Europe Has Apparently Learned Nothing

        by Majid Rafizadeh, Europe Has Apparently Learned Nothing :: Gatestone Institute

• Once again, Europe seems to have slipped into a dangerous fantasy: that engaging in polite diplomatic parleys with promises of sugar plums will tame Iran's rapacious ambitions.
• France, Germany, and the United Kingdom (E3), acting as the European Troika, declared their intention to revive the long-stalled nuclear negotiations with Iran.
• At the core of the E3's plan lies the deeply flawed assumption that Iran can be wooed into restraint through incremental "incentives." These generally consist of easing financial pressure, lifting trade restrictions, or delaying multilateral sanctions in exchange for ephemeral commitments.
• Sadly, Europe appears to be pursuing the worst lessons of appeasement: the dangerous illusion is that you can temper a ravenous aggressor by conciliation, weakness and generosity. The aggressor immediately sees that the best route for him is to demand more. The cycle becomes self-reinforcing.
• By treating the Iranian regime as a legitimate negotiating partner — and by discounting the moral and strategic gulf that separates it from liberal democracies — Europe is bankrolling the terrorism industry.
• President Donald J. Trump's current posture — doubling down on sanctions, refusing immediate diplomacy until leverage is secured — should jolt Europe out of its passivity.
• The European Troika's charade must stop. Anything less just prolongs the threat.

 

Why is Israel the Bad Guy when Fighting Back?

 

Bennett "The Mediator" in Moscow

 Video Of The Week – Bennett Visits Putin - https://tinyurl.com/32p9t9yt

For the full article by Pesach Benson go to- https://tinyurl.com/565yyatf

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett returned to Israel on Sunday morning after making a surprise visit to Moscow to discuss the Russia-Ukraine crisis with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

From Moscow, Bennett headed to Berlin where he updated German chancellor Olaf Scholz before flying back to Israel in time to lead Sunday’s weekly cabinet meeting.

Israel has historically kept a low diplomatic profile in international power games. So despite days of buzz about possible Israeli mediation — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had been calling for it — Saturday night’s news still stunned Israelis.

An Israeli premier was the first Western leader to meet with Putin since Russia invaded Ukraine. The mission had American and European blessings. Underscoring the gravity of the gravity of the situation, the Sabbath-observant Prime Minister departed for Moscow on Saturday morning.

It’s too soon to know if Bennett’s trip will bear any fruit. Certain aspects of his three-hour meeting at the Kremlin may not be known for years, if ever.

But the talks clearly have significant implications for Israel and the Jewish people. Here are four takeaways.

1. Israeli diplomacy is on the map.

No European country is suited to mediate. Russia is their neighbor. The European Union’s decision to send arms to Ukraine is the first time it has ever sent weapons to a conflict zone. Finnish public opinion suddenly supports joining NATO — which prompted menacing comments from Moscow to Helsinki.

Even ever-neutral Switzerland is freezing the assets of Russian individuals and organizations on the EU blacklist.

Spearheading an effort to end the war in Ukraine carries great rewards and great risks. Israel has opened the door on a new level of international diplomacy, which reflects three particular changes.

• Buoyed by the Abraham Accords, Israel has more secure standing in the Mideast.

• American and European trust in Israeli mediation seems to reflect that Washington, Paris and Berlin don’t believe that so many world problems will disappear if Israel would just make peace with the Palestinians.

• Israel’s insistence on striking Iranian targets in Syria — despite Moscow’s occasional objections — has apparently earned Putin’s grudging respect.

Those are all reasons to be optimistic.

2. Israel will be better poised to evacuate Jews from the Ukraine.

The biggest perk of being mediator is the extra access and leverage it provides.

If Russia is trying to extricate itself from the conflict, what better goodwill gesture than to create humanitarian corridors and safe zones for refugees — including Jews?

And if Russia proves to be insincere, having Putin’s ear will be all the more important if an emergency evacuation of Jews proves necessary. According to Haaretz, Israel had contingency plans in the late 1980s for an emergency airlift of large numbers of Jews from the Soviet Union. Those plans are being dusted off and updated now.

Israel’s last major airlift was Operation Solomon, a covert operation in which 14,000 Ethiopian Jews were evacuated within 36 hours amid a civil war in 1991.

3. Israel will be better poised to influence Iran nuclear deal.

Israel’s concerns about Iran’s nuclear program were never taken seriously by the West. That could change.

That’s because Moscow created a new linkage between the Iranian nuclear deal and its own interests. Specifically, Russia wants written guarantees that its own trade and military cooperation with Iran won’t be impacted by sanctions the West is levying in response to the Russian invasion. Washington and Tehran panned Moscow’s demand as “unrelated” and “not helpful.”

But the U.S. is relying on Russian help to finalize the nuclear agreement. That could give Israel room to exploit improvements in the deal.

Putin also has leverage over Iran’s presence in Syria — when it chooses to exercise it. Once upon a time, in 2018, Russian officials talked of keeping Iran and its proxies at 85 km (53 miles) from the Israeli border.

Iran has also endangered Russians by smuggling weapons through the Syrian port of Latakia. Perhaps Putin will take Tehran’s recklessness more seriously now that Israel has his attention.

4. This is Bennett’s chance to shine.

When news broke from the Kremlin, plenty of Israelis imagined Benjamin Netanyahu eating his heart out. After all, It wasn’t so long ago that Netanyahu’s re-election campaign prominently featured him with Putin and then-President Donald Trump.

The campaign’s message was powerful. Netanyahu was the only heavyweight Israeli capable of standing up for Israel’s interests with the world’s super powers.

Yes, Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid have paid historic visits to the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. But they were building on the Abraham accords which were finalized on Netanyahu’s watch.

Bennett put himself in this position by navigating between U.S. and popular Israeli demands for stronger criticism of Russia with sensitivity to Jerusalem and Moscow’s security coordination in Syria. Whether or not Netanyahu could’ve done it too is beside the point. Bennett pulled it off.

Mediating the Ukraine crisis is Bennett’s accomplishment and his opportunity to put a unique stamp on Israeli and international diplomacy.

What will that look like? Will he succeed?

Only time will tell.

To SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE  the BIG mailing list please click HERE NEW ,VIEW OUR WEBSITE WWW.BRITISHISRAELGROUP.WEEBLY.COM

Europe's Cowardice Dealing with Iran

Video Of The Week - Normalisation ties between Israel and UAE - https://tinyurl.com/y2scllgc            

For the full article, by Melanie Philips, go to: https://tinyurl.com/y4dgjl6y

When Britain’s foreign Secretary Dominic Raab visited Jerusalem last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly chewed his ear off.

Small wonder. It’s hard to exaggerate the perfidy, cynicism and head-in-the-sand cowardice currently being displayed by Britain, along with France and Germany, over Iran.

Instead of joining forces with those trying to neutralise the growing threat from the Iranian regime, Britain and these two other key European powers are actually acting in concert with the world’s twin empires of evil, Russia and China, in shoring up this terrorist rogue state.

Earlier this month, the United States proposed at the UN Security Council to extend the Iran arms embargo, which is due to expire on October 18.

This was strongly supported by the Gulf states.The proposal, however, went down in flames. Only the Dominican Republic voted in favour; Russia and China opposed it, while the United Kingdom, France, Germany and other Security Council members abstained.

As a result of this debacle, the United States activated the “snapback” mechanism under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran nuclear deal brokered by President Obama in 2015..Yet snapback is now also being blocked by the same unholy alliance of Security Council members.

In June, the International Atomic Energy Authority reported that Iran had enriched uranium beyond its permitted allowance and committed other breaches of the agreement. The IAEA also said that Iran was continuing to refuse to grant international inspectors access to its nuclear sites and might be concealing undeclared nuclear materials and processes.

Britain, France and Germany know all this.Yet they stood by while the Security Council proceeded to allow the world’s biggest supporter of terrorism to resume buying and selling lethal weapons.The United Kingdom, France and Germany are deeply reluctant to jeopardise the billion-dollar trading links they have with China, Russia and Iran.

Britain was a cheerleader for the JCPOA. It dismissed all concerns about Iran’s history of lies and deception. It denied that the deal would at best only delay Iran’s production of nuclear weapons. It waved aside the fact that it would channel billions of dollars into the coffers of the most dangerous terrorist regime in the world.

Maybe. But Britain’s cultural default makes it unable to  grasp the unique derangement of antisemitism and  the murderous hatred of Israel that drives both the Iranian mullahs and the Palestinian leadership can never be deflected..

Britain believes that everyone is susceptible to appeals to their short-term self-interest; and so everything can be resolved through negotiation, peace processes and, if necessary, cutting a deal between God and the devil.

Unabashed by his country’s shameful history of appeasement in the region—and with the stench of its current repeat performance rising from his briefing notes—Raab presumed to lecture the Israelis on how they should produce peace.

Even now, the British government is obsessed with meeting the Palestinians’ demands; even now, it is perpetuating the falsehood that Israel is not legally entitled to apply its sovereignty to the disputed territories.

The prime minister, Boris Johnson, couched his tepid welcome for the United Arab Emirates’ historic decision to normalise relations with Israel as a welcome for Israel’s suspension of its sovereignty plan..

It is fear of Iran that fuelled the UAE deal. The Gulf states understand that they need Israel and the United States to neutralise the threat of Iranian regional hegemony. And they are deeply concerned that if Joe Biden becomes president, he will become Obama mark two, reinstating the JCPOA and again paving the way for an Iranian nuclear bomb with international approval.

Clearly, this concern is shared in Jerusalem.

Trump’s resumed sanctions have weakened the regime. The assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the strategic genius of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force, was a blow from which it has not recovered.

So there’s never been a more promising opportunity to deliver a decisive blow against the regime, preferably by reimposing draconian sanctions. But there’s also never been such a dangerous time, with rising tensions and increasing Iran-backed attacks across both the Lebanese and Gaza borders—and with this wounded regime perhaps determined, if it believes it is indeed going down, to take Israel with it.

Such a time demands a unified resolve among those trying to stop this evil. And standing up against it are the United States, Israel and the Gulf states.

But on the other side stand the United Kingdom, France and Germany, supporting Russia and China in shoring up a regime that has waged a 40-year war against the west, intends to wipe Israel off the map and is getting ever closer to possessing the nuclear weapons that it thinks will enable it to do so..

NEW ,VIEW OUR WEBSITE WWW.BRITISHISRAELGROUP.WEEBLY.COM

German Parliament branding BDS as ‘anti-Semitic’

Video Of The Week - Inside the Life of an Israeli "Lone Soldier"- https://tinyurl.com/y28d9e4n

From “WIN” 18-5-2019 https://tinyurl.com/yxqw27cq

By Algemeiner Staff and Agencies

Top Israeli officials welcomed the German parliament’s condemnation on Friday of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement as “anti-Semitic.”

The non-binding motion — submitted by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives, their Social Democrat coalition partners, as well as the Greens and Free Democrats — read, “The argumentation patterns and methods used by the BDS movement are anti-Semitic.”

“The campaign’s calls to boycott Israeli artists, as well as stickers on Israeli goods that are meant to deter people from buying them, also recall the most terrible phase in German history,” it continued. “The BDS movement’s ‘Don’t Buy’ stickers on Israeli products inevitably arouse associations with the Nazi slogan, ‘Don’t Buy from Jews!’ and similar graffiti on facades and shop windows.”

Securing Israel’s survival has been a priority for Germany since the defeat of the Nazi dictatorship that committed the Holocaust in which some six million Jews were murdered.

“I congratulate the German Bundestag on the important decision branding the boycott movement (BDS) as an anti-Semitic movement and announcing that it is forbidden to fund it,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday. “I hope that this decision will bring about concrete steps and I call upon other countries to adopt similar legislation.”

Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan — who has been in charge of the Jewish state’s anti-BDS efforts in recent years — called Friday a “historic day in the fight against the anti-Semitic BDS campaign.”

“The true face of BDS is being exposed!” he exclaimed.

Israel’s UN envoy, Danny Danon, stated, “This is a crushing victory for the truth and a great achievement in the struggle against Israel’s detractors.”

Danon went on to urge world leaders to “join Germany, and work towards shaping a future without hatred against Jews and against Israel.”

Israeli Ambassador to Germany Jeremy Issacharoff tweeted, “We welcome this initiative by its sponsors. It has broader European significance given that BDS makes no attempt to build coexistence and peace between Israel and all of its neighbors.”

The BDS movement slammed the motion.

“The German establishment is entrenching its complicity in Israel‘s crimes of military occupation, ethnic cleansing, siege and apartheid, while desperately trying to shield it from accountability to international law,” it said on Twitter.

Lawmakers from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party abstained during the vote. They had submitted their own motion calling for a total ban of the BDS in Germany. That motion was defeated.

A majority of the far-left Die Linke party had voted against the motion. The party also submitted its own proposal, which called to oppose the BDS and commit the German government to work toward a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on UN Security Council resolutions. The motion was also defeated.

NEW ,VIEW OUR WEBSITE WWW.BRITISHISRAELGROUP.WEEBLY.COM

Jewish Power at 70 Years

 New York Times, by Bret Stephens - https://tinyurl.com/y99w9pc3

Video Of The Week – Israel at 70 - https://tinyurl.com/y9p33qwy

Adam Armoush is a 21-year-old Israeli Arab who, on a recent outing in Berlin, donned a yarmulke to test a friend’s contention that it was unsafe to do so in Germany. On Tuesday he was assaulted in broad daylight by a Syrian asylum-seeker who whipped him with a belt for being “yahudi” — Arabic for Jew.

The episode was caught on video and has caused a national uproar. Heiko Maas, the foreign minister, tweeted, “Jews shall never again feel threatened here.”

It’s a vow not likely to be fulfilled. There were nearly 1,000 reported anti-Semitic incidents in Berlin alone last year. A neo-fascist party, Alternative for Germany, has 94 seats in the Bundestag. Last Thursday, a pair of German rappers won a prestigious music award, given largely on the basis of sales, for an album in which they boast of having bodies “more defined than Auschwitz prisoners.” The award ceremony coincided with Holocaust Remembrance Day.

To be Jewish — at least visibly Jewish — in Europe is to live on borrowed time. That’s not to doubt the sincerity and good will of Maas or other European leaders who recommit to combating anti-Semitism every time a European Jew is murdered or a Jewish institution attacked. It’s only to doubt their capacity.

There’s a limit to how many armed guards can be deployed indefinitely to protect synagogues or stop Holocaust memorials from being vandalized. There’s a limit, also, to trying to cure bigotry with earnest appeals to tolerance. The German government is mulling a proposal to require recent arrivals in the country to tour Nazi concentration camps as a way of engendering a feeling of empathy for Jews. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that, to the virulent anti-Semite, Buchenwald is a source of inspiration, not shame.

All this comes to mind as Israel this week marks (in the Hebrew calendar) the 70th anniversary of its independence. There are many reasons to celebrate the date, many of them lofty: a renaissance for Jewish civilization; the creation of a feisty liberal democracy in a despotic neighborhood; the ecological rescue of a once-barren land; the end of 1,878 years of exile.

But there’s a more basic reason. Jews cannot rely for their safety on the kindness of strangers, least of all French or German politicians. Theodor Herzl saw this with the Dreyfus Affair and founded modern Zionism. Post-Hitler Europe still has far to fall when it comes to its attitudes toward Jews, but the trend is clear. The question is the pace.

Hence Israel: its army, bomb, and robust willingness to use force to defend itself. Israel did not come into existence to serve as another showcase of the victimization of Jews. It exists to end the victimization of Jews.

That’s a point that Israel’s restless critics could stand to learn. On Friday, Palestinians in Gaza returned for the fourth time to the border fence with Israel, in protests promoted by Hamas. The explicit purpose of Hamas leaders is to breach the fence and march on Jerusalem. Israel cannot possibly allow this — doing so would create a precedent that would encourage similar protests, and more death, along all of Israel’s borders — and has repeatedly used deadly force to counter it.

The armchair corporals of Western punditry think this is excessive. It would be helpful if they could suggest alternative military tactics to an Israeli government dealing with an urgent crisis against an adversary sworn to its destruction. They don’t.

It would also be helpful if they could explain how they can insist on Israel’s retreat to the 1967 borders and then scold Israel when it defends those borders. They can’t. If the armchair corporals want to persist in demands for withdrawals that for 25 years have led to more Palestinian violence, not less, the least they can do is be ferocious in defense of Israel’s inarguable sovereignty. Somehow they almost never are.

Israel’s 70th anniversary has occasioned a fresh round of anxious, if not exactly new, commentary about the rifts between Israeli and Diaspora Jewry. Some Diaspora complaints, especially with respect to religion and refugees, are valid and should be heeded by Jerusalem.

But to the extent that the Diaspora’s objections are prompted by the nonchalance of the supposedly non-vulnerable when it comes to Israel’s security choices, then the complaints are worse than feckless. They provide moral sustenance for Hamas in its efforts to win sympathy for its strategy of wanton aggression and reckless endangerment. And they foster the illusion that there’s some easy and morally stainless way by which Jews can exercise the responsibilities of political power.

Though not Jewish, Adam Armoush was once one of the nonchalant when it came to what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century. Presumably no longer. For Jews, it’s a painful, useful reminder that Israel is not their vanity. It’s their safeguard.

NEW ,VIEW OUR WEBSITE WWW.BRITISHISRAELGROUP.WEEBLY.COM

A Visit to the Old and New Hells of Europe

by Alan M. Dershowitz
May 17, 2016

For the full article go to:  http://tinyurl.com/jpa5q77

I just returned from a week-long journey through Hell! It began with a visit to the site of the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps in Poland (built by Nazi Germany during its occupation of the country), as a participant of the March of the Living, following a conference commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Nuremberg Laws and the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials. My week was consumed with recurring evidence of the worst crime ever perpetrated by human beings on other human beings – the Holocaust.

I traveled from the death camps to several small Polish towns from which my grandparents emigrated well before the Holocaust, leaving behind relatives and friends. During the course of my travels, I discovered the fate of two of my relatives. Hanna Deresiewicz (an original spelling of my family name) was a 16-year-old girl living in the small town of Pilzno when the Nazis arrived; she was separated from her siblings and parents. "The soldiers took several of the most beautiful Jewish girls for sex, and then killed them. [Among those] taken [was] Hanna Deresiewicz, 16."

I also learned that another Deresiewics, named Benjamin, survived, though his wife and five children, along with his parents and siblings were all murdered. He may have been Hanna's father, although I can't document that. In the book Schindler's Ark, on which the movie Schindler's List was base, the following account is given: "[The Commandant of Auschwitz] suspended his 15 year old orderly, Poldek Dereshowitz, from the ringbolts in his office ..." Although the book is fictionalized account, it is based on the recollections of an eyewitness. I cannot, therefore, be sure of the veracity of that episode. But seeing the name Dereshowitz associated with Auschwitz had an impact on me.

This is not the first time I have visited Nazi death camps. I was fully familiar with the statistical evidence of how six million Jews were systematically murdered. I was also familiar with how the Nazi death machine searched out Jews in the furthest corners of Nazi occupied Europe, even as far as the island of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea, and transported them to Auschwitz to gas them. 

I also knew that this was the only time in human history when people were brought from far distances to camps designed for one purpose only – to kill every possible Jew they could, find no matter where they lived. And I knew that because this was part of a planned genocide of the Jewish People, it was most important to kill every child, woman and man capable of producing future Jews.

But this visit, during which I learned the fate of members of my own family, brought the horrors home to me in a manner more personal than any statistic could provide. I was traveling with my wife and daughter, and I repeatedly imagined what it must have felt like for the parents and spouses of the murdered Jews to realize that everything precious to them was being annihilated, and that there would be no one left to morn them or to carry their seed to future generations.

From the old Hell, Poland, I traveled to a new Hell, called Hungary. Budapest is a beautiful city, but it too, provided a hellish end to its Jewish residents in the final months of the Second World War, when Hungarian Nazis turned the Blue Danube into a red mass grave. They shot their Jewish neighbors and dumped their bodies into the Danube River, even as the Nazis were retreating. And now in modern-day Budapest, I was told of the resurgence of Nazism among many ordinary Hungarians. An increasingly popular fascist party, Jobbik, boasts of its anti-Semitism and of its desire to rid Hungary of its few remaining Jews. The Jobbik party in Hungary also hates Israel, and everything else that is a manifestation of Jewishness.

I ended my trip meeting with a Jewish man of Greek background who told me that his grandfather was murdered by the Nazis and that he was now being targeted by Greek fascists for his outspoken defense of Israel and the Jewish people. Athens, too, has become a hotbed of Jew-hatred, with is popular fascist Golden Dawn party.

There was not a moment during my visit to Europe that I was not reminded of that continent's sordid history with regard to the Jewish people. Now, many Europeans — the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who were complicit in the murder of six million Jews — have turned against the nation state of the Jewish People with a vengeance. This time the bigotry emanates mostly from the hard left, but has the support of many on the new fascist hard right. The British Labour Party is as rife with hatred of the Jewish People and Jewish Nation as is the Hungarian fascist Jobbik party.

 Once again, European Jews are caught between the extremes of the Black and the Red. Extremists on both sides seek the demise of Israel, arguing that there is no place in this world for one state that is overtly Jewish in its character, despite the universal acceptance of multiple Muslim and Christian nations. Other Europeans seek to boycott Israel's products, its professors, and its performers. While still others simply apply a double standard to its actions — a standard they apply to no other nation, including their own.

My visit to Europe made one thing unmistakably clear: if there is any group in the world that needs a safe homeland — a sanctuary from bigotry and hatred — it is the Jewish people. When Hitler was willing to expel them from Europe, before deciding to exterminate them, no country — not even the United States or Canada — would give them asylum. Britain closed the doors of what is now Israel to them. They had no place to go. So they were murdered by the Nazis and their willing executioners throughout Europe. There is no group whose history entitles it to a safe and secure homeland more than the Jewish people.

For reasons that are difficult to explain, the hatred of the Jewish people and its nation defies rationality, but it is as real as the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the emerging fascist parties of Greece and Hungary. Jews today continue to be scapegoated in many parts of the world, and their nation state is demonized at the United Nations, on university campuses, in the media and in legislative assemblies. Following the Holocaust, there seemed to be an understanding that Jews would no longer be victimized. Now, less than a century after the Nazis came to power, that moratorium on Jew-hatred seems to have expired, as the memory of the Holocaust grows dim in most parts of the world.

My week-long visit to Hell reaffirmed my commitment to defend Israel's right to exist, to speak out for Israel when it is unfairly attacked, and to defeat its enemies in the marketplace of ideas. We owe nothing less to the victims of the worst crime in the history of humanity — a crime that could not have occurred without the complicity of most of the world. And a crime that will not recur if there is a strong and secure Israel.

Video of the week - Lebanese Muslim converts to Judaism -  http://tinyurl.com/jt9aj49

NEW ,VIEW OUR WEBSITE WWW.BRITISHISRAELGROUP.WEEBLY.COM