You might call it the Wishful Thinking Tour.

“From 1950 to 2000, the U.S. economy grew at an average rate of 3.5% annually,” Hoover Institution economist John Cochrane pointed out in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Since 2000, it has grown at half that rate — 1.76%. Even in the years since the bottom of the great recession in 2009, which should have been a time of fast catch-up growth, the economy has only grown at 2%.”

A Wall Street Journal editorial on February 5 provides context to that slow economic growth: “The overriding problem continues to be a lack of business confidence and investment, which leads to slower growth, which gives the U.S. economy a lower margin for absorbing growth shocks from around the world.”

But the crisis in business confidence and investment is only a symptom. The underlying disease is the panoply of anti-innovation policies, actions, and attitudes of the Obama administration. Obama’s White House has been an outlier — to the high side — in the number of “economically significant” regulations (those that are expected to cost Americans $100 million or more annually) it has added. According to Daniel Pérez, of the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University, “As of the end of January 2016, Obama had 393, with 12 months remaining in his administration,” and the most recent of the administration’s “unified agendas,” released last November, indicated that more than 2,000 regulations are in the pipeline, of which 144 are deemed economically significant, a new record.

The regulations cut a huge swath through the American economy. They include labeling requirements for pet food, new test procedures for battery chargers, mandated paid sick leave for contractors, and speed governors for trucks, and a host of new rules that will limit energy consumption and increase the price of household appliances.

LOSING THE WAR OF WORDS :RUTH KING

This month will mark the 49th anniversary of the Six-Day War, fought between June 5 and 10, 1967 by Israel against the neighboring states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. It was a war intended to annihilate Israel as stated clearly by Gamal Abdul Nasser in 1965: “We shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand; we shall enter it with its soil saturated in blood.” His threats were echoed by then Syrian Minister of Defense Hafez al Assad who was to become Syria’s President: “Our forces are now entirely ready not only to repulse the aggression, but to initiate the act of liberation itself, and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland. The Syrian army, with its finger on the trigger, is united. As a military man, I believe that the time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation.”

In their jihadist agenda they received the blessings of the entire Arab world. President Abdur Rahman Aref of Iraq exulted: “The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. This is our opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948. Our goal is clear — to wipe Israel off the map.”

King Hussein of Jordan, the pluckier papa of the present King Abdullah, was repeatedly asked by Israel’s leaders to stay out of the war, but anxious to shore up his standing in the Arab League he signed a defense pact with Egypt and joined the war against Israel. As a result, he lost control of the West Bank and Jerusalem.

The rest is history. Israel won a decisive victory, inspiring pride and confidence in Diaspora Jews, respect and admiration from military and defense experts throughout the world, and resolve among dissidents in the Soviet Union who organized a powerful army of “refuseniks.”

The 1967 war was won in battle but lost in the war of words. Israel’s media and leaders immediately referred to Judea and Samaria as “occupied territory,” and its Arab inhabitants as “Palestinians.”

After defeat, the Arabs and their protagonists replaced the emphasis on refugees with a myth of victimization under “occupation” by Israel. The media, academics, and politicians bought into the lies and “occupation” is now the buzzword for the morally degenerate boycott and divest movements ostensibly seeking “justice” for the Palestinian Arabs.

In fact, the West Bank and East Jerusalem were under illegal occupation from 1949 until 1967. Jordan’s rule was recognized only by Pakistan and England. In further contravention of international law which decreed that Jerusalem would be an open city, the Arabs trashed Jewish shrines, forbade access to Jews and limited access to Christian churches and shrines. Arabs built settlements throughout the area, but they made sure that the “refugee camps” were maintained in squalor as poster boys for anti-Israel propaganda.

There was no outcry about this illegal occupation, not even from the Palestine Liberation Organization which was formed in 1963 out of an alphabet soup of splinter terrorist groups who all adhered to one main principle of the Palestine National Charter, namely, the destruction of Israel, every inch of which was considered then and now as “occupied.”

The “occupied” Arabs of the West Bank enjoy basic freedoms unavailable to them in any Arab nations.

They might do well to consider some of the “justice” perpetrated on the Arabs by other Arabs.

COOL IT! BJORN LOMBERG

Widely known as “the skeptical environmentalist,” Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg has been vilified for his views on climate change. In this documentary, a companion to his book of the same name, Lomborg expounds on his opinion that the earth is not facing an imminent environmental catastrophe, contrary to the prevailing opinion of the scientific community. The filmmakers follow him as he travels the planet sharing his views in a series of interviews and lectures.

Cool It is a groundbreaking book that transformed the debate about global warming by offering a fresh perspective based on human needs as well as environmental concerns. Sundance ward winning director Ondi Timoner filmed a documentary with the same name based on the book and following Bjorn Lomborg for almost a year.

Understanding the Volatile and Dangerous Middle East by Steven Carol Reviewed by David Isaac

Mark Twain famously said, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.” So distorted is the news coverage about the Middle East today, you’re better off uninformed. Whether in the media or academia, treatment of the topic drips with anti-Israel bias and historical ignorance. Dr. Steven Carol’s new book Understanding the Volatile and Dangerous Middle East is a necessary antidote. The purpose of the book, according to Dr. Carol, is to “combat the mistaken beliefs, misrepresentations, and outright fabrications that have been perpetrated to the present.” He achieves his object in this impressive work, a nearly 1,000-page volume (with historical maps the author himself made) covering virtually every aspect of the Middle East, from the Arab-Jewish conflict to the history of the Kurds, Sharia law, Islamic culture, and more.

Understanding the Volatile and Dangerous Middle East succeeds both as a reference work and an entertaining read. Even those knowledgeable about Middle East history will learn from this book. For instance, did you know that the secret signal for Egyptian forces to seize the Suez Canal was “Ferdinand de Lesseps” – the name of the chief engineer in the construction of the canal? Egyptian President Nasser embedded the signal in a speech he gave at Mansheyya Square in Alexandria on July 26, 1956. He repeated it “fourteen times in the space of 10 minutes,” Dr. Carol relates, which is amusing as it suggests Nasser didn’t trust his forces to get the message.

It isn’t surprising that the book is filled with such tidbits for Dr. Carol has spent a lifetime studying his subject. The author of six books, including Middle East Rules of Thumb, he will be most familiar to Arizona residents, where he has taught at the high school, college and graduate levels and is the official historian of the Sunday radio program “The Middle East Radio Forum.” He is also Middle East consultant to the Salem Radio Network.

The author’s section on Israel is first-rate, including an overview of Jewish ties to the Land from ancient times. There’s a strong section on population exchanges throughout history where Dr. Carol zeroes in on the double standard applied to Palestinian Arab refugees compared to the vastly greater number of those displaced in other conflicts. Carol also explains the true nature of the conflict: “It is not the ‘occupation’ of various territories that is the issue, but rather the Arab/Muslim pre-occupation with destroying the Jewish state, no matter what borders it has.” All of this will be familiar to readers ofOutpost, but sadly not to the wider public.

The book is refreshingly un-PC, which becomes apparent right from the start when Dr. Carol opens with a list of basic principles. Here are just a few examples: “In the Arab/Muslim culture, pride, dignity and honor outrank truth on any scale of political values”; “The Arab/Muslim world views their history as starting in 622 C.E. Anything that happened before is an irrelevant myth”; and, “In the Islamic Middle East, the rational desire for peace is often perceived as weakness – a despised trait in that culture.”

IN AUSTRIA: RISE OF THE POPULISTS AND PROTECTING THE HOMELAND FROM ISLAM….SEE NOTE PLEASE

It is hard to root for a nation whose popular President was a Nazi criminal Kurt Waldheim the fourth Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981, and the ninth President of Austria from 1986 to 1992.

As the column states: “Austria is a country where the “greatcoat of silence” was draped over the past for far too long, as author Karl-Markus Gauss once wrote. One of the founding myths of postwar Austria is that the country was not first-and-foremost an accomplice of Nazi Germany, but rather that it was the first victim of Hitler’s aggression.” rsk

Rise of the Populists: Protecting the Homeland from Islam .

Suntinger, a member of the FPÖ, proudly claims to have once stood atop the Grossglockner, Austria’s highest peak, together with the late FPÖ leader Jörg Haider, who died in late night car crash in 2008. He tells the story as though it were a religious experience.

Suntinger is a farmer, a mountaineer and the father of two. In the last municipal elections in 2015, he was elected with around 80 percent of the vote. There was no other candidate.
His lecture on the state of the world begins. “Essential to the Koran is that the woman is a subject — and that in the 21st century,” he says, before reading out suras pertaining to sexuality and identifying women as a “place of sowing of seed.”

“The Koran sees only dead Christians as good Christians,” he says. Europe only makes sense, he goes on, “if it focuses on preventing the Islamization.”

He then presses his index finger onto the identification photo of one of the Syrian women. He says: “That is supposed to be the mother.” Impossible, he says, the children are much too old.

“The West is colliding with the East!” Suntinger calls out. “The people have to wake up!”

By that point, his presentation was only 10 minutes old.

The economy of the Möll Valley was long dependent on mining and agriculture, but is now trying to attract tourists — foreigners with money — as well. As part of that effort, Suntinger has overseen the several-million-euro construction of a new recreation park, complete with a hall where you can shoot at virtual deer. “It’s a big hit,” says Suntinger. “Because of the overpopulation of foreigners, many more people have weapons here.”

When Suntinger says foreigner overpopulation, he means migrants — and he would like to keep them away. Because as the FPÖ says: “Protect the homeland from Islam.”

Germs Multiply While CDC Fiddles:Betsy McCaughey

Federal officials are predicting doom because a Pennsylvania woman became infected with a germ that can’t be stopped by most antibiotics. “The medicine cabinet is empty for some patients,” warned Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Thomas Frieden last week.

You’d think the CDC was finally ready to get serious about drug-resistant infections. Think again. The CDC watched “superbugs” spread across the nation, and dawdled. Centers for Denial and Confusion is more like it.

The Pennsylvania woman’s infection is resistant to a last-resort antibiotic called colistin. This is the first case, as far as we know, of an infection resistant to colistin in the U.S. , but thousands of patients die every year from infections resistant to more commonly used antibiotics.

As antibiotics lose their punch, medical care becomes riskier, especially in hospitals. Patients who need chemotherapy or surgery rely on antibiotics. Without them, even a routine procedure – bypass surgery, or C-section – could turn deadly.

The medical community has struggled with drug-resistance for half a century. There’s no avoiding it. Bacteria naturally evolve to resist weapons we use to fight them.

CRE – carbapenem-resistant infections – have plagued New York-area hospitals for fifteen years. CRE bloodstream infections have a 50% death rate. In 2011, a New York patient transferred to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., carried the germ with her, starting an outbreak that killed several patients, including a 16-year-old boy. Yet the CDC waited until 2013 to sound the alarm about this “nightmare bacteria.” And has done little since.

Three aggressive steps are needed to protect patients, but the CDC has gotten serious about only one: curbing over-use of antibiotics. The agency is MIA on the need for rigorous cleaning and screening incoming patients for superbugs.