Yesterday I received the following email from Daniel Pipes:
Please join me on a visit to Israel on March 7-15, 2012. Heritage Study Programs, a leading tour company, has asked me to lead a one -time only informative, enjoyable, and inexpensive week.
Our focus will be on my special interest – the nearly 20 percent of Israel’s population who are Muslim, often called Israeli Arabs. The trip will offer special insight into current problems: Are Israeli Arabs integrating or isolating themselves? Are they Palestinians? What is the role of Arab immigration to Israel? How does this growing population affect the long-term welfare and survival of the Jewish state?
Shin Bet calls the Israeli Arab population a “genuine long-range danger to the Jewish character and very existence of the State of Israel.” Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman questions its citizenship. I have called it Israel’s “existential danger.”
With current attention on other matters (Middle Eastern upheavals, Palestinian statehood, Turkish bellicosity, the Iranian nuclear buildup), this topic tends to get brushed aside. But when the other problems have been resolved, Israel must deal with its Muslim community.
Khaled Abu Toameh, the Jerusalem Post’s distinguished West Bank and Gaza correspondent, will co-lead with me an unprecedented first-hand exploration of this and related subjects.
The trip will include travels to key locations, informative meetings, and lively discussions. You will meet with Israeli-Arab leaders, academics and researchers, with intelligence, police, military officers, high government officials, policy makers and counterterrorism experts. We will participate in a conference at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center on Muslim attitudes toward Jerusalem.
I hope you will come with me to Tel Aviv, Haifa, the Galilee, and Jerusalem. You will visit some of Israel’s most renowned sites, including the Golan Heights, the Sea of Galilee, the Western Wall, and areas around the Temple Mount.
Neither tour nor mission, this intimate fact-finding expedition will challenge and change your understanding of Israel.
Let’s be clear. Here we have a fusion between a Zionist fundamentalist, Pipes, and a Palestinian journalist with the pro-settler Jerusalem Post, Abu Toameh, helping to “expose” the supposedly existential threat of Arabs inside Israel.
Abu Toameh was recently in Australia as a guest of the Zionist lobby.