Hamas Is Telling Us Their Plan. Why Don't We Understand? Anti-Semitism?

When Will Obama and the West Listen to Hamas?

by Khaled Abu Toameh
November 10, 2015 at 5:00 am

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6850/listen-to-hamas

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Comment

• What senior Hamas figure Musa Abu Marzouk and other Hamas leaders are saying is very clear: Even if a Palestinian state is established in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, Hamas and other Palestinians will continue to fight until Israel is completely destroyed.
• Hamas is openly stating that it will use any future Palestinian state as a launching pad to attack and eliminate Israel.
• Hamas is not a small opposition party in the Palestinian territories that can be dismissed as a minor player. Hamas is a large Islamist movement, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that controls the entire Gaza Strip with its population of 1.8 million Palestinians. Hamas, not much different from Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, has its own security forces, militias, weapons and government institutions.
• The Obama Administration and Western governments can talk as much as they like about the two-state solution. Even if President Abbas agrees to a Palestinian state, he will never be able to persuade Hamas, Islamic Jihad and many other Palestinians to recognize Israel's right to exist.
• Under the current circumstances, where Hamas and other Palestinians continue to dream about the destruction of Israel, any talk about a two-state solution is nothing but a joke.

As President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were talking about the two-state solution during their meeting in the White House yesterday, the Palestinian Hamas movement reiterated its intention to destroy Israel.
Hamas's announcement shows that the two-state solution is not a recipe for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The announcement also shows that all those who have been talking about a change in Hamas's position towards Israel continue to live in an illusion.
As the Obama-Netanyahu meeting was underway, senior Hamas figure Musa Abu Marzouk issued a statement in which he declared: "We will never negotiate with the Zionist entity and we will never recognize its right to exist. We will continue to resist the Zionist entity until it vanishes, whether they like it or not. The soldiers of the Qassam [Hamas's armed wing] were founded to liberate Palestine, even if some have recognized Israel. We want a state from the (Jordan) river to the [Mediterranean] sea."

As U.S. President Barack Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday (left), senior Hamas official Musa Abu Marzouk (at far right, holding rifle) reiterated his organization's commitment to eliminate Israel.

Abu Marzouk's remarks came in response to statements made by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas during a meeting with Egyptian journalists in Cairo on Sunday night.
Abbas was quoted as telling the Egyptian journalists that Hamas and Israel were conducting "direct negotiations" to establish a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and parts of the Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. Abbas claimed that ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi had offered to annex 1000 square kilometers of Sinai to the Gaza Strip – an offer he (Abbas) had categorically rejected.
Abu Marzouk's latest threats to eliminate Israel are not only directed against Abbas, but also towards President Obama and those in the international community who continue to support the idea of establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel. What he and other Hamas leaders are saying is very clear: Even if a Palestinian state is established in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, Hamas and other Palestinians will continue to fight until Israel is completely destroyed.
In other words, Hamas is openly stating that it will use any future Palestinian state as a launching pad to attack and eliminate Israel. But Hamas's message has obviously not reached the White House and other Western governments, where decision-makers continue to bury their heads in the sand, refusing to see or hear what some Palestinians are saying.
Hamas and many other Palestinians are completely opposed to a two-state solution: they believe that Israel has no right to exist -- period -- in this part of the world. The only solution they are prepared to accept is one that sees Israel wiped off the face of the earth.
Hamas is not a small opposition party in the Palestinian territories that could be dismissed as a minor player. Hamas is a large Islamist movement, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that controls the entire Gaza Strip with its population of 1.8 million Palestinians. Hamas has its own security forces, militias, weapons and government institutions.
Since its violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, Hamas and its political allies have turned the coastal area into a semi-independent Islamist emirate.
Since then, Hamas has used the Gaza Strip as a launching pad to attack Israel with tens of thousands of rockets and missiles. And Hamas leaders have repeatedly stated that their chief goal is to "liberate" not only the West Bank and east Jerusalem, but "all of Palestine." In short, Hamas wants to replace Israel with an Islamist empire where non-Muslims would be permitted to live as a minority.
Hamas considers all Jews as "settlers" and "colonialists" who live in "settlements" such as Beersheba, Rishon Lezion, Ashdod and Bat Yam. Hamas does not differentiate between a Jew living in Ma'aleh Adumim or Gush Etzion (on the West Bank) and Tel Aviv, Haifa and Ramat Gan. That is why the Hamas media and leaders refer to Beersheba and Ra'anana, well within the "pre-1967 borders," as "occupied" cities.
The Obama Administration and Western governments can talk as much as they like about the two-state solution. But so long as they refuse to listen to what Hamas and other Palestinians are saying, they will continue to engage in self-deception and hallucination. Even if President Abbas agrees to a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lines, he will never be able to persuade Hamas, Islamic Jihad and many other Palestinians to recognize Israel's right to exist.
Under the current circumstances, where Hamas and other Palestinians continue to dream about the destruction of Israel, any talk about a two-state solution is nothing but a joke.
The Obama Administration and the rest of the international community also need to understand that that the two-state solution has already been realized. In the end, the Palestinians got two states of their own: one in the Gaza Strip and another in the West Bank. The one in the Gaza Strip is run by folks are not much different from Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, while that in the West Bank is controlled by a president who has entered the 11^th year of his four-year-term in office and as such is not even seen by his people as a "rightful" leader. This is a reality that the world, including Israel, will have to live with for many years to come.
It is time for the world to stop listening only to President Abbas and Saeb Erekat, and start paying attention to what many other Palestinians such as Hamas are saying, day and night, regarding their commitment to destroy Israel.

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A History Lesson.Fed Tactics Used Are From 1900

Bernanke's Recession-Fighting Weapon Developed by 1900s Banker

Friday, 20 Dec 2013 07:17 AM

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The first weapon Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke deployed against the worst recession since World War II owes a singular debt to Paul M. Warburg, a banker in the 1900s who understood money markets more than any contributor to the Federal Reserve Act.
When President Woodrow Wilson signed the act on Dec. 23, 1913, its central purpose was to serve as a backstop to a financial system that had lurched from one crisis to the next in the preceding decades. The concept of backstop lending came from Warburg, a native of Germany whose writings reveal concern that he never got appropriate credit for his role.
Nearly 100 years later, his ideas were vindicated when Bernanke used the so-called discount window on Oct. 29, 2008, to provide banks with $111 billion in loans as short-term credit markets nearly froze in the wake of the Sept. 15 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. The Fed chairman also used emergency powers to support money markets, which Warburg had flagged as critical to financial-system liquidity.
Warburg “is the father of the discount window in the United States” and “the grandfather of the Federal Reserve,” said Michael Bordo, director of the Center for Monetary and Financial History at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. If his “plan had been followed, the Fed would have done a lot better in the 1920s, and the Great Depression might not have been so bad.”
Unusual Choice
Warburg, who served from 1914 to 1918 as one of the first Fed governors and the second vice chairman, was an unusual political choice for a foundational seat on America’s new central bank. He was an investment banker at Kuhn, Loeb & Co. when Congress was suspicious of financial power. He disliked the decentralized scheme the American political system devised for the Fed and fought to consolidate it. At the heart of his concern was the need for a centralized money market the Fed would support if a panic erupted.
The U.S. was still on a gold standard, and Warburg saw that one way to create flexibility in such a rigid currency system was for banks to be able to discount, or sell, short-term liabilities in exchange for money. Today, they routinely fund themselves with short-term commercial paper and repurchase agreements that allow them to use securities as collateral for short-term loans.
In the course of daily business, the central bank wouldn’t be an active player, simply a buyer of last resort if a bank couldn’t secure funding. The cost of direct loans from the Fed would be the discount rate, which banks would pay to access the discount window.
Warburg ‘Aghast’
During a January 1913 hearing on banking and currency reform before a House subcommittee, Warburg told its chairman, Carter Glass — who guided the Federal Reserve Act into law — that he was “aghast” at the conditions of U.S. money markets when he arrived in America.
“I saw money rates of 25 and 30 percent,” he told Glass. “There was then one of those discussions going on, as they have been going on ever since, as to what to do.”
Later in the hearing, he said he knew exactly what action should be taken.
“Neither the banks nor the central reserve itself would be safe without the introduction of commercial or banking paper as a means of exchange,” Warburg said. “The key, if you please, to the vaults of the central reserve is furnished” by short- term debts that banks could turn quickly into cash.
Opposed Ideas
Wilson and Glass opposed some of his ideas, with Glass even criticizing the notion that Warburg contributed anything to the act.
“Warburg did not draft a sentence of the bill,” Glass wrote to his life-long friend Robert Latham Owen in a letter that was found in an archive of Glass’s papers at the University of Virginia’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. Owen sponsored the act in the Senate.
Still, both Wilson and Glass insisted Warburg serve on and help navigate the central bank in its formative years. His expertise was broadly recognized at the time, even among the general public.
“Such appointments as yours and your colleagues must tend to restore confidence toward establishing the new financial system,” F.W. Kelsey, head of a Manhattan nursery company, wrote Warburg in a May 8 letter found in the Paul Moritz Warburg papers, manuscripts and archives of the Yale University Library in New Haven, Connecticut.
‘Highest Standing’
Marcus Marks, Manhattan borough president, called Warburg “the best equipped man in the country to take on the duties of this position” in a May 5 letter. William Sproule, president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, wrote on May 6 he had a “sense of refreshment” that “a professional banker of the highest standing” accepted the job.
After graduating from school in Hamburg at 18, Warburg began apprenticeships in various financial houses, including the British investment bank Samuel Montagu & Co. and his great- grandfather’s firm, M.M. Warburg & Co., founded in 1798. He came to the U.S. in 1902, following his marriage to Nina Loeb, daughter of the founder of Kuhn Loeb.
Warburg’s European experience in import-export financing and commercial trade in the money markets would define his approach to central banking. In his view, the financial system needed a centralized, secondary money market where banks could immediately raise funds by taking commercial paper and trade credits, known as bankers acceptances, and selling them. He called them “quick assets,” a term that reflected his sense of securities almost as fungible as cash itself.
Critical Lesson
A century later, Gary Gorton, a professor of management and finance at the Yale School of Management, wrote that one of the critical lessons from the 2008 financial turmoil was that short- term debt can serve as a form of private money.
“An important misunderstanding revealed by the crisis is that regulators and economists did not know what firms were banks or what debt was ‘money,’” he said in his 2012 book “Misunderstanding Financial Crises: Why We Don’t See Them Coming.” “They thought that banks were only the firms that had bank charters and that money was only in currency and demand deposits.”
As Gorton points out, investors can write checks against their money-market mutual funds, which hold commercial paper, as easily as they can against cash deposits in their bank accounts. The financial crisis was mainly a modern-day run on these forms of money as confidence in the firms or assets that sponsored them eroded, which is what caused Bernanke to support these markets with emergency facilities.
Fed Roots
The central bank “has rediscovered its roots, in the sense that the Fed was created to stabilize the financial system in times of panic,” Bernanke said at a Dec. 18 press conference explaining the contributions of his chairmanship, which ends Jan. 31. “And we did that, and we used tools that were analogous in spirit to what the central banks have done for many hundreds of years, but of course adapted to a modern financial system.”
Warburg’s papers at Yale show tireless effort to start the market for bankers acceptances, which were more secure than commercial paper because they were backed by a bank that had “accepted” or put its name on the short-term credit, enhancing its appeal in secondary markets.
He spent hours refining regulations, drafts in his notes show, and scolded Benjamin Strong, the first head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, for not being more excited about the market.
“Do not get into the most discouraging and disappointing attitude of saying that no business can be done by the Federal Reserve Banks when, as a matter of fact, I know it can be done, and if I were in charge in New York, I know I could buy millions of bank acceptances,” Warburg wrote to Strong on Feb. 17, 1915.
Unmistakable Fingerprint
However much Glass, Owen and others might have tried to minimize Warburg’s contribution to the act, the original document bears his unmistakable fingerprint in the preamble.
In addition to establishing regional reserve banks and furnishing an elastic currency, the third directive reads: “to afford means of rediscounting commercial paper.”
In his 1930 memoir, Warburg called Glass and others who took credit for the act “pleaders in their own cause.”
“The Reserve System is the product of the labors of many minds,” Warburg wrote. The development of America’s central bank “must be looked upon as a national monument, like the old cathedrals of Europe, which were the work of many generations and of many masters and are treasured as symbols of national achievement.”
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