Israel-Palestine / religious terrorism (was non-islamic religious terrorism)

[Patrick Byrom]

Will the Trump Successes in the Middle East Survive? by Guy Millière, Gatestone Institute, 7 Feb 2021

... The new Biden administration, in under two weeks, is already threatening to undermine these and other victories. It had indicated...that it would like to return to the catastrophic nuclear "Iran deal".... [New] conditions seem to boil down to a demand that Iran respect the terms of the JCPOA, which Iran has, in fact, never respected. Evidently perceiving an American wishing to appease it, the mullahs announced on January 4 that they had decided to resume enriching uranium to the 20% level, close to the purity used for nuclear weapons. The same day, the mullahs seized a South Korean-flagged chemical tanker in the Strait of Hormuz. ...

I'm glad you recognise that Trump and his supporters are living in a fantasy world when they claim that he won the election. However, he was still President on January 4, so any action taken by Iran on that date was his responsibility to deal with, not Biden's.

[Capablanca-Fan]

The ICC has some nerve to target Israel
By Josh Hammer, NY Post, 29 Dec 2019

Among the institutions of the so-called international community, anti-Israel bias is so prevalent and obvious, it’s taken for granted and almost funny. The year-end statistics from the UN General Assembly tell nearly the whole story: Of the 25 condemnatory resolutions passed this year, 18 targeted the world’s sole Jewish state.

As I said, almost funny.

But now a more serious threat looms. The United Nations, for all its institutionalized anti-Semitism, remains a toothless body. Not so the Hague-based International Criminal Court, whose judgments can make life miserable for Israeli leaders and soldiers, rendering them vulnerable to arrest abroad.

On Dec. 20, Fatou Bensouda, a Gambian who has served as the ICC’s chief prosecutor since 2012, announced her intention to formally investigate the “situation in Palestine” and alleged Israeli war crimes that “have been or are being committed there.”

Bensouda served as a prosecutor and later justice minister under Gambia’s iron-fisted former dictator Yahya Jammeh. Speaking *before a Gambian truth-and-reconciliation commission, one dissident accused her of “masterminding” the torture he suffered. (Bensouda has denied knowledge of this torture.)

No wonder she is bent on making a scapegoat of Jews. Specifically, she wants to probe Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip during the last full-scale war against Hamas, in 2014. She also plans to investigate the Jewish state’s response to Hamas’ attempt last year to infiltrate the border fence that separates Israel from the terrorist-run territory.
…
Israel should lead a team of like-minded *allies in to fight the ICC jackals, including by exposing Bensouda’s own checkered past and her (at a minimum) alleged tacit involvement in *African human-rights violations. The Jewish, democratic and rule-of-law state of Israel doesn’t need a Gambian dictator’s lackey to lecture it on the ethics of war and peace.

[Ian Murray]

... The Jewish, democratic and rule-of-law state of Israel doesn’t need a Gambian dictator’s lackey to lecture it on the ethics of war and peace.

Jews and non-Jews are not treated equally

Israel: A Democratic State?

... Although East Jerusalem has been explicitly integrated into the Israeli polity, Israel has refrained from extending full citizenship rights to all inhabitants of Jerusalem, in clear violation of democratic values. Moreover, the Israeli reign over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would only not violate democratic standards if occupation were temporary. However, after more than fifty years of colonizing East Jerusalem and the West Bank and more than ten years of blockading the Gaza Strip, the assumption that occupation is temporary lacks plausibility. It is very unlikely that Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories will come to an end in the foreseeable future, particularly as since the millennium, no serious Israeli attempt at implementing the Palestinian right to self-determination has been empirically observable. As Israel has established an undemocratic reign in Jerusalem and as it is highly doubtful whether it honestly intends to terminate occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Western justification for strongly supporting Israel in their foreign policies and containing the BDS movement on the basis of portraying Israel as a democratic state is not well-grounded.