The Thomas Chronicles

This is just unbelievable.

Hamas goes on a week-long rampage across the Gaza Strip killing over a hundred Palestinians, fires upon Israeli soldiers and demands that the US, Europe and Israel give them money, food and aid.

The Islamists of Hamas accused the West on Tuesday of playing politics with Palestinian aid after it resumed assistance to the government in the West Bank while their Gaza bastion remains under Israeli blockade.

The United States and Europe restored direct aid to the Palestinians on Monday in a show of support for president Mahmud Abbas, who set up an emergency government when his Hamas rivals seized power in Gaza last week after days of brutal bloodletting.

“By announcing their political and financial support for the Palestinian Authority, the West is backing an illegimate government,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said.

EU and US support for the government of prime minister Salam Fayyad was “an attempt to manipulate the Palestinian people and distance it from Hamas,” he charged, adding that the strategy would not work.

Hamas’s seizure of Gaza after vicious street battles with loyalists of Abbas’s secular Fatah faction that left more than 110 people dead has driven a deep wedge in Palestinian society.

Abbas’s government is based in his West Bank stronghold while Hamas is in control of Gaza, a tiny strip of land whose impoverished people rely on goods from outside but are now sealed off from the rest of the world by Israel.

This is the same Hamas that is considered an extreme Islamofascist terrorist group all around the world and has sworn to destroy the nation of Israel and all Jews as, when and how they can.

And they accuse the West of playing politics with the aid we give as though they have a right to it? After they’ve gunned down over a hundred people and even now persist in their desire to kill Jews?

Unbelievable.

… if this Palestinian Civil War spills outside of the Gaza Strip, that is. And such a calamity would not just be a hypothetical possibility either.

Just so that we can have a valid frame of reference toward understanding the level of hostility in Palestine, I’ve heard accounts of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip wanting Israel, the enemy of their blood, to invade. This is on par with us inviting al-Qaeda to invade California because the situation there has become so awful. And lacking an Israeli invasion at the moment, it was just reported today that Gazans are fleeing the Gaza Strip toward Israel.

For the moment at least, it seems both the Fatah faction and the Hamas faction has slowed down hostilities in favor of consolidating their power. Hamas in the Gaza Strip can’t influence Fatah in the West Bank, and vice-a-versa, but the situation is far from stable.

People forget that next door is the Kingdom of Jordan, a key US ally. About half of their population is Palestinian, and many of the ones inside refugee camps support Hamas.

As odd as this sounds, one almost pines for the return of the Fatah Party to the Gaza Strip because, as bad as Yasser Arafat’s Fatah party and their cronies were, they never really had the level of state sponsorship that Hamas enjoys. Hamas is armed and funded by the Iranians, whose President has said on numerous occasions that he’ll “wipe Israel off the face of the map.”

Reports are spreading since late Saturday that the Israeli government is drawing up plans to invade Gaza.

ISRAEL’s new defence minister Ehud Barak is planning an attack on Gaza within weeks to crush the Hamas militants who have seized power there.

According to senior Israeli military sources, the plan calls for 20,000 troops to destroy much of Hamas’s military capability in days.

The raid would be triggered by Hamas rocket attacks against Israel or a resumption of suicide bombings.

Barak, who is expected to become defence minister tomorrow, has already demanded detailed plans to deploy two armoured divisions and an infantry division, accompanied by assault drones and F-16 jets, against Hamas.

The Israeli forces would expect to be confronted by about 12,000 Hamas fighters with arms confiscated from the Fatah faction that they defeated in last week’s three-day civil war in Gaza.

Details of the plan emerged as Fatah forces in the West Bank stormed Hamas-run buildings, including the parliament in Ramallah, where they tried to seize the deputy speaker.

Israeli officials believe their forces would face even tougher resistance in Gaza than they encountered during last summer’s war against Hezbollah in south Lebanon.

A source close to Barak said that Israel could not tolerate an aggressive “Hamastan” on its border and an attack seemed unavoidable.

“The question is not if but how and when,” he said.

It is clear that a Hamas dominated Gaza Strip is intolerable for Israeli national security, yet simultaneously, Israel’s invasion can spark a larger regional war. In a separate but perhaps not unrelated event, rockets are being fired from Southern Lebanon into Israel.

ADAYSSEH: Lebanese troops and UN peacekeepers were on full alert in Southern Lebanon Monday, a day after rockets were fired into northern Israel for the first time since the August 14, 2006, UN-brokered cease-fire that ended the summer war. Armored vehicles from both the Lebanese Army and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) patrolled the road running parallel to the border with Israel.

The army and police also set up snap checkpoints in the border zone a day after unidentified militants fired two rockets into northern Israel, causing no injuries and minor damage in Kiryat Shmona.

The attack, the first since Israel’s devastating invasion last year, raised tensions in Lebanon, which since May 20 has suffered a string of deadly bombings and further shaken by battles with Islamist forces in the North.

One day after the rocket-fire, Southerners voiced concerns about the renewal of violence with Israel, which forced hundreds of thousands from their homes last summer.

Fatmeh Sheet, a resident of the border town of Kfar Kila, said she was worried because the source of the rocket fire still had not been identified. The attack was a “negative development because now all of us Southerners will be accused,” she added.

Another Kfar Kila resident, Zeinab Bazzi, said she was not particularly worried, “as the army is now deployed in the South and we fully trust it to protect us and our land.”

Lebanese security sources told The Daily Star the incident was “extremely dangerous,” adding that it carried “internal as well as external messages.”

“Those responsible for the incident wanted the Lebanese to [believe] that the launching of rockets on Israel was tightly connected with bombings in Beirut and battles between the Lebanese Army and Fatah al-Islam militant group at the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in the North,” one of the sources said.

UNIFIL spokeswoman Yasmine Bouziane described the incident as a “serious breach” of a nearly year-long truce and urged all parties to exercise restraint.

No matter how you look at this, from which angle, when you scratch bare the surface of these events you’re going to see Iran standing there at the side.

Israel is almost fully bracketed by Iran now. Iranian-backed Hezbollah is directly north of them in Southern Lebanon. To the Northeast of the them is Iran’s staunch military ally, Syria. To the direct east of them are all the Palestinians in the Kingdom of Jordan who support Hamas.

Buckle up your seatbelts, ladies and gents. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

For more coverage, you can check out these commentaries here and here and here and here and here and here.

Here’s something to ponder when we think about the vitriolic hatred Arabs have toward Israelis.

One might say that our current troubles in the Mideast could be traced to a single, seemingly insignificant event in history. Thousands of years ago, before nation-states existed and the wars fought between humans were fought with rocks and pointy sticks, there lived a righteous man called Abraham to whom God chose to make His Covenant. Abraham had a wife, named Sarah, and he had two sons: Ishmael and Issac.

The problem was that Ishmael was not Sarah’s son. He was actually the son of Sarah’s Egyptian handmaiden, Hagar.

Without getting into the details of this tragic story, Sarah eventually drove Hagar and Ishmael from Abraham’s tent and into the wilderness. Little did she know that Ishmael would be the father of all the Arab nations, and the bane of the Jews to this day. In fact, when you ask Arab Muslims why they are anti-Semitic, they would protest the question.

They would say they are Semitic. They share the same father as all the nations of Israel… Abraham.

And so, the ripple effects that one act of injustice thousands of years ago continue on today. Of course, I’m not saying that the Arab Muslims are justified in their actions. Not in the least. I just find it ironic, in a dark sort of way, that the conflict between two half-brothers and their descendants might cause the eruption of the world thousands of years after the actual injury .

Somehow I don’t think telling the Arab Muslims to get over it will help. I don’t think telling them they’re mad to hold such a vehement grudge for thousands of years will help either.

I don’t think there is much we can do to abate their hatred. I think the string is just going to play itself out, but there is no moral equivalence. As far as I’m concerned, Israel has been extremely benign to their neighbors, despite their neighbors fictitious propaganda about Israeli atrocities and their incessant attacks upon Israel.

(Let’s get rid of one fiction now. After the 1967 war, they invited all the displaced Palestinians back to their homes. When they refused to return, the Israeli government paid for every piece of land they “conquered” by depositing the market-value sum into individual Palestinian bank accounts. Isn’t ironic that the most affluent, educated Arab Muslims are the Palestinians that did return to their homes and are still living peacefully in Israel?)

I don’t think Israel has infinite patience for the seemingly infinite temper tantrums of their neighbors. We all know what we would do if such attacks showered on us for the better part of forty years…

In a European poll, 44% believe that Jews have too much say in international markets. 58% of the Polish people believe that it’s “probably true” that “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust”. The poll was done in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland, and overall, those countries averaged at 47% in agreement to that last question that Jews talked too much about the Holocaust…

Even as Anti-Semitism is rising worldwide to unprecedented levels, a shadow of war looms over the embattled state of Israel. Aside from the near-daily rocket fire they absorb from the Palestinian Gaza Strip, Syria is also reported to be conducting a quiet arms build up. According to the chief of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, for the moment Syria’s military is in a defensive posture.

This, however, doesn’t inspire me to warm fuzzy feelings. The fact is these countries are close enough to smell each other’s bad breath in the morning. They’ve only to roll over and look at each other. The further fact that Syria is cavorting with hardened terrorists should give both Israel and us pause. We should trust them just about as far as we can sling a piano— without the use of hydraulics and a crane, of course.

And I’m pretty sure Speaker Pelosi’s shenanigans with Syria didn’t help matters much. The fact that a member of the US House of Representative behaved like a direct Presidential legate to a foreign power without the authority a Presidential legate can only be described as muddling the waters at best. Treasonous at worse.

I do note, however, the sequence of events following Pelosi’s visit. She visits Syria’s Assad. She comes home and rams through the bill calling for the withdrawal of American troops despite Bush’s assured veto. Iran declares that there will be no peace with the United States unless we repent of our “Satanic” ways. (This, of course, echoes al Qaeda’s terms for peace, which is to either kill all our Jews or to hand over all our Jews to them for them to kill.)

The Iraqi government goes on recess in the middle of our troop surge and leaves their entire agenda dangling. (Who wants to stick around? Aren’t we handing them over to terrorists like we handed the Kurds over to Saddam?)

Our domestic Muslims demand ceremonial foot basins at airports. They can’t use the same ones as the infidels apparently. Our domestic Muslims are also demanding separate schools, separate restrooms, separate everything… like they already received from Europe. They wouldn’t have dared to issue demands for fear of our reaction just a few months ago, and now they are doing it wholesale. Islamophobia, indeed. Then, there’s that attack on Fort Dix…

All this followed within just a MONTH of Pelosi’s trip to the Mideast and our increasing calls for retreat… draw from these events what you will. Her statement when she was in Syria, that “The road to Damascus is a road to peace,” is becoming more ridiculous by the day.

Then, there is Israel’s problem with Syria…

Here is what Mossad chief Meir Dagan said:

“Anyone who thinks that our talking with Syria would sever them from Hezbollah is mistaken,” Mossad chief Meir Dagan told a closed forum last week. However, he added, “I do believe Syrian President Bashar Assad could agree to expel Hamas and Islamic Jihad from Damascus and stop supporting them.”

Nevertheless, Dagan issued a clear warning about the dangers of talks with Syria: “If we enter negotiations with Assad and they fail, the danger of war will be greater than if there were no negotiations at all,” he said.

In the discussion, Dagan laid out his views on the Syrian issue in detail. Yet sources who were present at the meeting said that his bottom-line position remained unclear, and at times, he even contradicted himself. This may have been related to his belief, as he put it, that “the decision on whether to resume negotiations with Syria should not be the business of the intelligence agencies.”

“I’m not a politician,” he said. “I’m an intelligence person, and it’s not my job to say whether we need to negotiate with Syria; that is the job and the decision of the prime minister and the government. My job is to present assessments and risks.”

Nevertheless, these sources said, their general impression was that Dagan, one of the most dominant figures in the security establishment, believes that talks with Syria would do more harm than good.