Will President Trump Really Demand Same Old Concessions of Israel?

 

President Trump is definitely not Barack Hussein Obama as he does not even set any red lines to turn pink as he backs away digging a ditch deeper and deeper and never figuring out he should stop digging. President Trump does not believe in red lines, he just acts. He has proven it time after time. The first sign that things were going to be drastically different came early on at the United Nations. Nikki Haley was President Trump’s voice of change at the United Nations presumably laying down the law that the United States is done with Israel bashing in the General Assembly and elsewhere at the United Nations and will no longer allow the world to continue ignoring the war crimes committed throughout the rest of the world. Syria just found this out in probably the only language Bashir al-Assad and his ilk understand. The destruction of the airfield used to launch the planes used in the chemical attack with fifty Tomahawk missiles was overkill and that was the point. This was more than a message to Syria; this was a message to North Korea, to Iran, to Libya, to Venezuela, to the terror organizations throughout the world and to any dictator who was thinking of popping his head up and murdering, even potentially Putin. Unfortunately this was also a wake-up call taken by Hamas, Hezballah, Fatah, PLO, Islamic Jihad and all the smaller groups often overlooked but no less violent.

 

It is that those last groups and the message they received which will be the real problem. They realize that the way to persuade Trump is to show him dead babies and children, lots of dead babies and children. We can expect that there will be another round of violence with Hamas and Islamic Jihad or Hezballah or both as well as trouble with Fatah, PLO and the Palestinian Authority Security Forces, actually the PA’s armed forces, and the one thing we are guaranteed to see will be dead babies and children, lots of dead babies and children. The pictures will be plastered across the media, the newspapers, television, everywhere. There will be these images even if they need to stage them or, if necessary, murder them themselves. The blame will be aimed at Israel and many in the media will reinforce the story line even to the point of editorializing and expanding on the story line with great flourishes and emphasis on the horrors of these dead children. All the children shown on the media will be from the side of the Palestinians with none being shown from Israel. Many will be asking why this has come to be. The answer is simple; Israel spends millions upon millions of shekels on shelters for the people, armoring schools, kindergartens, children’s centers and required that all new residences have a bombproof room built into every apartment or home. The first concern in Israel is the safety of the people while the military remains out in the open for as long as there is any threat to the people. On the Arab side they have tunnels and command centers dug in well under ground where the terrorists hide coming out inside people’s homes firing rockets into Israel and then disappearing back underground hoping to get there before the Israelis can fire on the launch point of the attack. When the Arab terror forces do attack, they will do so from behind civilian cover using children as their bullet proof vests knowing that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) will not engage them if doing so endangers civilians, especially children.

 

Those who have witnessed previous wars between Israel and the terrorist forces surrounding her know the story and understand what happens. Unfortunately, the majority of people watching the news broadcasts will jump to the exact conclusion the terrorists desire, that the Israelis are slaughtering children needlessly. Hamas, Fatah, PLO, Islamic Jihad and Hezballah have all been known to shoot from atop apartment buildings using the balconies as their launching pads while ringing the roof with women and children in the hopes that Israel will return fire without checking to see who might get harmed. Where this can occur as not every target which is launching rockets into Israel can be checked out before returning fire, but Israel does so whenever possible and even at times when doing so means they will miss the opportunity to return fire on that target. Israeli pilots when engaging a target must check with an information officer who also checks with an IDF Human Rights Officer who is a lawyer specialized in human rights and these officers will have either a drone or spotter aircraft checking the target and only if it appears that there will be no civilian casualties is the go ahead given. Israel drops leaflets and sends radio broadcasts and SMS messages as well as cell phone calls to all the civilians in a region where they are going to be operating telling them where they can go to be safe. The IDF does this knowing that the terrorists will also either leave the area or set up ambushes for the IDF soldiers sent to clear the area. As insane as this appears, the IDF still manages to operate with a high degree of proficiency despite such warnings telegraphing exactly where they will be about to operate. They often do such warnings simply to get into an area where surveillance has indicated there exist entrances into the tunnel entrances knowing that it is worth giving away where they are coming if it will allow them to gain entrance to the tunnel systems where the command and control operations are hiding and where the stores of rockets and often launch positions are also concealed.

 

This is not the only problem the IDF soldiers face. Hamas places their top commanders, leaders and central command and control operations center in the basement of Gaza’s largest hospital. This is known to the world but the media will never utter a word about this because doing so would mean that their reporters would be thrown from Gaza if they were lucky and worse if not. The other dirty little secret never discussed is that all reports, pictures and media the networks and news services send from Gaza is first approved by Hamas officials and any failure in following these prescribed procedures results in reporters being expelled from Gaza and no more coverage from the scene. The media outlets do not want to have such occur as the best pictures are made available by the Arab stringers who provide the media with the pictures they use in their reports. They also receive most of their stories from other stringers all of whom are actually Hamas or Islamic Jihad information and propaganda officers. This is how stories such as the shooting death of Mohammed al-Dura, the twelve year old boy who French television news showed huddled behind cement barrels (video below revealing hoax as presented by DePaul University) with his father and presumably shot be IDF troops during a shootout with PLO terrorists. The story proved to be Pallywood and not reality and the entire story unraveled over the following months which included a high profile slander trial against the reporter who revealed the hoax by the French Television 2. There is an entire system producing such events to try and make the IDF appear as child killers, indiscriminant murderers, and simply horrific criminals and the system is referred to using an innocuous term of Pallywood. One of the major contributors to this is the Tamimi family where the father uses his children as props often sending his young daughter to curse, spit, kick and generally abuse IDF soldiers in the hopes to find that one soldier who loses his cool and even just push the girl as she is well versed in taking the fall making it look like she was struck viciously. The Timimi father was invited to talk to a third grade class in the Ithaca, New York Beverly J. Martin Elementary School on human rights and Israeli crimes in particular against Palestinians. As if the job of the average IDF soldier was not difficult enough and besmirched in the media sufficiently without any real objectivity.

 

 

With their new understanding of President Trump’s sensitivity towards any horrors involving children, we can expect this information to be utilized and stories of Israeli brutality and their general disregard for Arab children to increase exponentially. But even this aside, there is another hint of coming events which we find to be an even bigger threat. This was something we feared and warned that the Prime Minister must do everything in his power to inform President Trump of the futility of following down the “Two State Solution” road in our article Advice for Netanyahu When Visiting Trump before the two men first met and then how the refusal by Prime Minister Netanyahu to even speak about the “Two State Solution” being a dead end with President Trump and instead boring in laser-like on Iran, a problem President Trump was already on the Israeli side to begin with, instead would lead to another trip down that road in Israel and the Netanyahu-Trump Effect. Rumor now has it that President Trump is about to impose a requirement that Israel once again make concession to the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas in particular in order to reengage and get the peace process moving ahead after being moribund for the past decade and a half. The reason is easy to understand. No matter what Israel gives to Mahmoud Abbas, he cannot accept the deal and remain alive. Without the IDF along with the Shin Bet and other Israeli intelligence networks protecting Abbas from Hamas, ISIS, Islamic Jihad and even others in Fatah and the PLO, the other two groups which he presumably rules. One need understand that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is also the Chairman of the political party Fatah, the terrorist organization PLO as well but still needs an entire company of soldiers surrounding him in order to survive the day and they require the IDF and Israeli intelligence to prevent any serious threats from reaching those soldiers. Further, Mahmoud Abbas has made a simple promise, that he will never accept any deal less than the complete eradication of the Jewish State, the Zionist Entity as the Arab World calls Israel. Abbas is just one person in the entire Arab opposition to Israel and his assignment is to carry on the Yasser Arafat role of pure opposition to everything Israel. The only real difference between Arafat and Abbas is Arafat sported a two day beard growth and often wore a revolver strapped to his side (even when addressing the United Nations, the only person to manage to do so), Abbas wears a suit and tie and is clean shaven.

 

Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas

 

The entire Arab World and their relations with Israel can be traced to Khartoum, Sudan and the Khartoum Resolution and its “Three No’s” agreed upon and sworn to by the Arab League and all the Arab leadership. These “Three No’s” were “No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no negotiations with Israel.” When Egypt made peace with Israel the Arab League was troubled as what could they do as Egypt is the most populous Arab state. Well, the Arab League temporarily voted and Egypt was suspended from the Arab League in 1979 after signing a peace treaty with Israel and then Egypt was readmitted in 1989. There was an even more violent reaction to the Camp David Accords where Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar El-Sadat signed a peace treaty in 1979. United States President Carter was present at the signing and given large amounts of credit despite his insistence that the peace be negotiated into a grand peace including the establishing of a Palestinian State which Egypt not only could not force to happen and was not even interested in trying and President Carter’s constant insisting almost crashed the treaty. Fortunately Egyptian President Anwar El-Sadat was not to be deterred as he realized that his country would only gain from peace and would not be denied and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was equally driven to make the peace work. Egyptian President Anwar El-Sadat paid the ultimate price as a Muslim Brotherhood member and soldier in the Egyptian military broke from formation during a pass in review and rushed the Presidential stands shooting Sadat assassinating him. Fortunately the peace survived beyond him and despite being a cold peace, that peace continues to exist and under President Sisi there has even been increasing coordination concerning the terrorists and criminal enterprises present in the Sinai Peninsula. Jordanian King Hussein followed Egypt’s lead and made peace with Israel in 1994 and surrendered their claims and previous illegal annexation of Judea and Samaria which they had renamed West Bank to remove the links to Jewish and Israeli history.

 

It took another two years for the concept to arise that the lands Jordan had occupied illegally and Israel liberated in the 1967 Six Day War should be stolen from Israel again and made into an Arab State for some invented group of Arabs named the Palestinians. This was brought about coinciding with the first Intifada and was fully accepted by the world which has been anxiously attempting to take as much of the lands left for Israel, the mere 22% of the original lands of the British Mandate, and turn them into another failed Arab State. The entire world is aware that the sole purpose of such a state would be identical to that of the Hamastan State in Gaza, and that is to launch rockets into Israel murdering as many Jews as possible until the State of Israel has been erased from the world and the Jews no longer allowed to determine their own futures being returned to living at the permission of some foreign state being chased from here to there around the world stateless. This will once again enter the world stage as President Trump attempts to buy a peace which can only be purchased with the Jewish blood of the entirety of Israel in sacrifice after sacrifice. After Israel regained the lands illegally occupied by Jordan in the Six Day War, they should have been incorporated into Israel and the Jordanian citizens residing in these lands sent back to Jordan. If Israel cared to be benevolent, then they might be given the value of any property they had occupied and that should have been that. Israel absorbed almost nine-hundred-thousand Jews alienated from their homelands in the Arab world and the Arab world should have been made to accept the less than eight-hundred-thousand Arabs who had fled Israel in 1948 fully expecting the Mufti’s promise to have been realized and return in a few weeks after the Jewish infestation (we believe that is how he referred to the Jews in Israel) had been eradicated. The Jews managed, with the grace of Hashem, to survive that war despite losing some lands to Egypt (Gaza) and Jordan (Judea and Samaria and half of Jerusalem). Once these lands had been reunited with Israel in 1967 the Arabs residing there in these areas should have been returned to their countries of origin from before the 1967 war (Gazans to Egypt and Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem to Jordan plus Golan Heights to Syria). As far as Israel surrendering lands for another Arab state, such a concept should be pronounced dead on arrival as every time Israel has retreated from lands they have sooner or later become a haven for terrorists and criminal activities. This is what occurred in southern Lebanon (Hezballah), in Gaza (Hamas and Islamic Jihad) and after some time now in the Sinai Peninsula (ISIS, al-Qaeda and criminal gangs). Should Israel ever be forced to surrender Judea and Samaria (East Jerusalem has been annexed and reunited with the remainder of Jerusalem and the Arabs residing there have been granted a limited form of citizenship lacking only the right to vote in national elections for the time being), then at best the PA will be replaced by the PLO or worse by Hamas, ISIS, Hezballah or even Iran. This inevitability must never be permitted to happen and any demand for Israel to make further concessions, even if it is giving Abbas one shekel, should be rejected and fought with every ounce of energy available as the entire concept of a “Two State Solution” must be put to rest permanently.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

The Islamic Reformer in Egypt

 

The video below is what will hopefully be the opening salvo placing Islam on a path to having its own reformation. The timing is pretty much right on schedule as Judaism had its expansionism where it took lands by force and eventually ended that stage of its history after which it only fought to retain the small area of lands which it occupied, a struggle the Jewish state is facing today as the forces of the world continuously attempt to slice and carve Israel up leaving an ever smaller piece of land for the Jewish state to continue existing. The first story telling of Avram’s belief that idolatry was an empty concept and likely led Avram on his quest for the knowledge which eventually led him to finding G0d tells of Avram going into the showroom where his family sold idols to make a living. Avram smashed all of the idols in the shop except the largest idol which he placed the large hammer he had used to smite the rest of the idols. When his father entered the shop he was beside himself and furious demanding that Avram explain what had happened. Avram calmly explained that when he arrived that morning he caught the largest idol, the one holding the hammer, smashing and destroying the other idols. His father rejected the ridiculous story yelling that stone idols were incapable of such acts which Avram simply and calmly inquired why his father and family were selling idols under a false claim. This episode was the beginning of the travels and tribulations for Avram as most certainly he was invited to vacate his family home by his irate and distressed father. The amount of anger Avram probably received from his father and the rest of the family likely drove him to the farthest lands he could find where he felt safe from their reach and where Avram’s life was drastically changed and he started the seeds of what would become Judaism. During this struggle to find truth Avram found G0d and upon G0d instructing him, he changed his name to Avraham.

 

Some five or six hundred years later, after the Jews had been enslaved in Egypt, their numbers had increased to a point that the Pharaoh saw the Jews within Egypt as a potential threat and so placed them in bondage such that they would not revolt and join with one of Egypt’s enemies thus toppling his rule. After four hundred years we are told that the Jews were led to freedom by Moses who gave the Jewish people the Torah gaining Moses the title of the law-giver. Moses also led the Jewish people back to their ancestral homelands, the lands which presumably were granted to Avraham by G0d. The path to freedom and liberty and the forming of a people who did not have their minds enslaved and fearful, as were the minds of the vast majority of the Jewish people whom Moses led out of Egypt; Moses had to turn the nation of Israel around and journey back into the dessert. Moses had initially led the Jews directly to what was to be their homeland but the test of the spies who told of a formidable peoples who had cities with insurmountable walls and themselves were giants with great strength which was given by all but two of the twelve men sent to reconnoiter the land and the people’s panic caused Moses to lead them back into the desert until a new generation had been raised not under the oppression of slavery and with the mindset of a freed people. This, we are told, took forty years of wandering through the desert. To make this telling short we will simply list that Moses did not enter the Promised Land but turned the leadership over to Joshua who led the Jewish people on their initial efforts to conquer what would become their homelands. Initially the Jewish people broke into their individual tribes with each being autonomous. It was not until King David melded the twelve tribes into one nation and King Solomon built the L0rd’s Temple, the First Temple, in Yerushalayim. This was the pinnacle of Jewish expansion and conquest of lands and the rest of time until the Romans dispersed the Jews to the far corners of the Roman Empire in order to make them cease to exist and to perish from the pages of history that the Jewish People lived in the lands straddling the Jordan River and across the plains of the Galilee, much of these lands are where Israel exists today. The Israelites took approximately fifteen hundred to seventeen hundred years from their founding as a people and a religion by Avraham to their conquest and settling their lands centered on Yerushalayim and the Temple. This was the end of military expansionism and the adopting a kinder and gentler Jewish People, the same area approximately that the Jews are attempting to rebuild their homelands which had sat desolate for almost two millennia. Without going through the periods of conquest, rebirth and reconquering their area across Europe but instead look to when Christianity also became nonviolent and no longer expansionary, one sees that this happened for the Christian faith approximately fifteen hundred to sixteen hundred years. Checking the Islamic calendar one would notice that Islam is approaching the time-period where both Judaism and Christendom went through their transformations and became less violent and mostly no longer expansionist. So, perhaps this video has arrived and this will be the first salvo for the transformation of Islam. Here is the video and more continues below, but first the video requires watching if you have not yet come to see it already as it did appear on the social media circuit.

 

 

 

 

Time will tell if Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the latest general turned leader of Egypt will turn out to be the man who began the reformation of Islam or at least the reformation of Islamic beliefs and thought in Egypt, the most populous Islamic nation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and the location of the oldest and most prestigious Islamic university in the world, Cairo’s Al-Azhar University. This was the University where el-Sisi gave his landmark speech. When I first viewed this speech made by el-Sisi I immediately feared for his life. There exists probably nobody in a more advantageous position to foment this transformation. The previous time such a reformation in Islam might have been possible was just after World War I with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the secularly based Turkey which he had placed what he considered an unimpeachable guardian of the works of his lifetime when he placed the enforcement of the secular state he had set for Turkey. Much of his work is being undermined and undone by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who has been slowly and inexorably sliding Turkey away from the standards put in place by Mustafa Ataturk a century ago and has already replaced the top generals thus coopting the military from interfering with his designs on returning Turkey to the glory of its time as the head of the Caliphate. Now we have General el-Sisi aiming to turn Egypt into a modern and functional Islamic state. One has to give Abdel Fattah el-Sisi credit for giving this address before the faculty and administrators of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, the recognized premier and most prestigious Islamic institution for higher learning in the world. If Abdel el-Sisi can persuade the Imams who teach at Al-Azhar University to teach a reformed and flexible version of Islam more centered on the original teachings of Muhammad during the time in Mecca where he initially wrote the Quran and find some evidence or writing which defines Islam in the manners of Turkey then Abdel el-Sisi may turn out to be the man who started the reformation of Islam. What might the signs be that Abdel el-Sisi is making progress and what form and nature would a reformed Islam take?

 

We can all probably agree that the first accomplishment that Egyptian President and Islamic reformer must achieve will be remaining alive. The fate that awaited former Egyptian President Muhammad Anwar El Sadat after signing a peace treaty with Israel was that he was assassinated while watching a military revue when a soldier broke ranks and charged the reviewing stands and shot President Sadat at almost blank range. Anwar Sadat, like Abdel el-Sisi, was a general in the military before becoming President for Life and that relationship with the military was short-lived as it was from amongst the ranks of the military that the Muslim Brotherhood was able to reach out and assassinate him. So remaining alive and the symbol of a reformed Islam which is being practiced within Egypt, the largest Islamic state in the world, as well as taught at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, the premier institute of higher learning and scholarly discourse in all of Islam, will produce a base for Islamic reformation in which Islam is transformed into a religion which is finally capable of living in a world in which other religions are deemed to be permitted and Islam will finally be able to be practiced side-by-side with the other faiths and will no longer pose a threat challenging all other faiths demanding to be the sole religion of the world. Making such a transition will take time, hopefully not too much time, but time just the same as such a transformation cannot be expected to take place overnight, or even in a single year.

 

The signs that such changes are being effectively spread throughout Islam and there will be more than sufficient pushback making the task of spreading the reformed version of Islam that much more difficult. There will be the resistance from the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia who with Saudi oil monies who have been at the forefront of Jihad as a violent manner of spreading Islam if coercion and conversion failed to convince a people to adopt their version of Islam. Then there is the not so small matter of Shiite Muslims as Abdel el-Sisi is Sunni and thus will not hold any acceptable powers of persuasion or authority, moral or otherwise unless Abdel el-Sisi is planning to conquer all of existing Islam in order to teach then a version which is non-violent. Then there are places where Islam is practiced solely because of their willingness to use brute force to enforce the laws of Islam as they perceive such. There are entities whose very existence is dependent on violent Jihad such as ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezballah, the Twelvers which had their influence solely through nonviolent means. Then there are the recent events in Paris which may have revealed something extremely threatening about Islam today. The two brothers claim that they received training and that the plans were worked through and rehearsed before they were sent to France to perform their deadly acts. This would not seem to pose any problem except that one brother claimed to have worked with al-Qaeda while the other claimed he worked through ISIS. If what this implies is true then the world and Abdel el-Sisi have a serious problem on their hands. The merging of the two of the largest, best trained, and militarily capable of ruling over entire nation is seriously frightening. The world can only hope that al-Qaeda and ISIS are not working together, even if only on Jihadist acts which both terror entities have an interest, then reforming Islam will have become that much more difficult. Abdel el-Sisi made clear that he was speaking about changing the thinking and not the religion, the interpretation and not actual Islam. What he likely meant by these declarations was that he aimed to preserve the writings of Islam and simply shift the emphasis to coexistence as the Quran was first written and that the changes he was purporting were things which the Quran already states but which are not currently stressed and utilized thus getting Islam to change from being a threat to the other religions of the world into a more gentile and pleasant form where it coexists with the other religions in the world. Abdel el-Sisi reflected on his realization that should Islamic practices continue insisting on violent Jihad and the transformation of the entirety of the world to Islam by spreading Islam by the sword that Islam was facing a problem. Abdel el-Sisi described that problem perfectly when he stated, “It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire Ummah to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!! That thinking, I am not saying ‘religion’ but ‘thinking’, that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world! Is it possible that 1.6 billion Muslims should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants – that is 7 billion – so that they themselves may live? Impossible!!” Abdel el-Sisi has looked at the world through open eyes and seen that should Islam continue in its current path its hand will be against every religion, and every religion’s hand against Islam, and will in the end lead to the destruction of Islam, thus its path must change. Abdel el-Sisi has awakened from a nightmare revelation where he realizes that Islam will only continue if it refuses to continue raising its hands against the world thus he has taken upon himself the task of teaching the Imams and the presumed greatest of those preaching Jihad to now preach kindness. Can he win against the likes of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Feisal Abdul Rauf and Abu Hamza al-Masri? All the rest of us can do is pray that Abdel el-Sisi is making an honest attempt and not trying to aggrandize himself, and that should his intents be pure, from the depths of his heart, and guided by his reason, that he be blessed in his quest as, should he succeed, then both Islam, the Muslim world and the world as a whole will benefit from his efforts.

 

Beyond the Cusp