“A Royal Debunking”?

Video Of The Week - Royal Family’s Connection to Jerusalem-https://tinyurl.com/mw8t3par

For the full article By Stephen M. Flatow go to: https://tinyurl.com/2p8v67pj

The ascent of Prince Charles to the British throne King Charles III is a problem for advocates of the Palestinian Arab cause. The new king’s connection to a key Jewish holy site in eastern Jerusalem could focus attention on a subject that the Arabs are anxious to avoid.

King Charles III’s grandmother, Princess Alice, and her aunt, Grand Duchess Elisabeth, are both buried in a small Christian cemetery on the Mount of Olives, near the largest Jewish cemetery in the world.  The Mount of Olives is in that part of the city that the Palestinian Authority calls “Arab East Jerusalem.” The PA says that the area should be the “capital of Palestine.” According to the PA, Zionists – whether Jews or Christians – have no right to be there. They’re “illegal settlers.”  The cemetery where the two royals are buried belongs to the Church of Mary Magdalene, a Russian Orthodox church and convent that was built at the foot of the Mount of Olives in 1886 by Tsar Alexander II. It is located directly across the Kidron Valley from the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism.

Princess Alice, who lived in Greece during World War II, sheltered a Jewish family from the Nazis and was posthumously honored by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. Alice, who passed away in 1969, left instructions to be buried at Mary Magdalene cemetery. Her remains were transferred there in 1988.

 The royals’ desire to be buried in Jerusalem demonstrates a longstanding affection for the capital of the Holy Land, something that reflects what we call “Christian Zionism.”  Whether or not Alice or Elisabeth ever called themselves “Christian Zionists” – and whether or not the new king thinks of himself as such – doesn’t matter. The historical facts speak for themselves. Charles knows that his Bible describes the founder of their religion traveling and residing in territories with Hebrew, not Arabic, names – because those areas were, and are, central parts of the Jewish homeland. If there had been a Palestinian Authority in those days, no doubt it would have denounced Jesus as a “Zionist settler.”

As prince, Charles visited the graves of his grandmother, and her aunt, when he attended the funeral of Shimon Peres in 2016. Perhaps, in the PA’s eyes, that made him an “accessory to Zionist settlement activity.” Interestingly, Charles’s visit to the Mount of Olives was undertaken secretly, without the knowledge of the public or news media, apparently for fear of offending the Palestinian Authority.

It’s easy to see why the PA would have been angry over Prince Charles’s visit to his relatives’ graves. Any focus on the Mount of Olives is a public relations disaster for the Palestinians. It reminds the world that one of the most important Jewish religious sites in the world is situated in eastern Jerusalem – shattering the myth that it’s an all-Arab territory that belongs to the Palestinians.  The PA and its media allies call it “Arab East Jerusalem,” but that’s just a propaganda term. The Jewish people’s roots in eastern Jerusalem go back thousands of years, long before any Arab claims.

 The existence of the Church of Mary Magdalene is yet another PR headache for the Palestinians. It was established in 1886 – at a time when no Arabs called the area “Palestine” or called themselves “Palestinians.” That is yet another reminder that Palestinian national identity is a recent and shallow invention, created not because Palestinians are any different from Jordanians or Syrians, but simply as a weapon against the Jews.

How King Charles III interacts with Israel, and whether or not he visits his illustrious family’s graves in Jerusalem, remains to be seen. But the facts about why his relatives are buried there, and who the city and the country belong to, are part of a historical record that cannot be denied. 

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How "Human Rights" Believers Fund Evil

 Video Of The Week "Funding Evil is not British Fair Play" https://tinyurl.com/t8k88rw7

For the full article by Melanie Phillips go to https://tinyurl.com/35mc3dep

This week’s Jewish Chronicle features a major story by David Rose, which reveals that Britain has been investing millions of pounds in training the Palestinian Authority in human rights even while the PA has been perpetrating torture and beating a prominent Palestinian democracy and human rights campaigner to death.

David’s story can be read here, here and here.

The opinion piece that I wrote for the JC to accompany the story follows below.

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For many in the west, it has long been an article of faith that peace will only come to the Middle East when the Palestinians gain a state of their own.

Along with the EU and America, successive British governments have promoted a “two-state solution” to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.

Central to this thinking is a key distinction. Hamas is considered beyond the pale as Islamist extremists who throw gay Palestinians off rooftops to their death and make no bones about their aim to destroy Israel. But the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas is deemed “moderate” and entitled to run a future state of Palestine that would be part of the community of nations.

The JC has now exposed this faith in the PA as an excruciating misjudgment.

For while Britain has been investing millions in it in the arrogant belief that it can teach it western values, Palestinian officers have been murdering and torturing dissenters who campaign for their human rights.

Last year Nizar Banat, a leading Palestinian campaigner for freedom and democracy, was dragged from his home in Hebron by a squad of 14 PA officers and beaten with a hammer so severely he effectively drowned in his own blood. His murder triggered weeks of protests that were in turn violently crushed by the PA security forces.

Now the JC has revealed that for the past 14 years a “British Support Team” under the command of a brigadier has been training PA officers in human rights — including “inclusivity and gender awareness”.

The JC investigation shows that, in PA-controlled territory, torture by these forces is routine and systemic. People are arrested for their political views; lawyers are beaten; women are sexually assaulted.

A senior PA official said torture was justified to gather intelligence and that Banat deserved to be killed. Yet the British are solemnly teaching such people “inclusivity and gender awareness”. Maybe someone should teach the British “humility and self-awareness”.

The idea that human rights training might turn the PA into defenders of law and liberty is as laughable as it would be to provide human rights training to Vladimir Putin’s secret police or Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Yet Britain has long told itself ten impossible things before breakfast about the Palestinians. Ever since the Oslo Accords in the nineties established the PA as the putative government of a Palestinian state, Britain and others in the west have resolutely denied the truth about it.

They’ve denied that its aim has remained the destruction of Israel; denied  that British and EU funding facilitates PA incitement to murder Israeli Jews and steal their land; denied the savage repression it inflicts upon its own people.

Whitehall’s moral blindness is truly epic. Astoundingly, Britain has repeatedly claimed that its Palestinian human rights training is succeeding.

In 2011, the Foreign Office stated: “The PA leadership is committed to strengthening human rights and is making good progress” 

In 2018, the Foreign Office awarded itself an official score of “A+” for its PA programme, meaning that it had “exceeded expectations” for developing “capable, accountable and responsive security and justice services”.

Well, we can now see that the PA’s “accountable and responsive” reaction to this training was to continue to perpetrate torture and to produce a brutal squad that beat a human rights campaigner to death.

As a result, millions of pounds have been squandered. Worse, Britain has made itself complicit with a tyrannical regime that oppresses its own people.

Worse still, the British government has been helping sanitise the PA and perpetuating the lethal fiction that it can be trusted to uphold human rights.

It told itself this because it wanted to believe it. To put it another way, if it acknowledged that the PA was incorrigibly despotic with no understanding of or commitment to justice, the rule of law and respect for human life, it would have to acknowledge that there could be no state of Palestine in the foreseeable future.

That would mean its support for the Palestinian cause would be negated. It would mean that when Israel said the Palestinians posed a mortal threat to life and liberty, they were all too correct.

This would not only derail a key feature of British foreign policy. It would also show up as hypocrites, idiots or fellow-travellers of tyranny all who support the establishment of a Palestinian state run by the PA.

Since such a state is the cause of causes for the western intelligentsia, the truth must be denied. More than £65 million has now been wasted in perpetrating a lethal “human rights” fiction instead.

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