Maimonides and the Gazans

A respectable blogger, William Jacobson (Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion), has recently noted that he was right predicting that lifting the Gaza blockade would be detrimental to Hamas because it would take away the need in a source of its business - the tunnel trade. Indeed, now that the blockade is lifted, it is reported that "Hamas panicked". I disagreed, however. Although there may be some revenue difficulties because of a drop (likely temporary) in the tunnel traffic, the key personnel is unlikely to suffer. Although that personnel may be interested in revenue, the main goal of Hamas in its volatile environment is  maintaining its hold on power. It is power that makes Hamas's income possible. That power is always under threat - not only from the "moderate" terrorists of Fatah, but also from the less prominent jihad warriors always yelping on the periphery and waiting for their turn.

It may well be that lifting the blockade slightly diminishes a source of Hamas's income, but in that part of the world it is symbolic victories that matter most. Symbolically, lifting the blockage is Hamas's, Turkish Islamic and leftist victory, ultimately helping Hamas. Besides, I am sure that the US help to Gaza will take care of any fiscal shortfall for Hamas. See, "Obama described the situation in Gaza as 'unsustainable'." Naturally, he promised to sustain the Hamas electorate with an infusion of $400 million. This is because, in the endless wisdom of the White House, the terror-supporting Gazan people "deserve a better life and expanded opportunities". The UK government has also squeezed its pockets to promise "an extra £19m in aid" - not that it has not given anything before. The poor philistines can always count on generous donations. In fact, they receive the greatest amount of international aid of any entity in the world. We should not also underestimate the help from Hamas's brothers in faith, Iran, Syria, and other anti-imperialist donors. Terror and jihad have been a lucrative business ever since Muhammad started it from Medina.

But let's get back to the more reliable source of income for the work-loving Gazan population that prefers destroying hothouses (which used to provide a quarter of produce in Israel and were given to Gazans free) to growing vegetables. Namely, the alms, a.k.a. international aid. Aid is charity, one of the commandments in Judaism. The Hebrew word is tzedakah, translated as righteousness, clearly an important issue for a religious person. Rambam, which is the Hebrew acronym for Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, known to Gentiles as Maimonides, the great Jewish lawmaker and Torah commentator, considered eight gradations of tzedakah, called Maimonides' Ladder. The rungs of the ladder are viewed from the perspective of the charity's worth to the giver's righteousness (obviously, it is the giver who is righteous, not the taker) - they are levels of giving, but the scale is the usefulness to the taker. Donations are good, but better if the donor is anonymous, to an unknown recipient, before being asked, particularly via a public fund. The highest rung, however, is a rehabilitating kind of charity, such as an interest-free loan that would allow an individual to stand on his own feet. Clearly, of all forms of charity, this is the best to the recipient. By contrast, the worst must be a charity that deprives the individual of initiative, of incentives to improve, ultimately of the future, and makes him feel humiliated.

This, worst, is the kind of charity that is served to the Arabs of Gaza and of Judea and Samaria. The kind of charity that requires no accountability or work, allowing the Arab leaders to steal as much they wish, and their subjects to enjoy their miserable lives, exercising their "idleness, uncertainty and despair". With the feeling of humiliation whipped up by the leaders to support the crowd's rage they could channel to their benefit. Misled by Hamas's "victory" in lifting the blockade to allow more handouts in. Always blaming Jews for this parasitic existence, while supported in that murderous self-pity by the New York Times and world media, "flotillas" and "human rights" organizations, governments and intelligentsia. Murderous, because that self-imposed and artificial beggar status and humiliation are translated into rockets targeting Jewish kindergartens and suicidal murderers' bombs in Jewish discotheques. 

Parasites lose their organs, as they lose their need in them. Professional beggars, if not lacking extremities, frequently pretend they do - it's easier for them to be disabled than to lose their income. The endless unconditional charity, with no accountability and no need to make something of themselves, exploits "the natural indolence of mankind; their tendency to be passive, to be the slaves of habit, to persist indefinitely in a course once chosen" (John Stuart Mill, "The Principles of Political Economy"). Disabling and killing Arabs softly by charity just to prove that Jews (a.k.a. Israelis) are bad, the world prepares "Palestinians" for another explosion under the guidance of their chosen jihad chieftains - leading them from spiritual death to "work accidents" to Israel's inevitable response to banditry and terror. 

July 19, 2010. - The shockingly "unsustainable"  situation in Gaza has just reached a new level of "uncertainty and despair" with opening a luxury mall. Please urge President Obama not to procrastinate with his life-supporting donation of $400 million, lest "Israeli men's trousers at an attractive price" are not affordable to some Gazan sufferer. 

July 20, 2010. - What a horrible thing - to be right so often. Reena Ninan, the Fox News reporter covering Israel (with dirt), has just reported about that mall (some "news"), and  commented that salaries may be too low to afford everybody  in Gaza to buy everything in this mall.  A young round-faced Gazan man (clear signs of starvation) was on hand to authoritatively confirm the hardships. I couldn't hold my tears. Considering that salaries in Gaza are paid by Hamas, there is no doubt where you and our generous President should urgently send money.

Religion of Peace in its own words

As reported by MEMRI, Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi called upon Muslims to sacrifice themselves in order to achieve their rights: "We must revive what the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al-Bana, called 'the death industry'." That's what I call eloquence - "revive... death"! "Industry", of course, brings to mind the mass enterprise of the 1940's, in which the predecessors of the current philistines, headed by the genocidal Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, took some part - much as they could. The Sheikh suggests that "[Israel] must be eliminated, as it was founded on the basis of thievery..." He calls for jihad at "all levels – military, political, economic, cultural, and religious." Sheikh Yousef wants Allah  to "help him fight the Zionists and cause loss of life among them, and that he be hit by a bullet that will separate his head from his body" (I'd add that the order should be reversed if Allah is listening).

Now, the Sheikh is the head of the International Union of Muslim Scholars. See - scholars. He is a scholar. Who am I to believe regarding the proper Muslim thinking - him or George W. "Islam is religion of peace" Bush? I'll take the good Sheikh's opinion on what Islam is every time - over that of Bush or even Barack Hussein himself (although I am not sure how much the latter's opinion on the existence of Israel differs from Yousef's). On one point I agree with the Sheikh wholeheartedly - with his laments on that "there is a group among us still chasing the illusion of peace." Except, of course, he exaggerates in the flowery Oriental fashion the influence of that group among the umma  - there is no such group there (otherwise we would hear about it, wouldn't we). As much as we, on the other hand, want peace, it cannot be bought by concessions and the immoral "land for peace" principle. This principle started World War II. History has proven that it's a folly time after time.

Dershowitz's choice

I have again come across a pre-election piece by Alan Dershowitz, placed by him in Huffington Post, and thought that it is helpful to understand the convoluted rationale of well-intended people who elected Barack Hussein. It shows how wrong assumptions and unidimensional thinking can drive one to wrong decisions, and, at the same time, help explain the problems we suffer from these decisions.

Let's suppose Dershowitz was indeed so credulous as to decide that Obama "strongly supports Israel" based on the information that "[d]uring the debates each candidate has gone out of his and her way to emphasize strong support for Israel as an American ally and a bastion of democracy in a dangerous neighborhood". Considering that pre-election verbiage is well known to be unreliable, mildly put, while Obama's associations with antisemites and Israel-haters had been well known, Dershowitz would have to be daft to buy it, which he is not. He must have known - but disbelieved - that Obama's professed love for Israel is opportunistic and false. It was and is true, however, that, as Dershowitz wrote, "Obama's views on Israel will have greater impact on young people, on Europe, on the media and on others who tend to identify with the liberal perspective." That's exactly what Obama's views, turned into his anti-Israel policy, do now, supporting the rise of antisemitism on campuses and in the world. It is because of his policy that his support in Israel dropped to the unprecedented 4% - not because of his middle name as he put it, slandering Israelis as racists.

The problem with Dershowitz is that the falsity of attributions and predictions that he made was obvious at the time when he wrote his Huff piece to anybody whose critical abilities were not suspended. It is unfortunate that they were suspended in so many, and so many usually smart and well-informed people were and are guided by the left ideology and wishful thinking. Then again, whole nations were blinded by them, leading from one disaster to another.

Peace pardnership

As we find out for the umpteenth time, our "peace pardners" the philistines are really not. They are ready to wage war against Israel once Arab countries get to that. A friend commented that this is another example of taqiyya on the part of Abbas, a lie Muslims are supposed to be free to use when dealing against the kuffar, unbelievers. I think, however, that people have to be intentionally blind to buy this kind of taqiyya, or have concerns that override Israel's (and ultimately, this civilization's) security. Muslims have to be either exceptionally stupid to think it's believable, or simply realistic, knowing that however stupid and improbable their lie is, it is good enough to be either believed by the "international community", or used by the latter as another pretext to punish Jews for what they have never done - from killing Jesus to contemporary blood libels. No need to try hard.

If we, you and I, can get enough information from open public sources to detect damn lies of our "peace partners", shouldn't those having access to intelligence know a bit more? What additional proof is needed that whatever verbal concessions are given by them in English, they translate into their opposite in Arabic or, at best, are abrogated at the first opportunity - just as this is prescribed by Muhammad? Allah himself used to abrogate Koranic suras once they would become inconvenient to the ingenious "prophet" - remember the "Satanic verses", not the Rushdie book, but the actual Koran 53:19-20? Arafat openly called the Oslo accords Hudaybiyyah peace, referring to the 10-year truce that Muhammad signed with the Meccans when he was too weak to fight them, only to violate it in two years when he was ready to attack them. Why the hell wasn't Arafat and his gang immediately kicked out at least after that? The consequences of Oslo had been obvious to so many before Israel reimported sworn enemies and bandits. ZOA, for instance, of which I am a member, was against it, as it was against the abhorrent self-imposed ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Nobody among the decision-makers listened. Nobody does. I am afraid, nobody will. We are governed by people lacking not only morality, but also knowledge and the intellect to use it.

As I write this, I am listening to a Fox News report (courtesy of the ever-smiling Reena Ninan) of the "discrimination" against "Palestinians" buying real estate in Jerusalem. Of course, the "fair and balanced" reporter asks only a complaining Arab - of course, Abu Abdullah, looking so noble, decent and peaceful - how he suffers, with no possibility of finding out what the criminal Zionists think about that. I am not holding my breath for Fox News, bought by the memorable prince al-Waleed (who also helps families of suicidal murderers a little), to decry the discrimination against Jews buying land - not just in any of the 22 Arab states, but from a "Palestinian", who would be executed by the "peace pardners" if he decided to sell any. After all, the Jews got their land as stolen by the Europeans from the "Palestinian" natives, a payment for that dubious Holocaust. Just ask Barack Hussein. We know to whom he thinks Jerusalem belongs.

Builders of the future

Today's quote of the day from President Obama (town hall meeting in Racine, Wisconsin):
"We can return to what we know did not work, or we build a stronger future. We can go backwards, or we can go forward. And I don’t know about you, but I want to move forward in this country" (I heard it on TV, but copied the text off the site Organizing for America, whatever it means).

For those who have not lived in the unlamented Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, "building a stronger future" may sound either awfully nice or awfully hollow, depending on the part of the political spectrum one fits. For those who have spent any conscious years in the Motherland of the World Proletariat, among the Vanguard of Progressive Humankind,  these words sound as coming from a nightmare. We, who did live in the Soviet Union, have heard the phrase about building a future since we started hearing anything. The self-name of the Soviet people was Builders - of Communism, of the bright future, of the better (best) society - always moving forward. During the Demonstrations of Laborers on the 1st of May holiday - for which mass "spontaneous" expressions of building enthusiasm the masses were "organized" by their employment places,  - the announcer's voice from the megaphones on the lamp posts thundered, "Long live the great Soviet People, the Glorious Builder of Communism". The "glorious builders" joked, "yeah, long live the great Soviet people, the eternal builder of Communism." As for moving "forward", that is, in the direction of "catching up with and overtaking America" (an official slogan of Khrushchev's era), the joke was, "Why is the glorious Soviet people trying to catch up with and overtake America, which uncontrollably rolls to the abyss?"   

Sure I know that the right wingnuts like myself always try to scare Americans with their paranoid fantasies of socialism in the land of the free. Perhaps we indeed are a bit scared - at least those who have the Soviet Union as the reference point for political events and phenomena. Some of us wingnuts, however, may be scared justifiably. Arguably, we are finely attuned to detect anything that may pave the road to the bright socialist future, including the use of familiar cliches and newspeak we are so used to. The 60's Soviet  placard on the left, with the large ДОГНАТЬ и ПЕРЕГНАТЬ at the bottom,  "catch up with and overtake", quotes Lenin: "Either to perish, or to catch up with the leading countries and overtake them economically... Either to perish, or to rush full steam forward." Sounds a little familiar? The Soviet people did go forward. The future was great.

Dashing general

Call me paranoid (probably many of us who come from the Soviet Union are justifiably so anyway), but I doubt General Stanley McChrystal was indeed reckless to say what he said regarding the Supreme Balaboss. No way he did not know the MO¹ and ROE² when dealing with a CO³, especially as hollow as BHO. Surely Stan knew that one is not supposed to malign anybody a notch above you in the Army hierarchy - that's the whole Army thing. No army can function if the lines of authority are not strictly maintained. My uneducated guess is that the general, far from being rash, mindless and a bad example to his subordinates, did it - the only alternative left - on purpose. Say, got tired of the supreme incompetence of the likes of Biden and his golf buddy in the WH (do they often get to play together or the interests of national security keep them playing separate?). Say, decided that whatever comes  - resignation or retirement, - his replacement will be listened to with greater attention and the critical decisions will not take forever. He did apologize, but I am willing to read into that apology non-admission of guilt: he said, "What is reflected in this article falls far short of [his] standard [principles of personal honor and professional integrity]", and the reflections are not necessarily true.  Especially when those reflections are in a leftist musical gossip magazine (a nice picture of The Beatles playing in water though).

All this may be a stretch or wishful thinking, but it does not matter much. Even if the general said it thoughtlessly, and carelessly entertained that kind of disparaging remarks about the administration from his subordinates, it tells at least as much about the administration as it does about McChrystal's army etiquette. To wit, that the administration has not earned as little respect from people who risk their lives every second as for them to at least follow their common rules of conduct. These people see their Supreme Commander on the news declaring that they serve America's vital interests, which, one guesses, will cease to be so in, oh, about a year when the troop withdrawal is scheduled to start, with no victory mentioned. They know that it took months for him to accept McChrystal's request for more troops on which their lives depended, and then deducting a quarter from the number requested. Those who do research using governmental funding are well familiar with the thinking behind deductions like that. This is one of the many ways for bureaucrats to exercise their power and show their creativity - to cut a study's budget by 15, 25 or another round number of percentage points, despite the fact that the budget has been approved by peer review, i.e. by people who know how much is needed to do what's planned. It is not good for research, nor is it for the Army where lives are at stake. This is the type of strategy Leo Tolstoy made a joke of in War and Peace, talking about German generals-bureaucrats with their calculations, "Die erste Kolonne marschiert... die zweite Kolonne marschiert... die dritte Kolonne marschiert." Call me a doubting Thomas, but I am afraid that Gen. Petraeus, who has been exposed to Obama's "strategery" before, does not hold a lot of respect for him either. How long will it take for him to have enough?
_____
¹MO, modus operandi
²ROE, rules of engagement
³CO, commanding officer

Sweet memories

My dear wife Galina, remembering good times in the Soviet Union, composed this lovely song, a remake of the one we sang as children in kindergartens:
"The winter's gone, and here's summer. - 
Oh, thank you, President Obama!"

We can't wait for children to start singing it. Sort of like

Sorry, you have to know Russian to fully enjoy it. The video at the bottom of this post, however, is just as good.

The picture says, "Thanks to Dear Stalin for the happy childhood!" (can't really translate it literally, because it's not "dear" but rather a word indicating relatedness as if with a family member - there is nothing similar in English).

White House and its Corps

Helen Thomas, a White House Press Corps member, ordered Jews to "get the hell out of Palestine".
This was followed by robotic cackle, of the Joker's kind. Or Streicher's. "These people", she said (Arabs, I guess), "are occupied." - When people are occupied, it means they are busy with something. She must have meant a territory, but which? - The entirety of Israel, because the home of Jews, in her opinion that she shares with Hamas and Hizballah, is Poland and Germany. And USA. Herself, she is at home, a rabid antisemite, who, as daughter of Lebanese immigrants, is confidently enjoying comforts of the land whose natives - the few that survive - gave her full rights to settle there. I guess. There is little difference between her and Obama, however: both think Jews are in "Palestine" only because of the Holocaust. Who knows which one of them is more upset by that pesky presence. Thomas's is the real ugly face of the fighters for the rights of "Palestinians", whose only actual desire is to get rid of Israel, having failed in their prior attempts to exterminate the Jews.

6-07-10 PS. What is the analog of "swan song" for a vulture? She suddenly retired today, fired by Hearst. The news reported that she was a trailblazer. She may well be one - for open antisemitism in the mainstream media.

Peaceful bandits

As Debkafile reports, Erdogan may further escalate provocations against Israel, involving Turkish military, after the Turkey-supported attempt to break the Israeli naval blockade of terrorist Gaza succeeded in having several of suicidal attackers¹ on Israeli commandos killed. It is hard to imagine that Turkey, a member of NATO, would contemplate not only supporting any escalation, but even that "Free Gaza" flotilla, without permission from the US - if not explicit, then inferred from the actions of the US government. The latest such action is the US-sponsored attack on the supposed Israeli nuclear defense. One only hopes that Americans' dislike for Bush, which has brought a nobody, an impostor, to power, will not be sufficient to justify Obama's lethal retreat, appeasement of fascists and help to terrorists. Since Obama is not a madman to act against himself, his policy expresses whom he wants to see as friends and enemies. Perhaps the continued ascendance of the barbarians, which so obviously follows Obama's policy of punishing friends and rewarding enemies, will open eyes and bring about political change  in the US, and in the world. The price for eye-opening, however, is already too high and is going to grow higher.

1. see MEMRI video: "Gaza-Based Yemeni Professor Abd Al-Fatah Nu'man: As Much as the Heroes on the Flotilla Want to Reach Gaza, The Option of Martyrdom Is More Desirable to Them"

Occupiers and natives

I'll start, indeed, with duplicating one of the items located on my Israel on My Mind website. Not for better, but for worse, nothing that made me to write it has changed.

July 19, 2003. - I was invited to celebrate Independence Day by a nice American couple. Almost everybody there, with a rare Canadian exception, was a US-born American citizen. I would like to emphasize this ''US-born,'' the point close to the root of the problems discussed here.

As usual where a group of Jews is gathered, the conversation turned to Israel. I had known that the hosts were far to the left from me. For this reason, and because of the traditional voting pattern, I expected everybody to be a Democrat (which I, increasingly reluctantly, was myself). Unexpected, however, were the opinions regarding Middle East conflicts. First, even though support for the Iraq war, according to the polls, is the same among Jews as in the rest of the population, in this highly educated group it was scarce. More dramatic, it was even scarcer for Israel. There was little time left to find out why exactly, but two main points were clear: Israel was considered a cruel occupying power, and Arabs were unreservedly viewed as the suffering party.

I do not need to go into the much discussed issue of why Israel's rule in the disputed territories of Judea, Samaria and Gaza is not occupation - an interested reader is referred to the in-depth and definitive treatment of this issue by Eugene Rostow (former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, 1966-1969, and one of the drafters of UNSC Resolution 242) and Dore Gold. Jews have full legal right to live anywhere in these territories - the same as the right to live in Tel Aviv or Haifa. Clearly, however, the pro-Arab propaganda, operating with lies and distortions, has suppressed the influence of any objective information. Indeed, the human mind is selective in its information processing. It assimilates better what goes along with a pre-existing perspective (which, if not based on objective knowledge, is called prejudice), and, within the time limits afforded, can absorb only a limited amount. This is why the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, can comfortably lie about "500 victims" of the Israeli operation in Jenin, perfectly knowing that this lie will be disproved. He does not care about his credibility - he knows he has none. What matters to him as an experienced disciple of Goebbels is that this abhorrent misinformation is thunderously amplified by the media and fills the limited information space, feeding on old prejudices and supplanting truth, just as poisonous carbon monoxide supplants oxygen in the blood. This means that even if an equal amount of truth were to follow, it would be inadequate to set the record straight.

Any truth, however, is hardly forthcoming from major media sources, whose reporting standards have been hopelessly compromised by outright fraud compounded by anti-Israel bias. Nobody is surprised any longer that The New York Times published that photograph of a bloodied Jewish youth, Tuvia Grossman, protected from the Arab mob by a vicious-looking Israeli policeman – with the title “An Israeli policeman and a Palestinian on the Temple Mount” - and this is on the clearly seen background of a gas station (see Mr. Grossman's own account of that lynch attempt). BBC’s reporting in Israel has deserved its comparison with another notorious media source, Nazi “Der Stuermer,” which incited Germans to genocide.

The gross distortion of truth about Israel is promoted by a distinct group of intellectuals, whose left, right, Muslim, socialist and other platforms converge on one point – their Jew-hatred. The difference from the Nazi situation is two-fold. First, as observed in a comment attributed to Martin Luther King, “the times have made it unpopular, in the West, to proclaim openly a hatred of the Jews.” Second, the left were themselves persecuted by Hitler, so that they had little chance to join him in his genocidal effort. The same is true about Jew-haters among the Jews themselves, whose participation in Nazi crimes was limited to the few collaborationists who served in Judenrats (ghetto councils) and ghetto police. The times of war usually polarize people’s positions, and gradations in politically charged opinions become less likely. Nowadays, in what we – erroneously - perceive as peace, the Jewish opponents of Israel vary in shades from disliking the thought that they may be identified with whatever antisemitic/anti-Israel stereotypes and prejudice the Gentile population may entertain (which in Steven Rose's case extends to disliking the source of his misfortune of being born Jewish – his parents) to acting as a supporter of the mass murderers of Jews. These supporters, the contemporary candidates for the ghetto police and Auschwitz kapo jobs, include, but are not limited to, Stanley Cohen, the narcissistic Hamas attorney paid from the money this terrorist group gets from Saudis and Iran for murdering Jewish babies, and the Jewish members of the International Solidarity Movement who "recognize the Palestinian right to resist Israeli violence and occupation via legitimate armed struggle".

Regardless of psychological and historical roots of anti-Israelism, the result is the same – the unshakable belief that Israel is illegitimate and occupies the land whose natives – Arabs – have been treated as (or more) unjustly as were American Indians. The peculiar interweaving of these roots has resulted in the cancellation of a simple truth that the natives in the Land of Israel are Jews. Arabs are invaders or, at best, settlers, just as, before them, were Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans and whoever else tortured the Holy Land. The only difference from other invaders is that Arabs have never even ruled over “Palestine,” except when 80% of it was cut off by the British in 1921 and handed over to their puppet Abdullah bin Husayn for his service as his fiefdom. It is ironic that the emirate, and later kingdom, where Jews have been prohibited by law from settling, was given a Jewish name – the name of the Jordan river.

The Jewish presence in the whole of the Land of Israel has never been interrupted, despite all efforts of invaders. But even in places where it was, as it happened in Hevron (Hebron) after Arab pogroms instigated by the Nazi mufti Amin al-Husseini, this does not make invaders natives - just as nobody would think of white New Yorkers as Native Americans, even though the tribes who used to live on Manhattan may not even exist anymore. Being US-born, even in several generations, does not make you a native of the land. The difference in the perception of “nativeness” is all the more striking considering that Indians left no cities on Manhattan, whereas the “Palestinian” city of Hevron, under this very name, was the first capital of Israel under King David, when nobody had even heard of Arabs. The tombs of the Jewish patriarchs are there, in the place bought by Abraham. That Jews could come and worship there again only after the Six Day War, after 700 years of prohibition under Muslim “tolerant” rule, had not made the cave of Machpelah Arab. It is the Jewish names under which this land is known to all humanity, despite all efforts to rename Hevron into al-Khalil, Jerusalem into Aelia Capitolina (Romans) or al-Quds (Arabs), and the whole land into Syria Palaestina (Romans), Palestine (British), or Filastiniya (Arabs). No Orwellian effort to rewrite history can change the fact that Yerushalayim (Jerusalem) has been the capital of the Jewish - and no other - State since King David. Hevron is located in Judean Hills, Judea, the land of Jews.


PS. Little that I knew then, in 2003, that in 2010 an American administration would be first to introduce the Arabic replacement name into the official lingo.

Watch, and think about who those students “from Palestine” were, in the ‘70s in Egypt, who taught him “to live in peace and security” and “to practice our faith freely” (unless, of course, he is a Muslim, and "our faith" is Islam). You probably know that the Saudi duties as “custodians of the two holy mosques” include not allowing any non-Muslim to the land of the two "holy mosques", let alone building anything Jewish or Christian in the whole of Saudi Arabia.

If you ever travel to "Palestine", perhaps you’ll visit "Al Quds". I am not sure who will be its custodians, if this administration of Saudi supplicants succeeds in its hard work of creating the new pale of settlement for Jews, this time in the Land of Israel itself.