Newsletter #296     Friday, August 25, 2006

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This is a small sampling of the many excellent articles published this week. For more, please visit our Home Page.

• Whose war crimes in Lebanon?
  Avi Bell - Jerusalem Post - August 27, 2006
   Human Rights Watch's insistence on placing Israel in the dock based on dubious or fabricated evidence creates the obscene situation where, at best, a law-abiding army is equally accused with an organization of war criminals and outlaws, and at worst, the lawful actors are viewed as the brigands and the criminals as innocent victims.

• What Israeli security could teach us
  By Jeff Jacoby - Jewish World Review.com - August 24, 2006  If you thought the UN's 1991 repeal of the "Zionism is Racism" resolution, achieved by the determined efforts of then assistant secretary of state John Bolton, marked an end to the world body's promotion of this canard, guess again. On the same day that Iran's President Ahmadinejad renewed his call for the destruction of the Jewish state, the UN's top racism committee supplied Teheran with renewed international moral justification for that goal.

• The Threat and the Strength
  By Benjamin Netanyahu - FrontPageMagazine.com | August 21, 2006   The root cause of the conflict has been finally exposed. This is not a conflict about a particular piece of land. We withdrew from every inch of Lebanon, yet we were attacked. We withdrew from every inch of Gaza, yet we were attacked. Our enemies tell us that even if we give up every last inch of Judea and Samaria and return to the pre-1967 borders, this would make no difference to them. As Nasrallah said: “We launch our missiles at the enemy’s occupied settlements”, i.e., Tiberias, Safed, Acre, Haifa - all in pre-1967 Israel. At its core, this is a conflict about Israel’s very existence, whatever our borders may be.

• The necessary accounting
  By Carolyn Glick - Jerusalem Post - August 25, 2006  Currently, the Israeli public is referring to the latest war as the Second Lebanon War. Yet this is untrue. The latest war was fought on two fronts - Lebanon and Gaza. It was precipitated by Palestinian aggression against Israel from Gaza. By referring to the war as the Lebanon War, the regional nature of the war is ignored. The name does more to confuse than to clarify what just befell us.

  The Mountains of Israel is an exciting and refreshing new perspective on the Arab-Israeli conflict, clearly outlining how God is fulfilling His Word in modern-day Israel. Free with a $ 11.95 USD per copy Donation!  Click button at left for PayPal or visit our "Mountains" page onsite.

• Let the world bring it on

  by Stan Goodenough - Jerusalem Watchman - August 23, 2006

  Imnesty International (AI) has accused Israel of committing war crimes during the course of its self-defensive war against the Hizb’allah.

  So the outed anti-Israel news agency Reuters informed us Wednesday.

  Determined to prosecute such a charge while the widespread, media-manufactured outrage against Israel for its actions in Lebanon remains high, the so-called human rights group has called for the United Nations to quickly establish an “independent” inquiry into what it says were Israeli breaches of international humanitarian law.

  AI, known for the enduring hostility of its relationship towards Israel, employed its “evenhandedness” approach by saying that “both sides” had broken these laws.

  It is a tactic that is as tried and tested as it is transparent.

  As much as it wants to be seen as such, and no matter how forcefully Egypt may insist it is – the Hizb’allah is not a legitimate national entity.

  It’s a regionally-sponsored Islamo-facist terror machine that has consolidated its reputation and built up its growing following through acts of violence and gangsterism in Allah’s name.

  On July 12, this Iranian-equipped and Syrian-facilitated militia perpetrated an act of international piracy by crossing into sovereign Israeli territory to kidnap Israeli soldiers, killing eight IDF men in the process.

  And it unapologetically committed crimes against humanity by deliberately aiming at civilian population centers when it rained 4,000 missiles down on Israel between July 12 and August 14.

  (An inquiry we can be sure AI will never call for is one into the responsibility of Tehran and Damascus for the outbreak of this war and their contribution to the tragic cost in Israeli and Lebanese civilian lives.)

  No matter. What we have learned well during the past decades here in Israel is that the world wants to see Israel as guilty. Nations like France and England, South Africa, Russia and China are quite happy to be deceived into believing that Israeli soldiers and air force pilots, with the blessing of Israeli governments, will deliberately and even gleefully inflict death and destruction on Arab men, women and children.

  Let them believe these lies. Let them prosecute Israel for them. Let them even – in their show trials in The Hague or wherever they choose to have them – find Israeli individuals or Israel as a nation guilty as charged.

  These journalists and lawmakers, together with the public that believes and supports them, are set in their ways. The truth will make no dent in their bias; it will give no pause to their prejudice, no respite to their anti-Semitism.

  This world sees modern-day Israel as:

  • Increasingly a mistake at best, illegitimate at worst – created on stolen Arab lands.
  • Expansionist – seeking to enlarge its borders by illegal occupation and ultimate annexation of more of those lands.
  • Warmongering – ready and eager to make war on its neighboring states and against the Palestinian Arabs.
  • Criminal in its warfare – deliberately targeting Arab civilians.
  • Human-rights abusing – arbitrarily persecuting Arabs and employing collective punishment against them.
  • Racist – abusive and segregationist towards its own Arab citizens (Israeli Arabs).

  We know modern-day Israel to be:

  • Wholly legitimate – both biblically and historically the rightful owners of all the ancient land of Eretz Israel.
  • Excessively accommodating – has proven its readiness to relinquish claim to great chunks of that homeland.
  • Sacrificially peace seeking – from the early 1900s repeatedly extending its hand towards the Arabs for peace; since 1967 demonstrably willing to take risks for peace, even at the cost of thousands of Israeli lives.
  • Incomparably humanitarian in its warfare – never blitzing, carpet-bombing or in any other way mass-destroying its enemies; warning civilians to vacate areas the IDF needs to strike; placing its own soldiers repeatedly at risk in order to minimize the risk to civilians, the majority of who are fully supportive of and celebrate their countrymen’s attacks on Israeli civilians.
  • Self accountable: As a nation repeatedly ready to express sorrow and remorse for the excessive or unlawful actions of individual Israelis; holding courts martial to punish and prevent abuse of Arabs by individual Israeli soldiers, etc.
  • Restrained in its actions against terrorists – selectively targeting those it goes after; dealing with individual terrorist’s property when it could lay siege to entire communities; building security walls and fences to stop terrorist acts instead of employing iron fist against entire Arab communities out of which these terrorists come.
  • Self-critical to an astonishing degree of any latent prejudices and, through its parliament as well as its courts, seeking to redress imbalances in treatment of the Arab minority – an Arab minority that, even as it perpetually complains, happens to enjoy the highest standard of living in the Arab world, the protection of its civil and human rights, an equal vote and its own parliamentary representatives (most of whom are openly hostile towards Israel), exemption from military service, and many thousands of whom live in luxurious villas and mansions that are to be seen in every one of Israel’s Arab towns.

  The world is wrong in its treatment of Israel. It is unfair and it is unjust. But why worry about them? Let them bring it on. All they are doing is storing up judgment against themselves, judgment that will be poured out upon them when the God of Israel deals with all those who hate Zion.

  Thank God, He is Israel’s defender. And while He, a holy God, will deal “in measure” with Israel for its many faults and sins, He knows where justice and injustice lie in regard to Israel’s conflict with the Arabs, and the world’s position on this conflict.

  The Judge of all the earth is coming soon. “He is coming to judge the earth. He shall judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with His truth.” (Ps 96:13)

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