Yesterday Arab Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas gave a screed at the United Nations General Assembly opening ceremonies, which have been going on all week, filled with invectives and pure bile and hot hatreds against Israel, civility and the general decency which differentiates the human race from the base beasts of the wilds. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu gave his response today and fortunately spent little precious time addressing Abbas and his inflammatory speech simply stating that Israel was prepared to meet and negotiate with no precondition for the formation of an Arab state which would be demilitarized living beside Israel immediately and hoped that Abbas would take this opportunity. The video and the transcript for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s United Nations speech can be viewed on our special page. Much of the rest of the Prime Minister’s speech entailed the problems which will hatch as a result of the ill negotiated Iranian nuclear deal and impressed that Israel would take whatever steps deemed necessary to protect the Israeli population of Six Million Jews as well as its one-million-seven-hundred-thousand Arabs and the remainder of just over one-third a million other peoples. Where the Prime Minister spent but a small section of the ending of his speech to address the situation with the Arab Palestinians and the refusal since the signing of the Oslo Accords that is the refusal of Mahmoud Abbas, and Yasser Arafat before him, to reach any peace deal as doing so would require them to rule. This would bring to an end the gravy train of funds siphoned off from every Euro, Pound and Dollar received into their foreign accounts. Even this was a waste of time and needless as any recognition given Abbas and his grandstanding only further serves his aggressions against all of Israel. So, what has been the main development between the speeches by Abbas and Netanyahu?
Prime Minister Netanyahu delivered, as usual, an excellent speech but accomplished little by doing so. The forty-five seconds of silence may have been the most effective use of his time. Mahmoud Abbas may have delivered the most important address of which the initial effects may have already been felt. The Arab Palestinian Chairman delivered, to find the essence of his speech and deliver it in as short a set of terms as possible and as succinctly as possible, he delivered a declaration of war. There is no other way to interpret what Abbas’s speech was about. With the PA disbanded, as it was a construct of the Oslo Accords, we are left with Fatah which is synonymous with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) which was originally founded in 1964, a full three years before there existed any “occupied territories” and the charter read as their mission to complete the tasks necessary to erase Israel and replace Israel with another Arab and Muslim State. This PLO terror instrument never altered their aims of eradicating the Jewish State but had tabled any mention of such while under the guise of the PA, thus the PLO went dark. Still there were those who supported the far more belligerent struggles who eventually either joined Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda or even Islamic State and if remaining attached to Mahmoud Abbas, though he would regularly claim otherwise, he still listed himself as their commander. There was the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades which would every so often claim responsibility for a terror attack but found their survival more easily maintained if they just kept quiet about their operations. Well, perhaps the sole advantage is that now the leadership can declare their ownership of violent events and potentially take credit for their dastardly deal. Abbas and the rest of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda, Islamic State and al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades can proudly exclaim and praise their “brave warriors” when they assault unarmed Jews with lethal projectiles such as bricks, boulders and anything else, even bullets. The bullets were scarcely used as the projectile of preference as they immediately conveyed the concept that any such attack was attempted murder. Rocks the size of basketballs hurled into a windshield from a pickup truck with five or six youths riding in the bed each with such a rock as well as some softball or croquette size rocks as secondary ammunition and these projectiles were fired from a truck speeding in the opposite direction often at speeds over one-hundred KPH. Below are a collection of rocks that were hurled and a rare few had articles with actual pictures of these projectiles, though usually they simply report that rocks struck a vehicle. Such reports were always a bit strange and would leave one scratching their head and wondering to oneself how in all that is holy did rocks just leap out of nowhere to strike Israeli licensed vehicles.
What Israel, her people and especially her rulers must realize, internalize, and refuse to rationalize and instead proceed to actualize is this new information and new situation between Israel and the PLO is an actual declaration of war upon Israel. The very first item is no Zionist should ever mutter the Arab Palestinian Authority or PA as that institution was murdered by Abbas at the United Nations. The next step is to form a near immediate change in policy where any Israeli citizen, which includes the Arabs residing in East Jerusalem, throwing rocks or setting off pyrotechnics should be immediately arrested while any Arab noncitizen committing a similar act should be given a ticket on an El Al aircraft and flown to either the nation they chose or the closest such nation willing to accept them until their flight on an additional ticket boards to complete their transport to wherever they desire outside all of Israel permanently. The only other option is to build extremely large detention centers and in one section hold those who as Israeli citizens assaulted others in a nationalist terror manner under current definitions to keep them imprisoned for the duration of the conflict and the rest of complex built to hold those who are not Israeli citizens who will simply commit an act of war and been captured and must now serve their term until the war is finished and a permanent peace has been established. Abbas declared war and the leader of the nation which was named in the Abbas’s declaration of war, Israel, offered to sit and work out a peace agreement which could also lead to making peace with and having all Arab States agree to end their incitement as well. That is not going to happen anytime soon.
Israel is at war with the Iranians who have made it evidently clear that one of the first endeavors for their nuclear weapons within the next decade will be to eradicate Israel wiping it from the face of the Earth. Israel is at war with the Islamic State though that front will likely not become an active front for a number of years. Israel is at war with Bashir al-Assad and Hezballah along with any others including the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, in particular their al-Quds force which is dedicated to conquering Jerusalem, in Syria fighting for al-Assad or even a fair number of the other factions. Then there are others with whom Israel is still technically in a state of war such as Lebanon, Syria and other Middle Eastern nations from all the way back to the initial war to destroy Israel and slaughter every last Jew they could find from May 15th of 1948 where the war broke out before the ink could have dried on the speech read by David ben Gurion declaring Israel to be born with borders being between the Sinai Peninsula and the Negev Desert including Gaza as within Israel, the Lebanese northern border pretty much exactly as it is with a few small and minor areas to be debated and a border with Syria which gave Israel within her rights but the fence they erected was done inside Syrian borders and lastly Jordan with whom the original border was the Jordan River. These should be the borders Israel demands as a sovereign nation amongst the fellowship of nations. But the immediate war is the one which is taking place within our border. It would not surprise me that if allowed the latitude to control and area of the now defunct authority that Mahmoud Abbas may attempt to parlay his membership and recognition in a number of United Nations committees and call for Iran to come and assist in defending the Temple Mount and al-Aqsa Mosque. The danger of such an eventuality must produce actions of purpose and heightened reality and the brotherhood prevented entrance into any of these fronts.
The first fatalities of this newly redeclared war, the war was initiated originally by Mohammad when he altered complete verses and declared Mecca, not Jerusalem as he first indicated, to be the holiest of cities followed by Medina where Mohammad realized his victory over the older established religion of Judaism. There are many stories and explanations as to the reasons for the enmity which existed between the Jews of Medina and Mohammad and the Muslims. The problems reached their climax with the beheading of nearly one thousand Jews from the Banu Qurayzah tribe. This supposed trial and finding of guilt leading to the execution of every single adult aged male and the sale of the women and children into slavery was but the first step. The most famous victory of Muslim forces against the Jews at the very beginning of Islam took place at the battle at Khaybar where the remainders of the Jews of Medina were slaughtered and their wealth, women and children were sold into slavery. This has led to the modern day Islamic tradition, the chant “Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa yahud,” translated means, “Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning,” and is used as a battle cry when attacking Jews or Israelis. That has been the chant on many a university campus and other anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic gathering often protesting the lack of a lasting peace having been negotiated between Israel and the Arabs claiming to be from a mythical construct which has never existed called Palestine. This war has now returned full bore and charging into another attempted bloodletting of Israel be Islamic forces from near and far coming again as was the case in 1948-9, and again in 1967 for the Six Day War, and to a lesser extent in 1973 for the Yom Kippur War. The problem is that with modern weapons on both sides, and once Iran turns nuclear forcing a similar development in Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and who knows who else, the potentials for destruction on an unimagined scale is staring back at us from some future date when humanity becomes a forgotten trait and barbarism rules the day and the carnage will be immeasurable.
In the meantime the initiation of war had been announced and the first casualties have paid with their lives in the latest ambush of Jews by Arabs from the Fatah Party of Mahmoud Abbas, the purported angel of peace. This final war over the claims that the Jews have no rights or place being in Israel, and more so Jerusalem and never ever had any claim or Temples on the Temple Mount is imminent. This war began with the riots instigated by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini in the 1920s and on through the declaration of the State of Israel where he then led the local Muslim militias in the war of annihilation brought by over a half dozen Arab armies against the nascent state of Israel with genocidal aims to destroy the Jewish state in its crib. This latest and hopefully last war began in the year 2000 when Yasser Arafat declared what has rightfully become known as the Oslo War as it was as a direct result of the ill-fated desire for a civil peace where the Jews and Arabs could prosper together was the initiation of the efforts by some Pollyannish efforts to renew the moribund peace process which brought back the arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat as well as his trusted and close number two, Mahmoud Abbas. The Oslo Accords were entered into by Arafat and Abbas in order to regain a foothold that would lead to their long hoped but never quite attainable victory over the Jews and a second Holocaust would ensue, that was and still is the dream from one side of the “peace process.” This last wave of assaults has largely targeted Jerusalem and the Temple Mount as Abbas is fully aware that if he can chase the Jews from the Temple Mount, from all the Jewish holy sites in Judea and Samaria, and chase the Jews from all of the Old City of Jerusalem he will have decapitated the Jewish people and cut us from what is to us our lifeline which we have longed for for almost two-thousand years and has been the greatest joy, our strength, and our redemption. The initial threats were words which led to screaming mobs bumping and jostling IDF guards on duty hoping to capture some film or picture which could be interpreted as a frown on the face of a soldier and blow that up into an international incident. Then came the stones, then larger stones, then fireworks, then more even larger stones, then simply more stones at the ambush sites, then boulders followed by firebombs and it had to get here eventually but now it has become bullets, deadly bullets.
Pictured above are the parents so brutally murdered as explained in the caption above which reads, “Eitam and Naama Henkin and four of their children were in the car when the ambush was sprung and the shooting began. The children were unhurt in the gunfire but both parents were brutally and cold bloodedly murdered for the crime of being Jews. This was the first volley of the coming war which Mahmoud Abbas declared this past week when he told the world that any semblance of peace was over. This was the first volley as Mahmoud Abbas has thrown the Oslo Accords aside torn, tattered and burning into ashes, and Abbas has turned the clock back to 1964 and the PLO’s original Charter which called for the slaughter of the Jews in Israel, another Holocaust, another Shoah the murder of six-million Jews again to start another world at war, once again into the breach except this will be the final war which we have dread would come.” This is probably the farthest thing they could ever imagine, the being the initial victims of humanity at its most inhumane of levels and plotting for much, much more in the coming days, weeks, months and possibly the rest of the time mankind will have as an advanced species, which begs the question of how we can call ourselves advanced when we cannot even share a small square kilometer of space in what most agree is a holy city of peace, or that is what she has been named, Yerushalayim, Zion the city of peace. ירושלים, ציון עיר השלום
Taking full credit for this gruesome slaughter in a hail of gunfire was senior Fatah official Azzam al-Ahmed who told Hamas’s Al-Quds TV, “the attack is a natural response to the crimes of the settlers and every action has a reaction.” These crimes of the settlers are nothing more than the fact that they live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. This is the crime for which all the violence since the nineteenth century starting as early if not even further back with the 1834 looting of Safed (ביזת צפת בשנת תקצ”ד) where Jewish homes were looted and burned, synagogues were similarly looted and burned including the burning and other desecrations of the Torah scrolls and raping of the Jewish women and the murder of many of the Jews who remained in Safed as this continued for over a month. Furthermore, al-Aloul was noted by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) as having written on his Facebook page, “The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement Fatah, accepted responsibility for the Itamar operation carried out against settlers, leading to their deaths.” The Itamar operation carried out against settlers, translates to the cold blooded murder by the forces of evil this time reaching out to grasp and harm the most innocent as that way the terror is of the greatest shock value and terrorists aim for shock value as well as unarmed and unsuspecting people and seldom soldiers on duty but their war is against the innocent. We will hear from the pro-Arab Palestinian, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic protesters on some university campus or at some erudite cultural poetry reading where a Fatah representative will be present to read their poem, Ode to being Odious which tells of their great victory of the brave Arab Fatah freedom fighters, they must never be called terrorists as that might hurt their feelings and harm their self-esteem, and telling the tale will win him admiration and acclaim as the latest poetic genius.
Sometimes the anger at the senseless slaughter of innocent people and the news coming as it did leading into the Sabbath and one must now challenge themselves to rid their mind of disturbances thinking of the poor young children and the oldest two all of which will miss the love and care only a parent can provide. Others can do the exact same things, say the exact same words, be the same in every way except they are not the child’s parent and the child will know that difference which is why this has taken away innocence and replaced it with the hard and cruel reality of the fruits of hatreds. Bat-Sheva Sadan wrote the following in Hebrew but translated here about the challenges and the affects and effects of the loss of both their parents on their younger siblings. The deep emotion makes this a definitive read and I would beg that you take in the depth of feelings put into what would be mere words but this combination spoke to us here. The one item I might have to say is that when they feared the youngest might not remember the parents at all, not any number of things but they included smell. That may not be correct and will be proven likely at some point when the youngest is a little older and gets solemn for no apparent reason as they are walking in a mall, to synagogue or strolling along the beach boardwalk and when asked what is wrong their answer will be, ‘Nothing, really, just the last lady’s perfume reminded me of mom’ and it will come out of the blue and all will enjoy their own little memory that day all because small is the strongest and longest lasting of impressions especially between a mother and child.
The deaths of Eitam and Naama Henkin may be the deaths which history will remember as the initial shot fired which started the final conflict. They may be the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie who were murdered which set things into motion resulting in World War I. This just may be another possible echo from history. These echoes always seem to be worrisome as they are usually repeating things we would prefer not to repeat. We must pray this Sabbath and every Sabbath as these are dangerous times where simple events can take on gargantuan meaning, and this double murder is of great enough magnitude that it receiving more is beyond the cusp and all that is safe and sane.
Beyond the Cusp
Beyond the Cusp 