Talk to the terrorists or we'll sanction you

During the last ten days, there's been a growing level of challenge to the creeping accommodation with totalitarian, anti-Christian and anti-semitic politics that plagues so many mainstream left-liberal news sources and their commentators.

Now we have a report from a British House of Commons Parliamentary Committee which does not stop at urging Israel to enter negotiations with Hamas, pledged never to cease to work for the destruction of Israel and its replacement by an Islamic caliphate.

Additionally, a group of peers and MPs has been having meetings with the Hamas regime at a time when its gunmen have been busy running murder competitions with its Fatah rivals.

The Parliamentary Select Committee on International Development report also advocates that should Israel refuse to give Palestinians more access to crossing into Israel, the EU should end its Association Agreement (co-operation and trading agreement) until the Israeli government does so:

The UK should urge the UK to use the Association Agreement with Israel as a lever for change and consider suspending the Agreement until there are further improvements in access arrangements.

paragraph 38

This report comes from the Select Committee on International Development. Its members are largely unknown MPs who have little prospect of holding office. It's worth noting however that one of them is Richard Burden. He happens to be Chairman of the House of Commons Britain-Palestine All Party Parliamentary group, which is the lobby group of members of Parliament who support the Palestinian cause. If you go to his website and click on the link in the section "Middle East Crisis" you will be taken to a page where he lists his tirelessly one-sided series of letters, early day motions and the like, blaming Israel for every twist and turn of the continuing conflict.

The Committee's main argument seems to be that Israel should negotiate with Hamas because it was democratically elected, and the present isolation of Hamas is driving it closer to Iran. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. The view that closer talks with Israel will cause Hamas to cease taking money and arms from Iran seems to be so bizarre that it defies description. Indeed, it was the concessions by Israel in withdrawing from Gaza that enabled Hamas, main instigator of suicide bombing attacks on Israel, to claim "victory" and strengthen their electoral popularity. Their own report acknowledges that it was Fatah corruption and not isolation by Israel that helped Hamas to victory in the Palestinian elections.

Ironically, there are liberal Arab commentators who readily acknowledge the threat posed by the most extreme Islamist groups in the Middle East, particularly those like Hamas, associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

MEMRI has an article by Dr Mamoun Fandy, an Egyptian born political scientist who teaches in the USA and writes for the London-based Al Shaq al Awsat newspaper. This is what he has to say about what Hamas represents for the future of the Arab world, quite apart from its exterminationist threats against Israel:

today - after the Muslim Brotherhood has conquered a significant part of the symbolic Palestine - the incitement has become Islamist, and the domestic has become commingled with the external. This is because the structure of the Muslim Brotherhood's ideological discourse is not based on the separation of the domestic and the external, and because their ideology transcends the borders of [particular Arab] states. Hasn't the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt said that he had no objection to having [even] a Malaysian Muslim rule Egypt, as long as it was not ruled by a Coptic Egyptian? Likewise, the Muslim Brotherhood conquest of the symbolic Palestine means giving the [Palestinian] problem a religious character - and herein lies the danger.

"First of all, giving the Palestinian problem a religious character will lead to a Malaysian Muslim having more rights in Palestine than a Christian Palestinian. Likewise, it will transform [the Palestinian problem] from a resolvable territorial struggle into a religious struggle that cannot be resolved..."

.....

The success of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine means turmoil in Egypt. Today, this country is witnessing a fierce battle pitched between the ruling National [Democratic] Party and the banned Muslim Brotherhood party, and it appears that the battle is going to the Muslim Brotherhood. In light of the storm of responses to Egyptian Culture Minister Farouq Hosni's statements about the hijab, [3] it became clear that [the number of] Muslim Brotherhood [supporters] inside the National Party might be greater than [the number of] members in the banned [Muslim Brotherhood] organization [itself], and that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated into all Egypt's state apparatuses.

"The Egyptian press is perhaps the best reflection of this infiltration: The front and back pages of Egypt's government papers belong to the ruling party, while the 20 inside pages of every paper belong to the Muslim Brotherhood - and they do what they want with them, [via] their correspondents, theoreticians and propagandists. Whoever reads the Egyptian press today cannot but notice that Egypt is living in the Muslim Brotherhood era."

"As was clarified to me by a member of the National Party, 'there is [only] one party in Egypt, and that is the Muslim Brotherhood.' Over more than 30 years, the Muslim Brotherhood has been gaining control over Egypt's domestic arena - its streets, its institutions, and its press - and nothing stands between it and [full] control except for foreign issues, the first of which is the Palestinian problem.

"If the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine [i.e. Hamas] wins, they will set the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt at the top of Egypt's political pyramid. When [Hamas leader, Palestinian Prime Minister] Isma'il Haniya comes to Egypt, he will go to the Cairo branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, instead of meeting with the senior officials of the Egyptian state. Likewise, we will hear Haniya defending from Gaza the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, bestowing upon them the legitimacy of the Palestinian problem - which in the Arab mentality is above all criticism."

Dr Fandy sees Al Jazeera as a mouthpiece for this Muslim Brotherhood expansionism across the entire Middle East. According to him, the Hamas regime in the Palestinian territories is the flag carrier for the political takeover of the entire Middle East. You can make your own mind up about whether he or Richard Burden and his fellow committee members have a better understanding of what the issues are with Hamas and an electorate which chose to vote for it

"The Muslim Brotherhood has at its disposal media that transcends [state] borders, from newspapers to satellite channels, which have taken over the minds of millions - not only in Egypt and Syria, but throughout the entire Arab world. These are media that are tried and [ideologically] guided, and which level accusations of heresy and treason against those who disagree with them...

"'[Al-Jazeera] is the channel of the Muslim Brotherhood,' said Muhammad Dahlan, a sworn Fatah man, as he described Al-Jazeera TV, which is today incontestably the biggest Arab news channel. If the Muslim Brotherhood takes over the symbolic Palestine, the Muslim Brotherhood channel - formerly Al-Jazeera - will serve as a propaganda outlet for the new religious symbolism of the Palestinian problem.

"Al-Jazeera wastes no time, and it is already propagandizing for [Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader] Mahdi 'Akef and the [Muslim Brotherhood] organization, at the expense of the Egyptian state; for [Syrian Muslim Brotherhood leader Ali Sadr Al-Din] Al-Baynouni and his party, at the expense of the Syrian state; and for the Muslim Brotherhood in Algeria at the expense of the Algerian state. If you watch a debate program presented on [Al-Jazeera] by a [certain] non-Muslim host, you will be amazed at the supreme effort he makes to defend the Muslim Brotherhood, and you'll think that by the end of the program, he will be reciting the Muslim declaration of faith. [4]

"The Muslim Brotherhood takeover of the symbolic Palestine will not liberate the land of Palestine - not before the Muslim Brotherhood subjugates the entire Arab world to its rule. The Muslim Brotherhood prefers to eliminate the nearby enemy - the existing Arab states - in order to prepare the means for facing the distant enemy, [namely] Israel.

UPDATE: I originally looked in the HC report for who had been appointed, as is usual with Select Committee Enquiries of this kind, as specialist academic adviser to the group. I was surprised to see only the House of Commons Clerk to the Committee named.

But today I found this website claiming that Dr Karma Nabulsi, former PLO representative, and pro-Palestinian activist, had been the adviser. The adviser would of course be the person who selects all the papers, prepares briefings, advises who should be called as witnesses and maps out who the Committee should visit.

So that's the Chair of the British-Palestinian All Party Committee as one of the Select Committee members and a leading pro-Fatah Palestinian activist campaigner as its adviser. Very balanced, in the best British Parliamentary tradition.

Comments

[Lynne T]

Judy:

It's not only "moral support" that the Hamas-led PA is receiving. Apparently, excluding the money Hamas raised from their Muslim brethren, they also received twice as much finding in 2006 from western sources:

Tuesday 30 January 2007
Hamas-dominated PA received more foreign aid than previous Palestinian governments
In an article entitled “Palestinian Public Opinion a Year after Hamas’s Victory”, Mohammad Yaghi of the Washington Institute of Near East Policy quotes PA 2006 budget numbers released by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics which show that despite all the whining from Hamas enablers about Western democracies “punishing” Palestinians for electing an Islamist deathcult to power, the Hamas-dominated PA actually received more foreign financial assistance than previous Palestinian governments by a wide margin:

“Despite the conventional wisdom that the Palestinian Authority (PA) faces severe economic sanctions, the numbers tell a different story. According to data released by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics on December 26, 2006, the PA had received $550 million in aid during the first eight months of the year and expected the figure to reach $760 million by year’s end. In 2005, before Hamas’s election, the PA received $352 million-less than half of what it was expected to receive in 2006. Much of this increase came from the Quartet’s Temporary International Mechanism (TIM), which, according to the European Union, funds health-care services, utilities, and welfare support for 40,000 of the poorest Palestinian families.

The Central Bureau of Statistics did record a substantial decrease in the PA’s internal revenue-from $1.29 billion in 2005 to just $370 million in 2006. Much of this difference resulted from tax and customs revenues collected and held by Israel (which recently released $100 million of these funds to Abbas). Adding internal revenue and aid, the 2006 sum would have been $1.13 billion, or down 31 percent from $1.64 billion in 2005. Hamas has tried to overcome this significant reduction in PA revenue by cutting government spending to a minimum. It reduced the operating costs of all ministries by 38 percent and spent virtually nothing on development projects except for the construction of two new hospitals, which allowed for reduced spending on health-care treatment outside the Palestinian territories.”

I suppose, however, that if Ben-Dror Yemini's accounting of $5.5 billion in aid to the PA between 1994 and 2004 is correct, allowing for inflation, the 2006 figure represents a bit of "slippage".

And the World Pays

http://nrg.co.il/online/1/ART1/529/562.html