02/16 Links Pt2: Is BDS a Bust?; Sweden's "Special Envoy" to NGOs to the Arab-Israeli conflict

From Ian:

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Is BDS a Bust?

In 2005, a coalition of organizations claiming to represent Palestinian civil society issued a call to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel. Since then, the BDS movement has acted, in church organizations, on college campuses, and elsewhere, to make Israel the equivalent of apartheid-era South Africa; a pariah state. BDS has been active in the U.S., and COMMENTARY has covered many of its individual wins and losses. But it is worth pausing every now and again to consider its overall effect on American public opinion.
At least as Gallup measures it, that effect has been zero.
In 2005, 69 percent of U.S. adults held a favorable view of Israel and 25% held an unfavorable view. Today, those numbers are 71 percent and 25 percent.
A particular target of BDS has been young people, and polling has for some time shown that young people view Israel less favorably than their elders. In the 18-29 age group 63 percent view Israel favorably and 33 percent view Israel unfavorably. But BDS has focused on college campuses. “Israeli apartheid week” is, unbelievably, a feature of the American college landscape, and divestment votes, more often than not BDS fails, took place at 50 schools from 2012-2016. It is therefore surprising that young people view Israel so favorably. In spite of the longstanding leftward lean of our campuses, college graduates and postgraduates remain on par with non-graduates in their favorable views of Israel.
This year’s results are so far similar to last year’s, though Gallup has not yet released its findings concerning how 18-29 year olds view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For U.S. adults in general, though the numbers—62 percent sympathize more with the Israelis, 19 percent more with the Palestinians—are considerably better for Israel than they were when the BDS campaign began.

Michael Lumish: This Week on Nothing Left

This week Michael Burd and Alan Freedman speak live with Michael Lumish in the San Francisco bay area about the latest developments in the United States; we then speak live with Alex Ryvchin from the ECAJ in Sydney about a range of issues.
Following this we hear from Israeli political activist May Golan on Israel's illegal immigration problem, and finish with Isi Leibler in Jerusalem.
3 min Editorial: Anti-Netanyahu petition
14 min Michael Lumish in USA
50 min Alex Ryvchin, ECAJ
1 hr 11 min May Golan, Israeli political activist [ also check NL facebook page terrific interview with Hanity on Fox News]
1 hr 32 min Isi Leibler, Jerusalem

NGO Monitor: Sweden's "Special Envoy" to NGOs to the Arab-Israeli conflict

On February 15, 2017, Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström announced that Sweden will be naming a “special envoy” to the Arab-Israeli conflict, tasked with working “full-time on the Israel-Palestine conflict,” responsible for establishing “contacts” in the region, and representing “Sweden in international talks.” According to Wallström, the sense that “hope can turn to despair” was repeated in her consultations “with almost 150 Israeli and Palestinian civil society organizations” during a December 2016 trip to the region.
Prior to this, during preparation for the January 15, 2017 Paris Peace conference, Sweden, “initiated and led” a “civil society component” as one of three areas of focus to further a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Emphasizing Sweden’s close relationship with highly politicized non-governmental organizations (NGOs), a diplomat stated that prior to the Paris conference, “We spoke to NGOs, associations, bloggers and other actors. Everyone apart from politicians. The results of our survey are by no means scientific, but I believe they reflect well the situation at hand…” (emphasis added).
This alliance with favored NGOs does not occur in a vacuum – for many years, Sweden has provided large-scale funding to many such groups.
In 2015, Sweden budgeted approximately $16.1 million to NGOs active in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Many of these NGOs lead and take part in campaigns that are inconsistent with Sweden’s foreign policy goals of promoting peace and a two-state framework in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Some groups have even used antisemitic rhetoric and have apparent links to terror organizations.
In addition, Sweden provides over $5 million, to the Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Secretariat (Secretariat) – a framework that supports NGOs that promote BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) and “lawfare” campaigns against Israel. (h/t Yenta Press)

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01/05 Links Pt2: For Peace in Palestine, Start from Scratch; Phillips: Narrative is where you find fiction

From Ian:

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UN worker sentenced to 7 months in jail for aiding Hamas

A UN engineer, who had worked in the Gaza Strip and was indicted in August for abusing his post in order to aid Hamas, was sentenced to seven months in jail on Wednesday after reaching a plea deal with an Israeli court.
The man, Wahid Abdullah al-Bursh, is an employee of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), which undertakes such projects as rehabilitating Gaza Strip homes damaged in warfare.
He has worked as a UNDP engineer since 2003 and was tasked with overseeing the demolition of homes and evacuating the waste.
According to a Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) investigation, Bursh was approached shortly after the 2014 Gaza war by Husseini Suleiman, a messenger for senior Hamas commander Abu Anas al-Andor, who asked him to use his position to help the terrorist organization.
He was found guilty of providing “services to an illegal organization without intent to cause harm”, by helping build the naval commando port in the northern Gaza Strip in April and May 2015 and using his authority to transfer to the site 300 tons of construction materials to Hamas.

For Peace in Palestine, Start from Scratch

The U.S. should stop opposing Israeli settlements and start diminishing Iranian power and Arab terrorism.
President Obama’s decision to stab Israel in the back at the United Nations could prove to be a blessing in disguise. Obama’s instinct for radical overreach has achieved a reductio ad absurdum of the whole U.S. framework toward the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and made it far more difficult for President-elect Trump to embrace that framework without wholesale revision. And that could give us something we don’t have now: a realistic path to peace in Palestine.
Current U.S. policy toward the Israeli–Palestinian conflict evolved in support of a goal — the two-state solution — set by President Bill Clinton and formally embraced by President George W. Bush. This goal has become completely disconnected from reality. That is not to say that a two-state solution is not the right ultimate goal; maybe it is. But given the circumstances of today’s Middle East, a negotiated settlement leading to a two-state solution is simply impossible. The combination of Israel’s international isolation, Palestinians’ steadfast commitment to incitement and terrorism, and Iranian ascendancy to regional hegemony and nuclear weapons means that Israel simply can’t risk the concessions that would be necessary for a final settlement of the conflict.
When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the territory immediately became a terrorist safe haven and a platform for missile-fired terrorism. If the same thing happens in the West Bank, which straddles Jerusalem on three sides and abuts most of Israel’s population, it will be the end of Israel. A two-state solution under current circumstances would be suicide. Peace in Palestine requires new circumstances. And the object of U.S. policy should be to create them. Hence, every element of U.S. policy, including the U.S. position on Israeli settlements, should be justifiable as part of a coherent and realistic strategy for getting from here to there.

Philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy revisits Jewish roots in new book

It’s a vague childhood memory, but the French celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy still remembers the first time he was bullied for being Jewish.
“Three idiots in a Paris play yard tell me: ‘You don’t get to have Christmas presents because you’re a dirty Jew and Jews killed Jesus.’ Maybe I cry a bit on the street later, but first I start hitting,” the 68-year-old Levy, who was born in what is today is Algeria but grew up in France, recalled in an interview earlier this month with JTA.
More than half a century later, Levy — a slender man with wavy, gray hair who is one of France’s most recognizable individuals — is still embracing his Jewish identity and confronting anti-Semites.
But since that childhood incident, Muslim extremists have taken anti-Semitism in France from schoolyard taunts to terrorism, with multiple deadly attacks on Jewish targets.
This “return of anti-Semitism,” Levy said, “perhaps” prompted him to pen one of his most Jewish books ever, “The Genius of Judaism.” The English-language translation will be released next month in the United States, and Levy will do a Q&A (with Charlie Rose) at the 92nd Street Y in New York on January 11.
In the book Levy, a non-observant Jew, traces the Jews’ “misunderstanding with the nations” to their definition as a “chosen people.”

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11/15 Links Pt1: Fatah official: Trump’s “true face” – “Zionist and racist”; The West Must Stop Enabling Palestinian Lies and Hate

From Ian:

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PMW: Fatah official: Trump’s “true face” – “Zionist and racist”

Following the election of Donald Trump as the next US president, Palestinian leaders and others have reacted to the choice of the American people and voiced their opinions and expectations of Trump.
Deputy Secretary of the Fatah Central Committee Jibril Rajoub commented on Trump's "true" nature, categorizing him as a "Zionist and racist":
"Regarding [US President-elect Donald] Trump, I think that even before he won, he revealed his true face, Zionist and racist, supporting and adopting the Israeli right-wing and racist policy. In my opinion, his predecessor [US President Barack Obama] is not better than him, even though at the beginning he tried to present himself in a different way."
[Al-Mayadeen TV (Lebanon), Nov. 11, 2016]
The PA ambassador to the UN "warned Trump" against carrying out his campaign promise to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, considering it an "aggression" and "attack":
"Palestinian Ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour said that if [US] President-elect Donald Trump decides to implement his promise to transfer the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the Palestinians 'will make life miserable' for the US at the UN institutions. 'If they attack us by transferring the embassy to Jerusalem, that will constitute a violation of a [UN] Security Council resolution, and [UN] General Assembly Resolution 181 (i.e., the UN Partition Plan), which was drafted by the US. A step such as this would mean a revelation of aggression towards us..."
[Amad, independent Palestinian news agency, Nov. 13, 2016, emphasis added]

NGO Monitor: The European-Funded NGO PFLP Network

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is a terrorist organization designated as such by the US, EU, Canada, and Israel. The PFLP is involved in suicide bombings, hijackings, and assassinations, among other terrorist activities targeting civilians.
Many European countries fund a network of organizations, some of which are directly affiliated with the PFLP, and others with a substantial presence of employees and officials linked to the PFLP. The non-governmental organizations (NGOs) include Addameer, Al-Haq, Alternative Information Center (AIC), Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCI-P), Health Work Committee (HWC), Stop the Wall, Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), and the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC).
The NGO ties to the PFLP range from establishment and operation of NGOs by the PFLP itself to NGO officials and staffers being convicted of terrorism charges by Israeli courts. Some of these individuals have been denied entry and exit visas by Israeli (and Jordanian) authorities due to security concerns. A significant number of these NGO officials hold multiple positions in various organizations, indicating the close connections and relationships between these groups.
Donors to the NGOs include the EU, the governments of Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Norway, Ireland, UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France, and Switzerland, and the United Nations. Continued funding raises serious questions about due diligence and evaluation on the part of the governments and the UN, as well as compliance with domestic and international laws.
One such example is the NGO Addameer, which is funded by Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and others. Addameer campaigns in support of Palestinians convicted of security offenses. This agenda should have demanded close scrutiny and due diligence before any grants were provided.

JCPA: Incentivizing Terrorism: Palestinian Authority Allocations to Terrorists and their Families

The PA maintains longstanding legislation and payments to subsidize terrorists and their families. This amounts to an officially sanctioned PA government incentive system to kill Israelis. When I learned of this in November 2015, I was quite shocked. I proceeded to raise the issue with organized American Jewish community leaders and Israeli policymakers, and was told “everybody knows.” Disconcerted by my own lack of knowledge, I canvassed numerous American political leaders who, without exception, were unaware of the PA legislation/budget. The few leaders who were aware that the PA directly pays terrorists thought that the funding was only $5-$6 million; they were shocked to learn that according to the official PA budget online, it is $300 million for 2016.
Last year, the prevailing opinion was that the wave of knifers against Israelis consisted of young and disaffected “lone wolves.” As I examined the issue more closely, I realized that the “incitement” is much more than just an errant cleric or wayward school board, but rather is an institutional campaign of violence against Israel, coordinated, and funded by the PA themselves.This “struggle” or war is endorsed by the Palestinian leadership, as evidenced by their 2004 legislation specifying, “The prisoners and released prisoners are a fighting sector and integral part of the fabric of Arab Palestinian society.” PA budget line items are earmarked for funding prisoners, released prisoners, and families of “martyrs.”

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B'Tselem continues its dishonesty in attacking the IDF

B'Tselem was always an anomaly among human rights NGOs.

Unlike HRW, Amnesty, Oxfam, DCI-P and others, B'Tselem doesn't lie outright. It grounds its opinions on some semblance of reality, although it shares the same problem that the other NGOs have in that it decides on its anti-Israel opinions before it starts its investigations and skews the results to fit its foregone conclusion.

B'Tselem just released a major new report, called "Whitewash Protocol: The So-Called Investigation of Operation Protective Edge." It makes a number of major charges.

One is that the Military Advocate General of the IDF faces an inherent conflict of interest:

The MAG – who is in charge of investigations within the military – is faced with an inherent conflict of interests when it comes to the investigation of these acts. On the one hand, he was responsible for providing the military with legal counsel before the fighting, worked closely with military personnel on the ground throughout the fighting and signed off on their policies. On the other hand, he is now tasked with deciding what cases merit an investigation and what measures will be taken upon its completion. In cases in which suspected breaches of law relate to orders he personally approved, the MAG would have to order an investigation of acts he is responsible for, and, should senior officers be investigated, an investigation against himself, or his direct subordinates.

I would argue that this is in fact not true. The MAG sets the policy that the IDF must adhere to, and the officers and soldiers are then tasked with adhering to the policy. It is not unreasonable for the entity that creates the policy to be the one to audit the actions of the army against that same policy. (The command structure of the MAG is completely independent of the rest of the IDF.)

B'Tselem argues that the MAG was asked specific questions during Operation Protective Edge about activities that the MAG would later have to decide on the legality of the actual proposed operation, and therefore it would be a conflict of interest for the MAG to investigate an issue if the soldiers followed its specific advice in a certain case. However, the MAG is not tasked with deciding whether IDF policies adhere to international law, but whether its actions do. If the MAG was tasked to investigate the legality of the policies themselves, yes, that would be a conflict of interest.

The bizarre thing is that after making the accusations of conflict of interest, B'Tselem sort of agrees that it has no proof for this charge, in a section that few people will actually read:

Since in any case the investigations carried out by the MAG Corps do not address policy or directives, the MAG’s conflict of interest with respect to his involvement in these issues remains theoretical. However, a conflict of interest may arise if there is a suspected IHL violation in a case that was defined as “exceptional”, and if the MAG or his representatives were involved in approving it. B’Tselem has no information as to whether there are any such cases.

So B'Tselem is accusing MAG of impropriety and a conflict of interest, but only on a theoretical level.

How devastating!

Another of B'Tselem's major issues is that the IDF is violating the international humanitarian law of proportionality. Yet it devises an entirely new definition of the concept:

The MAG’s conclusion that all the attacks he examined were lawful in that those responsible for them could disregard the harsh outcomes of dozens of other attacks that took place during the fighting has a far reaching implication that applies to all strikes carried out during the operation: It absolves every level of officials involved in the attacks – from the prime minister, through the MAG himself through to the soldiers who ultimately fired – of the duty to do everything in their power to minimize harm to civilians. In fact, the MAG sets the bar very low in terms of what is required of those responsible for the attacks – including senior military officers and the MAG (who are not under investigation in any case) – by doing no more than examining what they knew in practice, while entirely disregarding the question of what they should have known, including the obligation to learn from their own experience.

Consequently, the MAG’s determination that the attacks he examined did, in fact, meet the proportionality requirement is also cast into doubt. This principle is based on balancing the assessment by those responsible as to the anticipated military advantage against their assessment as to the anticipated harm to civilians. Yet when the projection as to harm is made while knowingly disregarding the result of nearly identical strikes carried out in the days prior to the making of the assessment, namely that dropping a bomb in the middle of a residential neighborhood could result in many more civilian deaths than anticipated; that the warnings the military gives are not always efficient and that the intelligence information is sometimes incomplete or inaccurate – then their assessments of anticipated harm to civilians become hollow and worthless.

This is not what international law requires. The military commander, in the heat of the battle, makes the decision based on the information he or she has available to him or her at the time. B'Tselem is demanding that the commander to also anticipate what he doesn't know!

If military intelligence says that a building is empty or almost empty, that is a major factor that the commander has in making decisions. It cannot be otherwise in a battle. The fact that sometimes the intelligence was wrong is not a reason to mistrust intelligence which is objectively pretty accurate most of the time. Even B'Tselem's own analysis of the people killed in buildings during the war shows that in nearly all the cases of many casualties, there was a valid military target inside. That's pretty good intel!

To demand that a military commander second guess his intelligence reports is beyond absurd. There was not a pattern of mistakes, as B'Tselem implies. There were some, and there will be some in any war.

Again, B'Tselem shows a tiny bit of honesty:

Like any other legal rule, IHL is also up for interpretation. Interpretation is also obviously influenced by the worldview of the person offering it, including the MAG, yet as longs [sic] as it is reasonable and reflects the purpose of the law it is considered legitimate.

But then it goes beyond international law and even morality into its own universe:

However, an interpretation whereby such extreme harm to civilians (as was seen in Operation Protective Edge) is lawful and is not considered “excessive” – as the MAG argues – is unreasonable, legally wrong, and founded on a morally repugnant worldview.

One only has to read the MAG reports to see that calling their worldview "morally repugnant" is itself morally repugnant. The MAG spends thousands of hours looking at individual cases, prioritizing the ones where there were the highest number of casualties. It finds, based on actual research, that in most cases the actions of the IDF were legal. B'Tselem wants to ignore the specific cases - because it has no evidence to contradict any one of them - and instead does some hand-waving and spews out "But look at how many people died! It must be illegal, even if we can't show why!"

Ironically, B'Tselem's own statistics prove that the IDF targeted terrorists and show that most of the civilians who were killed lost their lives because of Hamas' human shield policy, not Israel's disregarding international law.

B'Tselem pretends to be honest - and compared to HRW and  Amnesty, it is - but in the end, it still bases its analysis on bias, not on facts.

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07/21 Links Pt2: Will anti-Israel academic boycotters now also boycott Turkish universities?; The day I met Islamophobia

From Ian:

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David Collier: The day I met Islamophobia

It was the terror attack in Nice that finally made me realise what real Islamophobia is. It is the fear of silence that Islamism generates within society. Why does our ‘free press’ refuse to call a spade a spade when it comes to Islamic terror? Islamophobia.
The word is incorrectly being applied as a cover for Islamic extremism, through which any action, regardless of how violent, cannot be labelled as being related to Islam. Islam cannot have a problem. If we mention it, we become Islamophobic, we become targets for public rejection, or retribution. Who would want to place themselves in that situation?
The Muslim children at schools who are wearing a more conservative dress code because others in the school began to do so are Islamophobic. The victim of FGM or honour violence who cower in silence in fear of further action from a family member, they are Islamophobic too. The Israeli who cannot identify as Israeli at university, the Jew who will not publicly wear a Kippa, all Islamophobes.
Our teachers, our local politicians, our unions, our universities, they all suffer from Islamophobia. The woman in Nice is Islamophobic, not because she is biased against Muslims, but because the right to air her opinions has clearly been stifled through the effect of radical Islamic threats and violence.
If you cannot stand up and suggest there are deep rooted issue within Islam that need reform, if you cannot stand by those like Quilliam who seek that reform, if you cannot directly state the connection between the terror attack and Islam, then you too are suffering from Islamophobia.

NGO Monitor: NGO Influence on the House of Lords "Library Note" (withdrawn) on Palestinian Children

In July 2016, the UK House of Lords Library posted a briefing paper: “Living Conditions, Health and Wellbeing of Palestinian Children,” which was “withdrawn” without explanation on July 19, but is available on unofficial websites. The authors present a narrative of Palestinian suffering as a result of Israeli security policies, without examining the means available to protect Israeli civilians from Gaza-launched rocket barrages and terrorist attacks. In addition, the role that Palestinian violence, corruption, and mismanagement contribute to the wellbeing of Palestinian children is ignored, as is the widespread exploitation of children (child soldiers) for attacks against Israelis.
This narrative reflects an ongoing, multiyear political campaign in which political advocacy NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are central participants. The objective is to demonize Israel by alleging abuse of Palestinian children.
The withdrawn House of Lords library note promoting this agenda is a prime example, relying heavily on publications from UN agencies and media platforms that largely cite NGOs to make their claims. These NGOs are highly politicized and biased, lack credibility, and suffer from basic and documented methodological flaws.
For example, the note repeats the entirely unverified allegation of Defence for Children International- Palestine Section (DCI-PS) that “detained children were subject to physical violence” and “interrogators used position abuse, threats, and isolation to coerce confessions.”

Commemorating the 40th anniversary of Israel's July 1976 Raid on Entebbe: The State of Israel ensures that "Never Again" remains a reality

Seventy years ago, in the wake of the Holocaust, the Jewish people took a vow: Never Again!
After the Nazis murdered six million Jews, we came to recognize that we only have ourselves to rely upon for our defense. In today's tumultuous world, the sole guarantor of Jewish safety is a strong Israeli military. Jews around the world facing mortal danger can count on the State of Israel to protect them.
This year commemorates the 40th anniversary of the July 1976 Raid on Entebbe, when Israel demonstrated what Never Again really means. After an Air France plane with about 300 passengers traveling from Israel to France was hijacked by terrorists and brought to Uganda, the Israeli and Jewish passengers went through a Nazi-like selection process and were kept as hostages while the non-Jews were set free to return to Paris.
The terrorists declared that they would kill all the hostages if their demand for the release of 53 international terrorists, held in Israel and other countries, was not met. Yet it was only the State of Israel that chose to take action and save the Jewish captives. Israel refused to accept the execution of Jews by the terrorists, and in a daring and carefully planned mission, Israeli forces used four American Hercules C-130 cargo planes, travelled 2,400 miles and rescued the hostages. One IDF officer, Lieutenant Colonel Yoni Netanyahu, brother of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and three hostages were killed. More than 100 were saved.
But this is not the only time in recent history that only the people of Israel were willing to put their own lives in harm's way to protect their brothers and sisters in other parts of the world. After a lethal pogrom in Yemen in 1947 after the U.N. vote to partition the British Mandate of Palestine, Israel secretly airlifted 45,000 Yemenite Jews to safety in Israel with Operation Magic Carpet. And again with Operation Solomon in 1991, the IDF airlifted 14,500 Ethiopian Jews out of harm's way in Africa to Israel. With these incredible rescue missions, Israel has made it clear that it will do whatever it takes to protect global Jewry.

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Fatah celebrates the release of a terrorist

Fatah's Facebook page is celebrating Fawaz Fayez being released from Israeli prison after a fifteen year prison sentence.

Which photo did they choose to emphasize the essence of Mr. Fayez?

This one, of course:

I don't know what he was convicted. But I do see from this photo that the gun is the focal point of the announcement celebrating his release.

NGOs like Amnesty and DCI-P like to tell the West that Israel does not follow due process, that Israel is wantonly imprisoning innocent people.

But from the Palestinian perspective, the prisoners who are heroes are not famous because of their innocence but because of their guilt. The fame of the prisoner is directly proportional to the number of Jews he killed or injured.

Now, consider that releasing prisoners is one of the "red lines" that Abbas insists on in any peace deal. He is not demanding their release because they were unjustly imprisoned. He wants their release because the murderers and wannabe murderers are the rock stars of the Palestinian universe and are wanted as the builders of their desired state.

In a society where warlords are the heroes and murderers are celebrated, expecting a lasting peace is a pipe-dream.

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06/18 Links: What Obama Actually Thinks About Radical Islam; Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Bold, Brave, and Right

From Ian:

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Jeffrey Goldberg: What Obama Actually Thinks About Radical Islam

It is not only Obama’s seven-year war against jihadist organizations that calls into question Trump’s claim that he is working to advance the interests of ISIS (or, to put it another way, if Obama is indeed an ISIS agent, he’s doing a very bad job of it). It is also his publicly and frequently articulated demand, made of all Muslims, to fight harder against those who refract their faith through the prism of arid and merciless textual literalism. “There is ... the need for Islam as a whole to challenge that interpretation of Islam, to isolate it, and to undergo a vigorous discussion within their community about how Islam works as part of a peaceful, modern society,” Obama told me.
He immediately pivoted from this statement, though, by addressing Donald Trump—not by name, but his target was obvious. “I do not persuade peaceful, tolerant Muslims to engage in that debate,” he said, “if I’m not sensitive to their concern that they are being tagged with a broad brush.”
This represents the core of Obama’s anti-Trump argument. John Brennan, the CIA director, described to me the tightrope Obama walks on Muslim extremism this way: “The goal is not to force a Huntington template onto this conflict.” Brennan was referring to the political scientist Samuel Huntington, who posited the existence of a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West.
The fundamental difference between Obama and Trump on issues related to Islamist extremism (apart from the obvious, such as that, unlike Trump, Obama a) has killed Islamist terrorists; b) regularly studies the problem and allows himself to be briefed by serious people about the problem; and c) is not racist or temperamentally unsuitable for national leadership) is that Trump apparently believes that two civilizations are in conflict. Obama believes that the clash is taking place within a single civilization, and that Americans are sometimes collateral damage in this fight between Muslim modernizers and Muslim fundamentalists.

Bold, Brave, and Right

Ayaan Hirsi Ali defends—and embodies—the American Idea.
Perhaps we should put less stock in politically correct Islamic exegesis and listen instead to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She spent her formative years living under Sharia in Africa and the Middle East, where she joined the Muslim Brotherhood. As is the custom in many such locales, she was subjected to female genital mutilation. Rather than submit to an arranged marriage in Canada, Ali escaped to the Netherlands, where she applied for political asylum. She won a seat in the Dutch parliament. In effect, she reasoned her way out of the Islamic-supremacist ideology once she arrived in the West by comparing the teachings of the core Islamic texts to those of the Western canon, which she found far superior.
Today, Ali lives under the threat of death from her former coreligionists. She is protected by around-the-clock security. For her unwillingness to accept a Western progressive’s distorted vision of Islam, she is censured and often censored. It must baffle Ali that, even as she speaks in defense of Western civilization, her fellow Westerners often seem to reject the principle of free speech.
I had the privilege of interviewing Ali prior to the Burke gala. She told me that she doesn’t wish to be treated as a hero. Speaking the truth, she said, ought to be the norm rather than the exception. She was troubled by the West’s lack of confidence in its own ideas. Free expression, she said, is the great deterrent to the global jihad.
In her devotion to classical liberal ideals and her willingness to die in defense of them, Ali is in many ways more American than those who were born here. She sought to become an American citizen because she studied intently and embraced wholeheartedly the American Idea. America is more than a landmass; it is an exceptional belief system that enables human flourishing. Islamic supremacism is not only incompatible with America but also seeks its destruction.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s life is a testament to the notion that ideas matter, and great ideas are worth defending. If America is to remain the last, best hope on Earth, we must heed her words.

Brendan O’Neill: Orlando has exposed the poison of identity politics

This discomfort with the idea that the massacre was both homophobic and an attack on humanity is captured again and again in the strange and bitter post-Orlando commentary. A British journalist slams those ‘portraying the massacre as an attack on humanity’. A writer for the academic magazine the Conversation spells it out even more clearly. He says the 49 dead should be remembered as ‘queer lives’ rather than ‘“human” lives’ (those are his quote marks around human). We must ‘reiterate the queerness of our dead brothers and sisters’, he says, and refuse to allow them to be talked about as ‘disembodied, undifferentiated and abstract “human” lives’. Read that again. He is saying we must actively, consciously, avoid referring to the victims as humans – or ‘humans’, to use his preferred punctuation – and just refer to them as ‘queers’. This is ugly. A few decades back, if gay people were killed you might expect homophobes to say, ‘They were only queer, not real humans’; now, alarmingly, and in a sign of how depraved identity politics has become, it is supposedly pro-gay people who say this, who effectively say: ‘Remember them not as people but as queers.’
The end result – the end result of all identity politics – is that people are dehumanised. They are reduced from complex beings to symbols; from messy, brilliant members of the human family that other humans can relate to and empathise with, despite being different, to mere identities, mere characteristics, mere sexual preferences, mere genders, mere skin colours. I would say that the victims of Orlando have suffered a double dehumanisation. First they were dehumanised by Omar Mateen, who clearly viewed them as less than human, as ‘faggots’, deserving of nothing more than violent death. And now they are dehumanised by the identity-politics narrative, which explicitly demands that we siphon them off from ‘generalised’ discussions of humanity and discuss them as ‘queer lives’ rather than as ‘human lives’. In a more PC, less apocalyptic, violence-free way, the mainstream purveyors of the politics of identity are repeating Mateen’s dehumanisation of these 49 people; they echo his foul belief that these people were queer first and human second.
The post-Orlando discussion should be of concern to anyone who considers himself a humanist. For it has confirmed the entrenchment of the politics of identity, and exposed how thoroughly it has usurped, or perhaps replaced, the older, more progressive politics of human solidarity. It shows that there is no escape from the identities we’re branded with. You are ‘born this way’, and you die this way, and you will be remembered this way: as an identity rather than a human. We must challenge this. We must insist that the Orlando massacre, this slaughter of gay people, was an outrage against humanity. And we must make the case that what we have in common with the people who were murdered in that nightclub – a desire for freedom; a shared humanity; a capacity for autonomy and empathy – outweighs every single difference between us that is currently being cynically talked up by a media and political set in thrall to the corrosive politics of identity. Those 49 people were humans first, and every human should rage against their destruction.

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04/26 Links Pt2: The Anti-Israel Money Trail; Yet another anti-Semitic UK Labour MP; Obama's view of reality

From Ian:

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Bret Stephens (WSJ): The Anti-Israel Money Trail

SJP’s self-declared goal is to end Israel’s “occupation and colonization of all Arab lands” while “promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.” That’s another way of saying destroying the Jewish state.
Yet as prominent as SJP and the wider BDS movement have become, less is known about the sources of their funding. That changed last week after testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee by Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Mr. Schanzer, a former Treasury Department official and terrorism-finance expert, notes in his testimony that a prominent backer of SJP and like-minded groups is an organization called American Muslims for Palestine, based in Palos Hills, Ill., and led by UC Berkeley lecturer Hatem Bazian, who also happens to be one of SJP’s founders. AMP claimed to have spent $100,000 on anti-Israel campus activities in 2014, including to SJP. An AMP conference that year at a Chicago Hyatt invited participants to “come and navigate the fine line between legal activism and material support for terrorism.”
FDD discovered that many of AMP’s leading members were previously active in some dubious former charities. The most prominent, the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation For Relief and Development, was shut down in 2001 by the federal government for providing millions in funds to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas; five Holy Land officials eventually were convicted to prison terms and two others fled the country.
Today, AMP’s leaders include at least three Holy Land alumni. One of them is Milwaukee furniture salesman Salah Sarsour, who last year told Al Jazeera that an AMP conference he chaired “aims to keep up with and support the Palestinian people’s continuous intifada.”

Obama's view of reality

Truth be told, Obama is living in a movie we all want a part in. In this movie of his everyone is the good guy, everyone loves one another, and most importantly everyone has really good health insurance. Obama's reality is precisely like the health insurance reforms he forced on Americans: In theory everything is wonderful, but in real life it's not all that great. Maybe this is why 83 senators asked to increase defense aid to Israel -- because the world isn't becoming a safer place, even if Attila the Hun isn't around anymore.
Obama has a tendency to build high hopes. Remember the hullabaloo over his Cairo speech? Remember what happened afterward? It's possible that Obama's words from Hannover on Monday managed to snap even Hosni Mubarak to his feet. Over 80 million Egyptians truly can't recall such tranquility.
The truth is that Obama is a president with exceptional capabilities. He has even managed to jar the mythically unflappable Brits. The American president's intervention in the country's internal politics, by calling on British citizens to vote against leaving the EU, has not only incensed the Brits but according to polls has increased the number of those who favor such an exit.
Some 400,000 Syrians have been slaughtered in their own country. Not since the Second World War has Europe been flooded with so many refugees and migrants. Also not since that war has the radical right in Europe posed such a challenge. The threat of terror has never been as tangible as the threat posed by Islamic State today. And the stagnation presently threatening European markets has never been worse.
But not to worry, although we may be on the precipice of the abyss in many places across the globe, next year, heaven forbid, we could take that large step forward -- among other things, because of Obama's legacy.

Don’t Protect Terror Sponsors

It is true that other countries might respond in kind to the United States, though most respectable countries would have far more to lose than gain from such actions, and the United States can afford to ignore less than respectable countries, think the Zimbabwes, Venezuelas, and North Koreas of the world. At the same time, it is worth considering the opposite: What is the cost of not holding to account those who perpetrated or facilitated an attack in the heart of New York City?
This was a conundrum at the heart of “Sovereignty Solution,” a book co-authored by Anna Simons, Joe McGraw, and Duane Lauchengco. They proposed generally that governments should be responsible for their citizens and note that sovereignty is both an honor and a responsibility. When a citizen of a country perpetrates an attack, then that country has a choice: shield its citizen or hold them to account. If a Belgian citizen sought to strike at the United States, Brussels would likely cooperate with the United States to bring that person to justice, even waiving diplomatic immunity if need be. When Iranian or Saudi elements sponsor terrorism, Tehran and Riyadh should have the same choice: Join with the United States to bring the perpetrators to account or shield them. If the latter, then the government of the country should assume responsibility. Sovereignty Solution is, of course, far more complicated but it really has been one of the most insightful and provocative books on statecraft of the decade
In the Supreme Court victory for victims of terrorism and their families over the Islamic Republic of Iran, the court deferred to Congress. Perhaps Congress and, more broadly, the White House should then work more to protect and advocate for American victims of terror rather than for those who shield the terrorists. If a country does not want to risk the consequences of its citizens attacking the United States, then it should damned sure put mechanisms in place to make sure that the money is expends on radicalism isn’t used for that purpose and that it doesn’t distribute diplomatic passports without recognition of the consequence of their recipients engaging in an act of war.
The United States should not treat Saudi Arabia unfairly, but if Saudi Arabia truly did wish to be an ally, it would recognize that it is their responsibility to bring to justice those of its employees or civil servants who contributed materially or in services to that fateful day.

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03/31 Links Pt2: BDS Groups Encourage Congress to Curb Aid to Israel; The Ongoing Failure Of Global Journalism

From Ian:

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NGO Monitor: BDS Groups Encourage Congress to Curb Aid to Israel

On February 17, 2016, U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy and 10 members of Congress sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, advising him to open an investigation into “gross violations of human rights” in Israel and Egypt. The lawmakers cited Amnesty International “and other human rights organizations” in suggesting that Israel has carried out “extrajudicial killings” of Palestinian terrorists. Secretary Kerry was asked to determine if these killings would restrict military assistance to Israel, as per the Leahy Law. While the small number of signatories reflects the widespread rejection of this false claim in Congress, the media impact is significant.
Anti-Israel groups who collaborated on the letter
Multiple anti-Israel organizations contributed to the letter. NGOs involved in this campaign are involved in anti-Israel BDS (boycotts, divestment, sanctions), demonization and lawfare activities. As a result of their strong political biases and their methodological errors, these groups are not accurate sources of information.
- Amnesty International– Amnesty regularly publishes methodologically flawed, one-sided reports condemning Israel and accusing it of human rights violations.
- Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)- JVP seeks to drive a “wedge” in the Jewish community over support for Israel.
- American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)- AFSC is involved in BDS campaigns on campuses and churches in the United States
- National Lawyers Guild– National Lawyers Guild, a Marxist organization, engages in anti-Israel “lawfare,”
Involvement of members of Congress in recent anti-Israel activities
- Nine of the signatories of this letter also signatories of a June 2015 letter to Secretary Kerry, claiming that Israel tortures Palestinian children during detention. The 2015 letter was organized by AFSC and Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-P).
Funding
- Eight out of the signatories receive funding from JStreetPAC, designed to help elect politicians sympathetic towards JStreet’s goals. (h/t Yenta Press)

Prize to ‘nonviolent’ wife of terrorist will not be rescinded

The British-based foundation that awarded a Palestinian Authority schoolteacher a $1 million prize for teaching nonviolence will not change its decision, despite revelations that the woman's husband participated in a horrific terror attack that murdered at least six Jews, reports the Associated Press.
The Varkey Foundation awarded Hanan al-Hroub of El Bireh its Global Teacher Prize two weeks ago, in a ceremony in Dubai. In selecting her, it cited her slogan "No to Violence" and her efforts to protect Palestinian schoolchildren from the effects of living in a conflict zone. The ceremony was addressed by Pope Francis via video link.
It has since been revealed that her husband, Omar, served ten years in Israeli prison after being convicted as an accomplice in the 1980 Beit Hadassah bombing attack that murdered six Jews as they approached Beit Hadassah in Hevron. According to an Associated Press account at the time, Omar al-Hroub was a chemist who provided chemicals needed for making the bombs.
An article in the Qatari newspaper al-Araby al-Jadid drew attention to his sordid past by praising him as a "freedom fighter...who took part in one of the most daring guerrilla operations in the occupied territories."
In a statement, the Varkey Foundation said it does not look into the conduct of candidates' relatives and that the teacher was committed to nonviolence.

IsraellyCool: The Ongoing Failure Of Global Journalism

And that’s it. Just a brief mention of her husband and specifically a mention that marks HIM as a victim of Israeli violence! Now we switch from the Washington Post to the efforts of Aussie Dave here on this blog. Five days before on March 18 he posted this piece: Hanan Al Hroub, Winner Of Global Teacher Prize, Married A Terrorist.
Oh, that’s interesting, the Washington Post didn’t mention that her “lawyer” husband has a terrorist past. I wonder how that slipped past them.
But this also piqued the interest of another Israellycool contributor (JPF) and he did some investigative journalism: also known as searching for stuff in Google. He published on March 29 but this is based on the Palestine Chronicle from March 17. He found that this Global Award teacher had the following in her biography:
Hanan Al-Hroub was born and raised in the alleys of Dheisheh refugee camp… She married a Palestinian freedom fighter, Omar Al-Hroub, who took part in one of the most daring guerrilla operations in the occupied territories, the Dabboya operation, in Hebron in May 1980. When the guerrillas were being pursued in the mountains they attacked a group of settlers going from the illegal Kiryat Arba settlement to the Dabboya building near the Ibrahimi Mosque. Thirteen settlers were killed, including their military leader in Hebron, and dozens were injured. Months after the operation, the guerrillas were captured; Omar was imprisoned and spent many years in Israeli prisons before being released. It was then that he met and married his life partner who became the best teacher in the world.
You see when you look at the Palestinian media, they’re PROUD of the fact her husband murdered Jews. This husband wasn’t released from prison because he was remorseful (of course) he was released in a prisoner exchange. A journalist might want to ask her and her husband directly how they feel about this. What messages does she convey to her students about “guerrilla operations” that kill Jews? But we don’t have many journalists any more.

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08/13 Links Pt2: When Prime Ministers took out hijackers; EU funds wasted on Amnesty’s CSI tool

From Ian:

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When the prime ministers took down the hijackers

Before Operation Thunderbolt in Entebbe there was Operation Isotope.
On May 8, 1972, four Palestinian terrorists hijacked the Belgian Sabena Airlines’ flight 571 as it flew from Vienna to Tel Aviv.
The plane landed in what was then known as Lod Airport, now Ben Gurion International. A 30-hour standoff between the hijackers and the Israeli government followed, before members of the crack Sayeret Matkal unit stormed the plane and took down the terrorists, killing two and capturing two.
Some 43 years later, Keshet Broadcasting has created a new film about the episode, with interviews from those who took part on both sides of the kidnapping, archival footage and modern dramatizations of the events.
The operation was led by former prime minister Ehud Barak, who commanded Sayeret Matkal at the time. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a team leader in the unit, was injured by friendly fire in the assault.
Though the film will not be broadcast in Israel until September 8, it premiered Tuesday evening in Jerusalem’s Cinema City, with many of the individuals who took part in the operation on hand, including Barak, Netanyahu, and then-transportation minister Shimon Peres.

Jimmy Carter: Two-state solution is dead, Israel to blame

Former US president Jimmy Carter said that the two-state solution has “zero chance” of being realized today, and blamed this on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a wide-ranging interview with Prospect Magazine Thursday.
Carter accused Netanyahu of adopting a “one-state solution,” and lamented that the “US had withdrawn” from making further efforts. He further accused the Jewish state of denying Palestinians equal rights, but stopped short of labeling Israel an apartheid state, a term he utilized in his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
“These are the worst prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians for years. At this moment, there is zero chance of the two-state solution,” Carter said.
Carter, who served as US president from 1977 to 1981, said he believes that Netanyahu has no intention of pursuing peace, and lamented that “They [Palestinians] will never get equal rights [to Israeli Jews, in a one-state solution].”
Netanyahu “does not now and has never sincerely believed in a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine,” Carter added. He noted that when he visited Israel and the West Bank in April, he did not bother to contact Netanyahu for a meeting, on the grounds that “it would be a waste of time to ask” — expecting that the request would be rebuffed as were previous ones.
The former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner gave the interview ahead of the launch of his new book, A Full Life: Reflections at 90, and shortly after he announced Wednesday that he has been diagnosed with cancer. He will turn 91 in October.

NGO Monitor: EU research funds wasted on Amnesty’s Hollywood-style CSI adventure

In July 2015, amid great fanfare, including a media blitz and later a press-conference in Jerusalem, Amnesty International and the UK-based Forensic Architecture project launched their “Gaza Platform.” The stated objective was to shed “new light on violations of international law committed” in last summer’s bitter war.
This pseudo-scientific exercise repeated Amnesty’s standard political bias and was immediately exposed as factually inaccurate – terrorists were identified as civilian health care workers; a “journalist” doubled as a Hamas operative, etc.. The major investment in graphics and public relations not withstanding, the impact of the “Gaza forensics architecture project” was largely and justifiably non-existent. The claim that computerized maps and “eyewitness testimony” gathered by NGOs in Gaza could somehow determine whether war crimes were committed is clearly untenable. (Under international law, this would require examination of the intentions of Israeli military officials, and determining the presence or absence of Hamas terrorists and their weapons at the time and location of each attack. “Forensic architecture” can do neither.)
However, on one issue, the implications are significant – the amount of European taxpayer money that was wasted on this Hollywood-style exercise in pseudo-science. Apparently persuaded by buzz-words and the promise of hi-tech graphics, the EU framework known as the European Research Council (ERC) paid the bills. An initial grant of €1.2 million was provided for the 2011-2015 period to Eyal Weizman, the “principle investigator”. An additional €150,000 came from the ERC in 2014 for a “Media Aggregation and Plotting Platform” (MAPP), ostensibly to give human rights organizations “a highly efficient research and advocacy tool.”
To qualify for this grant, Forensic Architecture is listed as a research project at the University of London (Goldsmiths), explained vaguely as “a field of practice and as an analytical method for probing the political and social histories inscribed in spatial artefacts and in built environments.” The Forensic Architecture website, however, is not hosted by the University, suggesting a very limited connection.

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Gaza war video shows kids were encouraged to play outdoors during air raids

In July 2014, while Israel was attacking terror sites in Gaza, news reports encouraged children to play outdoors.

This report from Jafra pretends to be documenting Gaza kids defiantly playing while bombs explode nearby, as if this was their own idea. In fact the message being given was to encourage children to put themselves in danger, and to frame it to parents as somehow heroic.






Gaza parents didn't care enough to protect their children from the danger of airstrikes - or from the hundreds of Hamas missiles that fell short. .

Dead kids was a Hamas goal of the war, The media and brainwashed parents played their role. Every dead kid is a victory for Hamas.

And now, a year later, Gazans treating their kids like cannon fodder then is paying off as "human rights" organizations like Amnesty are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, now, to make it look like Israel was targeting these kids.

And you simply won't find these NGOs that pretend to care about Gaza kids, like UNRWA or Amnesty or DCI-P, saying a word about how Gazans acted recklessly with their kids' lives a year ago. It's a cultural thing, you know.

Seriously - what kind of parents would allow their kids to play outside when you can see and hear explosions around you?

In contrast, this is what Israeli kids were being told to do by their teachers and parents during Red Alerts (this photo taken in Hod Hasharon).

That's what normal people do to protect their kids in wartime.

And the video that proudly shows "defiant" kids being encouraged to face bombs with laughing and chants is evidence not of bravery, but of child abuse.

(h/t  Bob Knot, July 2014)

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Ken Roth's Twitter lies, part 6

PART 6

(Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5)

Continuing my series of lies that were tweeted by Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch over the past two months.

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August 21 #Israel troops in #Gaza reportedly forced this 17yo to serve as human shield to find tunnels. http://trib.al/XKYlVei 
August 25 This 17yo says #Israel army used him as human shield, reviving practice that court had banned. http://trib.al/Z3VElbL 

Truth: Ken Roth here is first linking to Defense for Children International - Palestine, which has a track record of lying. They literally prompt kids to lie. If the "testimony" is inconsistent with the facts they coach the kids to re-testify until they get it right. They do not engage in the least amount of fact checking - if the story is anti-Israel, it is believed.

Moreover, I have proven that DCI-P will consistently ignore any evidence of Palestinian Arab kids being militants - even when other Gaza human rights organizations admit it.  They have lied about the number of child casualties.

The specific testimony of this teenager is literally unbelievable - except to people who want to believe the worst about Israel. The idea that the IDF used him to dig tunnels for them, or to check houses for bombs, is nothing but fantasy.

Proof of this comes from a later article about this kid, where his father - a Hamas official - says that the family  "forgot" to photograph the teen's bruises until they were gone and and threw out the clothing that the IDF supposedly forced him to wear. It is incredibly convenient that the two biggest pieces of evidence that would prove the case against Israel are accidentally overlooked by a Hamas official, isn't it?

Only a person who has an intense hate for Israel could believe this story. Ken Roth believes this story.

In fact, he believes it enough to tweet it twice.

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August  24 For supposed command center (tho can't ID floor), #Israel destroys entire 11-story aptmt building home to 42 families http://trib.al/z3COG0m
Israel has capacity to pinpoint supposed command center. Why destroy entire 11-story building? http://trib.al/0ZpAH40 

Truth: Just because the IDF spokesperson couldn't immediately answer which floor the command center was on doesn't mean that there was no command center.

But where did Roth get the idea that Israel has the ability to take out only one or two floors of a building - without destroying the structural integrity of the entire building?

If the command center was in the basement, there isn't much choice. If it was on the second floor, and Israel shot missiles only to that floor, the building would have a good chance of toppling into other buildings and causing even more damage.

Which Ken Roth would then criticize.

The fact is that Roth is clueless as to what intelligence Israel has and what the intentions are in targeting buildings. Intention is the key to determining if these actions are illegal or not under international law. Roth knows this quite well - and doesn't care. He pretends that he knows that Israel is targeting civilians, that Israel targets buildings for spite, that Israel targets power plants even though it is providing Gaza directly with power.

Since Israel cannot reveal its intel in anything close to real time, Roth knows that he can make these accusations and not have to worry about the truth being revealed while people are still following the story. Even when the truth comes out, as it did when Israel released its responses to the Goldstone Report - responses that showed that Goldstone was just as clueless as Roth - it doesn't matter, because the responses will be ignored. Certainly HRW will not defend its shoddy methodology and clear cluelessness that will be revealed when the IDF reports finally come out.

So Roth can make things up. Which is exactly what he does.

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Ken Roth's Twitter Lies, all parts

As I went through over 400 of Human Rights Watch's Ken Roth's tweets, I couldn't help but notice that dozens of them were flat-out false, and others were knowingly deceptive - virtually always against Israel.

Here are are some:

July 6: After days of near silence on kidnap-killing of Palestinian boy, #Israel PM Netanyahu condemns a "horrific crime." http://trib.al/iwoM2EG

Truth: Netanyahu called the murder "reprehensible" immediately after it occurred.

July 9: Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, indiscriminate; Israeli targeting of Gaza homes, collective punishment: @HRW. http://trib.al/AOo4Web 

Truth: Without knowing what was in those homes, Roth cannot make that flat statement. In many if not most of the cases, Hamas members used their homes as weapons caches, entrances to tunnels, meeting areas or command and control centers - all of which are valid military targets. 

July 13: Unlike Hamas, #Israel says it spares no effort to prevent civilian harm, but UN says 77% of Gaza dead are civilians. http://trib.al/qWcSMy7

Truth: Besides the fact that the percentage of civilians killed in the first days of the war have already been shown to be vastly exaggerated, even the UN report said "Data on fatalities and destruction of property is consolidated by the Protection and Shelter clusters based on preliminary information, and is subject to change based on further verifications." Anyone who reported these figures as flat facts, which Roth did numerous times, without the UN's caveat, was lying.

July 14: If Israel uses precision bombing & 133 of 168 of Gazans killed were civilians, what does that say of its intentions?  http://trib.al/fkWCvSo

Truth: Again, besides the inaccuracies of civilian casualties reported, Roth is saying that Israel's intentions must have been to target civilians. Of course, if Israel wanted to target civilians there would have been thousands killed every single day. So what does it say when Roth takes false data and applies it falsely to come up with a preconceived conclusion?

July 15: Even if militant is legit military target, attacking family home likely to cause disproportionate civilian casualties http://trib.al/9oA5bXg 

Truth: According to international law, that is not a decision for Roth to make, but a decision that a "reasonable military commander" must make based on the data he has in the field, based on the value of the target and the knowledge about what civilian casualties are likely.  That is the reality of international law, not the fantasy that Roth spins. We will see other examples of international law that Roth twists - always against Israel and, unbelievably, for Hamas.

July 16:  #Israel warns eastern #Gaza city residents to evacuate, suggesting (contrary to law) that anything goes if they don't pic.twitter.com/QbxDxADySQ

Truth: Nowhere did Israel imply anything like that - this is only in Roth's sick imagination. Warnings demonstrate that due care is being taken to minimize civilian casualties, which means that Israel was adhering to (or going beyond) international law. Civilians do not make military objectives immune to attack; if the target is a valid military target then international law accepts that civilians can die as long as their deaths are not disproportionate to the military value. As the ICTY case shows, after a warning is given the responsibility for civilian lives shifts, to an extent, to the authorities that have the ability to evacuate the citizens.

The rest of the series after the break.

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WHAT REPORTERS NEED TO KNOW during Operation Protective Edge

As an observer of previous Israeli operations in Gaza, and as the person who has uncovered and publicized some huge journalistic errors during those times, I strongly caution reporters not to make the same mistakes that they have made in the past in their coverage.

Mistake #1: Assuming that all Gaza casualties are the result of Israeli airstrikes

Traditionally, the number of Gaza rockets that fall short and never reach Israel, or that explode as they are fired, is over 35% -and sometimes as high as 80%!.

Between June 12-25, terrorists fired 41 rockets at Israel, of which 24 exploded in Gaza, killing one child and injuring six more children. That is a 58% failure rate.

At least three Gaza civilians have been killed this year by terrorist rockets.

Egyptian politician kissing dead baby killed by Hamas

During Operation Pillar of Defense, the media was fooled at least twice - and possibly three times - with false Arab reports that children were killed by Israeli airstrikes when they were killed by errant terror rockets from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Even schools have been hit by terrorist rockets.

Also, several civilians have been killed from gunfire during funerals of terrorists.

When terrorists are firing rockets hurriedly, as they are now, the chances for misfires is even greater. Not to mention "work accidents" (which have killed dozens this year alone) are probably more likely to occur in Gaza weapons workshops and laboratories.

Also Gaza spokespersons are known to lie and blame Israel for deaths caused by internal explosions.

For all these reasons, journalists must be especially careful when reporting on civilian deaths in Gaza.

The rule of thumb is that if the IDF denies an airstrike in an area where people were killed, the people were not killed by an Israeli airstrike.

On a similar note:

Mistake #2: Assuming that Gaza casualties and damage are the direct result of Israeli airstrikes

Lots of Israeli airstrikes towards terror targets hit weapons caches and explosives, and often the secondary explosions are larger than the direct explosion from the strike. Israeli forces don't always know the size of the weapons caches, and sometimes the secondary explosions cause deaths and injuries that cannot be blamed on Israel which is only aiming at military targets according to the laws of armed conflict.



This is of course much more difficult to know for sure, but stories should be filed with this in mind.

Mistake #3: Believing that victims are civilian when they are not

Most of the time, Hamas and Islamic Jihad are happy to announce deaths of their members, ushering them into paradise. But not during wartime.

Over 750 of the people killed during Cast Lead were terrorists, but Hamas did not publicize the deaths of many of them until months afterwards. As a result, during the operation the media assumed, wrongly, that the majority of deaths were civilian. It took a long time to research and crosscheck the names of the dead and their affiliations. (It would be wonderful if an enterprising reporter would do this research instead of people like me.)

Some NGOs will even call combatants "children" in order to inflate the number of supposedly civilians being killed. DCI-Palestine and Euro-Mid Observer have been particularly egregious in this regard.

PCHR and Al Mezan doesn't lie as badly, but their definition of "combatant" is usually restricted to anyone in uniform actively engaged in fighting, not terrorists who are hiding in civilian clothing. So Hamas "policemen" who are also members of the Al Qassam Brigades terror group would invariably be called "civilian" even though Hamas admits that they regard them as combatants.

It is easy to allow oneself to be fooled in the fog of war, especially when one doesn't know the history of how terror groups manipulate the media. Let's hope that this time around the reporters are more aware of the pitfalls of believing, uncritically, what terrorists and their supporters tell them.

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I don't usually ask this, but please tweet or email this to every reporter and media outlet you know.

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Beitunia Pallywood again: The injury of Mohammed Azza/Azi/Aziz (update)

The HRW report I mentioned earlier today does shed light on something: the time of the shooting of the injured youth Mohammed Azza.

HRW says:

Israeli forces shot and wounded Azza in the chest at around 12:20 p.m., about 15 meters from where Nawareh and Salameh were later fatally shot, Azza’s father and a witness told Human Rights Watch.

Human Rights Watch has not seen any video footage of Azza at the time he was shot. Azza stated he was not throwing rocks at that time.

...According to the reports, Azza suffered a gunshot injury to the left anterior chest wall and the left lung.

We have video from Camera 2 of Azza apparently being shot:



Starting from 12:20:00 on the security cam (37:20 of the video) you can see Azza moving towards the lower right side of the view, right next to a burning tire. He is hurling lots of stones, breaking some into smaller pieces on the ground.

Now that we have established how truthful Azza is in his testimony, we can go on.

At 12:20:42 on the CCTV time we see Azza suddenly crouch and turn - again, completely inconsistent with being shot in the chest with live fire, but possibly consistent with being hit with a rubber bullet. Two Arab girls in the lower right of the screen barely flinch at the sound, and continue to walk into the apparent line of fire, unconcerned.

Azza staggers back north, where he is quickly aided by a few people who help bring him to an ambulance.

There are photos of, supposedly, Azza with what appears to be a lot of blood. (I am not sure at what point he loses his light colored top/scarf.)

At least one photo appears to have been retouched, though. Here is the first one from the photographer's Facebook page:



Here's the version from Palestine News Network:

That is very bright blood, especially on dark clothing.

In the video, no blood is apparent on the street after the shooting. Still, this photo of him being carried to the ambulance seems to show blood on the carrier's jeans.

HRW's account is wildly different from the "eyewitnesses" that they love to quote. Mohammed told The Guardian that he was shot in the back, not the chest. 

Fakher Zayed in the same Guardian video says that he witnessed three youths get shot: first one in the chest, the second in the back, and the third in an unspecified area, a half hour after the second. Since Nawareh was facing south and Salameh was facing north, and Azi was according to the video and HRW hit 85 minutes before Nawareh, none of what Zayed says squares with the facts (unless there was a mystery fourth incident.)

Azza's account of the events to The National is also utterly inconsistent with his statements elsewhere and with the video:

“The protest wasn’t so big when we got there [at about 10.30am], there were only around 70 boys and four soldiers who were shooting rubber bullets and tear gas. When we went to the front, everyone was moving fast and throwing rocks. I was looking directly at a soldier under the vine tree and I wasn’t moving,” Mohammed recalls, sitting next to his father in their detached home.

“Then I heard the sound of the rifle. I thought it was a rubber bullet but then I felt something burning inside me. I started running with some of the other guys and they told me that I had been shot in my back. Some people picked me up and carried me to the ambulance.”

So he was looking directly at the soldier who shot him and he was shot in the back? He started running with them even though no one is seen on the video?

None of this bothers Human Rights Watch. HRW says that Azza suffered wounds "to the chest" but then later says that "Mohammed Azza, 15, told Human Rights Watch that Israeli forces shot him in the back earlier during the protests." So HRW, trying to square the accounts, instead of showing skepticism over Azza's words compared to the medical report, seems to be claiming that Azza was shot twice!

The accounts are absurdly inconsistent, and they do not jive with the video at the moment that HRW says the event occurred, but HRW just shrugs and insists Israel shot him with live fire in the chest, causing him to...crouch down and run under his own power.

Here is the supposedly critically wounded Azza, smiling for the camera in a photo posted on the day after the incident:

And here is is five days later:

I have no idea what really happened at 12:20 PM on May 15. I do know that Azza is lying, big time, about what he was doing at the time, as are all the other "eyewitnesses" and his family. Based on his reaction and the reaction of the passersby, I think it is highly unlikely that he was hit by a live bullet.

More importantly, Human Rights Watch also has no idea what really happened - but that doesn't stop them from pushing their own theories as if they are fact.

(h/t Bob Knot)

UPDATE: I wrote this based on HRW's time of 12:20 for the incident. But DCI is claiming that they have a CAM 3 view of the incident that happened around 13:00. (Conveniently, we don't have CAM 1 footage at 13:00, it starts at 13:04, and that's the highest quality camera.)

Someone is wrong. 

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05/29 Links Pt2: Why So Many Palestinians Are Still Refugees; Judith Butler’s BDS “Truthiness”

From Ian:

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Explaining Why So Many Palestinians Are Still Refugees (REVIEW)

As the authors elucidate, UNRWA’s steadfast espousal of the Palestinian “Right of Return” reveals both the degree to which it has been politically co-opted and compromised by its constituency, and that it is a position at odds with the United Nations’ own Charter; such a right “necessarily entails the dissolution of Israel as such… Jewish sovereignty as envisioned by the Zionist movement and the 1947 Partition Plan, would be ended and Jewish political and cultural rights necessarily curtailed.” In other words, for both AFSC and UNRWA, an initial commitment to humanitarian aid and relief became heavily politicized, reflecting the complexities of merging philanthropic (or religious) intention with geopolitics and regional conflict.
Romirowsky and Joffe are exhaustive in their research and consistent in describing an aspect of the Palestinian refugee historical experience that has heretofore been neglected in the scholarly and policy literature.
The dilemma the global community faces – building social and economic progress along with a political resolution that brings stability (if not peace) – is ultimately hampered by an agency of its own creation that pursues its agenda at the expense of the greater goal. UNRWA bears culpability for enlarging, intensifying and prolonging a refugee calamity it was intended to ameliorate. AFSC’s pragmatic withdrawal from Palestine refugee relief five decades ago, juxtaposed with UNRWA’s persistent re-entrenchment even in the face of decades of the breakdown of agency operations and the collapse of its chartered goals, should be a clear signal that a different strategy is necessary in the pursuit of Palestine refugee relief and the question of the resolution of the refugees’ status.

Musings on the Subject of Nakba Day

It behooves us, then, to make a list of other apolitical and neutral examples of human suffering to demonstrate that there are no political agendas behind the choice of which events are selected to be commemorated and mourned.
First, a day of commemoration for the tragic losses in property values by white slave owners in the American south, stripped of their slave assets, as a result of the loss of the Confederacy in the American Civil War, would be a great step in the direction of neutral apolitical honoring of human rights and dignity.
Second, we should be holding special campus days of commemoration and empathy for male rapists who have been injured while violently raping women. Their bruised knees and knuckles and scratched faces are human tragedies that all compassionate members of society must honor and respect in the name of neutral human rights and apolitical dignity.

Judith Butler’s Mythologies: “Truthiness” in the Philosophy of BDS

Although she denies being a spokesperson or leader of anything, few who have been following recent discussions concerning the BDS (Boycotts, Divestments, Sanctions) movement for restrictions aimed against Israeli academics on American college campuses would fail to recognize her name as one of its prime symbols. And it is in this case precisely the symbolic power of a name (since her books are unreadable for most non-specialists) that is at issue.
Butler lends credibility to an otherwise quirky, retrograde, and at least sometimes anti-Semitic push to reject Israel’s very right to exist in any conceivable two-state solution whatsoever to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (BDSers would prefer to liberate all of Palestine, “from the river to the sea”), because of her intellectual cache as one of today’s leading, trend-setting cultural “theorists.” The tribe of theorists, by the way, are supposed to be, like the extinct race of philosophers before them, lovers of wisdom–souls so drawn to the truth that they’re willing to run risks for it. Such at least is their reputation among the impressionable; when they aren’t, by contrast, being dismissed by cynics (like the philosophers before them) for pretensions to mere radical chic. Or worse.

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Pallywood again? IDF denies using live fire during "Nakba Day" demonstration (updates - new videos)

Yesterday, a security video was released that seems to show the two Palestinian Arabs being shot and killed during "Nakba Day" demonstrations near Ofer Prison in Bitunia:



The first second one shot was Mohammed Udeh, wearing a green Islamist flag. Here are some close-up photos of him before and after the event, plus a video of him throwing rocks beforehand: (These photos are from AFP.)

I cannot figure out how the second photo above, which must have been taken in the two seconds before he was swarmed by people, lines up with any frame of the video. Similarly, in the video he is taken away immediately, while the photos indicate that he was lying there for at least a minute. (UPDATE: I mixed up the two people in the CCTV video. The videos and the photos are largely consistent.)

Here is video of him beforehand, according to Al Watan Voice. He is clearly seen  at 0:17:




This heavily edited jumble of a video purports to show IDF soldiers shooting, but the editing does not allow anyone to determine if that portion was even taken that same day. The green-clad victim is also seen in this video.



Here are photos of the first victim:

Again, I cannot line up these photo with the CCTV video. I don't see the masked man above with the backpack, for example. At no point in the video is he alone, seemingly motionless, with his hand over his chest.

The inconsistencies between the photos and the video indicate that at least one of them was staged.

I see I mixed up the two, the video does seem to track the photos.

Now, the IDF has denied using any live fire that day: (received via email from CiFWatch)

Last Thursday, several violent demonstrations took place throughout Judea and Samaria. In the Bitunia area, a violent demonstration of approximately 150 Palestinians began in which acts of violence took place including the burning of tires and rock hurling.

Security forces arrived to disperse the demonstration using rubber bullets and riot dispersal means.

During the day it was reported that two Palestinians were killed by security forces. An initial investigation revealed that no live fire was discharged during the day.
The incident remains under an ongoing investigation.

The video which has been circulating online in the past hours has been edited and does not reflect the full incident, including the extent of the violence of the rioters in the demonstration.

One more thing: note that the demonstrators in the second video I show are throwing stones in the opposite direction of where the first person is supposedly shot in the CCTV video.

It is beginning to look like there is some serious Pallywood being done here. Where did the shots come from and where were the soldiers?

(h/t Joseph for pointing out my mistake)

UPDATE: Another video that expands on the second one above:



Also, I asked DCI-Palestine (who released the CCTV video) if they would release the entire unedited version, They replied that they gave the unedited version to news agencies.

UPDATE 2: B'Tselem released the entire video, along with the same scenes from the opposite angle. There is no apparent rock throwing at the time, only a burning tire in the street.

The fast reaction to the first incident, with the victim being carried away within seconds towards an ambulance that is only arriving  immediately after he is shot in the second CCTV video is very strange (h/t Joe)





(h/t Gidon Shaviv)

UPDATE 3: Some footage I hadn't seen yet:




UPDATE 4: Yenta Press identified where the incident occurred on Google Maps:

UPDATE 5: Found one more video taken that day, heavily edited. I'm still trying to figure out where the IDF soldiers were, there are no videos showing them at the same time as any protesters or obvious landmarks. We can see the direction that the stones are being thrown but no idea of distance.

(All posts on this topic here.)

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