Moroccan Poet: Arab World is Imperialist, 'Palestine' is Jewish

Outspoken poet angers Arab countrymen by provocatively quipping that Arabs 'are more Zionist than the Jews.'

By Ari Soffer

An outspoken Moroccan poet has angered many of her countrymen by accusing the Arab world of imperialism and defending the Jewish people's right to a homeland in Israel.

In an interview with Med Radio last week Malika Mezzane, who is an ethnic Amazigh (or Berber), challenged the official line in the Arab world, where tiny Israel is accused of being "expansionist" and where Zionism - the movementfor Jewish self-determination - is bizarrely equated with imperialism.

Asserting that it was in fact the Arab world which had pursued expansionist policies, Mezzane quipped that according to their own definition of the term, "Arabs are more Zionists than the Jews."

The Arab world, she said, believed that it was "God’s chosen people, and they have the right to extend their territory, at the expense of other nations."

Mezzane's own people, the Amazigh, are one of the indigenous non-Arabnations of northern Africa which who were conquered and subjugated by the invading Arab armies during the Muslim conquest in the seventh century.

Since then they have been subjected to persecution and periodic campaigns of cultural and physical ethnic-cleansing at the hands of Arab rulers in the region. In some cases, Amazigh calls for self-determination have been rejected by Arab states as somehow representative of "western imperialism" - a perverse inversion of the reality similarly employed by anti-Zionists against the Jewish state.

Further infuriating her listeners, Mezzane insisted that the Jews were justified in establishing "their state in Palestine, since it’s their homeland."

"We have never heard that Alaska or Australia was the homeland of the Jewish people. It’s the Arab people who exceeded their borders in order to establish the so-called Islamic Arab World, at the expense of the Jewish nation," said Malika Mezzane.

The poet's comments were decried as "provocative", with many ArabMoroccans taking to Facebook to denounce her views. She has previously caused controversy by voicing staunch support for the Kurds, another indigenous non-Arab nation fighting for its rights in the Middle East in the faceof hostility and concerted attacks by its Arab neighbors.

Since the so-called "Arab Spring" revolutions which weakened the existingArab regimes in north Africa, Amazigh activists have been more vocal in their demands for equal rights. Another Berber activist, author Boualem Sansal,provoked anger in his home country Algeria after visiting Israel to attend the Jerusalem Writers' Festival.

Senate Majority Leader: Hamas is Just as Bad as Islamic State

Senator Harry Reid says the failure to condemn Hamas as one would condemn the Islamic State is "stunning hypocrisy."

By Ben Ariel

In a recent speech, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) condemned Hamas and noted that it was no better than the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) group.

Reid’s speech to the Senate was made last Thursday but excerpts were published Sunday by JNS.

According to the report, Reid affirmed U.S. support for Israel, calling the failure to condemn Hamas as one would condemn the Islamic State group "stunning hypocrisy."

"Hamas and IS are both vicious, corrupt, hateful, evil groups. And both are extreme. Yet, for some reason, Hamas' brutality doesn’t elicit the same horror from the international community as ISIS. How can that be?" Reid wondered as he addressed the Senate.

He added that one of the few differences between Islamic State and Hamas is the latter's narrow focus on one single objective -- the destruction of Israel.

"Consider its actions over the past several months: Hamas raided its own limited supplies for housing and general infrastructure, intended to repair the destruction that occurred during the last conflict they initiated. But Hamas instead used the stolen materials to build tunnels to hide and infiltrate Israel -- infiltrating to kill, maim, kidnap and murder the innocent. These depraved agitators launched thousands of rockets into Israel, hoping to inflict death and destruction. Their rockets had no aiming capabilities -- they fired indiscriminately, not caring whether they hit a child, a family or anyone," he said.

Reid is not the first one to have compared IS to Hamas. In fact, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu did so recently during a meeting with visiting U.S. Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA).

At the time, Netanyahu said Israel was fighting the same war against Islamist terrorism as the US and other countries current working to combat the spread of the brutal Islamic State.

"We face the same Islamist network and we have to fight it together," Netanyahu stated. "Hamas is ISIS, ISIS is Hamas."

"You saw the gruesome beheading of James Foley. We see the gruesome murder and execution of three teenagers which Hamas has just admitted that they did. These are both branches of the same poisonous tree. The free world, the democracies have to stand together against this terrorism. That's the only way we'll roll them back. Ultimately that's the only way we'll defeat them.”

Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal later rejected Netanyahu’s comparison and said it was false, claiming Hamas is "not a violent religious group."

"This is a lie and a clear attempt to try to tie the issue with the U.S. war on terrorism," he said of Netanyahu's comments. "The truth is that the Palestinians are not terrorists - they're the victims of terrorism. Hamas aren't the terrorists but the Israelis are."

"We are not a religious violent group, we are fighting aggression in our land," Mashaal continued. "We are against the killing of innocent civilians and journalists."

Similar comments comparing Hamas and IS were recently made by none other than a leading Fatah party member, whose faction formed a unity government with Hamas.

In an interview with the Palestinian Authority's official TV station, Fatah Central Committee member Tawfiq Tirawi compared Hamas's methods of executing and brutalizing its political opponents in Gaza to the gruesome executions carried out by IS.

Bibi ... call this freeze now !

Zalmi Unsdorfer

Zalmi Unsdorfer is a Religious Zionist and Chairman of Likud-Herut UK. He advocates for Israel as a writer, TV & panel commentator. He supports Jewish resettlement in all of the Jewish homeland, Eretz Israel.

He regularly tweets @zalmiu

“ Citizens of Israel …

I may not be a religious man but I still feel it’s appropriate to give thanks to the Almighty for delivering us from the evil which has assailed our people over the last two months and for opening our eyes to the murderous plans of Hamas for a tunnel-led massacre of our southern families during the upcoming Rosh Hashana holiday.

The stunning success of our Iron Dome missile defence system prompted one terrorist leader to cry: “Their God is grabbing our rockets out of the sky!”

Well, if our enemies believe so strongly in our God, who am I not to?

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has lamented that there was no Iron Dome protection for the people of Gaza.

I say there was!

It was OUR Iron Dome which saved thousands of Gaza citizens. If Hamas rockets had reached their targets in our cities, our schools and our airport we would have been obliged to immediately flatten Gaza in the same way as Britain, America and Russia have carpet-bombed other parts of the world for a lot less than basic survival.

I would like to thank the American people and Congress for their partnership in our Iron Dome project and for the other support which is so essential to maintaining our qualitative edge over the enemies which surround us.

At the same time I am pained by the decision of the Obama administration to sign an eleven billion dollar arms deal with Qatar, which is the outspoken patron and paymaster of Hamas and host of its leader Khaled Mashaal. I believe the American people would not have approved such a deal if they knew the truth about Qatar. Even more painful was to find out that this record-breaking arms deal was signed just 6 weeks ago when rockets funded by the Emir of Qatar were being fired indiscriminately on our people.

But now to the main part of my message today.

Five years ago I stood at Bar Ilan university in Tel Aviv and declared my support for a Two-State Solution; a demilitarized Palestinian state living side-by-side with our Jewish state. I did so at great political risk, causing deep divisions within my Likud party which are still not healed. Since that time I have made further sacrifices including settlement freezes and, most painfully, by releasing hundreds of unrepentant killers of our people.

Ask me what I have received in return – and the answer is zero.

In truth it is less than zero. After all these concessions and the confidence-building measures requested by our American friends and members of the Quartet, I was rewarded with a peace treaty not between me and Mr Abbas, but between Mr Abbas and Hamas. This was followed by aggressive moves by Mr Abbas to force statehood on us through applications to UN bodies. And all that whilst his new allies were quietly tunnelling towards a bloody massacre of our citizens in the South.

We have watched as every inch of territory given away by us in the cause of peace has been planted with weapons for our annihilation. Now that I have witnessed the very real threat to Ben Gurion Airport from as far away as Gaza, I am simply not prepared to take the same risk in the West Bank, literally underneath the glidepath.

Einstein defined insanity as repeating the same process again and again and expecting a different result. We are not so insane as to risk the lives of millions of our citizens in the narrow coastal strip or compromise our air travel and vital commercial links by repeating the mistakes of South Lebanon and Gaza in the West Bank.

Therefore, in contrast to the many West Bank freezes I have imposed on our own people in the vain hope of genuine reciprocity, I am here to announce a different kind of freeze. This is a freeze on the Two State Solution.

Since my 2009 speech, I have watched the Arab world turned upside down.  Whilst the ‘Arab Spring’ unsettled 2/3rds of the Arab states in the region, its effects have loomed largest in our nearest neighbours. To the south we have seen Egypt go through two government overthrows. To the north we see the Syrian civil war enter its 4th year with a death toll of 180,000 and a refugee count now surpassing 3 million.

And that Syrian conflict has spawned the new phenomenon of ISIS which has destabilised Iraq and now seriously threatens our eastern neighbour Jordan.

Even before the Gaza rocket war it would have been a gross understatement to say that life in this neighbourhood is not the same as it was when I made that speech in 2009.

During the Gaza conflict we saw the true and genocidal face of Hamas, not just against us but to its own people in their open use of women and children as human shields and the sacrificing of their lives just to grab headlines. ISIS shows the same scant regard for the lives of innocents and now uses the most graphic forms of killing to grab even greater media attention.

Life will soon be returning to normal in Gaza. And normal means the reopening of UN schools whose Hamas staffers have never stopped teaching Jew-hatred to eternalise this conflict.

So I am freezing all talk and negotiation of a Two-State Solution for the next 12 months to give Mr Abbas the chance to prove he is not with Hamas and ISIS or just another puppet of Iran, Qatar or the Muslim Brotherhood.

He can make a start by eradicating all incitement from classrooms under his control and from TV programming.  Just 12 months without the poisoning of children’s minds is capable of making a major impact for the good. I want to see Mr Abbas cancel his pact with Hamas and withdraw his applications to UN bodies seeking imposed solutions as if we genuinely did not exist.  I want him to recognise our existence as a Jewish state in its biblical homeland. Most of all I want to see him take sides between the darkness of Hamas, Hezbullah and ISIS and the bright future that awaits a people committing itself to peace in word and deed.

Ladies and gentlemen, my 2009 speech was delivered at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv.

This time I have chosen to address you from the University of Ariel in Samaria, otherwise known as the West Bank. I do so to emphasise that this area is no less legal Israeli territory than Tel Aviv. Its legitimacy ranks two thousand years ahead of America’s claim to Indian Arizona or Britain’s claim to Celtic Cornwall.

Israel was our homeland centuries before the birth of Islam. And for as long as the Bible remains a bestseller, our title deed is secure.

Whilst this is and remains OUR land, we have a generous spirit and are prepared to share it in peace with our neighbours. Just as we opened the holy sites in Jerusalem to all the world’s faiths for the first time in centuries.

But we will share this land only with people who demonstrate we can trust them.

Such people will not have a charter to annihilate us. Such people will not be partners to those who rocket our cities.  Such people will not name their streets after terrorists. And above all, such people will recognise and respect us for who we are.

I hope to return to this podium in a year from now and be able to report progress in all these areas. If not I shall come anyway, just to revisit the students and remind them that this is our God-given land and that we shall never again be removed from it. 

Shana Tova.  May we be blessed with a more peaceful New Year.