Israel braces for fresh round of Islamic terror

Here's a fact you might want to ponder, at least if you're keen on peace in the Middle East.

Half the Palestinian population in greater Israel is under twenty years of age.

In their lifetimes, what has PLO/PA done for them?

If they are in Gaza, what has Hamas done for them?

Palestinians under both Hamas and the PA have known nothing but humiliation.

Along comes ISIL, Islamic State, with a promise of restoring Palestinian pride.

Driven out of Syria and Iraq after wreaking immense havoc, these toxic fundamentalists, with whom the IDF played footsie while they were on our side in Syria, seem to have a foothold in greater Israel today.

This can only get much worse before it gets better.

A PLO sympathiser considers the Kushner peace plan

I can't say I've met a lot of Palestinians. There was the guy I worked with at Kearney's, who hailed from the West Bank and dreamed of owning a corner store. One day while shopping at Zehrs, he slipped on a grape and hurt his neck. Miraculously, he made a 100% recovery shortly after winning enough of a settlement from his lawsuit against Zehrs to stake his store.

A few years later, whilst a student at the U of G, I recall attending a presentation by a Palestinian guy who represented some Palestinian solidarity cause, no doubt a PLO front. There were a handful of ADL types doing their best to be disruptive, but that only served to make the guy more appealing to the activist undergrad audience.

Shared a few pints at the Brass Taps with the guy later on. The "two state solution" was still a viable thing in those days, or at least that's what people thought.

Only a completely deluded moron would think that today.

Which is why the Palestinians should take the money. The two state solution is long dead, but the one state solution is an inevitability. Fifty billion dollars will put a lot of food on a lot of tables as Palestinians continue to struggle, peaceably, towards a single state wherein the Palestinian citizens have in every aspect the same rights as the Jewish citizens.

A generation or two from now, Israel could be a real democracy, in which some Jews vote for Palestinian candidates, and vice-versa, because of the candidates platform rather than their ethnicity.


That may not be what Kushner envisions, but take the money and keep working towards that goal.

The wily Erdogan outflanks team Trump in Qatar

For the first couple of days after Saudi Arabia announced the excommunication of Qatar from the community of US vassal states in the Gulf, the punditocracy was unanimous that Qatar's goose was cooked. They'd have no choice but to deep-six their civil relationship with Iran. They'd have no choice but to drastically rein in their pain-in-the-ass Al Jazeera network. In fact, there was widespread talk that regime change wouldn't be long in coming.

What's coming instead is the Turkish military, and they're not coming to expedite the removal of the Emir. Quite to the contrary. Qatar and Turkey are two of the main sponsors of the Muslim Brotherhood. Thanks mainly to Israeli lobbying efforts, the MB have long been a listed terrorist outfit in much of the West, and also in Saudi Arabia. I would hazard a guess that if and when push comes to shove, an Erdogan-led Turkey would have more loyalty to the MB than to NATO.

Israel's main problem with the MB is that it's the backbone of the democratically elected government in Gaza. There was a time when Israel happily nurtured the fledgling Hamas to undercut the PLO. Those days are long gone. Today, the PLO/PA are generally seen as Israel's bum-boys, while Hamas are considered Palestinian patriots.

This unfolding shitstorm was unleashed by Trump's bombastic rhetoric on the occasion of his visit to Riyadh last week, when he demanded that his audience stand with America in the war to exterminate "terrorism" once and for all. Even in mainstream American media it's widely acknowledged that it's the Saudis who are the primary enablers of this thing we call terrorism.

Not that the Qatari's have clean hands, but after the putative leader of the free world put things so baldly, it was just a matter of time before the finger-pointing got serious.

So here we are. The Saudis are doing way more to keep the order books of Lockheed and Raytheon and Boeing plumped up than Qatar is, which is why they've got more cred in the West, at least for now. But with Erdogan throwing this spanner into the works and Washington in chaos, it's impossible to predict what's next.

Interesting times indeed!

The next intifada

The next intifada is just around the corner, and it won't be pretty.

The US government went a long way towards hastening the next intifada by cutting off $200 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority today. For those of you who don't follow our middle east adventures on a regular basis, the PA are the "good" Palestinians, the ones we put in place to replace the ones we didn't like.

PA leader Abbas is our bumboy, our stooge. Yet even a bumboy needs to have something to show his people once in awhile just to maintain his cred. After the demise of Arafat, who we couldn't talk to, we put Abbas in place. We gave him lots of money and lots of guns and set him loose on the Palestinians we didn't like, the Hamas.

Ironically, Hamas were a crew we used to support because we thought they'd undermine Arafat, which they did to a point. Then, before we even realized what had happened, the bumboys went rogue. Not a new phenomenon. Think Noriega. Think Saddam Hussein. Think Pakistan. History is chock full of guys who take our money and our guns and then turn against us.

So we've had our bumboy Abbas "negotiating" a two-state solution all these years, while our erstwhile ally, the only democracy in the middle east, continues to build settlements on the land that Abbas is supposedly negotiating over. While it's a nice thing for him to be on our payroll, he still has to give his own people some sense that there is forward motion. That's been getting harder and harder. While he's negotiating, the settler population goes from one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand to five hundred thousand.

In desperation, our boy in Ramalla decides he's going to appeal for statehood directly to the UN, just like Israel did over sixty years ago. Well! If that didn't twist a few knickers in Tel Aviv and Washington! So the leaders in Washington are going to teach him a lesson. Two hundred million bucks worth of lesson.

Well, that'll for sure cut the legs out from under our puppet. So who's left? Oh, Hamas! Great!

As I've pointed out in previous posts, if the folks in Gaza can smuggle full-size Mercedes sedans through the tunnels, there's a lot of other stuff they can smuggle in too. And if they're stealing the cars in Libya, guess what else is up for grabs there? Got the picture yet?

The Third Intifada. Coming soon. Hold on to your hats.