Palestinians, Poverty & Islamic State

A Jerusalem Post editorial points a finger at Palestinians for not "taking responsibility" for their own condition

A Kurdish TV Parody of Islamic State

Taking Responsibility - Editorial

Palestinians would have had a state decades ago if they had renounced violence and focused on improving their lives. Random suicide bombings, rocket fire directed at civilians and other forms of violence adopted by Palestinians over the decades are not a protest against poverty and unemployment. They are a cause of it.

As long as Palestinians continue to justify violence as a legitimate means of political action they will live in poverty.
(Jerusalem Post)


Another obscene Israel analogy - Ben Cohen

We all know about the ludicrous and insulting parallel drawn between Israel and the former apartheid regime in South Africa.

And we know, too, of the obscene comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany.

But now there’s a new analogy—and it’s one that attacks Israel by using a contemporary reference. Appropriately for our digital age, it takes the form of a Twitter hashtag: #JSIL.

If it’s not immediately clear what that means, JSIL is a spinoff of ISIL, the barbaric jihadist terrorist organization with whom we are now at war. JSIL, meanwhile, stands for “Jewish State in the Levant.”

Yes, you read that correctly. There are people out there who are seriously equating a gang of rapists, decapitators, slave traders, and genocidal killers with a democratic state that takes the trouble, whenever it is dragged into an armed conflict, of informing civilians on the other side when and where it will be launching an attack so that they can get themselves to safety.

Just this week, Deutsche Welle, the taxpayer-funded German broadcaster, published an article on its website that cast American Jews volunteering for the IDF in the same light as Muslims from Europe and elsewhere joining the Islamic State terrorists. Germans should, by now, know better.

[W]hat the Deutsche Welle piece demonstrates is how easily this clumsy, morally illiterate argument can penetrate the mainstream.
[JNS.org]
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What Was Kerry Thinking? - David P. Goldman

Israel has nothing whatever to do with any of this suffering. It is all the result of social and political disintegration in the Muslim world itself. To blame ISIS' recruitment of young Muslims on the refugee problem of 1948, as Secretary of State John Kerry did last week, boggles the imagination. It is one thing to ignore the elephant in the parlor, and another to pretend it is not there when it is standing on one's toe.
[Middle East Forum]
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UPDATE:

No Connection Mr. Kerry - Khaled Abu Toameh

The rise of the Islamic State is one of the by-products of the "Arab Spring," which began as a secular revolt against decades of tyranny and corruption in the Arab world. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the last thing Arabs had in mind when they took to the streets to protest against decades of dictatorship and bad government.
     
In fact, the "liberation" of Jerusalem is ranked sixth among the Islamic State's objectives. Indeed, the group's failure to express solidarity with the Palestinians or Hamas during the Gaza war drew strong condemnations in the Arab world. 
(Gatestone Institute)
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