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In this mailing:
* Khaled Abu Toameh: For Some Arabs, Preventing Peace with Israel Is More Important Than Combating Coronavirus
* Lawrence A. Franklin: Natan Sharansky: A Hero for All Seasons


** For Some Arabs, Preventing Peace with Israel Is More Important Than Combating Coronavirus ([link removed])
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by Khaled Abu Toameh • May 10, 2021 at 5:00 am
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* The project sounds like the type of assistance that Jordanian women need, especially during this difficult period of the economic and health crises in their country.
* What particularly irritated the anti-normalization activists and groups in Jordan was that some of the Jordanian women appeared in a video praising the project and talking about how happy they were to join forces with their Israeli neighbors on the other side of the border.
* This Jordanian writer [Mohammed Sweidan] has taken it upon himself to be the spokesman for all women in his country. He claims to have some special knowledge of their actual intentions. Notably, he did not even bother to contact the Jordanian women to ask them about their attitude toward the joint project with the Israeli women.
* These [Arab] leaders and media have filled the Arab people with so much hate against Israel that participating in a positive, productive endeavor becomes a major crime.
* As long as such incitement against Israel in the Arab world continues, any talk about peace will be a pipe dream with hopes going up in smoke.

Instead of focusing their efforts on trying to find solutions to the severe medical crisis in the country, many Jordanians are busy condemning a meeting between Jordanian and Israeli women that took place in Wadi Arava, an area south of the Dead Sea Basin that forms part of the border between Israel and Jordan. Pictured: The Wadi Arava area on the Jordanian side. (Image source: Zairon/Wikimedia Commons)

Hatred for Israel (and Jews) in many Arab countries continues to take priority over economic, health and political problems. Some Arabs prefer to dedicate more time and energy to combating peace with Israel than to dealing with the deadly fallout of COVID-19 in their own backyards.

Jordan, an Arab country that signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, is no exception.

On March 31, Jordan reported 111 COVID-related deaths, the highest daily toll since the outbreak of the pandemic. The report came as some Jordanians took to the streets to protest the government's failed policies, especially in healthcare and the economy.

Instead of focusing their efforts on trying to find solutions to the severe medical crisis in the country, many Jordanians are busy condemning a meeting between Jordanian and Israeli women. These aggrieved Jordanians are dubbing the meeting an act of treason and calling for a commission of inquiry into the encounter.

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** Natan Sharansky: A Hero for All Seasons ([link removed])
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by Lawrence A. Franklin • May 10, 2021 at 4:00 am
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* Sharansky reasons that until there is a fundamental internal transformation of Palestinian Arab society that embraces democracy, there can be no realistic negotiations. He roundly condemns Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as a dictator and a terrorist. He views his successor Mahmoud Abbas as a pale and equally corrupt reflection of his predecessor. Sharansky is under no illusions about Palestinian leaders. He believes that they still are wedded to the goal of Israel's elimination. Sharansky underscores his point by quoting Soviet dissident and creator of the USSR's hydrogen bomb, Andrei Sakharov: "Never trust a government more than it trusts its own people."
* Sharansky comes down hard on the Iranian regime as ideologically the most dangerous of enemies, claiming that he is in agreement with prominent Iranian analysts such as, Uri Lubrani, the last Israeli unofficial ambassador to Iran; Dr. Bernard Lewis, the most accomplished western Islamic scholar, and Ron Dermer, the long-serving Israeli ambassador to the US. Sharansky has sharp words of condemnation for Barack Obama; he accuses the former US President of having abandoned Iran's dissidents by his refusal to offer even verbal support for anti-regime demonstrators during their nationwide protests in 2009.
* Sharansky... is a fierce critic of the "new" campus-based anti-Semitism, and catalogues several programs that Israeli and some American Jews have developed to lend courage to Jewish-American youths to defend, fight back, and celebrate their Jewish identity in the face of radical Jew-haters as well as self-hating American Jews who serve as a poisonous brew that eventually destroy both the institutions of democracy and the freedoms of individual liberty.

Natan Sharansky. (Image source: Ram Mendel/Wikimedia Commons)

Natan Sharansky's recent autobiography "Never Alone" is a testament to what a solitary soul can endure and then accomplish if he maintains a life of principled consistency. The book's first section recapitulates Sharansky's "refusenik" role in the USSR in defense of the human rights of Soviet Jews. This period also covers his nearly nine-year incarceration in the KGB's infamous prisons. Sharansky credits his unwavering faith in the G-d of the Jewish Bible, his awareness of his wife Avital's relentless efforts to rally global dignitaries and world Jewry to work for his release, and his mastery of mental chess matches to sustain hope for his ultimate liberation. In retrospect, Sharansky celebrates the improbable unity of Israeli Jews and the Jews of the Diaspora as the formula that forced the totalitarian Soviet empire to disgorge him to freedom.

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