A TIME TO SPEAK
Vol.V:3 (No. 51)
March 2005 - I-II Adar 5765
MADNESS
AND METHOD -- Part II
"Though this be
madness, yet there is method to 't"
--
Hamlet Act II Scene 3
Hamlet's madness was feigned in a stage tragedy. The progressive madness of Israel's governments is a real tragedy.
There were mistakes and misjudgments enough before 1992, but policies since then have gone far beyond normal human fallibility. The progressively disastrous consequences of these policies were never unexpected or unforeseen. On the contrary, there were logical analyses, cogent objections, and passionate pleas aplenty. The policymakers had one all-purpose response: Ignore the content of the arguments and vilify those who presented them.
The folly of the Oslo Accords progressed to shameful submission to the arrogant alien Roadmap [see Issues 39, 45, 46] to the madness of Disengagement. [See Issues No. 45, 46, 49, 50] The method for forcing them on the nation progressed from deceit, intimidation, and bribery to the present governmental violation of the most basic principles of liberty, democracy and decency. [See Issues 49, 50].
What can be the reason for such drastic and dangerous doings?
1]
Might Israel benefit from exchange of concessions, commitments, or
obligations?.
The Oslo Accords came with a piece of paper in which the PLO committed itself to future peaceable conduct. No person with any sense believed that promise. Disengagement is a free gift to the PLO.
The terrorists know this is a victory for them, and perceive it as proof that Israel is weak and fearful. This inspires them to the open contempt of announcing their intentions: Get as much as they can out of Israel, and then resume mass terror attacks to get still more.
2]
Might the people of Israel be safer after Disengagement?
They will be in vastly greater danger. The terrorists will have unimpeded access to and unrestricted use of massive weaponry, rockets, and missiles. They will feel free to use them whenever and wherever they fancy.
Former IDF Chief-of-Staff and current Minister of Defense Shaul Mofaz has announced that the terrorists in Gaza acquired missiles that can bring down civilian airliners. This has not dampened his own ardor for proceeding with Disengagement.
3]
Might Disengagement win the gracious consent of the Bush-Rice Administration
for
the Children of Israel to live in the Land of Israel?
Sharon's bluster that he won U.S. "assurances" of consent are a sham.
Official statements from Washington and the U.S. embassy in Tel-Aviv deny that there will be any such grace. These denials are credible. Indeed, demands for Israel's flight from its own Land now go even beyond those of the Roadmap. A newly revealed requirement is that the envisioned PLO state be "contiguous", and that is geographically impossible without chopping Israel itself into disconnected segments.
4]
Will Israel be free of the burden of Gaza?
After Disengagement Israel will still be liable for supplying water, utilities, transportation, and other services. It will most likely be under pressure from the Bush-Rice Administration to contribute to the Gaza economy as well.
5]
Might it be in Israel's interest to make sacrifices in order to shore up
Mahmoud Abbas
as
a "partner in peace".
When the notion of Disengagement was first sprung on the people of Israel more than a year ago, the excuse was in essence: "We have no partner for an agreement, so we have to do something unilaterally." This nonsense has been altered to fit the change of regime in the PLO. The revised excuse is the fancied need to be nice to the new Chief Terrorist.
Mahmoud Abbas (a/k/a Abu Mazen) has for decades been one of the highest-ranking figures in the PLO. He earned a doctorate degree from a Soviet university for a thesis that denies the Holocaust ever happened, or maybe there was just a mini-Holocaust that was no big deal..
His career has been dedicated to the destruction of Israel. That destruction is still his goal, and any interim policy is a means to that end.
He is now recruiting recruited or is attempting to recruit the most hard-line terror gangs into his "security services".
6]
Is Disengagement from (meaning abandonment of) parts of the Land of Israel
necessary
to maintain demographic balance?
The standard demographic figures for the various populations within the Land of Israel were incorrect and misleading. Recent more stringent studies show very different figures and proportions. Old arguments based on faulty figures are now obsolete. No policies or decisions should be made on the basis of obsolete data.
7]
Might the sacrifices of Disengagement "improve Israel's standing in the
world" and bring a respite
from
foreign pressures and condemnations.
Disengagement will be correctly seen as weakness and loss of will, and therefore encourage more pressure. Europe is already assuring Israel that this is only a first step, that must be followed by more and more retreat.
If Israel casts away its heritage and its rights, its honor, dignity, and self-respect, it cannot thereby temper the malevolence of its enemies. It can only hurt itself and betray its true friends; the Christians and Jews who believe in its heritage and have always stood by it.
* * * * * * * *
Disengageniks do not make a case that passes basic tests of evidence, experience and common sense. Why, then, are they determined to do this thing, even at the cost of tearing apart society and nation? And how much confidence should be placed in the character and judgment of those in the fforefront of disengagement?
1]
Ariel Sharon:
A flamboyant military career brought him fame, but not unanimous respect of fellow officers. After switching to politics, he hopped from party to party and ministry to ministry. Over several decades, his outstanding achievement was to push his own agenda by deceiving and ruining Prime Minister Menahem Begin.
He finally became prime minister because a clumsy electoral system left voters no other way to free the country from the calamitous Ehud Barak. Throught his tenure in this office, he has failed to protect Israel and Israelis. He never made any serious effective response to the PLO's Oslo War that has taken thousands of lives and ruined thousands more. Indeed, his policies have served to strengthen and embolden the enemy. While he refrains from victory over the enemy, he imposes his will on the country he is supposed to lead, by ruthless punishments of critics and shameless bribery of sycophants.
Sharon and his sons Gilad and Omri have kept the office of the Attorney General busy with their convoluted affairs.
Omri Sharon has been indicted for improprieties and illegalities in raising money for his father's political campaign.
Gilad Sharon has been investigated on his part in a potentially very lucrative real estate deal on a island of Greece. The patch of real estate in question could not be sold without the approval of particular clergyman of the Greek Orthodox Church. Ariel Sharon can Israel's consent to the appointment of the clergyman as Greek Orthodox Patriarch for Israel and the Territories, despite his fierce Judeophobia and close ties to Arafat and the PLO.
2] Shimon Peres
He has now added Vice Prime Minister to the other titles he has held in the course of a long and progressively malevolent political career. [See Issue No. 49] He has made Disengagement possible by bringing his defeated Labor Party into Sharon's government, and thereby outweighing the opposition from the winning Likud Party.
However, Labor adherence to the Sharon government is dependent on it ceding more and more land to the PLO, and dispossessing more and more Jews from their communities. That is, it uses Sharon to carry out its own platform that the voters massively rejected.
Peres long ago chose his side in what he defines as a contest between "the Israelis" and "the Jews". By "Israelis" he means the enlightened secular-socialist Osloids. By "the Jews" he means the unenlightened who incorrigibly cling to ancestral tradition.
There are off-and-on investigations of his murky financial via the European-funded Peres Center for Peace, and his business interests in a PLO regime that he himself established via Oslo.
3] Dov Weissglass
He has been Sharon's consigliore, attorney, government bureau chief, and government office bureau chief, and regular personal emissary to the Bush-Rice Administration.
His fellow arch-Disengagenik and Minister of Defense Shaul Mofaz recently insisted on giving the PLO control of Jericho. Chief of Staff General Moshe Ya'alon had strongly opposed the dangerous loss of control over Jericho. Mofaz over-ruled him, and very shortly thereafter deprived Ya'alon of his post.
Jericho -- one of the most ancient cities in the world -- is the site of a very profitable gambling casino belonging to the PLO and its partners and associates. Among the later is Dov Weissglass.
From "The
Jericho Casino", Makor Rishon, 25 Febuary, 2005:
[. . . .] According to a source close to the Palestinian Authority, Ya'alon's fierce opposition to relinquishing IDF security control over Jericho at this time and Mofaz' and apparently Sharon's displeasure with Yaalon's warnings, may also lead directly to the doors of the Jericho Casino and back to some senior offices in Israel.
The source noted that Ya'alon and other senior security figures have expressed concern in the past that Jericho's casino profits --that have been estimated at more than one million dollars per day even after the start of the Al Aksa terror war in 2000 -- had also been used as a prime funding source for Palestinian terror activity against Israel. [. . . .]
Reportedly, figures from Israel's underworld work along with their Arab counterparts [and] the Israeli underworld and their Palestinian counterparts are cooperating in the Jericho Casino racket.
[. . . .] West Bank strongman Jibril Rajoub and former senior Arafat financial advisor Mohammed Rashid, who is known to control Arafat's several billion dollar portfolio, top the list of Palestinians believed to have among the heaviest financial interests in the casino.
[. . . .] It is also well known in Israel that MK Omri Sharon, the Prime Minister's son and closest confidante, and Former Sharon Bureau Chief Dov Weissglass have been long time associates of Rashid. The younger Sharon and Weissglass were reportedly Rashid's guests at his swank Tel Aviv Apartment on the night of Sharon's election victory in February 2001 according to Israeli journalists Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff in their 2004 book, The Seventh War.
An Israeli source with close ties both to the Palestinian Authority and Jordan noted this week that some Israelis and Europeans may also be interested in reopening the Jericho casino as soon as possible. A very senior Israeli security source said this week that he and others in the IDF remember 'with a cynical smile' the repeated approaches Weissglass made to the IDF and security establishment after the closing of the Jericho Casino in 2001 to convince them to reopen the casino. 'It was well known to us that Dov Weissglass had personal interests in the Jericho Casino,' the senior security source added this week. The source added that he does not understand Mofaz's role in the matter.
Of equal interest is the fact that Weissglass is still actively associated with his law firm Weissglass-Almagor that until recently was the law firm of record representing the Jericho Casino and other interests of the Palestinian Authority, facts that were reported in Makor Rishon and as recently as September 2004 by investigative journalist David Bedein in the American Magazine Frontpage.com. According to Bedein, the law firm Weissglass-Almagor is today listed as representing the interests of Casino investor and European financier Martin Shlaff whose alleged financial contributions to Prime Minister Sharon's 1999 and 2001 campaigns are under criminal investigation. [. . . .]
The Omri Sharon indictment is part of the ongoing investigation into his connection to various illegal funding sources including Martin Shlaff, reportedly a source of illegal campaign contributions to Sharon. . . . . Austrian financier Martin Shlaff is also well known as a major investor in the Jericho Casino, together with Sharon longtime friend Cyril Kern.
[. . . .]
It is not yet certain whether Dov Weissglass will have an interest in a second PLO gambling casino to be opened in Gaza after Disengagement.
These men have in
effect hijacked Israel. And the outside world imagines Israel in their ugly
image.
* * * *
* * * * * * * *
The mainstream news media in Israel are generally vigorous and inquisitive. Even a hint of scandal about prominent and powerful personages would ordinarily have them licking their lips. Not this time. They busily crank out exaggerated or invented warnings about the nefarious intent of those who oppose Disengagement. The questionable doings of the Chief Disengageniks are not newsworthy.
On the revelations about Sharon & Sons, investigative reporter Shimon Cohen assembled a mass of material. He reports: "I gave it to senior reporters and investigative reporters on Channels One and Two, and to [newspapers] Ha'aretz and Maariv, but no one chose to take up the gauntlet and to deal with the grave findings."
From "Sharon
Family Scandals Buried in Favor of Pullout", IsraelNationalNews.com,
22 February 2005:
Top political, media personalities admit: Public silence on criminal suspicions against Sharon and family stems from media's support for his plan. MK Hendel: This was Sharon's strategy all along.
Eitan Haber, a former top aide to Yitzchak Rabin and a writer for [newspaper] Yediot Acharonot, put it poetically: 'Our products – values and norms – are drowning in the sea, and the left-wing is singing praises.' [. . . .]
'If not for the fact that he was promoting the disengagement plan, said at least one [Labor Party] MK, 'a public outcry would have arisen regarding the accusations against Sharon in the Greek Island and campaign funding scandals.'
[. . . .] Speaking with Army Radio today, Eitan Haber said that the media's silence vis-a-vis Sharon stems only because of the disengagement plan. 'The left, and not only the left, is as silent as sheep because it's convenient for it that he's carrying out his political plan.'
Even more surprising was when this viewpoint was reiterated by Channel Ten TV's Moti Kirschenbaum, the former head of the Israel Broadcasting Authority who is considered to hold extreme left-wing views. 'There's no doubt,' he told Army Radio on the same program, 'that the media are dealing with the Sharon family with uncharacteristic tenderness because of their [the media's] empathy towards his diplomatic plans.'
[. . . .] Kirschenbaum hinted that the press is planning to deal with the suspicions against Sharon after the withdrawal from Gaza and northern Shomron.
Media dereliction
of duty and partisan motives are admitted by a senior newsman. From "Top
Journalist Confesses: Media Pushed Disengagement", IsraelNationalNews.com,
11 March 2005:
Respected Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea admits that most of the Israeli media has acted more like the 'guard dog' of the disengagement plan than that of democracy.
Writing in the most recent edition of the monthly media publication The Seventh Eye, Barnea stated that Israeli journalists made a mistake that must now be acknowledged.
'There is no argument that the tone in the Israeli media is pro-disengagement,' Barnea wrote. 'Were the media just supportive, or also enlisted [in its favor]?' He added that had the Prime Minister presented a program to strengthen Jewish communities instead of dismantling them, the media would have treated him 'with cruelty'.
Barnea noted that only certain newspapers have published articles against the Prime Minister. He noted that the 'right-wing' media, mainly the B'Sheva and Makor Rishon weeklies and the daily HaTzofeh, correctly have emphasized that Sharon promised he would accept the results of last year's Likud party referendum on whether to accept the disengagement plan. [. . . .]
Israel's media treated Sharon with 'kid gloves' although he acted pretentiously, Barnea confessed. 'We were the guard dog of disengagement more than we were the guard dog of democracy. Our duty is to report, expose, criticize, educate and influence.' The media's conscription in the disengagement program was 'a mistake' and the media should admit it now and not later, Barnea concluded."
Thus much of the mass media choose not to learn and report the news, but to misreport or unreport it. They choose not to inform the public, but to mislead it. This is not merely bad journalism, it is a perversion of journalism.
* * * *
* * * * * * * *
Interlocking cliques embedded in government, the judiciary, academia, the arts, and the media, have been following their own agenda since the establishment of the State. [See Issue No. 38] The agenda is to liberate themselves from what former Minister of Education Amnon Rubenstein calls "archaic Jewish values". They define as enemies those who cling to those values and try to live by them, and thereby do not fit into a "modern" or "normal" society unencumbered by faith or time-tested tradition or out-of-date standards of personal conduct.
A current government official considers it cause for alarm that more and more IDF officers are observant Jews, though admitting that they are good soldiers. A writer for the far-left newspaper Ha'Aretz castigates opponents of Disengagement for "putting Jewish attachment to the land of Israel before the interests of the nation" -- as if there could ever have been a nation without Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel.
These cliques know that the Oslo Accords, the Roadmap, and the Disengagement cannot bring peace or security to Israel, but they do serve a purpose: To break the Jewish heart and crush the Jewish spirit. The cliques are unwittingly abetted by the uninformed, the indifferent, and simultaneously supported and exploited from abroad.
For more than a decade, incumbent governments and the cliques that pull their strings have been promoting this agenda, regardless of any political platforms or promises to the contrary. They have lurched from one blunder to another, despite the obvious dangers and disastrous consequences.
1] They betray the past by trying to throw away the heartland of Israel; biblical Judea and Samaria, Bethlehem, Hebron and Shechem [Nablus]. They even play fast and loose with Jerusalem.
The Jewish people were sustained through 2,000 years of oppression and torment in exile by the memory of these places, and the belief that they would one day redeem them. The redemption came -- some would believe miraculously. No transient officeholder has a right to toss it away.
On Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Muslims are permitted regular mass prayer services. A Jew is subject to arrest and punishment if someone thinks he looks as though he is saying a silent prayer. The reason for this discrimination is admittedly fear of offending the Muslim Waqf, that Israel inexplicably gave control over the most sacred site of the Jewish people.
The Waqf deliberately and relentlessly obliterates all relics and traces of Jews and Christians on Temple Mount. Supine Israeli authorities do not interfere with destruction of artifacts, perhaps even texts, that might yield new knowledge of Jewish and Christian history but have been lost forever.
If control of Judea and Samaria is yielded, there can be no more searches and discoveries there. If anything Jewish or Christian is found by chance, it will also be destroyed.
2] They betray the present by refusing to make any genuine defense of the people of Israel. The Osloids gave the PLO the power and the means to murder. No government since has taken the power away from it.
A massacre in a restaurant or on a passenger-bus is avenged on an empty building. The most drastic response to a rain of terror is an operation that lasts for a few days, and then ends leaving a terrorist regime intact to carry on the terror. For this, the lives of valiant young soldiers are squandered.
In recent days, with terrorists bombarding Israeli targets with shells, the government has ordered the IDF to take no action at all.
3] They betray the future by deliberately incurring one avoidable calamity after another, from the madness of Oslo to the spineless submission to the Roadmap, to the Disengagement that if it proceeds will wreck the nation body and soul.
* * * *
* * * * * * * *
If Disengagement really goes through, more than 8,000 Israelis will be dragged from the houses, farms, greenhouses, schools, and synagogues they built. The disposal of this private property has yet to be determined.
Some argue to destroy everything, rather than see it taken over by a triumphant PLO.
Some consider selling the property, perhaps taking up the offer of purchase form a billionaire in the Gulf States.
Some want to give everything to the PLO as a gesture of good will.
But Israel will not have to make a decision. Madam Doctor Secretary Condoleeza Rice has spoken. She has ordered Israel to give everything to the PLO as a gift. General Mofaz has responded "Yes, Ma'am".
END