Abbas’s Precious Gift to Iran: Hamas by Khaled Abu Toameh

The Iranian-backed Hamas movement has welcomed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s latest threat to renounce all agreements and understandings with Israel and the US, including security cooperation.

“We hope that this time Abu Mazen’s (Abbas’s) decision is a serious one,” said Saleh Arouri, deputy head of the Hamas “political bureau.” Arouri added that the return of the “armed resistance” to the West Bank was now possible “and even closer than some may think.”

The Hamas official repeated his movement’s rejection of any peace agreement with Israel, including the Oslo Accords, signed between the PLO and Israel in 1993. “Since day one, we have rejected the Oslo Accords,” Arouri explained. “We have also strongly opposed all security agreements with the occupation, and therefore we welcome Abu Mazen’s decision to halt the security coordination [with Israel].”

Iran’s other Palestinian proxy, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), also seems to be satisfied with Abbas’s recurring threat to renounce all agreements with Israel, including security coordination.

“We take Abu Mazen’s announcement seriously and look forward to its implementation,” said PIJ Secretary-General Ziyad al-Nakhalah. “What is required of the Palestinian Authority is a big step towards unity.”

Why are Hamas and PIJ so happy with the Palestinian leader?

Abbas’s threat, which came in response to an Israeli plan to extend Israeli law to parts of the West Bank, is undoubtedly a precious gift not only to his Palestinian political rivals in Hamas, but also to Iran, whose leaders continue to talk about the need for “eliminating the Zionist regime.”

On the same day Abbas made his announcement, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, wrote on Twitter: “Eliminating the Zionist regime doesn’t mean eliminating Jews. We aren’t against Jews. It means abolishing the imposed regime and Muslim, Christian and Jewish Palestinians choose their own government and expel thugs like [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu. This is ‘eliminating Israel’, and it will happen.”

In another comment on Twitter on May 19, Khamenei said that the West Bank, where Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are based, “must be armed, just like Gaza.”

The Iranian leader is actually saying that his country is seeking to turn the West Bank into a launching pad for terrorist attacks in order to achieve the goal of eliminating Israel. Bizarrely, he is promising to destroy Israel, but without killing Jews.

Khamenei evidently sees Abbas’s decision to renounce all agreements and understandings with Israel and the US as a positive development that would facilitate the mission Iran and Hamas share to export anti-Israel terrorism to the West Bank. The Iranian leader wants the West Bank to become like the Gaza Strip, from where Hamas and its allies have been firing rockets at Israel for several years.

If Abbas goes through with his threat to halt security coordination with Israel, that would mean an end to his efforts to prevent Iran’s Palestinian proxies, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, from proceeding with their ambition of extending their control to the West Bank. By halting the security crackdown on Hamas, Abbas would be paving the way for terrorists to kill him and his associates in the West Bank, as they already began to do in 2007 in the Gaza Strip, and possibly again in a coup in 2014.

In recent years Abbas’s security forces have arrested hundreds of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad members in the West Bank as part of an effort to prevent these groups from undermining his regime. Israel, for its part, has been helping Abbas by routinely arresting Hamas members and officials who pose a threat to his government.

It is rare for a Hamas leader to praise Abbas. Hamas and Abbas have been engaged in a power struggle since 2007, when the Islamist movement, Hamas, staged a violent coup in the Gaza Strip, hurled members of the Palestinian Authority from high buildings and overthrew the Palestinian Authority regime, along with Abbas, who, since then, has not even been able to return to his house in the Gaza Strip. Like their masters in Tehran, however, the leaders of Hamas now apparently believe that Abbas may finally have decided to join the Iranian-led “axis of evil” by cutting Palestinian ties with Israel and the US.

Therefore the leaders of Hamas are now heaping praise on Abbas and urging him to “translate his words into deeds.” The message Hamas is sending to Abbas is, “Thank you for finally realizing that the armed struggle is the only way to destroy Israel. Let us join forces in the Jihad to eliminate Israel.”

Hamas does not recognize Israel’s right to exist; its charter states that “the land of Palestine has been an Islamic Waqf throughout the generations and until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of it, or abandon it or part of it. No Arab country and no Arab king or president have that right.”

The charter also makes it clear that [peace] “initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas]. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion; the movement educates its members to adhere to its principles and to raise the banner of Allah over their homeland as they fight their Jihad. There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad.”

For several years now, Hamas has been strongly condemning Abbas because of his perceived support for the two-state solution and contacts with Israel, including security coordination between the Palestinian Authority security forces and the IDF in the West Bank. At one point, when Abbas was quoted as saying that he was not opposed to the establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri responded by announcing that the Palestinian leader’s statement did not represent the Palestinian people.

In 2014, Hamas went further by calling for removing Abbas from power and putting him on trial for “high treason.” Yahya Abadseh, a senior Hamas official in the Gaza Strip, said that Abbas should be toppled and brought to trial for “betraying the Palestinian people and endangering their interests by imposing sanctions on the Gaza Strip and collaborating with foreign parties.”

Three years later, another senior Hamas official, Marwan Abu Ras, called for “imposing [Islamic] sharia law against Abbas by hanging him in front of his people.” Abu Ras too accused Abbas of “treason” and “collaboration” with Israel.

Additionally, paying verbal respects after a death constitutes high treason in the eyes of Hamas. A year ago, the terrorist organization accused Abbas of betraying the Palestinians by offering condolences to Israeli President Reuven Rivlin over the death of his wife in June 2019. Hamas spokesman Abdel Latif Qanou said, “Abbas’s condolences to the President of the Zionist entity over the death of his wife is a betrayal of our Palestinian people, a stab [in the backs of] the families of the [Palestinian] martyrs, and a disregard for their noble feelings.”

If and when Abbas does suspend security coordination with Israel, he will be sending a message to Iran and its Palestinian proxies that the time has come to turn the West Bank into a center for Jihad against Israel and the “infidels.”

At the same time, Abbas will be signing his own death warrant: Hamas has apparently not relinquished its desire to “hang Abbas in front of the Palestinian people.” It appears to be decision time: Will Abbas ally himself with those who are protecting him or with those who execute him as a traitor?

Khaled Abu Toameh, an award-winning journalist based in Jerusalem, is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

Misusing the Bible against Vaccination by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16053/misusing-the-bible-against-vaccination

These are God’s words, as recorded in Leviticus, Chapters 13 and 14. “The priest shall isolate” the contagious person for seven days and then an additional seven days if the contagion persists. “And he shall dwell alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.” Nor was this quarantine voluntary. The priest could compel it.

Anti-vaxxers are free to cite science, philosophy, law— but do not miscite the Bible or God. It is irreligious and insults the intelligence of those who have actually studied the Bible by assuming, as many do, that the Bible opposes everything they oppose.

Invoking the Bible and God is intended not as a stimulus to further debate, but rather as an argument- stopper: God is against it; no further discussion, research or argument is necessary; the debate is over.

They simply assume that God is on the side of every political or ideological position they espouse. If that is not taking the name of God in vain, I don’t know what is. And I have a source for that: The Ten Commandments.

Most of the emails and phone calls that I have gotten since I stated that the Constitution permits safe mandatory vaccination against highly contagious and lethal diseases have been from anti-vaxxers who claim the authority of the Bible. Have they actually read the Bible? Of course, the Bible says nothing about vaccinations: they were not even imagined at the time, but the Bible speaks volumes about the need to prevent the spread of contagious diseases. Large sections of the Bible deal with diagnosing contagious diseases such as leprosy and quarantining carriers outside the city walls until they were no longer contagious. The Bible also demands that we choose life over convenience, money or other values.

Over 4,300 virus patients sent to NY nursing homes, AP counts

https://www.foxnews.com/us/ap-count-over-4300-virus-patients-sent-to-ny-nursing-homes

More than 4,300 recovering coronavirus patients were sent to New York’s already vulnerable nursing homes under a controversial state directive that was ultimately scrapped amid criticisms it was accelerating the nation’s deadliest outbreaks, according to a count by The Associated Press.

AP compiled its own tally to find out how many COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals to nursing homes under the March 25 directive after New York’s Health Department declined to release its internal survey conducted two weeks ago. It says it is still verifying data that was incomplete.

Whatever the full number, nursing home administrators, residents’ advocates and relatives say it has added up to a big and indefensible problem for facilities that even Gov. Andrew Cuomo — the main proponent of the policy — called “the optimum feeding ground for this virus.”

“It was the single dumbest decision anyone could make if they wanted to kill people,” Daniel Arbeeny said of the directive, which prompted him to pull his 88-year-old father out of a Brooklyn nursing home where more than 50 people have died. His father later died of COVID-19 at home.

“This isn’t rocket science,” Arbeeny said. “We knew the most vulnerable — the elderly and compromised — are in nursing homes and rehab centers.”

Biden’s offensive statement about blacks wasn’t the worst thing he said By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/bidens_offensive_statement_about_blacks_wasnt_the_worst_thing_he_said.html

Joe Biden took a lot of flak on Friday for saying on The Breakfast Club, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” However, bad as that line was, Biden said a lot of other things that were just as bad as his condescending, tone-deaf attempt at a “no true Scotsman” joke.

The Breakfast Club is a popular progressive morning show that is carried on 45 affiliate stations, while the YouTube channel boasts 4.41 million subscribers. To date, just the YouTube version of Biden’s May 22 interview with “Charlamagne tha God” has had over 700,000 views. This is a show with reach, and it allowed Biden to talk directly to a young black audience.

What Biden was pitching to the audience is that he’s been a black advocate since practically the day he stepped out of law school in the late 1960s. To that end, he used the Wuhan Virus to play the race card against Trump and then settled into his shtick about how he’s always acted in the best interests of American blacks. Little that he said supports this claim.

Biden began by boasting, “I’m ahead in all the national polls,” only to have Charlamagne point out the 2016 polling failures. Biden’s non sequitur response was that 2016 was “totally different” because “you had somebody who didn’t, they didn’t know” Trump, meaning that Trump “had no serious opposition that turned out to materialize.” I mention this short Biden argument as a reminder that even though Biden talks a lot, he often doesn’t say anything.

If Only 1199 SEIU Union Members Really Knew By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/if_only_1199_seiu_union_members_really_knew.html

George Gresham, president of the New York-based 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, a position he has held since 2007, recently penned a piece titled “Donald Trump is Destroying Our Planet.” According to Gresham, Trump has “destroyed the global health security and biodefense directorate that the Obama administration put in place. ” Furthermore, Gresham asserts that “the Trump administration’s complete failure in face of the greatest public health crisis in modern history is only the most glaring example of how dangerous his presidency has been.” According to Gresham “[w]e have all seen the outright corruption — not only his personal corruption in looting our tax dollars to make millions from his hotels and golf courses — but his corruption of the government itself.” Moreover, Trump “has waged war . . . against immigrant workers from Latin America and the Caribbean as well as Muslims, Asians and Africans in our communities.”

These are certainly serious charges and as Ayn Rand wrote in her essay “How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society, they “require the most precise, the most exacting, the most ruthlessly objective and rational process of thought” in order to refute them.

The first clue to his ideology is the non sequitur he makes about “looting tax dollars” and Trump’s ventures in construction. Then, Gresham completely ignores the fact that Trump sent 4,000 respirators and 4,400 ventilators as well as a naval ship to assist New York health workers fighting the pandemic. Also Gresham sidesteps the unconscionable actions of Governor Cuomo who absolutely put health workers and patients in perilous situations when he insisted that nursing homes take back corona virus residents.

Media Cowardice and the Collusion Hoax What happens when the press becomes an interest group whose interest isn’t the truth? by Holman Jenkins Jr. *****

https://www.wsj.com/articles/media-cowardice-and-the-collusion-hoax-11590186850?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

To many hack commentators, “conspiracy theory” has become a term used to make certain kinds of implicit and explicit cooperation unacknowledgeable.

With evidence newly in hand last week, we see that the resources poured into promoting the Steele dossier before the 2016 election were nothing next to those mobilized by Clinton campaign chief John Podesta after the inauguration. Transcripts two years old show various Obama officials denying under oath that they possessed evidence of Trump-Russia collusion while they implied the opposite on TV.

Even the outside firm that the FBI relied on for its claim that Democratic emails were hacked by the Russians admitted under oath to finding no evidence that emails had been actually removed from Democratic servers.

Newsies in the aftermath of the Russia hoax now insist they were merely reporting on official actions. They carefully avert their eyes from the fact that the leaks they received and possibly even the official acts they reported were manufactured deliberately to put lies into the news.

If they had any grit, many of our senior reporters would be hopping mad now to learn they had been manipulated into reporting untruths to the public.

California’s College Testing Mistake The state university system puts racial politics above merit.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-college-testing-mistake-11590189601?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Thursday’s decision by the University of California regents to eliminate the SAT and ACT in admissions is a historic blow to excellence in higher education. Applicants to the largest university system in the U.S. will now be judged entirely on how well they can flatter admissions bureaucracies with coached personal statements, as well as high school grade-point averages whose meanings are obscured by grade inflation.

The UC started using the SAT in the 1960s to find talented students from modest backgrounds. As an exhaustive faculty senate report—ignored by university leadership—put it this year, “This original intent is clearly being realized at UC.” Yet diversity bean-counting has displaced the philosophy of merit and excellence that made the UC the envy of the world in the last century. The claim that math and reading tests discriminate against minorities (except Asians) easily won the day, never mind the evidence.

California’s political class is desperate to create a different racial makeup at the UC, and it sees testing as an obstacle. The SAT shines a light on failures and inequalities in California’s public K-12 school system. Black and Hispanic students are more likely to attend low-quality schools which because of unions are nearly impossible to reform. For California’s political class the convenient solution is to ban tests—concealing the achievement gap while congratulating themselves on a commitment to equity and inclusion.

The Germs That Transformed History For eons, epidemics have caused mass deaths and social upheaval, with far-reaching effects on politics, trade, migration, colonization and conquest By Jared Diamond

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-germs-that-transformed-history-11590159271?mod=hp_featst_pos2

Mr. Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of “Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis,” “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” and “Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies,” for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.

The Covid-19 pandemic is an almost unique phenomenon in world history. The only precedent for its rapid spread to every continent, killing people everywhere and devastating both local economies and world trade, was the flu pandemic of 1918-19.

In both cases, the germs behind the pandemic weren’t especially lethal. Covid-19 and the flu both fall within the normal range of mild infectious diseases. Compared with smallpox and Ebola, they kill only a small percentage of their victims, and their person-to-person transmissibility isn’t unusual. What sets them apart—what has made them world-wide pandemics—is modern transportation: fast steamships for the flu, and now jet airplanes for Covid-19.

Of course, there have been a great many “mere” epidemics in human history, diseases that have spread more slowly over large areas, but their effects have been profound. Over the course of recorded history and now in the archaeological record, examples abound of germs producing high death tolls and social and political upheaval, with far-reaching effects on local economies, trade, migration, colonization and conquest.

Will Covid-19 transform our own era, too? Are we entering an age of pandemics? It is far too early to say, but the long history of germs as agents of historical change can provide needed perspective—and perhaps a window into how Covid-19 and its likely successors may shape our destiny, for good and ill.

The Arts of Government Criminality By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/the-arts-of-government-criminality/

Destroying or altering evidence, lying under oath, leaking classified info … but no pre-dawn televised raid for any of the wrongdoers.

In the entire 2016–19 efforts to derail the Trump campaign, transition, and presidency, Hillary Clinton, Christopher Steele, and the FBI, Department of Justice, CIA, and other government bureaus have consistently sought to distort reality. Some of our best and brightest have destroyed evidence, altered documents, lied, leaked, and pled amnesia when questioned about their reprehensible conduct. At each stage, they were aided and abetted by a compliant media.

The dissimulation over the past four years has fallen into four rough categories. Here are a few examples of each.

Deletion of Evidence

Christopher Steele, who bragged for years of his meticulous research and whose work has been quoted chapter and verse as proof of Trump wrongdoing, recently testified under oath to a British court that he now has no records of his supposed conversations with “sub source” Russian informants. His lawyers previously had insisted that his sources were “meticulously documented and recorded.” Now Steele sheepishly admits that such an assertion was a lie, given that he can produce no evidence at all for his meticulous allegations. He admits that his emails and documents were wiped clean from his devices by January 2017.

FBI operatives working with the Mueller investigation team admitted that thousands of undisclosed text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page simply disappeared. In addition, the phones of Strzok and Page apparently were wiped clean after Strzok was dismissed from the Mueller team. Most of these mysterious losses, according to the Mueller investigation, were supposedly a result of a software glitch or other computer malfunctions.

Beijing Moves to Control Hong Kong By Michael Auslin

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/china-moves-to-control-hong-kong-beijing-geopolitical-hardball-could-reshape-asia/#slide-1

The PRC’s geopolitical hardball could reshape Asia.

Under cover of the global coronavirus crisis, China is moving to rewrite Asia’s geopolitical map. Beijing has announced it will essentially take control of Hong Kong by directly imposing a sweeping national-security law, bypassing the territory’s elected Legislative Council. Despite repeated assurances by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that it would abide by the 1984 agreement with Great Britain to allow Hong Kong to maintain a loose independence under the so-called “one-country, two-systems” framework for 50 years after the 1997 turnover, the past decade has seen a steady erosion of Hong Kong’s freedoms, culminating in the massive million-person-plus demonstrations throughout 2019. Now, those last freedoms face extinction.

The new national-security law will criminalize “foreign interference,” secession activities, and subversion of state power. Moreover, the CCP appears ready to alter Hong Kong’s Basic Law, essentially its constitution. Moreover, China’s security services will be able to operate openly in Hong Kong, further reducing Hong Kong’s sovereignty.

Only 23 years have passed since Great Britain handed over the colony to Beijing, and in that time, Hong Kong’s importance as a financial hub has lessened as Shanghai and other mainland financial centers developed. Yet Hong Kong always remained a symbol of relative freedom within China’s Communist system, and as the CCP has steadily clawed back power inside China since the accession to power of General Secretary Xi Jinping, Hong Kong’s status increasingly became irreconcilable with trends on the mainland. The CCP pushed electoral reforms by Hong Kong’s Legislative Council that ensured the election of pro-Beijing candidates, interfered with the courts and press, and steadily increased the mainland’s influence over society.