Peace Now’s Lara Friedman relays her dissatisfaction with the failure of Arab officials to acknowledge Jewish rights to Jerusalem.
By Rachel Hirshfeld, INN
Americans for Peace Now’s Director of Policy and Government Relations, Lara Friedman, has expressed her discontent and dissatisfaction with the failure of Arab officials to acknowledge Jewish rights to Jerusalem.
While Friedman is vehemently against Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, military action against Iran, and advocated on behalf of freeing the Islamic Jihad terrorist Khader Adnan from Israeli administrative detention, she nonetheless laments that the Arab League’s Conference on Jerusalem in Doha on Sunday did not give voice to Jewish perspectives.
“When I was invited to this conference, I took this as a sign that the Arab League wanted to capture the full complexity of the issues related to Jerusalem, including openly pro-Israel, pro-peace voices,” she wrote Monday in the Forward. “However, it seems that virtually every conversation I am having here involves me, to a greater or lesser degree, having to defend the two-state solution and having to assert and defend the Jewish stake in Jerusalem..
“[I]t seems to me that by not having more pro-two-state solution, Jewish voices here, the Arab League is doing a disservice to the cause it is ostensibly concerned with — the health and status of Jerusalem — and missing an opportunity. The Arab world, and activists around the globe concerned with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, do themselves no favors when they listen to voices that tell them only a piece of the story that is comfortable to their ears.
“Speakers at Sunday’s opening session, including Palestinian [Authority] President Mahmoud Abbas, one after another laid out laundry lists of criticisms of Israel — many of them regrettably marked with exaggerations. All also spoke a great deal about Muslim and Christian attachments to Jerusalem and the importance of defending the holy sites and communities associated with both religions. However, only one speaker, Michel Sabbah, formerly the Latin Patriarch in Jerusalem, mentioned any Jewish connection to the city,” she added.
“This is a serious problem,” Friedman proclaimed. “If President Abbas cannot acknowledge Jewish claims in Jerusalem, even as he asserts Palestinian claims (a problem Yasser Arafat suffered from), he should not be surprised if it is more difficult for Israelis and Jews, wherever they are, to believe that he can be trusted in a peace agreement that leaves Jerusalem sites precious to Jews under Palestinian control.
“If representatives of the organization that sponsored the Arab Peace Initiative cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the legitimacy of Jewish equities in Jerusalem, they should know that they discredit their own professed interest in peace.
“All throughout the day, it was unfortunately the same story. Participants talked about Jerusalem as if Jewish history did not exist or was a fraud — as if all Jewish claims in the city were just a tactic to dispossess Palestinians.”
She concluded by saying that she “regret[s] that the conference so far has not taken the issues related to Jerusalem more seriously. Much of the discourse here thus far has been personally objectionable and even painful to me, but I believe my presence here is important for the cause of peace.”
Friedman, like Norman Finkelstein, among others, seem to be disheartened and disillusioned by the liberal, leftist and anti-Israel groups which they espouse. Finkelstein recently admitted that the Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which he so closely aligned and supported in the past, is “a cult.”
This “disillusionment” with arabs, reminds me of one of my favourite books: “homage to catalonia” by George Orwell. The great man fought in the Spanish civil war with the socialists. Only to discover that their “allies” the communists were worse than the fascists. He went back to England with a life long hatred of communism.
Any chance that all the lefties in the west will also have an epiphany and realize their real enemy is Islam? [sigh] As Bob Dylan wrote, the answer my friend is blowing in the wind.
Shy you have been AWOL.
Just saw the news tragedy for family and friends. Setback for people whose brains are in forward gear. RIP.
Andrew Breitbart Z”L, dead at 43 from natural causes. He will be missed
Peace now is unhappy with ” the failure of Arab officials to acknowledge Jewish rights to Jerusalem.”
And what about the right of Israel to exist?
The tactic described here, which the enemies of our Jewish nation always have used against us, can be used by us as well. In a couple of centuries, the Jewish population of an expanded Greater Israel will have doubled repeatedly, as it has been doing for the past century. Then, our people shall control the power, and with that power, the palimpsest of revisable history.
But go ahead and tell me that would be halachically incorrect. I would only smile, because I know exactly how dicta purposely can be reduced to mere conundra, and from there, remolded to a new reality that suits the requirements of the new Jewish nation and state. It all depends on growing a future Jewish power base that would be unrecognizable from the puny standards of yesteryear and today.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Must be something in the water in Tucson, Arizona. The “JINOs” born there like Friedman, Phoenix SUNS owner Robert Sarver, who loves drug cartels and ILLEGALS just as long as they stay out of his tony Phoenix neighborhood and go to his team’s games, and the “Jewish Cowgirl” (not) Giffords have this strange, quirky mindset. Remember, as much as we love Gabby and cheered in her recovery, she did support all of the bills Ovomit demanded, including Ovomitcare and that 1.4 Billion thing over the past three years in aid to the Palestinians – also she openly stated in the debate with her then-Republican opponent that she had a “problem” with (Jewish) Settlements in Israel.
As said, must be something in the water there – Friedman is no different than the other fruits, nuts, and wackos from that town.
Lara Friedman is originally from Tucson, Arizona which is important to understand here.
Tucson, a quaint town in many ways, is very much like the Bersekely of Arizona – the “Jewish” community there is full of its wackos, fruits, and nuts. As much as we empathized, felt pity, and cheered her recovery, Gabby Giffords epitomizes Tucson “Jewry”. For years she referred to herself as being a “Jewish Cowgirl” when she was surely NOT a cowgirl and her adherence to the Jewish people and the security of Israel is also VERY questionable. In the debates with her Republican opponent months before the near-assassination, Giffords openly said she had a problem with (Jewish) Settlements and towed the Ovomit line, while the former Marine who opposed her, not Jewish, openly said we should have no problems whatsoever supporting Israel, period.
Giffords and Friedman are NOT the only strange ones coming from this town so near the borders that Tucson NOT Tombstone Liberals want to open up for ILLEGALs and Drug Cartel gangsters. John McCain’s Democrat opponent in that same election, a nonentity named Grossman, touted his open borders philosophies with his boasting of service in the Air Force (NOT in combat, but as a JAG lawyer – ho hum). I know of a REAL Jewish Cowboy who resides there and has lived his life out on the range and the rodeo, but nonetheless sure doesn’t have that Cowboy sense to him – proudly referring to himself as being a “A New York Democrat” and finding nothing wrong with Ovomit policies.
There are others too, from Tucson. The JINO “fat cat”businessman, born with a Silver Spoon in HIS ignorant mouth, the one and thankfully only Robert Sarver, the “OPEN BORDERS” owner of the Phoenix Suns, who wants Arizona innudated with Illegals and Cartels and has openly and quite vocally said so, yet himself lives in a gated community in one of Phoenix’s swanky neighborhoods, Paradise Valley, is another Tucson native. So is the (non-Jewish) Pima County Sheriff, the fat, obnoxious Clarence Dupnik, who openly opposed SB1070 and vowed NOT to implement it, even if it meant putting scores of Arizona citizens lives in jeopardy, and whose deputies recently riddled a Marine with scores of bullets in a very tragic mistake, but never seems to get a strong recall cry as the effective and courageous Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio does. Evidently Tucson residents are too stoned or too affluent to care that they have a fat numbskull who knows diddly squat about Law Enforcement but certainly knows how to pander the anti-Arizona, anti-America Democratic Party line as their sheriff.
As said, Giffords, Grossman, my Cowboy friend, Sarver, Dupnik and Lara Friedman epitomize Tucson – a town that morally equates Israel with Hamas, and unlike Tombstone, which by the way voted almost unaminously against Giffords in that last election, lost his Western Heritage and values a long time ago. As said, must be something in the water there – as the brave, old traditional Democrat and chip off his father, Will Rogers Junior chose to commit suicide there, suffering some terrible illnesses. He was a Cowboy, the same cannot be said for Giffords or her fellow JINO “Princess” and Paly sucker Lara Friedman.
The ideological left and the Arabs have much in common, they both create history and historical facts according to their ideological needs…”Sanity is not statistical.”
From Commentary: Contentions…by Jonathan Tobin
Not a Parody: Peace Now Shocked to Discover Arabs Don’t Want Peace
100(2) Arabian nights,and counting...The Arabs continue with their fantasies. It is part of their invented cultural narratives.
“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” Orwell 1984
All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”
Orwell 1984
FROM PMW: Rewriting history
“Rewriting history Palestinian history fabricated”