Secretary Janet Napolitano has no idea that there has been an intelligence leak in her Department of Homeland Security.

In this slow but telling video clip, Representative Louis Gohmert questions her about a man named Mohamed Elibiary who stole and leaked DHS secrets.

Mohamed Elibiary is a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. There are 26 members in all. He was the only one given access to the Homeland Security State and Local Intelligence Community of Interest (HS SLIC) database.

He abused the privilege by downloading and leaking secret information.

Patrick Poole reports:

There’s yet another update to my exclusive PJM report last week that Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council member Mohamed Elibiary allegedly leaked sensitive law enforcement documents prepared by the Texas Department of Public Safety obtained thru the Homeland Security State and Local Intelligence Community of Interest (HS SLIC) to a left-leaning media outlet claiming that the reports represented a pattern of “Islamophobia” to attack TX Governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry. According to my source at the publication, they declined to run the story that Elibiary pitched because they didn’t believe that the TX DPS reports were “Islamophobic”. The source also said that reports were marked “For Official Use Only” (FOUO). …

Rep. Louie Gohmert … grilled DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano on these allegations in a House Judiciary Committee hearing last week.

And yesterday I reported from multiple sources that Elibiary’s access to the HS SLIC has been revoked.

Now comes an even more disturbing revelation from inside DHS that Mohamed Elibiary is the only member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council – one out of 26 members – who has been given access to the HS SLIC (Homeland Security State and Local Intelligence Community of Interest) database.

I have repeatedly asked DHS spokesman Chris Ortman by phone and email why Elibiary was given special access to the HS SLIC database, and when and how that special access was given, but after more than a week I have received no reply.

This new development raises questions about why an outside adviser who is not employed by any state or local law enforcement agency would be given access to a database intended for sharing intelligence between agencies. It should be noted that highly sensitive material, including FBI source reporting and terror watch lists, are posted on the HS SLIC system and would have been available to Elibiary.

Homeland security and law enforcement officials I spoke with this week about expressed serious concerns that an outspoken partisan political appointee with no law enforcement experience and highly questionable background would be given access to their intelligence reporting. Why and when was Elibiary given this access by DHS?

With Janet Napolitano and the Department of Homeland Security continuing to stonewall questions about this matter, it may be that only Congress exercising its oversight authority will be able to get answers to these questions.

While Janet Napolitano is in charge of national security, we’d all better be armed and extra vigilant.

The following is a slightly revised version of a reply Jillian Becker made to a British (and fatuously anti-American) commenter on the post Islam and “Islamism”, November 14, 2011.

*

From time to time it’s necessary for us to state what we’re all about.

We are atheists. That is self-explanatory. We are conservatives in that our principles are those at the core of American conservatism: limited government, low taxes, strong defense, a free market economy, individual liberty.

Liberty is our highest value. We oppose collectivism, which is serfdom.

Collectivist ideologies are  of two kinds: egalitarian and inegalitarian. Marxism, Communism, Socialism, Stalinism, Maoism are examples of the egalitarian. Nazism, Islam, the Catholicism of the Middle Ages are examples of the inegalitarian.

Our chosen task is the critical examination of ideas, mainly political and religious. Our pages are are full of criticism of Catholicism, Calvinism, Judaism, Islam, and many more such systems of belief. They are sets of ideas, and as such need to be examined and criticized. Their histories and the crimes committed in their name need to be repeatedly exposed.

We fix our assessing eye on Islam more than on any other religion because it is waging war on the West. Our view of Islam is not prejudice, it is judgment. We have taken the trouble to inform ourselves. To be against subjugators, oppressors and mass murderers is not “bigotry”.  We quote Muslims who are regarded as authorities, sometimes showing them in videos expressing themselves directly. Islam’s defenders have the hospitality of our comment pages to explain why they like it.

We have never advocated, and never would, the harming of any person except criminals or those who declare an intention to commit a crime. In such cases we expect the law – not a mob – to deal with them. Or if they are terrorists held, say, at Guantanamo Bay, we want them to be brought before a military tribunal and if found guilty, executed.

Islam should become as abominated as Nazism and Maoism generally are at least in the West. It deserves nothing better. That it calls itself a religion in no way exonerates or excuses it. In any case, we respect no religion, no belief in the supernatural, no orthodoxy, no dogma.

To discredit Islam, constant public criticism of it is absolutely necessary. That is why no laws or resolutions protecting it from criticism must be passed by nation states or by the UN, which is currently trying to do just that (with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s help).

Islam declared war on the non-Muslim world 1400 years ago. That war has become very hot of late. Since 9/11 there have been some 18,000 deadly terror attacks  carried out in the name of Islam (see our margin). Most of us can only fight the battle with words. Let’s not spare them.

Dr. Yasser Dasmabebi –  amazingly in the light of what he writes here at Front Page, from which we quote – holds the Edward Said-Noam Chomsky Linguistics Chair at Abdul Abulbul Amir University in Cairo.*

With a degree of sarcasm that suggests an angry (and justifiable) bitterness, he lists some of the choice sayings of Palestinians expressing their hate of Israel and Jews:

As our Palestinian national culture has exploded onto the world stage (so to speak) and now has come to embody a more mature wisdom and calm that anyone can plainly see in the conduct of public life in Palestine, the appreciation for the use of language to the fullest extent of purity of purpose, clarity of vision, subtle nuance, harmonic overtone, mellifluous allusions have likewise matured and deepened. All this inspires a linguistic heart such as mine to sing!

So, in the service of creating a discourse for which the expression of the yearning for peace and brotherly love are the ultimate fulfillment, and for which Palestinian society is universally known, I have compiled a short, though naturally far-from-complete, list of quotations from notable Palestinian political and devout religious leaders — almost all of whose salaries are paid by Palestinian governing bodies, and whose money is therefore donated by European and American governments, and thus by you, the taxpayers — SHUKRAN! –, who yearn for nothing more than a Jew-free country living in peace and harmony, so that we can return to our first love: reading and reciting beautiful poetry. …

Many of these statements inevitably lose a bit of their inherent beauty and majesty in translation. Furthermore, it is far from easy to compile such a list, the more for what must be omitted than for what may be included, there being such a plethora of rich material. Please consider mine but a meager offering, a beginning, and, more importantly, a small contribution to the dream of Peace in Our Time. …

3-1-44: Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem: “Arise, Oh Sons of Arabia! Fight for your sacred rights. Slaughter Jews wherever you find them. Their spilled blood pleases Allah, our history and our religion. That will save our honor.” (The Grand Mufti, a true prophet, was fighting the occupation a full 23 years before it began!)

– 2006: Yasser Ghalban, Hamas leader: “The Jihad for Allah is the way of the truth and the way for salvation and the way which will lead us to crush the Jews…”

– 12-3-2008: Imam Safwat Higazi: “Dispatch those sons of apes and pigs to the Hellfire on the wings of Qassam rockets.”

– 5-15-2009: Dr Wafa Musa, psychologist (!): “The Jews deserved their annihilation by Hitler.”

– 9-1-09: PA Presidential advisor Omar Al-Ghoul: “Israel is a rogue country trafficking in the organs of Palestinians it kills.” (Note — notice the beautiful congruence of the poet’s name — “al- Ghoul” — with the content of his speech. How indeed can one not be moved by the utter beauty!)

– 11-15-09: Tawfik al Tirawi, PA Security Chief: “Israel recruits Palestinians to sexually harrass their sisters and mothers.”

– 1-29-10: Al Aqsa TV (PA TV): “Even if donkeys cease to bray, the Jews will not cease to be hostile to the Muslems.”

– 2-28-10: Al Aqsa TV, Deputy Minister of Religious Endowments, Abdallah Jarbu: “Jews are bacteria, not human beings.” (…reflecting Palestinian commitment to medical research and healing by means of research into bacteriology.)

– 3-31-10: Al Aqsa TV, Dr Salah Sultan, President of American Center for Islamic Research: “Jews murder non-Jews and use their blood to knead Passover matzos.” (Yum!)

– 4-25-10: Al Aqsa TV, Bassam Abu Sharif, Advisor to Yasser Arafat: “Israel assasinated JFK.”

– 5-5-10: Yasser Arafat: “Israel uses depleted uranium to cause cancer and infertility.”

– 6-5-10: Imam Salem Abu Al-Futuoh: “The Jews use human blood in Passover and wedding ceremonies.”

– 8-25-10: Al Aqsa TV: “Muslems should wage jihad to liberate the Al Aqsa mosque from the filth of the Jews, the brothers of apes and pigs.”

– 9-3-10: Imam Sheik Ismail Aal Radhwan: “Those who negotiate with Israel will be gathered in the hell-fire along with the apes and pigs.”

– 3-19-11: Al Aqsa TV: Deputy Minister Religious Endowments, Abdallah Jarbu: “Only a madman would think Jews are human.”

– 5-11-11: Imam Yunis Al-Astal: “The Jews were brought to Palestine for the Great Massacre through which Allah will relieve humanity of their evil.”

– 5-17-11: Imam Yasser Qachlaq: “…Human filth…”

– 7-18-11: Imam Safwat Higazi: “The foreign riffraff who live in Palestine are not really Jews; they have brought corruption and evil upon the world ever since trying to kill Christ.”

– 8-11: ‘Atallah Abu al-Subh: “The Jews are the most despicable and contemptible nation to crawl upon the face of the earth.”

– 9-20-11: Muhammed Abdu: “Israel, that plundering, crude, cruel and criminal [notice the artful alliteration!] entity, which wants to devour the remainder of our lands…Oh! sons of a sow, your hands are soiled with the blood of the people…!”

– 9-23-11: Ahmad Bahr, speaker Hamas Gaza Parliament: “We will sweep the siblings of pigs and apes out of our land.”

– 10-19-11: Khalil Al-Khayeh, Gaza legislator: “The heroes of the knife, the heros of martyrdom operations, Jihad and the resistance.”

– 10-25-11: Khodhr Habib [which, appropriately, means “Friend” in Arabic]: Islamic Jihad, Gaza: “We will give you nothing but bombs, spears and swords, which will slit your throats.”

– 11-8-11: Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade: “The number of heroic operations reached 4,300…which included 61 martyrdom operations [i.e., suicide attacks], 24 abductions, 230 armed clashes, 33 incursions, 423 bombing operations, 90 sniping operations, 146 ambushes, and 25 raids on Zionist targets.”

But the winner of our annual Helen Thomas Award for Poetry must go to the eloquent Dear Leader:

– 10-23-11: Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority:

“I will never recognize a Jewish State.”

Note to Islamophobes: Print this list and keep it handy. It’s top grade ammunition.

And read more by this extraordinary writer here.

* We have a growing feeling that the Abdul Abulbul Amir University in Cairo, and even Dr. Yasser Dasmabebi himself, are fictitious.The words he quotes, however, and their sources are genuine.

One man, Peter Schiff, an Austrian School economist, stands alone against an onslaught by Keynesians.

They sneer, they mock, they try to laugh him out of court.

But, as we all know now, HE WAS RIGHT.

Will those who mocked and derided Peter Schiff ever admit they were wrong? Apologize? Will any of them “sign a letter saying he/she was wrong”? Could they change their minds as to which school of economic thought – the Keynesian or the Austrian – has proved to be right in the real world?

Almost certainly, no.

Ben Bernanke, current Chairman of the Federal Reserve, hasn’t changed his mind, although (in the video) he claims open-mindedness when Ron Paul asks him what it would take to persuade him he was wrong.

(Hat tip Don L for the video link)

Robert Spencer confirms our understanding that there is no distinction in reality between the Islam of those who act to bring about the destruction of Western civilization, and the Islam of 1.2 billion Muslims (or 1.4 billion – estimates vary), most of whom do not noticeably act to bring about the same end.

He writes  at Jihad Watch:

The term “Islamist” is in common use to refer to Muslim individuals and organizations that adhere to Islamic law’s political aspects (most notably its denial of any legitimacy of a separation between religion and the state) and consequently most fiercely oppose America, Israel and the West in general. The implication is that Islam itself, in its authentic form, has no requisite political aspect, and no incompatibility with Western values or democratic government.

The problem with this is that it is a Western, artificial distinction, imposed by non-Muslims upon the Islamic world and lacking any real substance with reference to Islamic law as it has always been formulated by the Sunni and Shi’ite madhahib (schools of jurisprudence). Islam has always been political, and the union of religion and the state has always been essential to its political program; the idea that all this can and should be separated from Islam proper is the wishful thinking of Western analysts who do not wish to face the implications of the fact that these ideas represent mainstream Islamic thinking.

In line with this, I recently received this email from a Jihad Watch reader in Canada:

“A conversation with several friends on Facebook erupted into something quite extraordinary. An 18 year old Muslim student, from Western University and born in Mississauga had this to say about the distinction between Islam and Islamism:

‘case and point on why you dont understand Islam. No one makes this distinction [between Islam and Islamism] other then the Western world, for the sake of having a tidy little system to classify everything. Our religion and political ideology are one. Furthermore, I really wouldnt use the term islamist or Islamism. Many muslims, including myself, find the term deeply offensive.'”

In other words, in Canada, there is an entire generation of Muslims who openly subscribe to ‘Islamism’ as indistinguishable from Islam.

And that should come as no surprise. Except to willfully blind non-Muslim analysts in the West.

Islam is an evil ideology. It has no good parts or aspects, and there’s nothing in it that can be “reinterpreted” to be good. It is primitive, ignorant, and cruel. It is savagery justified by superstition, a vile survivor from the Dark Ages.

One could dispense with both terms, Islam and Islamism. Muslims hate to be called “Muhammadans”, but as followers of Muhammad, that is a perfectly apt name for them. Their religion can correctly be called “Muhammadanism”.  The fact that they don’t want us to use the words to designate who they are, and the appalling creed they believe in, is no reason not to use them.

If you like to laugh out loud, or even just chortle, read the whole article we quote from here. It is by the best-informed, most clear-sighted, and by far the funniest writer alive – Mark Steyn.

Have you been following this so-called supercommittee? They’re the new superhero group of superfriends from the super-Congress who are going to save America from plummeting over the cliff and into the multitrillion-dollar abyss.

There’s Spender Woman (Patty Murray), Incumbent Boy (Max Baucus), Kept Man (John Kerry) and many other warriors for truth, justice and the American way of debt. The supercommittee is supposed to report back by the day before Thanksgiving on how to carve out $1.2 trillion dollars of deficit reduction and thereby save the republic.

I had cynically assumed that the superfriends would address America’s imminent debt catastrophe with some radical reform — such as, say, slowing the increase in spending by raising the age for lowering the age of Medicare eligibility from 47 to 49 by the year 2137, after which triumph we could all go back to sleep until total societal collapse.

But I underestimated the genius of the superfriends’ supercommittee. It turns out that a committee created to reduce the deficit is instead going to increase it. As the Hill reported:

“Democrats on the supercommittee have proposed that the savings from the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan be used to pay for a new stimulus package.” …

Do you follow that? Let the Congressional Budget Office explain it to you: “The budget savings from ending the wars are estimated to total around $1 trillion over a decade, according to an estimate in July from the Congressional Budget Office.”  …

Why stop there? Why not estimate around $2 trillion in savings by 2031? After all, that would free up even more money for a bigger stimulus package, wouldn’t it? And it wouldn’t cost us anything because it would all be “savings.”

Come to think of it, didn’t the Second World War end in 1945? Could we have the CBO score the estimated two-thirds of a century of “budget savings” we’ve enjoyed since ending that war? … The Spanish-American War ended 103 years ago, so imagine how much cash has already piled up! …

The president is asking for your votes for the 2011 SAVE Award. To demonstrate his commitment to fiscal discipline, he set up a competition whereby federal employees can propose ways to cut government waste. A panel of experts (John Kerry, Paula Abdul, etc.) then weigh the merits, and the four finalists go up on the White House website to be voted on by members of the public: It’s like “Dancing With the Czars.” …

This year’s SAVE Award nominees include Faith Stanfield of Toledo, Ohio, a “general technical expert” with the Social Security Administration. As someone who’s technically expert in a very general sense, she sees the big picture. It’s on the front of the SSA’s glossy magazine.

Did you know Social Security has its own glossy magazine? It’s called Oasis and it’s sent out to 88,000 SSA employees plus about a thousand government retirees. …

It’s the magazine that says you’re cool, you’re now, you’re living the SSA bureaucrat lifestyle. But Stanfield thinks they should scrap the glossy pages and only publish it online.

Ooh, I dunno. Sounds a bit extreme to me. Could result in hundreds of Social Security lifestyle editors being laid off and reduced to living on Social Security. …

What with the proposal to use the nearly two centuries of budget savings from the end of the War of 1812 to fund the construction of high-speed monorails and the plan to turn the Social Security Administration’s in-house glossy into an in-house virtual-glossy, it’s no surprise that the president himself has got the deficit-reduction fever.

On Wednesday, he signed an executive order “Promoting Efficient Spending” — and ending government waste. Just like that! According to Section Seven: “Agencies should limit the purchase of promotional items (e.g., plaques, clothing and commemorative items), in particular where they are not cost-effective.”  …

Fresh from launching the war on tchotchkes, the administration then proposed a 15-cent tax on Christmas trees in order to fund a federal promotional campaign to promote the sale of Christmas trees. … He was forced to rescind the proposal, presumably after an ACLU chum pointed out that settling the Bureau of Christmas Tree Promotion lawsuit would wipe out all the budget savings from the French and Indian Wars.

Meanwhile, as these ruthless austerity measures start to bite, the government of the United States continues to spend one fifth of a billion dollars it doesn’t have every hour, every day, every week …

Click on the link. Don’t miss a line of it.

From PowerLine:

If there is a single face of the financial crisis, it is probably Barney Frank, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac’s chief Congressional patron, who shouted down all warnings and resisted all efforts to bring those agencies under control. It is probably too much to hope that Frank will be evicted from Congress any time soon, but in the meantime we can enjoy this song by Kathleen Stewart, “Frankly Barney:”

On October 14, 2011, President Barack Obama announced that 100 U.S. troops, acting as advisors to the Uganda military, will help in military action against the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) — a rebel force roaming northwest Uganda, recruiting child soldiers, committing atrocities, and taking hostages (including slave “wives”) for more than fifteen years.

Information on the origin and nature of the appalling Lord’s Resistance Army is provided here at PJ Media by Harvey Glickman, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Haverford College, who also speculates on the reasons for the recent stepped-up US involvement against it in Uganda. (For more on the LRA see our post The Lord’s army of child slave cannibals, June 14, 2011.)

The LRA’s main goal is to live off the terror it creates. Northwest Uganda, northeast Congo, and southeast Sudan (now divided by the new border with South Sudan) have all seen decades of bloody disorder as the LRA traversed international borders to elude Ugandan troops. At times, the LRA has also attacked in Rwanda, Republic of Congo, Republic of Sudan, and Uganda, committing atrocities in those countries.

The LRA emerged as an atrocity-anarchy mechanism in the mid-1980s. It arose among the long-neglected Acholi people in northern Uganda, whose brief period of ascendancy during the brutal Idi Amin regime was overthrown by the National Resistance Army, led by Yoweri Museveni, in 1986. Museveni parlayed his military success into the presidency and remains there today.

Joseph Kony, a member of the Acholi people originally from Gulu in northern Uganda, founded the LRA, and instigated a rebellion against the Ugandan government in 1986. His ostensible purpose was to establish a theocracy based on orders from God communicated to him via spirits. His method to spread the “Word” encompassed unspeakable atrocities and child abduction, eventually displacing two million people in his rampages through northern Uganda, Congo, and Sudan.

After the September 11 attacks on the United States, the Ugandan military reinterpreted its own measures against the LRA rebellion as part of the global war against terrorism. In 2002 the Uganda parliament passed a Suppression of Terrorism Act. The United States rewarded Uganda’s support for the war in Iraq by restarting a military training and assistance program in 2003. The agreement provided for electronic technology and some direct military assistance, but not weapons. Part of the program was to “win the hearts and minds” of the Acholi people, whose territory within Uganda has been most ravaged by LRA depredations.

By 2003 it was estimated the LRA had 3,000 fighters under arms and 2,000 camp followers, many involuntary. In October 2005, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for five leaders of the LRA, including Kony.

Early in 2010, however, the Ugandan military stated that the LRA was at its weakest point in the past fifteen years. More recently, it claims there are only 200 to 400 soldiers still in the field for the LRA.

So why does the U.S. government pick this moment to get involved?

It turns out that the United States has been involved with this issue for some time. As early as 2003, the United States contributed aid to the Uganda defense budget as part of the expanded struggle against global terrorism. And President Obama has disclosed that since 2008 the United States has helped efforts in the region to protect local people by pursuing the LRA.

U.S. Public Law 111-172 — the “Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009” — was passed by the U.S. Congress on May 24, 2010. The bill, combining national security and humanitarian goals, was sponsored by Senators McCain and Feingold to provide financial and material assistance to Uganda’s counterinsurgency efforts.

But U.S. support for the anti-LRA war has not been an unmitigated success. The National Security Council authorized training and financial support for the December 2008 Operation Lightning Thunder, a joint Uganda-Congolese-South Sudan campaign. This resulted, however, in major casualties among Congolese civilians, with 200,000 people displaced and the LRA escaping to fight another day.

Again the US is invoking R2P – the Responsibility to Protect – as its reason for intervention in a foreign war. It was the reason given for US military intervention in Libya. But if the intention really was to protect civilians, that intervention must be counted as a failure. (See our posts The danger of R2P, March 23, 2011; A siren song from hell, April 1, 2011; NATO bombards civilians in Libya, October 5, 2011.)

There were other reasons for the US and NATO to go to war in Libya, among them the need for European NATO member-states to ensure their access to that country’s oil. And there are surely other reasons for the US to go to war in Uganda.

Somewhat puzzling about the new U.S. deployment “to protect civilians” — as stated by the U.S. Embassy in Kampala on October 17, 2011 — is the fact that the Ugandan army announced that the Kony/LRA problem is no longer a threat in Uganda, but a regional problem. So, apparently the UPDF is joining the U.S. in an African regional conflict. Uganda has been a leader in the African Union’s battle against the al-Shabaab terrorists in Somalia, and suffered a retaliatory bombing in Kampala by them in July 2010.

So does this new operation mean a wider U.S. regional military action in East Africa in support, however reluctant, of Kenya’s incursion into Somalia against al-Shabaab? Is this part of an expanded role for AFRICOM, the U.S. military command in Africa? …

Among the possible motives that Glickman considers for more military action by the US in the region, one makes more sense than most:

There is one other possible factor inspiring this new U.S. effort. The geographic areas in which the LRA operates are in the middle of recent discoveries of oilfields. The finds are substantial. Three companies have bought the drilling rights. Heritage sold its interests to Tullow, Tullow sold 30% of its interests to Total and CNOOC (China National Offshore Oil Corporation, which is state-run). …

The Obama administration’s motives are still not clear. Given this list of possibilities, the way the campaign develops should provide some answers.

We think oil is a very good reason to go to war. It would be an added benefit, greatly to be welcomed, if in the course of such a war the Lord’s Resistance Army were to be destroyed.

Two videos from Creeping Sharia to remind the West that Islam is waging war against us.

We all have opinions on issues about which we are ignorant. They arise from our characters, our prejudices, and our emotions. Fortunately, in our private lives, our opinions seldom matter enough to cause much harm. But when persons in power form policies based on uninformed opinions arising from their deep-seated prejudices, they affect the lives of millions, necessarily for the worse.

And in the arena of politics, the prejudices and uninformed opinions of many individuals can all too easily influence the actions of the powerful.

One of the dangers of democracy is that the vote of the know-nothing counts for exactly the same as the vote of the well-informed, and the know-nothings can swing an election.

It’s the business of the mass media to inform the public. When journalists let their own opinions keep them from telling the truth about an issue or a candidate for office, they empower the ignorant. The media failed in their duty to inform the electorate that Barack Obama was a poorly-educated, inexperienced, far-left ideologue with close ties to terrorists and jihadists. The votes of the uninformed gave him the presidency. The result is a wrecked economy, and the weakening of the United States as a power in the world and so of Western civilization as a whole.

If there is one issue in world politics on which opinions are held most strongly while being least informed it is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Vast numbers of people, almost certainly a majority, believe these falsehoods:

1. The Palestinians had their country taken away from them by the Jews.
2. The Israelis expelled the Palestinians.
3. The Israelis illegally occupy territories that belong to the Palestinians.
4. The Israelis refuse to negotiate for peace with Palestinian leaders.
5. Israeli intransigence impeded a peace process that Palestinian leaders pursued in good faith.

We summarily dismiss points 1 and 2: –

1. There never was, in all history, a State of Palestine.
2. There is no evidence that any Arabs were expelled from the State of Israel. There is evidence that in at least one city – Haifa – they were implored to stay. There is also evidence that the Mufti of Jerusalem and Arab leaders urged them to leave before five Arab armies invaded the newly-declared State of Israel, promising them a victory after which the refugees would return to their homes. And there is absolute certainty that hundreds of thousands of Jews were forcibly expelled – stripped of all they possessed – from the Arab states. 

As for points 3, 4, and 5, we quote from an excellent recent column by Melanie Phillips at the Mail Online. She writes:

One of the most egregious signs of western irrationality and bigotry over the issue of Israel is the way in which its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is routinely scapegoated for causing the breakdown of the so-called peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.

This charge is based on the widespread fallacy that the ‘peace process’ has stalled because Israel keeps building more Jewish ‘settlements’ on ‘Palestinian land’. This reasoning is not only totally wrong but utterly perverse on the following grounds:

1) The actual reason for the collapse of the ‘peace process’ is that Mahmoud Abbas repeatedly maintains that he will never accept that Israel is entitled to be a Jewish state, hails Palestinian terrorists as heroes for murdering Israelis and does nothing to end the incitement to murder Jews disseminated in schools, mosques and media under his control. In other words, Abbas is not a legitimate interlocutor in any civilised ‘peace process’ since he remains committed to the eradication of Israel [as are all Arab and Muslim leaders – JB]. Yet Netanyahu is blamed for the impasse.

2) It is only Israel that has made concessions in this ‘peace process’ [giving up vast areas of land conquered in defensive wars in exchange for peace that was never granted]. The Palestinians not only failed to deliver what was expected of them under the Road Map [or under any of the signed agreements] but now, with their UN gambit, have unilaterally reneged on their previous treaty obligations. Yet Abbas is given a free pass while Netanyahu is blamed instead for the impasse.

3) The claim that the ‘settlements’ are the key to resolving the dispute is ridiculous. First, they take up no more than one or two per cent of West Bank territory. Second, even when Netanyahu froze such new building for ten months as a sign of good will, Abbas still refused to negotiate. Yet this is all ignored, and Netanyahu is blamed instead for the impasse.

4) The claim that the establishment of a Palestine state would end the dispute is also ridiculous. Such a state was on offer in 1948; Israel offered to give up more than 90 per cent of the West Bank for such a state in 2000; and an even more generous offer was subsequently made by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The Palestinian response was in every case war and terror. Yet all this is ignored, and Netanyahu is blamed instead for the impasse.

5) Whatever land Israel may choose to give up in its own interests, under international law Jews are entitled to settle anywhere in the West Bank. There is no such thing as Palestinian land and never was.The West Bank and Gaza never belonged to any sovereign ruler after the British withdrew from Mandatory Palestine; before that it was part of the Ottoman empire. Israel’s ‘borders’ are in fact merely the cease-fire lines from its victory in 1948 against the Arab armies that tried unsuccessfully to exterminate it at birth. It is therefore more correct to call the West Bank and Gaza disputed territory. Yet this history and law are denied and Netanyahu is blamed instead for the impasse.

6) The Jews alone have the legal – as well as the moral and historical – right to settle within the West Bank and Gaza, a right given to them by the Great Powers after the First World War on account of the unique historical claim by the Jews to the land then called Palestine. This Jewish right to settle anywhere in that land was entrusted to Britain to deliver under the terms of the Mandate for Palestine – an obligation which it proceeded to break. [Even giving away the greater part of the territory to the Arabs to create the Emirate of Transjordon – now the Kingdom of Jordan – which is therefore an Arab state of Palestine.] Yet this history and law are denied, and Netanyahu is blamed instead for the impasse.

This information is the bare minimum a commenter needs before he is justified in expressing an opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An opinion formed with any less knowledge is worthless and potentially dangerous.