By Ben Shapiro https://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2018/05/16/why-jerusalem-matters-n2481057 May 16, 2018 Ivanka Trump at the inauguration of the new embassy in Jerusalem on May 14th.(Ronen Zvulun/Reuters) This week, the Trump administration inaugurated the new American embassy in Jerusalem. The celebration in Israel was palpable; the embassy move came amidst the national celebration of the 70th anniversary of the creation of the state. The streets filled with Jews of all sorts, cheering and dancing. Meanwhile, on the Gaza border, Hamas broadened its monthlong campaign to break down the Israel border, staging border "protests" attended by thousands -- including terrorists who have used the supposed protests as a staging point for violent attacks on Israeli troops and territory. Palestinian terrorists have caused mass chaos, throwing Molotov cocktails at troops, attempting to rush the border, flinging explosives and tying incendiaries to kites in an attempt to set Israeli territory alight. The Israeli Defense Forces have responded with restraint. Despite this, a few dozen Palestinians have been killed, not the hundreds or thousands Hamas would presumably prefer. But even as Yahya Sinwar, leader of Hamas in Gaza, suggested that "more than 100,000 people could storm the fence" between Israel and Gaza, and as 23-year-old Mohammed Mansoura announced, "We are excited to storm and get inside ... to kill, throw stones," the media covered the slow-rolling terror assault as a form of peaceful protest. A New York Times headline read "Israeli Troops Kill Dozens of Palestinian Protesters." A Wall Street Journal headline reads "Scores Killed, Thousands Injured as Palestinians Protest US Embassy Opening In Jerusalem." Never mind that the riots had been going on for weeks preceding the embassy opening. Never mind that Hamas and the Palestinian Authority could quickly and permanently end all violence simply by stopping the violence. The real issue, according to the press, is President Trump and his Israeli friends. What drives the leftist press's coverage? Simply put, antipathy to the West. Israel is seen as an outpost of colonialism by leftists, and has been since the 1967 war. Then-President Barack Obama expressed the view well in his 2009 speech in Cairo, suggesting that Israel's rationale relied on its "tragic history" that "culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust." In this view, the Palestinians were shunted aside in favor of providing national reparations to Jews; the Jews took their Western ways into the heart of a foreign region. This isn't true. The living proof of that is Israel's eternal connection to Jerusalem. That's why both radical Muslims (including the Palestinian leadership) and the far left deny Israel's historic bond with its homeland and hope desperately to stop public recognition of that bond. If Israel exists because Jewish connection pre-existed everything else, then Israel isn't a new outpost of the West; it's the oldest center of the West. That's why Trump's announcement is important: It's a recognition that the West was founded on Jerusalem, rather than the other way around. Peace will come when everyone recognizes what Trump has recognized: The Jewish connection to Jerusalem is unbreakable. And peace will come when Israel's enemies realize that violence can't change that underlying fact.
Officials from the DHS and BCA removed boxes and computer equipment from the Salama Child Care Center, Wednesday, May 13, 2015 in Minneapolis, MN.(Elizabeth Flores/Star Tribune)
At the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, the carry-on bag bulged with $1 million in cash from a welfare rip-off scheme. The loot was headed for Somalia, some of it to regions controlled by the al Shabaab terrorist group, and this shipment was part of $100 million sent over the past year alone.
Back on March 15, Fox 9 got a tip about a man leaving the country with $1 million in cash, but this was only part of the story. “Fox 9 learned that these cloak-and-dagger scenarios now happen almost weekly at MSP. The money is usually headed to the Middle East, Dubai and points beyond. Sources said last year alone, more than $100 million in cash left MSP in carry-on luggage.”
Glen Kearns, a former Seattle police detective formerly with the FBI’s joint terrorism task force, told Fox “it’s an outright crime, it’s unbelievable.” The operator was part of “Hawalas,” businesses that transport money to countries that have no legitimate banking system.
According to Kearns, the money was going to an area controlled by al Shabaab, which operates the Hawala there. As Kearns learned, those sending tens of thousands of dollars “happened to be on government assistance in this country,” the USA. As Kearns’ sources explained, “It’s welfare fraud, it’s all about the daycare,” a story Fox 9 had been covering for five years.
Somali fraudsters would start a daycare center and sign up low-income families that qualify for child-care assistance funding. Parents would check in the kids and promptly leave, but the center would bill the state for a full day.
Fozia Ali, a city official in Hopkins Park, ran a daycare center in south Minneapolis that billed the government for more than $1 million in bogus childcare services. The FBIs Craig Lisher told Fox that “some of the funds went overseas.” On trips to Dubai and Kenya, staying in luxury hotels, Fozia Ali “used an app on her phone to bill the state of Minnesota for childcare services.” She is now serving time in federal prison, but the rip-off did not end there.
In 2015, investigators tracked $14 million in those mysterious suitcases at Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. By 2016 it was $84 million and last year a full $100 million, all ripped off from American taxpayers. Fox reporters asked Kearns if any of the money was funding terrorism.
“I say absolutely,” Kearns confirmed. “Our sources tell us that. Good sources, from the community leaders.” And as Fox noted, “fraudsters in other states are now using the Minnesota playbook to rip off millions of public dollars meant to help kids.”
Way back in November of 2002, one year after the 9/11 attacks, historian Roger McGrath authored “The Great Somali Welfare Hunt.” As he noted, Lewiston, Maine, a mill town of 36,000 on the Androscoggin River, “has been the destination for hundreds of Somali Muslims.” This was due to the Refugee Act of 1980, which changed the priority of favoring refugees from Communist countries and rebranded “refugee” as any person unwilling or unable to return to their homeland because of a fear of persecution etc.
According to Renee Bernier of the Lewiston city council, the Somalis “came in droves off the busses” and “some made the welfare office their first stop.” They could grab five years of assistance, public housing and Section 8 vouchers. As McGrath noted, “employment opportunities are evidently a low priority.”
In similar style, as Soeren Kern observed, “Jihadists Exploit Welfare Benefits” in Europe. In Austria, jihadists used welfare payments to finance trips to Syria. Jihadists in Belgium received nearly $60,000 in welfare benefits and used the money to finance terror plots. Some jihadists continued to receive welfare after they had traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight for the Islamic State.
In Britain, Manchester suicide bomber Salman Abedi used taxpayer-funded student loans and benefits to bankroll his terror plot. The Islamist Anjem Choudary, a supporter of ISIS, was taking home $32,000 a year in welfare benefits, plus money for housing and income support.
As Kern noted, “Choudary believes that Muslims are entitled to welfare payments because they are a form of jizya, a tax imposed on non-Muslims as a reminder that they are permanently inferior and subservient to Muslims.”
In all likelihood, the Somali Muslims in Minnesota believe they are likewise entitled to the money of non-Muslim American workers. So they rip off American taxpayers, stuff suitcases with cash, and send the money winging to Islamic terrorists abroad.
As Glen Kearns told Fox, “my personal opinion is we need a nationwide task force to clamp down on this type of fraud.” It might take just a bit more than that.
Criminals and welfare cheaters abound in the United States. A ballpark figure for the number the USA should import is zero.
The slave-holding American South was a plutocracy built on a monstrosity.
A self-perpetuating elite that derived both its material worth and self-worth from its dominion over millions of stolen Africans, the planters conned themselves into believing that their flogged chattels were devoted to their benevolent masters and that their "peculiar institution" would survive any Yankee challenge. Slaves, proclaimed South Carolina planter James Henry Hammond in 1858, were "happy, content . . . and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations."
Three years later, most of the slave states rebelled, the newborn Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter, igniting the Civil War, and their charmed dystopia was doomed.
In his accomplished new book, Bruce Levine, a history professor at the University of Illinois, tells the story of the Civil War's inexorable destruction of slavery and the social order it sustained. An absorbing social history, "The Fall of the House of Dixie" is at its best when it is teasing out what Marxists like to call the "fatal contradictions" of Southern society. Karl Marx himself has a cameo with an astute analysis of Lincoln: The president, he observed, "never ventures a step before the tide of circumstances and the general call of public opinion forbid further delay."
Indeed, for readers whose Civil War bibliography runs to standard works by Bruce Catton and James McPherson—with an audio-visual assist from Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln"—Mr. Levine's book offers fresh insights into the complex reality of what most Northerners thought of as the solid South and the slow evolution of the Union crusade against slavery.
The scope of slavery at its crest in the decade before Fort Sumter was as vast as it was appalling. In 1858, writes Mr. Levine, there were nearly 60,000 Americans who owned at least 20 slaves. Three thousand men owned 100 or more, and one Georgia planter boasted 1,500 human chattels spread over several properties. In all, there were four million slaves in the states that would form the Confederacy and elsewhere in the Union and its territories. They were valued at the equivalent of $83 billion in today's dollars. The cotton they raised represented fully half of the exports of the young republic, mostly to Britain's "dark satanic mills."
The power of the slave interests was as much political as it was economic. Of the 15 presidents before Lincoln, all but three—the two Adamses and William Henry Harrison, who died after just a month in office—were slave owners or their enablers. Across the South, planters dominated state houses, local governments and congressional delegations.
But the grip of slavery on the slave holders went beyond economic and political power. The slave system, Mr. Levine writes, was "the unique basis of the particular outlook, assumptions, norms, habits and relationships to which masters as a social class had become deeply and reflexively attached. It defined their privileges and shaped their culture, their religion and even their personalities." The men of the South came from "a master race," proclaimed Georgia's Gov. George Fitzhugh in 1861. And many used their power, most conspicuously, to exercise sexual mastery over the slave women on their plantations.
From the beginning of the rebellion, slave interests called the shots. Of the 50 delegates from the deep South who met in Montgomery, Ala., in February 1861 to explore secession, 49 were slave owners, 21 of them planters. The millions of Southerners from the hill country and the border states who couldn't afford slave labor or had no need for it on their hardscrabble farms were unrepresented. This fundamental conflict of interest would undermine the Southern cause, shape the destiny of the rebel army and ultimately contribute as much to the fall of Dixie as Lincoln's blue host.
None of this was clear to most people at the start of the war. Southern aristocrats were certain that their slaves would stand with them and that their martial young men would obliterate the ragtag Northern armies poised on their borders—in a month or two at most. Initially, Lincoln's aim was simply to restore the union and bar the further spread of slavery. He was so concerned to keep slave-holding Kentucky in the Union as a base to attack the upper South that he muffled any talk of abolition.
A few knew better. The most prescient was Frederick Douglass, the vibrant ex-slave turned abolitionist orator. "The Negro is the key of the situation—the pivot upon which the whole rebellion turns," he said in 1861. "The inexorable logic of events," he predicted, would drive Lincoln to make the eradication of slavery the spear point of the war.
That is indeed what happened. Early Confederate victories at Bull Run in 1861 and 1862 and elsewhere forced Lincoln's hand. First, slaves were declared "contraband of war"—not freed but ruled to be enemy property eligible for seizure by Union forces. By July 1862, Congress had ordered that slaves of rebel owners "shall be deemed captives of war and shall be forever free." The president himself declared: "We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued." Six months later, Union troops handed out a million copies of the Emancipation Proclamation throughout the South as thousands of blacks abandoned their masters and fled to the Union columns.
Helpless in the grip of their own self-delusion, the slave owners undermined their own cause. Even as their armies bent under fierce Union attack, they refused to lend their slaves to build defenses or toil behind the lines. Instead, they "refugeed" tens of thousands across the Mississippi to Texas, out of easy reach of Union forces. They allowed planters' sons to buy their way out of serving and resisted desperate measures by Jefferson Davis's government to raise food and other supplies from the plantations. To the end, they refused to give guns to their slaves and press them into combat, even after Lincoln armed the freed slaves and other blacks and formed them into effective regiments.
These actions only aggravated the class conflict between the slavocracy and the poor whites, who realized that they were fighting and dying to preserve the wealth and social order of the haughty rich. One man in the ditches of Georgia wrote that his comrades were "tired of fighting for this negro aristockracy [sic]." Another said: "I would not give my life for all the Blame negroes in the Confederacy." As the rebellion spiraled down, they fled the ranks. Some formed guerrilla bands and fought their ex-comrades. A plantation mistress confided to her diary, "we have almost as much to dread from our own demoralized mob as from the public enemy."
By the end of the war, a third to a half of the Confederate army had deserted, and more than 300,000 Southern whites were fighting for the Union. In Montgomery, the planters and their ladies danced on the lip of the volcano. "We eat, drink, laugh, dance in lightness of heart," one woman reported. A few months later, Robert E. Lee surrendered what remained of his Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox.
Mr. Levine calls the transformation of the South through the abolition of slavery "the second American revolution." It was, of course, incomplete. The impulse to give the freedmen confiscated plantation land so that they could establish economic independence to match their new liberty never got traction. Instead, slavery was replaced by serfdom in the guise of tenant farming that bound the ex-slaves to the land nearly as tightly as the master's chains. Within a generation, the remnants of the Southern white aristocracy found common cause with their poor white brethren to subjugate the blacks once more through Jim Crow laws that thwarted the newly liberated. It would take the better part of another century of struggle to make fresh progress in redeeming Lincoln's original promise.
An accomplished ironist, Mr. Levine recognizes how the South defeated itself more effectively than the zeal and industrial might of the Union. "A war launched to preserve slavery," he writes, "succeeded instead in abolishing that institution more rapidly and radically than would have occurred otherwise." Or, as South Carolina plantation mistress Mary Chesnut lamented: "Our world has gone to destruction."
—Mr. Kosner is the former editor of Newsweek, New York, Esquire and the New York Daily News.
By Rich Lowry https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/donald-trump-jerusalem-embassy-a-foreign-policy-triumph/ May 15, 2018 White House senior advisor Ivanka Trump (R) and US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin (L) arrive to the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem on May 14, 2018, in Jerusalem, Israel. (Photo by Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images,) In the second century a.d., Jewish rebels who had stunned the Romans and liberated a portion of Judea overstruck imperial coins with images and a message of their own, “Year One of the Redemption of Jerusalem.” The Roman emperor Hadrian had planted the seeds for the rebellion with his ambitions to remake Jerusalem, including the construction of a temple to Jupiter built on the site of the old Jewish Temple.
The leader of the Jewish rebellion, Bar Kokhba, was fired by a vision of a united Israel with Jerusalem as its capital, which had been the exception during the prior millennium, thanks to the depredations of the Assyrians and Babylonians, among others. But such was the power of the national idea — and his messianic zeal — that Bar Kokhba ventured all on regaining it.
And lost. Not for nearly another 2,000 years would the vision come to fruition. At a ceremony in 1982 burying bones of some of those long-ago rebels with military honors, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin declared: “Israel and Judea are reborn. We have redeemed Jerusalem.”
King David conquered the city in 1000 b.c. and made it the capital of the kingdom of Israel. His son Solomon built the First Temple. “He who has not seen Jerusalem in her splendor has never seen a desirable city in his life,” declares the Babylonian Talmud. “He who has not seen the Temple in its full construction has never seen a glorious building in his life.”
But Jerusalem would repeatedly be captured and the Temple destroyed (first by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar and then by the Roman emperor Titus).
The story of the Jewish people is one of loss, memory, and faithfulness and persistence. Psalm 137, recounting the Babylonian captivity, avers: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.”
The Jewish people never forgot. In one of the miracles of our age, after long periods of exile punctuated by genocide at the hands of the Nazis, they reestablished Israel in 1948, and then gained control of all of Jerusalem in 1967 (prior to that, when Jordan held East Jerusalem, Jews couldn’t visit the Western Wall).
The notion that the City of David isn’t the capital of Israel was an impolite fiction, honored by the U.S. and the West for fear of provoking Arabs hostile to the very idea of the Jewish state. Its prime minister, parliament, and highest court are based there, and it’s unimaginable that Israel would ever agree to any peace deal that didn’t recognize it as the capital.
The tired, conventional arguments against it haven’t held up well in the wake of President Donald Trump’s decision to move our embassy. The Arab street hasn’t exploded. The West Bank has been relatively quiet. Arab capitals haven’t erupted in outrage. The flashpoint has been in Gaza, the terror statelet ruled by Hamas. Israel pulled out of Gaza more than a decade ago and has been rewarded with constant attacks emanating from a territory where the infrastructure of mayhem and destruction — rockets, tunnels, and the like — is the only growth industry.
Hamas has goaded rioters to storm the Israeli border, defended by Israeli soldiers who fire on them if necessary to protect local communities (more than 50 were killed on Monday). This isn’t “the caravan” that arrived at the U.S. border with peaceful migrants seeking asylum, but a violent provocation that is a function of Hamas’s commitment to Israel’s destruction.
For now, that poisonous ambition looks more fantastical than ever. Trump’s move is an acknowledgment of reality. It is also a symbolic statement of permanence, that Menachem Begin was correct when he said at the ceremony for the Bar Kokhba rebels 36 years ago, “Glorious fathers, we are back and we will not budge from here.’’
Hamas supporters in Gaza held the world’s first peaceful protest with hand grenades, pipe bombs, cleavers and guns. Ten explosive devices were peacefully detonated. There were outbursts of peaceful gunfire and over a dozen kites carrying firebombs were sent into Israel where they started 23 peaceful fires. And Israeli soldiers peacefully defended their country leaving multiple Hamas attackers at peace.
"We will tear down the border," Hamas Prime Minister Yahya Sinwar had peacefully vowed. "And we will tear out their hearts from their bodies."
But the only hearts his terror thugs tore out were already bleeding with sympathy for Islamic terrorists.
The Hamas mob chanted, “Allahu Akbar” and the genocidal racist threat of, “Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud," a reference to the primal Islamic massacre of the Jews. While IDF soldiers held back the invaders, the jets of the IAFtargeted the snake’s head striking Hamas compounds and outposts. By 5.30 PM, the Hamas organizers changed course and began urging the thugs away from further fence attacks.
Hamas had offered $100 to every rioter. During previous violent assaults back in April, the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist group had been offering $200 to anyone shot by Israelis, $500 for severe injuries and $3,000 to the dead.
$100 a day may not seem like a lot, but the Israeli teen soldiers they’re trying to kill, earn $13 a day.
The Hamas supporting thugs are depicted as helpless, starving victims who can barely lift the firebombs they’re throwing at Israelis, but they make ten times as much as the Israeli soldiers they are there to kill.
Hamas can write all those checks to its aspiring killers because the cash is coming from Iran.
Last year, Senwar, whom Israel had released in exchange for captured Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit, had boasted that Iran was once again "the largest backer financially and militarily".
With as many as 50,000 Hamas supporters in Gaza participating in the day’s attacks at $100 a head, over 1,000 allegedly injured at least $200 each, and another 52 allegedly killed at $3,000 each (there is no reason to treat Hamas casualty figures coming out of Gaza as anything other than propaganda), the whole thing cost Hamas and Iran $5.3 million. The unmarked cargo plane filled with foreign currency that Obama dispatched to Iran carried $400 million. That was part of a known $1.7 billion cash payment.
But the total Obama terror payments to Tehran may go as high as $33.6 billion.
Despite media misreporting, the Hamas mass fence attacks began back on March 30 and even though their Great March of Return was supposed to end in mid-May, the show proved to be unexpectedly popular in Tehran, Brussels and Berkeley, and the attacks will continue through at least June.
Even a single one of Obama’s cash smuggling runs to Iran is enough to fund attacks just like these for two and a half months. And the $100,000 that an Iranian group offered to anyone who blows up the embassy? That illegal cash run can pay for bounties on every American diplomatic facility in the world.
Lefties bemoaning Israel’s moral authority can look up and follow the money trail from Iran’s IRGC (the terror mothership whom Obama resisted sanctioning), to the unmarked cargo planes from Obama, and to their own greasy little fingers that pushed the button or marked the ballot for him. The Israeli teens in IDF khaki with rules of engagement for using force longer than some graduate thesis papers are dealing with a problem from hell created by Democrat voters who wanted to feel inspired by Obama.
The cost of that inspiration today ran to dozens dead. If the Israeli teens shooting in self-defense lack moral authority, where is the moral authority of the Obama voters whose votes financed the attack?
Those Israeli teens in green earn $408 a month if they're in a combat unit. Before a raise a few years ago, they weren't even earning $300. Support units earn $327 and rear units $225. Not only is that far lower than the average civilian salary, but if often hardly covers living expenses. Dodging the draft isn’t hard these days. The average red-shirted hipster does it easily, putting in a few years at a fake startup before heading to Berlin to protest Zionism. And those who serve know if that they make a single mistake, if they shoot an attacker who turns out not to be armed, Israeli leftists will see them jailed.
Hamas supporters charge at them for $100 a day. And IDF soldiers hold the line for $400 a month.
So why for $400 a month, do Israeli soldiers face down mobs of tens of thousands of Hamas supporters baying for their blood? The average IDF soldier who reports for duty comes from one of the Judean communities (slurred as settlements) under attack by Hamas or from development towns in the north under attack by Hezbollah. He is often a religious settler who sees the hand of G-d in the high hills or a descendant of Mizrahi immigrants whose recent ancestors were oppressed under Muslim rule.
When your family lives under fire, holding the line on the Hamas mob isn’t an abstract idea of duty.
The Hamas invaders were there to kill Israelis. The Israeli soldiers were there to protect Israelis. The attackers were invading someone else’s land while the defenders were protecting their own country.
That’s why Hamas has to pay its rioting thugs ten times as much as Israeli soldiers earn to attack them.
While the $100 a day thugs threw rocks and firebombs, the professional terrorists hung back waiting for a breach in the fence. Some were caught planting bombs. And killed. They are among the 10 known Hamas terrorists killed in the Gaza fighting and bemoaned by the media as victims of a Jewish massacre.
The $400 a month Israeli teenager with a rifle is there as the front line in case the fence is breached. Hamas wants to take more hostages to free more terrorists. If it can’t do that, it will kill them. And if the attackers make it past the soldiers, they will hit Israeli towns and villages hoping to kill anyone they find.
While the fence holds up, the Hamas terrorists and their supporters sent flaming kites in the hopes of setting Israeli farms and fields on fire. One such attack had already destroyed 400 acres of wheat.
A sympathetic New York Times piece from last week described the "flaming-kite squadrons" prepping hundreds of fire kites, but unfortunately, "The wind was blowing the other way."
“The wind is still against us,” Ismail al-Qrinawi whined. “We are waiting for it to pick up so we can fly tens of kites and burn their crops." Instead, "the direction of the wind not only thwarted the kites, but also blew copious amounts of Israeli tear gas toward the protesters."
Pharaoh and his legions had the same bad experience with the wind. G-d must be an Islamophobe.
Hamas organized the invasion. It urged its human shields to head to the fence telling them that the Israelis had run away. That was the same way Egypt’s Nasser had tricked Jordan’s King Hussein during the Six Day War. Instead of defeating the Israelis and salvaging Gaza, Nasser’s scheme led to the liberation of Jerusalem, along with Judea and Samaria by the indigenous Jewish people. And it also had disastrous consequences for this latest attempted invasion by Egyptian-Jordanian settlers into Israel.
While the Hamas supporters were destroying their own crossing point infrastructure, as they had previously trashed their own gas lines, the United States was inaugurating the opening of an embassy in Jerusalem. Despite media misinformation, the riots predated the embassy and will postdate it.
The media used contrasting photos of the embassy opening and the Pallywood fake photos of protesters crying for the cameras and pretending to limp on crutches to smear Israel and America. And as usual they missed the real story. While Israelis and Americans were building something, Muslim terrorists were destroying everything they could get their hands on. While Rabbis and Pastors blessed, Imams cursed.
Hamas Sheikh Iyad Abu Funun had sworn on the Koran that, "We will not leave a single Jew on our Islamic land." It did not matter, “whether left-Wing, right-wing, secular, religious, or extremist.”
That is what this is about.
The dedication of the embassy is a leap of faith. Faith in building rather than destruction. Faith in life instead of death. Faith in the G-d who watches over Jerusalem, not the Allah for whom Gaza burns.
Related:
Media Do Hamas' Dirty Work, Claim Israel Is Killing 'Protesters.' That's A Lie.-
A sign calls on US President Donald Trump to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem.(REUTERS)
The United States is officially opening its Israeli embassy in Jerusalem today, making May 14, 2018 an historic day for the Jewish State of Israel. Other U.S. presidents have made campaign promises to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, only to abandon their promises in deference to the foreign policy establishment and "international" opinion. In moving forward to fulfill his promise to move the embassy to Jerusalem, President Trump ignored the foreign policy establishment and "international" opinion, much as President Harry Truman did when he gave de facto recognition to the newly created State of Israel only eleven minutes after Israel’s proclamation of its independence.
President Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law and key adviser Jared Kushner are representing President Trump for the opening of the new embassy. The Israelis are celebrating. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared at his weekly cabinet meeting, "President Trump promised to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and he did so. He promised to move the American Embassy to Israel and he is doing so. Of course we will all celebrate this day.”
President Trump’s decision, denounced not only by the Palestinians themselves, as expected, but by amoral government leaders and opinion makers all around the world, should not be so controversial. Each nation has the sovereign right to locate its own embassies wherever it chooses. The U.S. embassy will be located in West Jerusalem, not in any area claimed by the Palestinians to be part of their future "capital" in East Jerusalem. Moreover, President Trump clearly stated that U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is not intended to decide any final status issues regarding Jerusalem as a whole. Finally, the United Nations resolutions that the critics of President Trump’s decision rely upon to support their objections on “legal” grounds do little to help their case. The General Assembly has no legal authority under the UN Charter to require anything of the member states except payment of their annual budget assessments. The Security Council has huffed and puffed about so-called “illegal” Israeli settlements including in East Jerusalem and called upon member states to withdraw their embassies from Jerusalem, but did so solely in the form of completely non-binding resolutions.
President Trump did what he thought was the right thing to do, as President Truman had done seventy years ago when he said, "I had faith in Israel before it was established, I have faith in it now." President Trump was willing, in President Truman’s words when dealing with his critics regarding the Palestine situation, “to let them all go to hell."
Unfortunately, it looks like there will be some hell to pay from the Palestinians before this week is over. On Sunday, which was being observed ahead of the embassy opening as Jerusalem Day by Israelis, the day was marred by clashes that broke out between Jews and Arabs on the Temple Mount. In order to keep the peace, Israeli police officers separated the two sides, and removed Jews from the Temple Mount who had allegedly broken the rules of conduct that ban all non-Muslims from praying or singing on the Temple Mount where Al-Aqsa Mosque is situated.
Of course, it is not enough for the Palestinians that the Israeli government forbids Jews to sing or pray at loud on what is the Jewish peoples’ holiest site, out of undeserved deference to Muslims' sensibilities because of their mosque’s location on the Temple Mount. Palestinians want complete control of Old Jerusalem, including the entire Temple Mount and the area in which the Western Wall is located. Even that is not enough for many Palestinians. They are encouraged by their irresponsible leaders, including Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas who has said that Israel is a “colonialist enterprise,” to believe that the Jewish State of Israel is illegitimate. Millions of Palestinian descendants born years after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 are brought up with the fantasy that they have a so-called “right of return” to “homes” inside Israel, some of which were abandoned by their parents, grandparents or great grandparents seventy years ago.
Israel is preparing for mass Palestinian protests early this week along the Gaza border with Israel, bolstering its IDF forces and bringing in special firefighting squads according to a Debkafile report. The air space over and around Gaza has been reportedly closed by Israeli authorities. More intense violence than in past weeks is expected as Hamas leaders have called for waves of Palestinians to break through the border fence separating Israel from Gaza, the culmination of seven weeks of “Return Marches” demanding the so-called “right of return.” The opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, together with the 70th anniversary of what the Palestinians call the "nakba," or catastrophe resulting from the creation of Israel as an independent state in what Palestinians still fantasize as their land, are likely to send the protesters into overdrive. "What's the problem with hundreds of thousands breaking through a fence that is not a border?" Hamas’s Gaza head Yahya Sinwar asked rhetorically.
The Palestinian propagandists and their supporters try to portray the Gaza protests as the peaceful exercise of freedom of speech and assembly by unarmed Palestinian civilians. In truth, Hamas leaders and other Islamists are preaching violence and using civilians, including children, as human shields to carry out their jihad against Israel. Late last month, for example, a Gaza cleric Sheikh Musa Abu Jleidan preached violence when he said that the "Great Return March" is a "form of Jihad" that "does not eliminate the need for Jihad by the sword, by missiles, and by rockets. They go hand in hand." He added that Jews “are the philosophers of terrorism and crime, people of treachery and deceit, who slayed the prophets of Allah. It is an honor for us, here on this blessed land, to have been chosen by Allah to fight them and to strike fear in them."
A young Palestinian girl protesting at one of the Return March rallies absorbed the jihad message. She was heard exclaiming "Martyrs in the millions are marching to Jerusalem. Palestine forever! Jerusalem belongs to us, not to the filthy Israel." Other protesters cheered her on, shouting “Allah Akbar.”
Any Palestinians marching to Jerusalem to oust Jews are not martyrs. They are usurpers. Historically, Jews have been living in Jerusalem continuously for more than three millennia. Jerusalem has never been the capital of any sovereign nation except of the Jewish people. In more recent times, Jews have constituted the largest single group of inhabitants in Jerusalem since at least the mid-1800s. Prior to the Jordanians’ illegal occupation, Jerusalem was an undivided city. Jerusalem is so again today, open to worshippers of all faiths. It is the Palestinians who seek to replicate Jordan’s temporary illegal occupation and division of Jerusalem and make it permanent, imposing an ethnic and religious cleansing of any Jewish residents in the Old City. President Trump’s bold decision, fulfilled this week, will go down in history along with his predecessor President Truman’s early recognition of the Jewish State of Israel.
By William Sullivan https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/05/a_quiet_place_is_a_loud_proclamation_of_humanitys_greatest_virtues.html May 13, 2018 John Krasinski’s newest film, A Quiet Place, is performing well at the box office. As a horror movie fan, this is reason for optimism, because it signifies that more films like it might be produced. The movie is fairly original, tightly-paced at a sleek 90 minutes, well-acted, and uncomfortably scary. But the film doesn’t rely upon cheap tricks alone to scare audiences. The emotional response elicited by the film derives from the most primal and common of human feelings shared by the audience. It makes for an interesting observation to note that while the depiction of realistic human characters on screen may have endeared so many to the film, it has also caused some on the left to become bothered by the way the realism on screen conflicts with the unrealistic world which they imagine exists. (Some spoilers follow.) The film follows a family living in Iowa after an invasion of deadly creatures which will attack anything creating loud sounds. The family, therefore, exists in this post-apocalyptic world in silence, scouring a grocery store for provisions in the opening scene. It is one of the more interesting and engaging openings I’ve seen in a horror film. There is little verbal exposition. You know they are a loving family, and you know nearly everything about the world around them following this scene. As we learn more about the family’s home life, however, we find the first of the left’s problems with the film. The film depicts the family in the “quaint traditionalism” of the “White American family,” as Damien Straker lays out in his review. It’s all too Norman Rockwell for him -- the holding of hands to “pray before eating” at the farmhouse, and the “slow dance” of a mother and father in love as they exist within desperate circumstances. Straker also laments the “conventional gender roles” employed in the film. The father as the hunter, provider, and protector. The mother is cast in the role of the nurturer and the foundation of home life. The left has a problem with this arrangement, because in challenges the gender-neutral world that they imagine exists. Reversing the roles to advance that silly gender-neutral worldview might have been a less “conventional” choice which would have satisfied some leftist critics, but not a realistic one within the world created by the film. This dichotomy of the mother and father has been the reality of the natural human condition, and the arrangement which has sustained the nuclear family for millennia – and particularly, in times without all the industrial and technological advances that we enjoy today. Progressive feelings do not change that fact. And thankfully, the movie observes that reality rather than conflating it by injecting more modern, “progressive” sensibilities. Then we have the film’s second infraction -- that the mother is pregnant and chooses to bring her screaming, helpless baby into the world, rather than aborting the child or having practiced extreme birth control efforts. Esther Zuckerman gripes at Cosmopolitan that she “kept wondering why these two were having another kid in the first place… did they truly think through what that means for their two surviving kids?” This one is even more confounding than the first. Even if we were to accept the premise that human beings are nothing more than creatures existing alongside all the others in the animal kingdom, the most primal impulse among humankind would still be the proliferation of human life. The adults of the film are clearly more than animals, however, as they seek to instill higher values in their children and educate them about the inherited wisdom humanity has achieved (i.e., reading, writing, mathematics, moral principles, etc.). Director John Krasinski, in a way, addresses this “gripe.” When he received the script for the film, he says, he had just had a daughter weeks before. He was in the “terrifying new phase of parenthood” that many parents know well. “I was scared to keep her safe, scared to keep her alive, scared about whether or not I was a good enough person to be her father. And all these things are in the movie.” He goes on to say that, while he’s happy the film is received as a “scary movie,” he says the film is really “a love letter to my kids. This is truly a story about ‘What would you really do for your children in order to protect them?’ The family stuff is so emotional for me.” What, indeed, would you have done for your children? Wouldn’t the very first thing you would have done been to prepare for their arrival in the world in the best way you knew how, rather than ending their lives in the womb or never conceiving them, as the characters in his film do? I have a hard time believing that Krasinski meant for the movie to exhibit a pro-life message. But it’s unmistakably there, accidental or not. Then there’s the final straw for the left – the family’s reliance upon a gun. As Richard Brody writes in the New Yorker, the movie “disgorges its entire stifled and impacted ideological content” when Emily Blunt sobbingly asks of her husband, “Who are we if we can’t protect [our children]?” Brody writes of his displeasure in “the rustic farmhouse” turning into a “visual fortress” where the “stash of firearms” is “the ultimate game changer, the ultimate and decisive defense against home intruders.” Indeed, the last line of defense, and ultimately the salvation of the family, lies not only in human ambition, intelligence, and a bit of luck (all things that our forebears might have referred to as Providence), but also the very prominent use of a gun to defend their lives against their attackers. And in this, nothing could be closer to our reality. So yes, it’s a pro-Second Amendment movie. It’s a pro-life movie. And it’s a pro-traditional-family-values movie. It’s highly unlikely that the filmmakers sought to make a movie that broadly expressed the absolute value in those virtues such that it would broadly appeal to conservatives. But it does. And, perhaps because of this broad appeal, the movie is now expected to surpass $250 million in global box office sales this week. And this leads to my other reason for optimism, in terms of the culture. Jimmy Kimmel quipped at the Academy Awards that “We don’t make movies like Call Me by Your Name to make money, we make them to annoy Mike Pence.” The movie he cites, a film about a homosexual love affair between a 24-year-old man and a 17-year-old boy, earned only $40 million in the global box office, despite all the self-congratulatory fanfare among the Hollywood elite. But A Quiet Place shows that movies about the reality we all share and observe, not just movies about the left’s preferred conception of a reality which has never existed, can still be made, and made well, in Hollywood. And despite Kimmel’s silly quip, I believe that Hollywood still likes money enough to keep making them for us from time to time, however accidental the more conservative messaging within them might be. William Sullivan blogs at Political Palaver and can be followed on Twitter.
