Moral equivalence has become a moral atrocity by Caroline Glick ( Guest)

We have reached the point where moral equivalence has become a moral atrocity. The smart set in the West has insisted, for over a generation, that Israel and the Palestinians are morally equal. There are extremists, on both sides, they say. Both sides are responsible for the absence of peace.

The first serious outcry against this lie came immediately after the Palestinians began there terror war against Israel in September 2000.

That war, incited, directed, funded, commanded and celebrated by Yassir Arafat and his henchmen, including his successor Mahmoud Abbas, began two months after Arafat overturned the table at Camp David in response to then prime minister Ehud Barak’s offer to withdraw from 95 percent of Judea and Samaria, all of Gaza and half of Jerusalem to enable the establishment of an independent state of Palestine in the areas.

The areas in question, Barak said, would be handed over to the PLO Jew free. The hundreds of thousands of Jews living in the areas set to become Palestine, would be forcefully evicted from their homes to ensure that the delicate, sensitive Palestinians, wouldn’t be troubled by the Jews with their “dirty feet,” in the words of Abbas.

That, of course, wasn’t enough for Arafat. And it was insufficient not because Barak failed to give him what he demanded. It was insufficient because his demands were insatiable. Arafat was never interested in peace. As his deputy Faisal Husseini said at the time, the peace process was a “Trojan Horse.”

Its purpose was to get the PLO bases of operation inside of Israeli territory in order to expand its ability to destroy the Jewish state. This is the reason that despite the fact that the international community has given them more financial assistance than any other people in the history of humanity, the Palestinians have not built a society. They have received tens of billions of dollars in development aid and failed to develop an operating economy.

This failure isn’t due to incompetence or corruption. It is simply that the Palestinians don’t want those things. They chose not to develop independent institutions. They do not want to build a state.

They have spent the money to transform Palestinian society into the most anti-Semitic society in the world where the vast majority of its people want to kill Jews and destroy Israel.

They have transformed Palestinian society into a place where Jews have no right to live – not because of some sort of occupation, but because they are Jews, and Jews, they have been indoctrinated to believe, are an abomination.

Anyone with eyes in his head can see this. It has been obvious for 16 years.

The smart set’s failure to note reality back in September 2000 marked the beginning of its descent into moral oblivion.

Its first step down that road was when its members coined the pernicious term, “cycle of violence.”

“Cycle of violence,” means that there is no moral distinction between a murderer and a policeman, between a society geared toward annihilating its victim and its victim’s actions to prevent that from happening.

The latest consequence of this moral depravity came on Friday with the publication of the so-called Middle East Quartet’s much awaited report that is supposed to show us the way to peace. That report – like its predecessors insisted that a Jewish “settler,” is the moral equivalence of a Palestinian murderer.

The day before the report was released, we saw – yet again – the evil empowering nature of that claim

.

Thursday morning, a hate-drenched, demonic Palestinian murderer took a knife and stole into Kiryat Arba – a “settlement.”

He broke into the Ariel family’s home. He walked into their children’s bedroom. He found 13 year old Hallel Yaffa asleep in her bed.

He stabbed her, repeatedly. When there was no place left to stab her in her face and chest, he turned her over and continued stabbing her in the back.

The murderer set off the sensors in Kiryat Arba’s security fence when he traversed it. It took but three of minutes for the community’s security team to get to the house. They shot and killed the Palestinian assailant and so prevented him from moving to the adjacent high school and transforming his slaughter into a massacre.

But Hallel was already gone.

The next day, the Mark family was driving along Highway 60. A Palestinian car carrying murderers drove up beside them and opened fire on Michael Mark, his wife Chavi and their children. Mark was murdered, his wife and daughter seriously hurt and his son was wounded as the car flipped over and over, after Mark lost control of the wheel.

On cue, the Palestinians began celebrating the murders and the murderers. The PLO governor of Hebron paid a condolence call at the home of Hallel’s killer. The Palestinian media celebrated their crimes. And a new high quality animated film was released on Facebook directing viewers to murder MK Yehuda Glick. The film included driving directions to Otniel, and images of terrorists burrowing under the security fence to enter the community and avoid detection.

Amidst all of this, the Quartet released its report. And although the report struck the tone of neutrality – both sides need to do this and both sides need to do that, the fact is that after 16 years of Palestinian atrocities against Israelis, the Quartet’s determination that they are the same is a moral atrocity.

The Quartet recommends that both sides “de-escalate tensions.” But of course, only the Palestinians are escalating tensions.

Both sides, the wise men tell us, “should take all necessary steps to prevent violence and protect the lives and property of all civilians.”

But only one side is fomenting violence and deliberately targeting civilians.

Both sides, the Quartet says, should “exercise[e] restraint and refrain from provocative actions and rhetoric.”

But only one side is engaging in provocative actions and rhetoric, unless the Quartet says that Israel responding angrily to the slaughter of its children and families is acting provocatively – which of course is what they are implying here.

And it gets worse. The report includes an empty call for the Palestinians “to act decisively and take all steps within its capacity to cease incitement to violence and strengthen ongoing efforts to combat terrorism, including by clearly condemning all acts of terrorism.”

The Palestinians of course, will do no such thing. Abbas is the engine of the incitement and the violence. He always has been. And the fact that he’s been able to get away with this since taking over from Arafat 12 years ago shows that the moral miasma of the West has become a danger to world peace.

After pretending that the people who transformed Palestinian society into the hate-filled, murder applauding mob it has become are interested in doing the opposite, the Quartet turned its guns on Israel.

Israel needs to deny Jewish property rights. Israel needs to expand the powers of the Palestinian death cult into Area C – where all the Israeli communities are located and but two percent of the Palestinians live.

Israel needs to expand its security cooperation with Abbas’s US-trained militias that have been marinated in the same Jew hatred as the rest of the Palestinians, and have often propagated.

Sunday afternoon, hundreds of people stood silently outside the Ariel home in Kiryat Arba, waiting to enter the modest home to console the family. The landscape outside is pastoral.

The Ariels live off of their vineyard and the wine they produce.

Surrounded by the vines, and the hills, the Ariel’s homestead looks like the sort of place where nothing bad can happen. A quiet family of profound faith, the Ariels were just going about their quiet lives, raising their daughters, tending to their vines when the evil beyond their gate entered their home and struck.

That is the difference between the two sides. One wishes to tend his vineyard. The other wishes to destroy it.

It is black and white. It is a clear distinction.

The international community’s pernicious refusal to recognize this basic fact, after so many years, is a major reason that there is no peace, and there is so much bloodshed.

Column One: The Left’s ‘grassroots’ by Caroline B. Glick ( guest)

Column One: The Left’s ‘grassroots’ by Caroline B. Glick ( guest) As the Left showed on Tuesday, yet again, it has no intention of cleaning up its act. Subversion is the only card it has left.

It was an ironic coincidence that the same day the Knesset passed the updated, watered down “NGO law,” the US Senate Permanent Select Committee on Investigations published its final report on the Obama administration’s use of an Israel-registered NGO to run a campaign to bring down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the 2015 election. Hours after opposition leader Isaac Herzog hysterically and falsely alleged, from the Knesset podium, that “the blossoms of fascism are rising in Israeli society,” the Senate committee announced that the OneVoice organization unlawfully used US taxpayer money to conduct a political campaign to bring down Netanyahu in 2015. In 2013-14, OneVoice received $465,000 from the US State Department to conduct a campaign to raise domestic Israeli support for the State Department- brokered peace process with the PLO. In December 2014, the Knesset called an early election. The same month, OneVoice merged with a new group called V-15, or Victory 2015. Together they led a campaign to unseat Netanyahu. OneVoice informed the State Department, through then-consul- general in Jerusalem Michael Ratner, of its intentions. According to the Senate report, Ratner unlawfully subsequently deleted his communications with the group regarding its anti-Netanyahu campaign. To run the pro-peace process campaign, the State Department gave OneVoice money to build databases of Israeli voters, to train campaign cadres and to build a major online presence. OneVoice used these US-financed resources for its campaign to overthrow Netanyahu in contravention of US law. From the perspective of the Israeli public, the Senate report is illuminating for two reasons. First, it reveals the true nature of the crisis in Israel’s relations with the US. Second, it demonstrates how foreign government-funded Israel-registered NGOs harm the country. From the outset of Barack Obama’s presidency, which has overlapped Netanyahu’s tenure as prime minister, the Left’s central argument against Netanyahu has been that he upended Israel’s alliance with the US. The Senate report shows that this claim is a lie. The Senate report shows that the Obama administration has used the Israeli Left as its agent to advance its Israel policy – a policy that the Israeli public rejected in three successive elections. That policy requires Israel to renounce its rights to Judea, Samaria and united Jerusalem and cede those territories to the PLO. After the peace talks failed, the administration’s leftist Israeli agents used the resources the US paid for, to wage a massively funded campaign to demonize Netanyahu with the aim of unseating him in the general election. In other words, the Israeli Left, which warns about a breach with Washington, has been the main beneficiary of and a partner in facilitating and expanding this breach. To the extent that Netanyahu shoulders any responsibility for this state of affairs, he is responsible for his failure to rein in the Left or to call it out for its anti-democratic behavior. And this brings us to the uproar the Left raised at the Knesset on Tuesday against the NGO law. The updated text does nothing to stop this sort of subversion by foreign governments working with the Left. All it does is require foreign government-funded Israel-registered organizations to note that they are funded by foreign governments on their official communications. So what is behind their uproar? To understand, it is first necessary to understand how foreign government funding of Israel-registered groups harms Israel. Understanding the nature of the damage also points to the direction the Knesset must go to repair the damage. Israel is harmed by these relationships in three ways. The first two are apparent in the OneVoice story. First, they harm Israel’s public discourse and through it, our democracy. OneVoice/V-15 based their US-funded and -directed campaigns on the central claim that they were grassroots groups of regular Israelis who felt the time had come to stand up and be counted. In other words, they claimed they were the silent majority. Variations of this claim of native authenticity stand at the root of all the operations of foreign- funded NGOs. As the Senate investigation showed, in the case of OneVoice, this claim is entirely fraudulent. It is also a fraud when staked out by the likes of B’Tselem, Peace Now, Yesh Din, Breaking the Silence and dozens of other groups, which receive the bulk of their funding from foreign governments. If it weren’t for their foreign funders, they wouldn’t be doing what they are doing. By presenting themselves as grassroots Israeli voices, when in fact they are paid representatives of foreign governments who act to advance the interests of those governments in Israel, these groups distort the domestic discourse. We think we are talking to Israelis who are invested in the future of this country. But we are actually talking to Europeans and Americans whose loyalty is not to Israel and its future and indeed is often hostile to Israel. The Israelis we face are not independent actors. They are paid contractors of foreign powers. This brings us to the second type of damage that these groups cause Israel. They facilitate the West’s anti-Israel policies. Anti-Israel governments need to sell their hostile policies to their electorates. They need to fund them. To do so, they need to build and maintain domestic support for their political war against the Jewish state. To secure this support, these government quote the findings of studies that they paid their Israel-registered NGOs to carry out for them. So not only does foreign government sponsorship of Israel-registered NGOs harm Israel’s democratic order. It causes massive damage to Israel’s ability to defend itself abroad. The last way that foreign government-funded NGOs harm Israel isn’t reflected in the OneVoice example. But it is reflected in the action of hundreds of other NGOs funded by foreign governments, every day. Foreign governments use Israel-registered NGOs to gum up the works of the Israeli judicial system to impede the operations of the entire government. And they do this deliberately. Take the Norwegian Refugee Council for instance. According to a recent report by NGO Monitor, between 2011 and 2013, the Norwegian government- funded NRC gave Israeli and Palestinian groups $20 million to file lawsuits against the Israeli government in Israeli courts. During that period, the sponsored groups – among them Yesh Din and the Public Committee against House Demolition – filed 677 suits in local courts and the Supreme Court. According to NGO Monitor’s report, a lawyer affiliated with the NRC program stated that these cases are an attempt to “try every possible legal measure to disrupt the Israeli judicial system.” In his words, “As many cases as possible are registered and... as many cases as possible are appealed to increase the workload of the courts and the Supreme Court to such an extent that there will be a blockage.” To sum up then, foreign governments work through Israel-registered NGOs to harm Israel by weakening its democracy, obstructing and weakening its justice system and weakening its international position. And against these damaging operations, all the Knesset has done is require these groups to mention they are funded by foreign governments on their official communications. In other words, the Knesset has so far failed to deal with this large and growing problem. So what can be done? To repair the actual damage, rather than go through the motions, the Knesset needs to pass three laws. First, we need to have a full picture of the relationships between these groups and their foreign funders. Who initiates their projects? Who oversees them? What does the Norwegian Ambassador tell B’Tselem’s director when he hands her the monthly check? In January, Ad Kan revealed that Breaking the Silence gathered information about IDF weapons systems, tactics and troop movements from reservists. Who tasked the “Israeli” organization to do so? Once the public knows the answers to these questions, these groups’ ability to distort the public debate and so harm our democracy will be vastly curtailed. To this end, the Knesset must pass a law requiring groups that receive funding from foreign governments to report the contents of all of their communications with those governments. Europeans governments refuse to divulge the details of their relationships with these groups. And as the State Department’s deletion of its emails to OneVoice makes clear, the US does as well. The reason for their secrecy is obvious. The purpose of their relationships with these groups is subversion. OneVoice used a resource – a voter database – whose creation was financed by the US government. When native Israeli V-15 workers knocked on voters’ doors and urged them to bring down Netanyahu, it would have been useful for the public to know that those campaign workers were trained on the US taxpayers’ dime, and that they knew its addresses because the State Department paid for V-15’s voter rolls. The Knesset must pass a law requiring all groups that use resources in their work that have been funded by foreign governments to report the foreign origin or ownership of those resources. Finally, there is the lawfare issue. The government is sued by foreign government- funded Israel-registered NGOs nearly every day. The lawsuits are only made possible and often directed by those governments. Their objective is to prevent the smooth functioning of the government and legal system. The Knesset should pass a law that requires foreign governments that fund lawsuits through NGOs to be identified as parties to those lawsuits in court documents. So, too, foreign governments that sue the government should be required to pay court costs. Foreign states have chosen to use undiplomatic means to influence government policies. The Knesset needs to make sure that these means are brought out in the open so we can know what we’re dealing with. This finally returns us to Herzog and his fellow leftists, and their unhinged, libelous response to the passage of the toothless NGO law this week. Those libels were part of an ongoing campaign by Herzog and his comrades to delegitimize the government and Israeli society as a whole as an illegitimate gang of brownshirts in training. Now that we understand the collaborative relations between the Left and foreign governments, we realize that these statements are part of the deal. Herzog and his colleagues, who benefit from these subversive operations by foreign governments, help them along in their efforts to delegitimize the country. After all, that’s what friends are for. The time has come to put an end to this travesty. As the Left showed on Tuesday, yet again, it has no intention of cleaning up its act. Subversion is the only card it has left. To save our democracy, the Knesset needs to stop beating around the bush and get to work.