Remembering Noam

Remembering Noam

No room could be found for his bravery. by Jonathan Medved

Staff Sgt. Noam Apter, age 23, died Friday night Dec. 27 as a hero in an attack on the Jewish settlement of Otniel. His picture was on the front page of every Israeli daily newspaper. His bravery reported on every newscast in Israel. His family’s mourning and loss have been a subject of conversation at dinner tables, office coolers, essentially all over Israel for the past week.

Yet, the story of Noam did not appear in the Los Angeles Times, or in most papers abroad. Not even his name appeared. Nor his age. Nor the names or ages of the other three victims brutally murdered in the Sabbath eve massacre at Otniel. He was just another one of "four Israelis killed in the West Bank."

To illustrate how one-sided the coverage of Israel has been, one needs to go no further than the Los Angeles Times. During the four days after Noam’s death, the Los Angeles Times reported extensively on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Seven major articles were published with a total of more than 7,000 words. Yet, no room could be found for Noam’s name or for the story of his bravery, nor for the story of his family’s loss. Is this because Noam was not a Palestinian?

http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=9903

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I find the anti-Israel hatred so repugnant, and rampant throughout so much of the world, and even amongst Christians today. This inequality has such the same feel as the 1920's-1930s and the sound of breaking glass, Kristalnacht, echoes down through the decades. We must never forget, and we must stand with Israel.

The rabid dogs must be driven out of Israel, Arafat and the other terrorists sent back to the Arabs from which they came, and the land secured and the children made safe.

A servant of Christ,
Drew

 

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http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0502/mideast_facts.asp

Twenty Facts about Israel and the Middle East

ROOTS OF THE CONFLICT

· When the United Nations proposed the establishment of two states in the region—one Jewish, one Arab—the Jews accepted the proposal and declared their independence in 1948. The Jewish state constituted only 1/6 of one percent of what was known as "the Arab world." The Arab states, however, rejected the UN plan and since then have waged war against Israel repeatedly, both all-out wars and wars of terrorism and attrition. In 1948, five Arab armies invaded Israel in an effort to eradicate it. Jamal Husseini of the Arab Higher Committee spoke for many in vowing to soak "the soil of our beloved country with the last drop of our blood."

· The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964—three years before Israel controlled the West Bank and Gaza. The PLO’s declared purpose was to eliminate the State of Israel by means of armed struggle. To this day, the Web site of Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority (PA) claims that the entirety of Israel is "occupied" territory.* It is impossible to square this with the PLO and PA assertions to Western audiences that the root of the conflict is Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

· The West Bank and Gaza (controlled by Jordan and Egypt from 1948 to 1967) came under Israeli control during the Six Day War of 1967 that started when Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran and Arab armies amassed on Israel’s borders to invade and liquidate the state. It is important to note that during their 19-year rule, neither Jordan nor Egypt had made any effort to establish a Palestinian state on those lands. Just before the Arab nations launched their war of aggression against the State of Israel in 1967, Syrian Defense Minister (later President) Hafez Assad stated, "Our forces are now entirely ready . . . to initiate the act of liberation itself, and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland . . . the time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation." On the brink of the 1967 war, Egyptian President Gamal Nassar declared, "Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel."

· Because of their animus against Jews, many leaders of the Palestinian cause have long supported our enemies. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem allied himself with Adolf Hitler during WWII. Yasir Arafat, chairman of the PLO and president of the PA, has repeatedly targeted and killed Americans. In 1973, Arafat ordered the execution of Cleo Noel, the American ambassador to the Sudan. Arafat was very closely aligned with the Soviet Union and other enemies of the United States throughout the Cold War. In 1991, during the Gulf War, Arafat aligned himself with Saddam Hussein, whom he praised as "the defender of the Arab nation, of Muslims, and of free men everywhere."

· Israel has, in fact, returned most of the land that it captured during the 1967 war and right after that war offered to return all of it in exchange for peace and normal relations; the offer was rejected. As a result of the 1978 Camp David accords—in which Egypt recognized the right of Israel to exist and normal relations were established between the two countries—Israel returned the Sinai desert, a territory three times the size of Israel and 91 percent of the territory Israel took control of in the 1967 war.

· In 2000, as part of negotiations for a comprehensive and durable peace, Israel offered to turn over all but the smallest portion of the remaining territories to Yasir Arafat. But Israel was rebuffed when Arafat walked out of Camp David and launched the current intifada.

· Yasir Arafat has never been less than clear about his goals—at least not in Arabic. On the very day that he signed the Oslo accords in 1993—in which he promised to renounce terrorism and recognize Israel—he addressed the Palestinian people on Jordanian television and declared that he had taken the first step "in the 1974 plan." This was a thinly-veiled reference to the "phased plan," according to which any territorial gain was acceptable as a means toward the ultimate goal of Israel’s destruction.

· The recently deceased Faisal al-Husseini, a leading Palestinian spokesman, made the same point in 2001 when he declared that the West Bank and Gaza represented only "22 percent of Palestine" and that the Oslo process was a "Trojan horse." He explained, "When we are asking all the Palestinian forces and factions to look at the Oslo Agreement and at other agreements as ‘temporary’ procedures, or phased goals, this means that we are ambushing the Israelis and cheating them." The goal, he continued, was "the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea," i.e., the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—all of Israel.

· To this day, the Fatah wing of the PLO (the "moderate" wing that was founded and is controlled by Arafat himself) has as its official emblem the entire state of Israel covered by two rifles and a hand grenade—another fact that belies the claim that Arafat desires nothing more than the West Bank and Gaza.

· While criticism of Israel is not necessarily the same as "anti-Semitism," it must be remembered that the Middle East press is, in fact, rife with anti-Semitism. More than fifteen years ago the eminent scholar Bernard Lewis could point out that "The demonization of Jews [in Arabic literature] goes further than it had ever done in Western literature, with the exception of Germany during the period of Nazi rule." Since then, and through all the years of the "peace process," things have become much worse. Depictions of Jews in Arab and Muslim media are akin to those of Nazi Germany, and medieval blood libels—including claims that Jews use Christian and Muslim blood in preparing their holiday foods—have become prominent and routine. One example is a sermon broadcast on PA television where Sheik Ahmad Halabaya stated, "They [the Jews] must be butchered and killed, as Allah the Almighty said: ‘Fight them: Allah will torture them at your hands.’ Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them."

· Over three-quarters of Palestinians approve of suicide bombings—an appalling statistic but, in light of the above facts, an unsurprising one.

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I'll bet Israel would cease all suicide bombings performed by Israelis if the Palestinians would cease suicide bombings performed by Palestinians. That would be a good place to start.

Jason

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There are NO suicide bombings by Israelis. There has not been one Israeli strap on a belt of dinamite, or drive a car laden with explosives, to kill as many men, women and children as is possible in the blast which kills themselves.

The Israelis have lost many IDF forces in doing house to house clearing, to try to hold down injuries to collateral civilians.

A servant of Christ,
Drew

 

Drew,

I should have used graemlins, as your point was exactly my point! Israel has sat down at the peace table many times with the PA, and the PA has always been the one to break the treaty with the use of violence.

It is rediculous to expect Israel to once again sit down at the peace table only to get blown up again. One of these days, they will grow wise to the fact that the palestinians have no desire to have peace with Israel, and that the palestinians are proving to be fundamentally dishonest.

Jason

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Amen Jason!!!!!

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http://www.middleeastfacts.com/Articles/Yashiko/Palestinians.html

If you are so sure that "Palestine, the country, goes back through most of recorded history", I expect you to be able to answer a few basic questions about that country of Palestine:

· When was it founded and by whom?
· What were its borders?
· What was its capital?
· What were its major cities?
· What constituted the basis of its economy?
· What was its form of government?
· Can you name at least one Palestinian leader before Arafat?
· Was Palestine ever recognized by a country whose existence, at that time or now, leaves no room for interpretation?
· What was the language of the country of Palestine?
· What was the prevalent religion of the country of Palestine?
· What was the name of its currency? Choose any date in history and tell what was the approximate exchange rate of the Palestinian monetary unit against the US dollar, German mark, GB pound, Japanese yen, or Chinese yuan on that date.
· Have they left any artifacts behind?
· Do you know of a library where one could find a work of Palestinian literature produced before 1967?
· And, finally, since there is no such country today, what caused its demise and when did it occur?

The truth should be obvious to everyone who wants to know it. Arab countries have never abandoned the dream of destroying Israel; they still cherish it today. Having time and again failed to achieve their evil goal with military means, they decided to fight Israel by proxy. For that purpose, they created a terrorist organization, cynically called it "Palestinian people" and installed it in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria. How else can you explain the refusal by Jordan and Egypt to unconditionally accept back the "West Bank" and Gaza, respectively?

The fact is, Arabs populating Gaza, Judea, and Samaria have much less claim to nationhood than that Indian tribe that successfully emerged in Connecticut with the purpose of starting a tax-exempt casino: at least that tribe had a constructive goal that motivated them. The so called "Palestinians" have only one motivation: the destruction of Israel, and in my book that is not sufficient to consider them a "nation" -- or anything else except what they really are: a terrorist organization that will one day be dismantled.

In fact, there is only one way to achieve piece in the Middle East. Arab countries must acknowledge and accept their defeat in their war against Israel and, as the losing side should, pay Israel reparations for the more than 50 years of devastation they have visited on it. The most appropriate form of such reparations would be the removal of their terrorist organization from the land of Israel and accepting Israel's ancient sovereignty over Gaza, Judea, and Samaria.

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