Move On.Org's Double Standard

I am about to piss off all of my Democratic friends, all of my liberal friends and all of my feminist friends....

But it's your own fault. Sorry.

Remember an organization that was born in the midst of the partisan warfare within the Beltway during Clinton's presidency? MoveOn.Org was launched initially to oppose the Republican-led effort to impeach Clinton. Initially called "Censure and Move On," it invited visitors to add their names to an online petition stating that "Congress must Immediately Censure President Clinton and Move On to pressing issues facing the country."

The whole point of the MoveOn petitions was to quit wasting taxpayer monies on what amounted to a stealth attack on the people's choice for President of the United States. The sense at the time, which I clearly recall because I was part of this consensus, was that as a nation we had better things to do than spend billions of dollars of taxpayers' money to investigate yet another case of Men Behaving Badly. Gee, the POTUS got a blow job from his intern....this is news? You wasted my hard-earned tax dollars to discover yet another politician is having sex with an aide?

MoveOn.Org was a truly grass-roots, computer generated petition movement started by two Berkeley computer entrepreneurs. Granted, they were Berkeley liberals but even Berkeley liberals get it right some of the time. Sadly, it was grass-roots only until it sold its soul to George Soros.

Being aware that Clinton had the happy precedent of FDR, Ike, JFK and MLK, and having lived in the Beltway suburbs twice during my father's tour of duty at the Pentagon, it came as no huge shock that such things could and often did happen in the hallowed precincts of government.

Like many people, I was appalled at the waste of taxpayer money spent investigating the Clintons and the fact that the only thing of note that the investigation turned up was a man's denial of having an affair when publicly questioned about it (which in an earlier age would have been the chivalrous response) only convinced me, as it did others, that this was nothing more than a partisan attempt at impeachment because the Republicans would stoop to any low tactic to remove the lawfully elected President. Besides, I thought Gore was a pompous dunce and didn't want him running the country anyway.

I still think the original petition was well-founded, and that like a person's sex life, birth control, and how you voted in the last general election, there are just some things that aren't the government's business--and that includes elected officials' sexual indiscretions. It's private. You don't "need to know." For those of you who disagree on the grounds that it is a reflection on a man's moral character -- well, in this department, generally, men don't have "moral character." I'm sure there are exceptions, but the general rule, long acknowledged in human history, is that men screw around. As my mother-in-law was fond of saying, "A stiff d$#^ has no conscience."

But then MoveOn.Org sold out. It became not a grass-roots effort to curb ridiculous government expenditures on stupid partisan issues, but instead a Left-liberal mouthpiece for trashing Republicans.

In 2003, rather than focusing on the substantive issues, MoveOn.Org wasted its donors' money on attack ads alleging that Arnold Schwarzenegger was a serial groper of women. This overbroad attack was seriously undermined by using as support the claims of women who were into body-building and Hollywood groupie-dom some twenty years earlier, none of whom filed a complaint with anyone -- not police, not friends, not relatives, not SAG, not the owner of the gym -- at the time of these alleged sexual harassments. And, not coincidentally, the first public complaint of this alleged groping behavior came at anti-Schwarzenegger press conferences and rallies called by....MoveOn.Org.

That attack ad alone would have been bad enough, but there were others accusing the Republican candidate of "hijacking" the great state of California; after he was elected, MoveOn.Org mounted a recall petition.

MoveOn.Org also lambasted Schwarzenneger for refusing to provide copies of his immigration files.

Gee, is that like refusing to provide copies of one's Hawaiian birth certificate?

The last time MoveOn.Org solicited contributions from me, I sent them a curt note declining to contribute on the grounds that if we, the taxpayers, were supposed to simply "censure and move on" with regard to Clinton's sexual peccadilloes, which were allegedly numerous, then certainly the same standard applied to all politicians and candidates, and their blatant disregard for their founding mission in the interests of promoting a partisan political agenda and smear campaign was very, well, Gingrich-like. No thanks.

And now it's "I-told-you-so-time" on the Left. Schwarzenneger has admitted to sleeping with a housekeeper on his staff and fathering a child. Apart from the heartbreak this has caused to nearly everyone intimately connected with this, he is being lambasted on Facebook, Twitters, Talkbacks and Op-Eds by liberal, Left and/or feminist commenters everywhere.

"What a pig!" one said.

"Maria doesn't deserve this heartbreak."

"He should be castrated!"

Tiger Woods didn't get this kind of opprobrium. Neither did Jesse Jackson, who fathered a child on an aide. Or Willie Brown, who although not married, got an aide pregnant and acknowledged the child was his. John Edwards did come in for more condemnation but that wasn't because he had an affair -- it was because he dissed the campaign wife, dying of cancer, who stood by him throughout his political career.

I have a problem with the Double Standard. Not THAT Double Standard, where men are "men" but "girls" must be "virgins" ... I have a problem when the media and it's sheep-like public pillory one politician or prominent public figure for sexual escapades, but give a pass to others. Especially as the distinction seems to be strictly along political party lines....

I give the Governator a lot of credit, actually. In an era when public officials have to chase deadbeat dads through the court system to get even minimal child support payments, he did the old-fashioned European thing and took financial responsibility for his child. Under California law, he didn't have to: a parent has only two years to contest or claim paternity. From all accounts, Schwarzennegger was told that the child was his only after that statute of limitations had passed.

That says more about his moral compass to me than baseless allegations of groping brought by MoveOn.Org-sponsored Arnold-bashing press conferences.

Move on, okay?

Mass Graves--Stepping Stones to Greater Syria

I have a friend who, in most cases quite correctly, has stated that the first person to resort to name-calling in an argument loses. As the Jewish son of a Holocaust survivor, he has little patience with those who trivialize his father's experience by calling everyone they disagree with a "Nazi."

He has a point.

But there is a time when the N-word is appropriate.

Today's as yet unconfirmed news is that Bashar al-Assad, Ba'athist dictator of Syria, has quelled dissent in his country not only through mass arrests of protestors, indiscriminate shelling of towns, opening fire on civilian crowds, gunning down women who opened their front doors to security agents, and rape, but has now added mass graves to his tool-kit of oppression.

Why not? The world continues to give him legitimacy despite the rising death toll of Syrians. The Russians protect him as a quasi-client state; the U.S. has apparently decided to maintain an ambassadorial presence there despite Assad's multiple pogroms in multiple Syrian cities and villages. The EU and NATO are otherwise occupied holding on to Libyan oil and bank bailouts.

Why not? It worked for Saddam Hussein, who is famed for his genocide against the Kurds of Iraq (see "Halabja") who refused to change their names, their language, their history, and their aspirations for autonomy by "Arabizing" under Saddam's reign of terror. Ask the Iraqi Arab parents of a third grade class which vanished one day, after one prankster wrote "Down with Saddam" on the class blackboard when the teacher stepped out. The mass grave of these eight-year-olds was later uncovered by Coalition forces.

Why not? Bashar's father, the leader of a military coup in 1961, maintained his Ba'athist secular party's grip on power by slaughtering 40,000 residents of Hama, a Sunni town opposed to the Alawite-controlled Ba'athist government. The rancor between the Muslim Brotherhood representing Sunni interests and Hafez al-Assad's Alawite-controlled Ba'athists had festered from 1940 until 1982, when decades of guerrilla tactics by Sunnis erupted into full-scale revolt following al-Assad's execution of 1200 Sunni prisoners.

The world took no notice of Hama.

The world ignored Halabja.

The world ignored the killing fields of Ba'athist Iraq and Syria for decades.

The world is a dunce.

The Ba'athists are the closest living political relatives to the German Nazis around. They are allied with Iran not because they share a fundamentalist Islamic world view--they don't.

What they do share is a virulent desire to bring the Middle East under their governance. Syria wants an all-Levant Ba'athist Arab future; Iran wants a Shi'ite Moslem Caliphate. The Syrian Ba'athists, albeit a nominally secular political party, are Alawites, a Shi'ite minority believed to be "heretics" by their Sunni majority population. What more natural ally than another Shi'ite nation, Iran, which shares a desire for Moslem hegemony in the Middle East, free of such decadent Western imports such as democracy, equal rights, free press, enfranchised women, birth control, and so forth?

Syria has never abandoned it's dream of "Greater Syria" formulated during and after World War I.

"Within the Levant, Syrian Baathists find Lebanese, Jordanian, and Palestinian autonomy barely tolerable. From the late Ottoman period onward, Syrian Arab nationalists have viewed Lebanon and Palestine as part of a Bilad ash-sham (Greater Syria). Syrian leaders considered the western side of the Fertile Crescent to be the Syrian backyard and Damascus, the region's rightful political center." (Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2005)

In 1920, the majority of the Arab population in the Levant, freed finally from Ottoman Turkish rule after World War I, identified as "Syrian." The post-war subdivision of the Levant by British and French allied victors in 1923 was decried as the "First Naqba" or catastrophe by Levantine Arab populations, who saw this carving up of the region as an impediment to Arab national expression. The Arab residents of that section of the Levant called "Mandatory Palestine," a name coined by Protestant British rulers, took to the streets in riotous protest at what they saw as the false, European-created suggestion that Palestinian Arabs constituted a separate ethnic nationality from the rest of Syria.

The term "Naqba" or "Catastrophe" was originally coined not because of Israel or "Palestinian" nationalism but because Arabs living in Palestine regarded themselves as Syrian, and were enraged at being cut off from their Syrian homeland. Palestinian Arabs saw themselves as Syrians and were seen as such by other Syrians.

The chronicler of this "Naqba" was none other than an Arab historian, George Antonius,a man of Lebanese-Egyptian origin who lived in Jerusalem for a short period (and hence is called "Palestinian" although he wasn't) at the mansion of Nazi-allied and paid for stooge, Haj Amin el-Husseini.

In his seminal work, The Arab Awakening, Antonius wrote, "The year 1920 has an evil name in Arab annals: it is referred to as the Year of the Catastrophe (Am al-Nakba). It saw the first armed risings that occurred in protest against the post-War settlement imposed by the Allies on the Arab countries."

What does this have to do with mass graves today?

The Syrian regime is the heir to Vichy France's pro-Nazi occupation, home to fled Nazis, inculcated with Nazi nationalist ideology, convinced of Arab ethnic superiority (hence it's hatred of Jews, Kurds and other non-Arabs) and equally convinced of its "right" to take back its "historic homeland" of Greater Syria.

Look at the map of Greater Syria. It divides the Levant into Greater Syria and Iran. Together they wish to control the Middle East, its resources, its people and impose their Shi'ite nationalism on the entire region. This is why Syria occupied Lebanon and oppressed non-Shi'ites; this is why Syria invaded Jordan; this is why Syria connives at war both open and covert against Israel.

And this is why there are mass graves in Daraa. A totalitarian racist Nazi-like regime intent on "Lebensraum" does not brook dissent. A totalitarian racist Nazi-inspired regime intent on conquest of its neighboring countries does not permit democratic expression. A Nazi regime slaughters its opponents, both domestic and foreign to further the goal of Greater Syria.

There are stark moments in time when to refrain from identifying a brutal totalitarian war-mongering regime bent on conquest as "Nazi" is to side-step the ugly truth.

Children of Abraham

I have a friend of whom I am very fond...we worked in the trenches of criminal courtrooms for decades. Our only real disagreement is and was over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

She is the daughter of a Palestinian man from Beit Hanina, and grew up in California, and has a narrative quite at odds with my own Zionist appreciation of history.

She sees the Palestinians as victims of Israel; I see Israel as the stalwart beacon of hope and refuge for spat-upon, murdered, humiliated, disenfranchised Jews world-wide. Including those in that Arab world which has tried to destroy us time and again.

She sees 1948 as the "Naqba"; I see 1948 as the rebirth of our ancient sovereign state, living in dignity and freedom instead of under the boot of European Christians, or Arab Moslems. She sees 1948 as a disaster; I see 1948 as the Intifada of the Jews, shaking off the yoke of centuries of oppression.

One of her friends recently posted the newest in Jewish delegitimization: Jews aren't really descendants of Abraham but instead are European Slavs who converted to Judaism.

He then conceded that North African and Middle Eastern Jews might be, but Ashkenazi Jews are not descendants of Abraham and the Judean tribe that survived multiple conquests and ethnic cleansings in our own land.

I can only assume that his adherence to this is based on his own racism--Middle Eastern and Maghrebi Jews are usually but not always darker in skin, eye and hair color than the Ashkenazi populace (I have one Syrian-Jewish friend and one Turkish-Jewish friend who are both blue-eyed blondes), therefore his declaration is based on the absurdity of a person's coloring. This is laughable in large part because Palestinians and Jews here are largely indistinguishable. Yes, red-headed, freckled, blue-eyed Ashkenazi Jews live here; on the other hand, my Arab electrician is a fair-skinned, blue-eyed guy with wavy light-brown hair; the Palestinian woman waiting in line at Hadassah with me had two daughters young enough to not wear hajib, who both had porcelain skin, grey eyes and blonde hair. Even Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy contained an Egyptian daughter with blue eyes and blonde hair.

I don't ascribe this racism to my friend, who is a peaceful woman of good intentions and who believes that Jews and Arabs are descendants of the same father Abraham.

However, her friend's comment points to a rising tide of delegitimizing not just the Jewish connection to Israel, but to Jerusalem and to historic Jewish connection to this land.

I doubt that most Arabs understand that our Law commands us to live in this Land. I doubt that most understand that Judaism, among many details, overarchingly relies on the Torah, on Am Yisrael the People, and on the Ha Aretz "the Land."

Maybe they do know this. Maybe that's why it is so important to teach Arab and Palestinian youth that these are all Jewish lies, because by reducing the Jews to cockroaches instead of cousins, it is easier to call for our expulsion and extermination.

Young people have the internet. They can do their own research. They can travel virtually to someone else's web-page, and if they both speak English, they can talk directly to each other, and maybe come to a better, if not complete, understanding of each other's hopes and fears.

I cited one of many studies regarding the close genetic affinity between Jews and Palestinians--ALL Jews, including Ashkenazim. Her friend shrugged it off as "fantasy." I got the clear impression he didn't even read the scientific article demonstrating this affinity.

I already have one friend who wryly refers to the Palestinians as "The Cousins" and I thought by pointing this out to the writer who dismissed this affinity, he might, like me, view us as "cousins" and have more regard for our mutual desire to live in this small piece of land.

Silly me.

Arab rejectionism has reached new lows.

In 2002 at Camp David, Yasser Arafat, an Egyptian, announced that the Jewish Temple was never in Jerusalem, in complete contradiction to Islamic writings.

This was just one in a series of Palestinian attempts to erase any Jewish connection to Jerusalem or Eretz Israel.

In a statement issued Dec. 10, 1997, the PA’s Ministry of Information claimed that Jews never had any connection to Jerusalem because archaeological excavations in the Old City have found “Umayyad Islamic palaces, Roman ruins, Armenian ruins and others, but nothing Jewish.” The Ministry also falsely claimed that “there is no tangible evidence of any Jewish traces/remains in the old city of Jerusalem and its immediate vicinity.”

Well, in fact there are plenty but they are ignored when professional archeologists uncover them, or derided as "plants" or destroyed when Palestinians uncover them.

The PA newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah published an article in its issue of Dec. 1, 1997, which declared: “I call to be alert and to treat the Tomb of Joseph and the Tomb of Rachel as dunams of Palestinian land which must be liberated, and to treat Joseph and Rachel as just two people who died, like anyone else who dies.”

Similarly, the Israeli daily Ha’aretz quoted Palestinian Authority officials as saying that “Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem is the traditional tomb of the Cushite servant of Mohammed.” (Ha’aretz, Oct. 9, 1996)

Prior to 1996, no one in the world had ever claimed that Rachel's Tomb was anything but a Jewish holy site. Ottoman historical records support this. The alleged "Cushite servant" is actually buried in Syria, according to other Arab records.

The oddity of this is that for centuries, Moslem rulers of all stripes, Turk, Mameluke or Arab, treated these as Jewish sites and protected them as Jewish sites. Only since Arafat came to power has the Jewish connection to these ancient sites of veneration been erased.

“The Western Wall is not a Jewish holy site.” The Arafat-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Ikrama Sabri, who was the PLO’s senior religious authority for the city, said: “The Al-Buraq Wall [Western Wall] and its plaza are a Muslim religious property, and the Israeli government’s decisions do not affect it…The Al-Buraq Wall is part of the Al Aqsa Mosque. The Jews have no relation to it.” (Al Ayam, Nov. 22, 1997)

No, actually, your mosque is built on top of our Temple's ruins. Check out those Herodian walls and carbon dating....

Arafat’s Minister of Religious Affairs, Hassan Tahboob, said: “The Al-Buraq wall is Muslim property and it is part of the Al Aqsa Mosque of course.” Tahboob said that in accordance with a Muslim religious court decision in 1929, Jews “are allowed to pray towards the Wall,” but they must remain “two meters [six feet] away from the Wall” and not touch it. (Interview with the Israeli news agency IMRA, Nov. 23, 1997)

This is another excellent reason for Israeli unwillingness to give up the Old City--discriminatory laws and practices against Jewish worshipers, which were practiced under the Turks but not under the Jordanians--they simply denied all Jewish access to holy sites.

Yasser Arafat corroborated the Islamic denial of any Jewish connection to our ancient Temple: “That is not the Western Wall at all, but a Moslem shrine.” (Ma’ariv, Oct. 11, 1996)

And then there is the "Slavic conversion" lie:

“The Jews never lived in ancient Israel.” A program broadcast on Palestinian Authority Television in June 1997 featured Palestinian Arab historian Jarid al-Kidwa, who claimed that “all the events surrounding Kings Saul, David and Rehoboam occurred in Yemen, and no Hebrew remnants were found in Israel, for a very simple reason—because they were never here.” Al-Kidwa said: “Most of the Khazars [a Turkish tribe that converted to Judaism in medieval times] are the Ashkenazic Jews who arrived in Palestine. As Allah is my witness, in my blood flows more of the Children of Israel and the ancient Hebrews than in the blood of Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu.” [Ha’aretz (July 6, 1997)]

The Khazar fable is debunked by modern DNA testing showing that Palestinians and Jews are closely related. A little historical knowledge would help those in denial as well: there was a Khazar tribe in what is now the Ukraine. There is some apocryphal evidence that some of them converted to Judaism, but ultimately the area was overrun by the Russians who converted the populace to Christianity at sword point, and later the same area was conquered by the Ottoman Turks who made many of their conquered into Moslems. The vast bulk of the Jews of eastern Europe were migrants from Jewish communities fleeing from western Europe to escape Christian persecution.

“Jerusalem was never a Jewish city.” Someone please get the Palestinians a copy of the Ottoman censuses....from the time the Turks first started keeping census records, Jerusalem was a majority-Jewish city. Oh, you mean ancient Jerusalem? David and Solomon weren't Jewish? The Roman and Jewish records of the Jewish capital's conquest and destruction are about some "other" Jerusalem? The Byzantine tendency to build churches where Jesus was buried in Jerusalem aren't evidence we're still in the same Jerusalem? Jerusalem has always been a Jewish city, not only in terms of population but also because every religious Jew in the entire world sings of it during the blessing after meals, and bends toward it in prayer three times a day.

“Jerusalem is not a Jewish city, despite the biblical myth implanted in some minds…There is no tangible evidence of Jewish existence from the so-called ‘Temple Mount Era’…The location of the Temple Mount is in question…it might be in Jericho or somewhere else.” (Walid M. Awad, Director of Foreign Publications for the PLO’s Palestine Ministry of Information, interviewed by the IMRA news agency, Dec. 25, 1996.)

Sure. All those archeological remains, those bullae written in Hebrew and carbon-dated to before the Islamic conquest and colonization of Israel, those shards, those wall and floor tiles.....those are all figments of international archeologist's imaginations. And then there is the historical record....

Yasser Arafat, the Egyptian: “Abraham was not a Jew.” “Abraham was neither Jewish nor a Hebrew, but was simply an Iraqi. The Jews have no right to claim part of the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, Abraham’s resting place, as a synagogue. Rather, the whole building should be a mosque.” (Arafat, quoted in the Jerusalem Report, Dec. 26, 1996)

Abraham was the first Jew, you illiterate terrorist....the first to accept HaShem as the One and Only G-d; the first to enter into the Covenant of Circumcism; the father of Isaac and grandfather of Israel.

More Palestinian denial and delegitimization: “There never was a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.” “The people of Israel realize perfectly well that they have no temples or ruins near Al Aqsa Mosque. According to the Koran, the people of Israel lived somewhere to the west of Bethlehem…they were living in Bethlehem and not in Jerusalem.” (Sheikh Ismail Jamal, the PLO’s Director of the Islamic Wakf in Jericho, quoted in the Chicago Jewish Sentinel, May 18, 1995)

This is in direct contrast to Islamic teachings:

Imam Abu Abdullah al-Qurtubi, who lived from 1214 to 1273 and was one of the most authoritative medieval Quranic annotators, in his Al-Jami’ li Ahkam il-Qur’an, or Encyclopedia of Quranic Rules, explains the context (asbab) of the verses by mentioning among other sources the authentic Prophetic tradition (hadith). He wrote:

Hudhayfah Ibn al-Yaman asked the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him:

‘I travelled more than once to Jerusalem, but saw no Temple standing there. What is the reason?’

The Prophet Muhammad replied:

‘Verily Solomon son of David raised Bayt al-Maqdis [i.e., Beth ha-Mikdash, the First Temple] with gold and silver, with rubies and emeralds, and Allah caused human beings and spirits to work under his command, until the raising of the House was completed. Afterwards a Babylonian King destroyed Bayt al-Maqdis and brought its treasures to the land of Babylonia, until a King of Persia defeated him and ransomed the Children of Israel. They rebuilt Bayt al-Maqdis for the second time [the Second Temple], until it was destroyed for the second time by an army led by a Roman Emperor.’

Thus Jewish and Muslim traditional sources corroborate each other: The Temple was built by Solomon and destroyed by a Babylonian king. A Persian king later defeated the Babylonians and ransomed the Jews, permitting them to return to the Land of Israel. The Temple was rebuilt but afterward was destroyed by the Romans. This Temple stood in the area referred to as Beit haMikdash in Hebrew and Bayt al-Maqdis in Arabic. Those political and pseudo-religious Palestinian leaders like Arafat and his politicized religious appointees who claim that “there was never a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem” are surely aware that, in order to support their political claims, they are compelled to lie and contradict the letter of the Quran and the Islamic tradition.

An earlier Quranic exegete and jurist, Imam Muhammad ibn Jarir at-Tabari, who lived from 838 to 923, writes in his Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk, or History of Prophets and Kings, that the same sacred area was the place where Jacob had his vision of the Heavenly Ladder:

When Jacob awoke he felt blissful from what he had seen in his trustful dream and vowed, for God’s sake that, if he returned to his family safely, he would build there a Temple for the Almighty. He also vowed to perpetual charity one tenth of his property for the sake of God. He poured oil on the Stone so as to recognize it and called the place Bayt El, which means ‘the House of God.’ It became the location of Jerusalem later.

In Jerusalem on a huge Rock, Solomon son of David built a beautiful Temple to expand the worship of God. Today on the base of that Temple stands the Dome of the Rock.

In 1932, during the British Mandate period, the Supreme Muslim Council of Jerusalem published a Brief Guide to Haram as-Sharif for Muslim pilgrims, written in English. “This site is one of the oldest in the world,” it says. “Its sanctity dates from the earliest times. Its identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot, according to universal belief, on which David built there an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings.”

My friend asked me why I was making Arafat "the heavy" with regard to Jewish delegitimization. I can answer that question easily: because historical negation of Jewish and Islamic sources concerning Jerusalem is recent and does not predate the PLO and its political propaganda. It started on Arafat's watch and under his direction,and is continued by his successors in the Waqf and the PLO. His lies undermining Jewish existence historically and religiously here are designed to sow discord, hate and war.

Most Moslems seem to be unaware that the Jewish return to our land from centuries of exile is fulfillment of Islamic prophecy as well as our own:

Sura 17:104~ "And thereafter We [God] said to the Children of Israel: ‘Dwell securely in the Promised Land. And when the last warning will come to pass, we will gather you together in a mingled crowd."

Such A Deal!!

In the interests of getting Palestine recognized as a real rather than ersatz state, Hamas has been pimping their party platform.

On May 11, Senior Hamas official Mahmoud Zahar said Hamas would be willing to accept a Palestinian state on 1967 borders.

Nice. Except that there are no "1967 borders." There is a 1948 Armistice Line which the Arab nations insisted for decades were NOT borders. They saw it merely as a minor delay, a sort of Do-Not-Pass-Go line on their way to the eradication of Israel and the slaughter of its dhimmi inhabitants.

However, this announcement of Hamas's gracious acceptance of a Palestinian state must be read in light of other official pronouncements.

On May 4, the same official stated that Hamas would never recognize the State of Israel. In other words, we want to be a U.N.-member state without recognizing another U.N. Member state, and while communicating our intention to wipe out said U.N.-member state....

According to Zahar, who was speaking on Al Jazeera, "Palestine is "hallowed ground" and Hamas will never recognize Israel. He added that Palestinians will not give up on their "right" to Palestine, while recognizing "the rule of Poles and Ethiopians in their land."

I'll just skip right over the obvious racism in this statement and head straight for the facts:

(1) Religious tomes, as the Left so often derides Israeli "settlers", are not a Title to real estate....and that includes the Quran;

(2) Palestinians have no "right" to Israel; those "Palestinians" born abroad and living in Lebanon, Syria, Chile, Jordan, Brazil, Canada, Europe, Kuwait, etc. are Lebanese, Syrian, Chilean, Jordanian, Brazilian, Canadian, European, Kuwaiti, etc....they are NOT "Palestinian" both because they were not born in Palestine, and because there IS no Palestine. When a state of Palestine is recognized, they have the "right" to live there -- not in Israel.

Side note: Palestinians claim that their identity as "Palestinian" is immutable and survives emigration, flight, intermarriage, overseas birth, other citizenship....once a Palestinian, always a Palestinian unto the nth generation....

So why do they have such a problem recognizing immutable Jewish rights to this homeland?

(3) 70% of Israelis are native born....they may have parents or grandparents who came from Poland or Ethiopia, but they did not....they speak Hebrew, not Polish; they have no "right" to EU or Ethiopian citizenship.

According to Mashaal, leader of Hamas, they are willing to temporarily accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. But the ultimate goal, however, would be a state of "Palestine in its entirety," meaning the eradication of Israel.

This position was reinforced by Zahar, who stated that Hamas could not recognize Israel, because doing so would "cancel the right of the next generation to liberate the land." He added that recognition of Israel could lead to Palestinian refugees losing their right of return.

"What will be the fate of the five million Palestinians in the diaspora?" Zahar asked.

Duh!

They're supposed to give up their U.N. welfare cards, become Palestinian citizens, and work on building their new state, much like Israel did with its influx of Jewish refugees driven out of Arab states.

And where did you get 5 million? Palestinians can't count. The number of Palestinian "refugees" still living is less than 300,000 -- the rest of them are descendants and welfare frauds, neither of which is a "refugee" category.

So, this is the deal Hamas is offering in its bid for statehood:

a. We'll take a state in the West Bank and Gaza;

b. It's temporary;

c. We reserve the right of the Next Generation to wage further war against the Zionist entity to "liberate" the rest of "Palestine;"

d. We refuse to recognize the state of Israel because to do so would abrogate our "right" to eradicate Israel;

e. There is no "peace" but only a "truce" (Hamas reloading) while we prepare the next wave of invasion and war.

THIS is a peace offer?

They think we'll accept this?

The Collective Idiocy of the EU, Ashton et al, thinks we'll accept this?

This is a recipe for war and genocide.

Not only "No" but "Hell, no! Never Again!"