A Palestinian Minister of Genocide

Since assuming control over the Palestinian Authority (PA), the Hamas terror group has been making it abundantly clear that their strategic goal remains the destruction of Israel.

Rockets continue to be fired at the Jewish state on a near-daily basis, and Palestinian terrorists persist in their efforts to carry out suicide bombings and other attacks.

Now, if all that weren’t enough, the new Palestinian Foreign Minister has declared that his government’s policy objective will be to replace Israel with a Palestinian state stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Speaking at his first meeting with his subordinates at the Palestinian Foreign Ministry, Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar said that Israel should not be recognized as a state and that the PA’s aim is to establish a Palestinian state in place of Israel.

This is nothing less than a blatant call to mass murder, and it is time for the international community to stop ignoring Hamas’ lethal intentions. Al-Zahar’s rhetoric should not be dismissed as mere words, if only because Hamas has shown in the past that it is dedicated to killing as many innocents as possible.

Israel must take action as soon as possible to remove Hamas from power and topple the PA. Failure to do so will only result in still more unnecessary violence and bloodshed.

The Power of Prayer

Israelis yesterday received a miraculous, if somewhat frightening, reminder of just how much our lives are entirely in the hands of G-d.

Palestinian terrorists in northern Gaza continued their daily rocket assaults against southern Israel, firing a couple of Qassam rockets at the town of Sderot. One of the explosive projectiles struck a classroom at a yeshiva high school, but thankfully none of the students was inside at the time.

As a person who arrived on the scene told Arutz-7: "The students were on their way to the classroom after finishing morning prayers and the classroom was still locked. Some students were waiting outside, and the teacher was on his way up - and that's when all of a sudden the rocket crashed in, hitting the teacher's chair. The teacher was very emotional, seeing that it had crashed exactly where he would have been sitting minutes later."

One of the reasons why the teacher and some of the students were not yet there was because he had kept them after morning prayers for a few extra minutes to give them a schmooze – a short speech on a Torah-related subject.
"By miracle," a local woman told Arutz-7, "no one was hurt - but how long can we rely on these miracles, merely because of our leaders' foolish decisions enabling the terrorists to shoot at us? Today and Tuesday are market days here in Sderot, just two blocks away from the school, and the hesder yeshiva is two blocks to the other side - it could have landed anywhere and killed people. How long can this go on?"

Indeed – an excellent question. But an even better one is: why is this still going on? And the answer to that is really quite simple: because Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government has failed to take the necessary steps to stop it.

But for all of us watching this sorry series of events unfold, we should make sure not to overlook what this incident can teach us. After all, those students in Sderot yesterday were saved because they had been saying their prayers and learning G-d’s Torah.

However terrifying it may have been for them, for the rest of us it should serve as a timely reminder of the power of prayer – not only to change our lives, but to save them, too.

A Bit of British Humbug

Talk about good ol’ fashioned British hypocrisy.

Later this month, educators in the UK are planning to debate a proposal aimed at imposing an academic boycott on Israel because of its policies in the so-called “occupied territories”.

On May 27-29, the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) in England, Wales and Northern Ireland will convene to discuss this weighty subject.

But if the learned British instructors are truly concerned about issues such as expansionism, occupation and colonialism, they might consider looking a little closer to home.

After all, which country is it that refuses to yield sovereignty over Northern Ireland? Who is it that is stubbornly hanging on to control over Gibraltar? And who waged a bloody war to uphold their occupation of the Falkland Islands two decades ago?

And they want to preach to us?

All one can say, as a Dickens character might have put it, is: “Bah humbug.”