Appeasement in our time?

Stephen Sizer posted a blog on 16 June in which he likened Tony Blair's success in persuading the Israeli Prime Minister to ease the blockade on Gaza to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time" deal with Adolph Hitler.

On his web site in March, Rev Sizer, who is not known for his subtlety, featured some photos he had taken of Israeli soldiers in Bethlehem under the caption "Herod's soldiers operating in Bethlehem today".

Back then I emailed him to say:

I just saw your pics of "Herod's soldiers".
Your pictures are, as ever, technically good but in view of the caption and that the Israeli checkpoint you and Colin Chapman passed through reminded you of an "abattoir", are you suggesting that Binyamin Netanyahu is the new Herod and that the Israeli soldiers are murderers of Bethlehem's children?

Stephen replied:

Dear Mike,
I didn’t say that so please don’t put words in my mouth.
Blessings
stephen

I wrote back:

Thank you Stephen.
I didn't put words in your mouth. I asked a question.
The caption must mean something. So if it is not an allusion to Matthew 2:16-18, what does the caption mean?

I received no reply. Today I wrote to him about his latest blog:

I just read your read your “Peace in our time” blog.
It left me wondering: if Tony Blair is Neville Chamberlain, who is Benjamin Netanyahu?
When I wrote to you about “Herod’s soldiers operating in Bethlehem today” you were not prepared to say that Netanyahu was Herod or that his soldiers were killing Palestinian babies (even though the implication was crystal clear).
The implication of your latest blog is that “Tony ‘Neville’ Blair” is appeasing “Benjamin ‘Adolph’ Netanyahu”. Or is this “putting words in your mouth”?
I wonder if you will be blogging about Turkey’s air strikes last week that killed 120 Kurds, including a seven-year-old girl, in retaliation for an attack by Kurdish rebels on a Turkish naval base which killed twelve soldiers.
This incident was the latest flare-up of a 26-year conflict that has claimed the lives of more than 40,000 people. For decades Turkey has oppressed its Kurdish minority by forbidding the use of the Kurdish language in state schools and government institutions. Layla Zana was expelled from the Turkish parliament in 1994 and imprisoned a year later for uttering from the parliamentary podium a single sentence in Kurdish .
I shall look forward to seeing you expose the hypocrisy of Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan who in the wake of the Mavi Marmara incident accused the Jewish state of crimes against humanity and called for sanctions against Israel.
I see also that you cite Stephen Lendman with approval. I think I drew your attention to him last year so, knowing your aversion to Holocaust denial, I wonder why you were willing to quote at length a man who contributes to the surreally bizarre anti-Semitic website www.rense.com which, amongst other things, denies the Holocaust and defends as authentic The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

I'll let you know what Stephen Sizer says.

I criticise Israel, therefore I am not an anti-Semite

English MP Jeremy Corbyn has objected to an opinion piece by Leon de Winter in The Wall Street Journal. De Winter’s brief article, Anti-Semitism Is Acceptable Again, asked why people and organizations that present themselves as “progressive” team up with reactionary Muslims. The Free Gaza group, said de Winter, is just such a Leftist-Islamist alliance. Israel withdrew from Gaza five years ago, therefore Gaza is already free but that isn't enough for Hamas; it wants a Jew-free Israel too. The Gaza flotilla, he said, was “the perfect execution of a masterful piece of Islamist theatre”. It is acceptable once more to be an anti-Semite.

Corbyn, a political progressive who is not adverse to “teaming up” with radical Muslims, responded by saying that although “race hatred and discrimination of any description is wrong” de Winter should not “conflate criticisms of Israel with hatred of the Jewish people; they are NOT the same.”

I’m not saying Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite but the way Corbyn and other critics of Israel respond to the charge that some criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic almost amounts to saying that being a critic of Israel is proof positive you are not an anti-Semite. Is there, one wonders, any form of condemnation of Israel that Corbyn and other progressives would acknowledge as clearly anti-semitic? For example, do false allegations of war crimes, the use of the term "apartheid" to describe the state of Israel and “Nazis” to describe Israel’s leaders and the denial of the right of the Jewish people to self-determination not qualify as anti-Semitism.

A few weeks ago, in an unprovoked attack, North Korea sunk a South Korean ship killing 47 people. Where was the world's outrage? In Pakistan, hundreds die in terrorist attacks every week and the Pakistani military kill hundreds of insurgents every month. Where are the expression of indignation from the rest of the world? The Turks killed hundreds of Kurds every year but where was the anger of the progressives? These, and many more conflicts around the world, cause far more deaths and injury than the justified Israeli assault on the Mavi Marmara last week. Yet, according to world opinion, Israel is a pariah state, the world’s leading terrorist organisation and the scum of the earth.

Jeremy Corbyn has shared a platforms with Abou JahJah, a Hezbollah supporter and Holocaust denier who founded the Arab European League, which posted racist cartoons aimed at Jews, including a particularly crude and obnoxious scribble of Ann Frank in bed with Adolph Hitler. Corbyn also spoke alongside Hezbollah MP, Hussein el Haj Hassan who objected to Lebanese children being taught about the diary of Ann Frank.

If Jeremy Corbyn really does believe that “race hatred and discrimination of any description is wrong” why did he join these Islamic radicals to protest against Israel? Perhaps in Corbyn’s book even Holocaust denial and crude cartoons that target Jews don’t yet qualify as race hatred.

Moishe Rosen: 1932 – 2010

Moishe Rosen, the founder of Jews for Jesus, died on Wednesday 19th May in San Francisco after a long battle with prostate cancer.

The son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Moishe Rosen trusted Jesus as Messiah in 1953 along with his wife, Ceil. A short time later he sensed a call to ministry and after attending seminary at North-eastern Bible College in New Jersey, he spent the five years working with the American Board of Missions to the Jews before founding Jews for Jesus in 1973 with young Messianic Jews who had embraced Jesus as Messiah during the Jesus movement.

From 1957-1972, Moishe served in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco with the American Board of Missions to the Jews (now Chosen People Ministries). In the late sixties and early seventies the Jesus Movement, a revival among Hippies happened. Many in the Jesus Movement were Jewish and Moishe gathered young Jewish followers of Jesus together to use unconventional methods and strategies to communicate the gospel to their own people. In September 1973, Jews for Jesus was born.

Moishe was quoted as saying, “God has a great sense of humour letting an over-aged, overweight and overbearing person like me lead a youth movement.” He would also say “I have been called the founder/leader of Jews for Jesus but it found me because I was the one who owned the printer that we needed to crank out our broadsides.”

I admired Moishe for the fact that he was not an “ivory tower” mission director. He distributed broadsides on the streets with his staff and for his self-deprecating attitude. Just before I met him for the first time I read an article which began something like this: “As I was distributing broadsides, a guy told me I was a big, fat, ugly slob. After complimenting him on his powers of observation, I asked him what he thought of Yeshua.” That taught me the necessity of leaders of missions not taking themselves too seriously and also being involved in evangelism.

Moishe was for a number of years a member of Christian Witness to Israel’s council. At times, he would get up from the Council table and lie with his eyes closed on the chaise lounge. But Moishe was not asleep; his razor-sharp mind was taking in every word spoken at the table and sifting them all. He would suddenly come back to the discussion with a gem of wisdom.

Moishe Rosen was one of the greatest mission leaders of the twentieth century. He has gone to receive the Lord’s commendation as a “good and faithful servant”. In your prayers, remember his widow Ceil and the staff of Jews for Jesus.

The Differences between Jews and Muslims

I was recently sent this.

Muslims want to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth. What a difference that would make!

The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000. One billion two hundred million or 20% of the world's population. And they have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:
1988. Najib Mahfooz

Peace:
1978. Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
1990. Elias James Corey
1994. Yaser Arafat:
1999. Ahmed Zewai

Economics: (zero)

Physics: (zero)

Medicine:
1960. Peter Brian Medawar
1998. Ferid Mourad
TOTAL: 7

The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000, approximately 0.02% of the world's population. They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:
1910. Paul Heyse
1927. Henri Bergson
1958. Boris Pasternak
1966. Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1966. Nelly Sachs
1976. Saul Bellow
1978. Isaac Bashevis Singer
1981. Elias Canetti
1987. Joseph Brodsky
1991. Nadine Gordimer World

Peace:
1911. Alfred Fried
1911. Tobias Michael Carel Asser
1968. Rene Cassin
1973. Henry Kissinger
1978. Menachem Begin
1986. Elie Wiesel
1994. Shimon Peres
1994. Yitzhak Rabin

Physics:
1905. Adolph Von Baeyer
1906. Henri Moissan
1907. Albert Abraham Michelson
1908. Gabriel Lippmann
1910. Otto Wallach
1915. Richard Willstaetter
1918. Fritz Haber
1921. Albert Einstein
1922. Niels Bohr
1925. James Franck
1925. Gustav Hertz
1943. Gustav Stern
1943. George Charles de Hevesy
1944. Isidor Issac Rabi
1952. Felix Bloch
1954. Max Born
1958. Igor Tamm
1959. Emilio Segre
1960. Donald A. Glaser
1961. Robert Hofstadter
1961. Melvin Calvin
1962. Lev Davidovich Landau
1962. Max Ferdinand Perutz
1965. Richard Phillips Feynman
1965. Julian Schwinger
1969. Murray Gell-Mann
1971. Dennis Gabor
1972. William Howard Stein
1973. Brian David Josephson
1975. Benjamin Mottleson
1976. Burton Richter
1977. Ilya Prigogine
1978. Arno Allan Penzias
1978. Peter L Kapitza
1979. Stephen Weinberg
1979. Sheldon Glashow
1979. Herbert Charles Brown
1980. Paul Berg
1980. Walter Gilbert
1981. Roald Hoffmann
1982. Aaron Klug
1985. Albert A. Hauptman
1985. Jerome Karle
1986. Dudley R. Herschbach
1988. Robert Huber
1988. Leon Lederman
1988. Melvin Schwartz
1988. Jack Steinberger
1989. Sidney Altman
1990. Jerome Friedman
1992. Rudolph Marcus
1995. Martin Perl
2000. Alan J. Heeger

Economics:
1970. Paul Anthony Samuelson
1971. Simon Kuznets
1972. Kenneth Joseph Arrow
1975. Leonid Kantorovich
1976. Milton Friedman
1978. Herbert A. Simon
1980. Lawrence Robert Klein
1985. Franco Modigliani
1987. Robert M. Solow
1990. Harry Markowitz
1990. Merton Miller
1992. Gary Becker
1993. Robert Fogel

Medicine:
1908. Elie Metchnikoff
1908. Paul Erlich
1914. Robert Barany
1922. Otto Meyerhof
1930. Karl Landsteiner
1931. Otto Warburg
1936. Otto Loewi
1944. Joseph Erlanger
1944. Herb ert Spencer Gasser
1945. Ernst Boris Chain
1946. Hermann Joseph Muller
1950. Tadeus Reichstein
1952. Selman Abraham Waksman
1953. Hans Krebs
1953. Fritz Albert Lipmann
1958. Joshua Lederberg
1959. Arthur Kornberg
1964. Konrad Bloch
1965. Francois Jacob
1965. Andre Lwoff
1967. George Wald
1968. Marshall W. Nirenberg
1969. Salvador Luria
1970. Julius Axelrod
1970. Sir Bernard Katz
1972. Gerald Maurice Edelman
1975. Howard Martin Temin
1976. Baruch S. Blumberg
1977. Roselyn Sussman Yalow
1978. Daniel Nathans
1980. Baruj Benacerraf
1984. Cesar Milstein
1985. Michael Stuart Brown
1985. Joseph L. Goldstein
1986. Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
1988. Gertrude Elion
1989. Harold Varmus
1991. Erwin Neher
1991. Bert Sakmann
1993. Richard J. Roberts
1993. Phillip Sharp
1994. Alfred Gilman
1995. Edward B. Lewis
TOTAL: 129!

Jews do not brainwash their children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths non-Muslims!

Jews don't hijack planes, kill athletes at the Olympics or blow themselves up in German restaurants. There is not a single Jew who has destroyed a mosque or church. Jews don't traffic slaves or call for Holy War and death to all the Infidels.

Perhaps the world's Muslims should consider investing more in standard education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems.

Muslims must ask what they can do for humankind before demanding that the rest of humankind respects them!

Regardless of one’s feelings about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and Arab neighbours, even if one believes Israel is more culpable, the following quote from Binyamin Netanyahu says it all: 'If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.’

A Letter to Gaza

I saw this remarkable correspondence between a resident of Gaza and Nonie Darwish, author of They Call Me an Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel and the War on Terror on FrontPage.

I recently received an email accusing me of hating Arabs and my father. This email is typical of Arab media accusations of my views regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Since most Arabs have no chance to read my book, Now They Call Me Infidel, Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel and the War on Terror, which explains in detail my position, I will answer the email in this article. First, below is the translation of the Arabic language email which I received without a signature:

Salam to you,

With all of our pride in your father we pray that Allah will bless him with entering paradise, which is the wish of every person after this short prideful meaningless life. I want to ask you, has your father become your enemy after his death? We in the city of Gaza take pride in your father and I live on a street by the name of Shahid Moustafa Hafez which also has a school by the name of Shahid Moustafa Hafez. We never forgot his sacrifice, so how could you become an enemy to the tortured Palestinian people who are still suffering at the hands of Arab Zionists? I ask Allah to give you health and strength.

Awaiting your response and thank you in advance.

Here is my response:

Dear Gaza resident,

Your email touched me as sincere even though your accusations are wrong. I am not the enemy of Arabs and I assure you that I love my original culture and people. What makes me different is that I do not only love Arabs, but I also love the Jewish people. I am speaking my conscience. I respect their right to live in peace in their tiny homeland, Israel. I understand how that could be puzzling and unbelievable to many Arabs, to love both Jews and Arabs.

We Arabs have suffered from an unnatural and consistent indoctrination into Islamic supremacy and Jew hatred for over 1400 years. Thus it has become unfathomable to the Arab mind to comprehend loving both Arabs and Jews and wishing both well. Our culture has deprived us for many centuries from loving all of humanity as equals, through intense religious indoctrination resulting in self-imposed isolation and non-integration with other cultures. This isolation and jihad against non-Muslims has become increasingly difficult to maintain. Muslims everywhere are trying desperately to save face, reform Islam’s image and deny the undeniable. But they also want to have their cake and eat it too. While they are telling the world Islam is a religion of peace, they still want to continue with the jihad against non-Muslim countries.

While one leader says, let’s kill all the Jews and take over Rome, another says to Western media that Islam is a religion of peace and we are deeply offended by the anti-Islam rhetoric. To play this sick game, Muslim culture must live a dysfunctional double life where everyone is deceived, including Muslims.

Thus to do the kind of jihad that Bin Laden, Ahmadinejad, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Assad, Nasser, Saudi jihadists etc, do and which is dictated by Sharia, Muslims find it hard to be honest. Thus, Muslims must claim victimhood in order to justify jihad. The entire Muslim world is using your people, the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza, to justify their jihad against not only Israel, but also all non-Muslim countries. That includes Iran, which supports Hamas and Hezbollah.

Your people in Gaza should have realized this game a long time ago, but you refuse to see and be open about who is your true oppressor. Arab and Muslim media is using and abusing your people in order to justify their Islamic jihad around the world. That is why they never want to resolve your problem and want you to suffer and live in constant terror against Israel.

Under Islamic law, non-Muslim countries are never equal to Muslim countries and actually their sovereignty as a non-Muslim nation must always be challenged by Islamic jihad. Islamic law codified jihad as a permanent war with non-Muslims to establish the religion. Muslims thus have to use Taquiyya, lies, to legitimize their aggression on Israel and the West. That is why Muslim countries can never abandon the constant hate propaganda, lies and misinformation about Israel and the West. If that ends, their jihad ends. The UN must be constantly bombarded by complaints from Arab countries against Israel. The Arab street must be constantly bombarded with ridiculous accusations and Zionist conspiracies. Lately on Syrian TV a Syrian intellectual accused Israel of stealing human organs in Haiti while they were helping them after the earthquake. This is not something new; it started in the 7th century, when the prophet Mohammed accused the Jews of treason to justify killing and expelling them and taking over their wealth. To explain this away, he stated that Jews are worthy of this treatment since they are the descendants of apes pigs and enemies of Allah. Muslims still use the same dynamic and the world still falls for it every time.

The Arab mind was trained to never venture outside of the box of Islamic superiority, and that prevented us from treating the rest of humanity as equals. It is alien to Muslim preachers today to preach love to all of humanity and wishing non-Muslims the same human rights as Muslims. I have never heard that from a Muslim preacher. Only after 9/11 and in the West today, do we see some Muslim preachers trying to preach some Western values and engage in interfaith dialogue, in order to rehabilitate the image of Islam in the West and attract more converts.

I often get mail from secular Muslims who ask me: I can understand that you chose to leave Islam, but how can you support the Jews? I get mail like this because, in the Muslim mindset, loving, accepting and feeling good about Jews or Christians and thinking of them as equals, is unthinkable and an act of treason to Islam itself and even worse. It is as though the whole religion of Islam is dedicated to hating and killing Jews.

After centuries of this kind of education, the Muslim world produced a dysfunctional society, unable to relate to the rest of the world. While wanting to convince the world they are a religion of peace, do not be afraid of Islam, they are still hell-bent on conquering the world for Islam. That is Islam’s dilemma today.

What I, and a few others, are trying to do is to bring the truth to both Muslims and non-Muslims to finally face this sick game. We want to encourage Arabs to look at Jews and others as human beings and not as enemies to conquer. What kind of God will tell his followers to kill more than half of humanity if they don’t submit to Islam?

The Muslim world today is a disaster waiting to happen. Ahmadinejad, who is not an Arab, wants to continue the Islamic jihad against Jews by destroying Israel. I have news to especially the Left in Europe and America: Islamic jihad will not end with Israel; you will be next.

To my email writer: in your letter to me, I have noticed that your outlook on life is pessimistic describing it as short and meaningless pride. Your views are prevalent in Muslim culture and I have heard it thousands of times when I lived in the Middle East. I remember even when we laughed and giggled as young girls, we were immediately silenced as being improper and that Allah somehow does not like us to laughing for no reason or in public. Even a heartfelt laugh to a Muslim was not going to get you friends, but critics. Your message to me and to Muslims is that life on earth will not get us happiness and the only escape from such misery is the everlasting happiness in the pleasures of Allah’s paradise after dying in jihad. But why take the Jews with us? They want to live and enjoy life and to make the earth, right here, a better place.

Our rejection of life is not a coincidence: since jihad does not value life, then it must value death. The first casualty of the jihad principle is peace and that is why I never learned peace as a value in Gaza. I have never heard a peaceful song in Arabic. To think of peace with the Jews is equal to treason to Islam. Rejection of peace has detrimental consequences to the healthy functioning of the Arab personality, family, society and the whole region. It is not a coincidence that Saudis reject under the law any celebration of Valentine’s Day, reject celebrating love between a man and a woman, teaching peace and compassion to their children towards the others. Just look at our Islamic law books and see the most cruel and unusual punishments ever created in any culture on earth. Only a culture that demands war and terror can promote such cruelty.

As to your question about hating my father, again I want to assure you that I adore and respect my father more than all of the people of Gaza. Actually I love him and wish him heaven not because he killed Jews, but because he was a good human being who was respected by many including the Israeli soldiers who killed him. He was known even to Israel as a cut above his peers and had integrity and honor. My father was the victim of the blood-thirsty culture of death all around him. He is one of the many thousands and even millions of victims of the jihad ideology, practiced over the last 1400 years.

Dear Gaza resident, yes, I cannot blame the Jewish people, or the government of Israel, for what you call the ‘misery’ of the Palestinians. I can only blame Arab and Islamic culture which used and abused you and which you allowed. I believe that this is an Arab self-inflicted crisis that has nothing to do with Israel.

Arab education has never told us the truth about the Israeli people and the story from their side and what Jerusalem means to them. We were told that Jerusalem was a Muslim city simply because Mohammed dreamt one night that he went to the farthest mosque but he never mentioned Jerusalem. The Koran never mentioned Jerusalem, which is mentioned hundreds of times in the Bible as the heart and soul of the Jewish people. We as Muslims never respected other religions holy cites and always claimed them to Islam; even Spain and India are being claimed as Muslim land. It was the tradition of Muslim conquerors to convert churches and temples to mosques and that is exactly what happened to the Jewish Temple Mount when 100 years after the prophet Mohammed died, Muslim conquerors built the mosque right on top of it. Just imagine if Jews or Christians had built a temple on top of the Kaaba in Mecca. This is how Islam has treated the Jews. It is time for Muslims to seek redemption and forgiveness and to extend the hand of reconciliation and peace to the Jewish people.

Nonie Darwish

The Sevenoaks candidate and the 'frightful conspiracy'

It has been brought to my attention that our local Jewish conspiracy theory parliamentary candidate Mark Ellis (see Vote, Vote, Vote for Mark Ellis, 19 April) has made the national news. Writing on the Guardian's blog on Wednesday April 21 2010, Simon Jeffery says:

OK, this is an odd one – a candidate running in Sevenoaks on a platform quoting liberally from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – the notorious Russian forgery claiming a worldwide Jewish conspiracy that served as a key text for 20th century European antisemitism.

Now breathe out and let's get back to the location: Sevenoaks. Cairo, maybe (the protocols linger on in the Arab world). But Sevenoaks? With its mix of turn-of-the-century plotting and a leafy setting in southern England, this is an election leaflet as it may have appeared in an Edwardian novel in the vein of HG Wells's War of the Worlds or Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent.

The candidate is Mark Ellis, a retired customs officer standing as an independent. The leaflet was sent by a reader understandably alarmed to find it on her doormat (and is also on the Straight Choice election leaflet website).

It begins with a quote from the Protocols (protocol No 3, for those with a copy at home) that says a "symbolic snake" is wrapping itself around Europe. Ellis brings us in on: "When this ring is in place, then all the European states will be held as by strong claws" – he suggests that the European Union's ring of 12 stars can be seen as a "symbolism of the 12 in control" (when the Protocols were written, "the 12" were Jews; Ellis talks of "this same folk"). He then follows through with a mash-up of Europhobia, anti-environmentalism and support for classic British military aeroplane design as he lists 21 harms that the "Cons" (Conservatives) have wrought against the country.

This may seem odd to you, seeing as the Conservatives have been out of power nationally for 13 years, but that is probably because you don't live in Sevenoaks, where with the exception of a Liberal MP in 1923-24 the Conservatives have held the seat continuously since it was created in 1885. All politics is local.

His complaints include controls on C02 emissions, low-energy light bulbs, VAT, energy bills, degrading of links with white settler Commonwealth countries (including "Rhodesia"), "needless spoiling of the firework trade" and failure to keep RAF Dakotas and Avro Vulcans flying.

The battier ones include the removal of "Kent" and "England" from maps. The explanation here is that some believe the EU has a long-term plan to turn England into regionally-administered entities for the sole purpose of removing the word "England" from the map. "Kent" would go too. No one has explained why the EU would want to do this, other than for reasons of spite. Ellis also describes the Bolsheviks as a "non-Russian folk" (that word again) who financed communism from the United States and now pay Labour and the "Cons".

The idea that the EU is part of a Jewish/Masonic New World Order designed to crush the British state in preparation for a world government is definitely one that has some followers – except, of course, among those who prefer the Eurabia thesis, which holds that the EU is a plot to make the majority Christian countries of Europe an extension of the Muslim Arab world.

It is in trying to reconcile the competing visions of Muslim and Jewish conspiracies on the loose in Brussels that my head starts to hurt. And then there is the EUSSR. (All this is many notches further on from standard Euroscepticism.)

I click through to EU conspiracy websites from links left in comments on rival news sites – probably more than I should – and after a while the anthropology of them soon starts to soak in. Paranoid conspiracy theories are pretty much formulaic when you get to grips with them, mostly involving Jews and Masonic symbolism (and increasingly a business/public sector leadership training group called Common Purpose that had Body Shop founder Anita Roddick as its first chair). Really, I could write my own Dan Brown novel – and might have to if the writer's block stops me getting any further on my misery memoir A Blogger called It.

Back to Ellis: he concludes his leaflet by explaining that he was "aware of a frightful conspiracy" and "matching protocols with happenings became my task" – which is a waste of a retirement really, since it was established in 1921 that the protocols were made up. I blame the internet.

A Palestinian Zionist Organization?

I have long believed that there is no hope for a political solution to the Israel / Palestine problem. A single state would be the end of Israel and would result in Jews becoming a second-class citizens as they are in most Arab countries. A two-state solution, as we’ve seen with Gaza, would create an independent Palestine that from which state-sponsored terrorists would continue to attack Israel.

Palestinian Arab Elias Issa also believes that. Last week Issa marked Israel's 62nd Independence Day by launching the Palestinian Zionist Organization.

Issa rejects the notion that the Jewish state is a repressive entity that has stolen the lands of another people and established the PZO to show the world “why it must support the Jewish people and to [distance itself] from the terrorist Palestinian government."

Issa insists that an independent Palestinian state would be nothing more than a haven for terrorism, not only against Israel, but against the West in general. He also explains that the world has been duped, either knowingly or unwittingly, into believing that the Palestinians truly want a peaceful two-state solution.

“The Palestinians don't believe in a two-state solution; they only believe in a one-state solution – a land called Palestine [which] does not involve any Jewishness.”
For his own safety, Issa now resides in the United States, where Mosab Hassan Yousef, another former terrorist who now supports Israel, lives. Yousef’s book Son of Hamas, details his years of undercover service for Israel's security agencies, despite being the son of one of Hamas' top leaders. Coming closer to Israel and the Bible eventually resulted in Yousef becoming a Christian.

Israel’s critics frequently cite Jewish and Israeli critics of Israel to bolster their charges against Israel. But Israel’s Jewish critics do not have to live in exile with 24/7 protection. Indeed, Israeli Jeff Halper, who lives unmolested by his neighbours in Jerusalem, uses the very safety he enjoys as a stick to beat Israel. He regards the fact that his neighbours don’t persecute him for his anti-Israel activities as evidence that they don’t care about the plight of the Palestinians.
For more information on the Palestinian Zionist Organization, visit their website.