I almost hate to mention this because the situation is always precarious, but unless I'm mistaken it has been nearly six months since any Israeli was killed in a terror attack.
The last victim was Rina Shnerb, 17, killed by an IED on August 23, 2019.
That attack was done by the PFLP - the same PFLP who is linked to anti-Israel NGO DCI-Palestine in news over the past couple of days. The PFLP is linked to a number of NGOs to use them as another avenue to attack Israel under the guise of human rights.
Needless to say, none of the PFLP-linked NGOs said a word against Rina's murder.
Still, a six month stretch without a terrorist murder in Israel is quite unusual; the last time I can see a stretch that long was seven months between October 29, 2011 (Moshe Ami, 56, rocket hitting Ashkelon) and June 1, 2012 (Staff-Sgt Netanel Moshiashvili, 21, shot on patrol near Gaza).
Let's hope the current streak continues for a long, long time.
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Palestinian leaders were handed a great and unexpected victory in late 2016 when President Obama facilitated the passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334. It asserts that there is "no legal basis" for Israeli claims to the West Bank – for centuries known as Judea and Samaria – including even the 2,000-year-old Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, and the ancient Jewish holy sites of the Temple Mount.
If that were true, on what basis would Israelis have a right to anything – even a right to exist?
And if that's the verdict not just of Israel's enemies but even of the "international community" including the US, why should Palestinian leaders compromise? Why accept less than Israel's surrender and a new Jewish exile – to be called, for public relations purposes, an "end to occupation"?
By putting forward a plan that licenses Israelis, should they face continued Palestinian rejectionism, to alter facts on the ground through annexations, President Trump has changed the dynamic – at least for now.
Perhaps the next Palestinian Authority leader will be pragmatic enough to recognize that in the contemporary Middle East, where Iran's Shia imperialists pose an existential threat to their neighbors, it's time to relinquish the dream of a Palestine that is Jew-free from the river to the sea.
That does not mean acquiescing to everything President Trump and Kushner packed into their 180-page plan. It does mean resuming negotiations with Israelis, perhaps putting a counteroffer on the table and, for the first time ever, transitioning from "resisting" the Jewish state to building a Palestinian state – a real state, with functioning institutions, not a failed state kept afloat by the "donor community."
To do that would give birth to something that for generations has existed only in our imaginations: a peace process.
On Wednesday morning, NeverTrump propagandist Bill Kristol told his MSNBC audience that Democratic chances of victory over US President Donald Trump will rise if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is defeated in Israel's elections on March 2.
Along the same lines, if Netanyahu fails to apply Israeli sovereignty to the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria before the election, not only will he almost certainly lose those elections, his defeat will bury Trump's peace plan and harm Trump's reelection chances.
To understand why this is the case it is first necessary to understand the nature of the Blue and White party and its relationship to Trump and his peace plan.
After Trump's peace plan was published, Israelis discovered significant problems with the map attached to the plan. Among other things, the map places large sections of Highway 60, which crosses Judea and Samaria from south to north outside Israeli jurisdiction. If left uncorrected, the designation will endanger the security of tens of thousands of Israelis whose communities will be rendered isolated enclaves. Since ensuring Israel's ability to defend itself and its citizens on a permanent basis is a major goal of the plan, this omission was obviously an oversight. Netanyahu announced this week that he has assembled a team to work on the map.
So long as the map is not adjusted, members of Likud and other parties in the right-religious bloc Netanyahu leads will be unable to vote in favor of the plan, despite their support for Trump and for the plan overall.
This then brings us to Benny Gantz and his party.
Just before Gantz traveled to Washington to meet with Trump at the White House last Monday, it came out that his top campaign strategists, Ronen Tzur and Joel Benenson had both separately published multiple posts on Twitter viciously attacking Trump. Both men compared him to Hitler, called him a Russian agent and a racist. In other words, both men parroted Democratic talking points against Trump. (After his posts were reported, Tzur claimed that he no longer believed the things he had written.)
Whereas Tzur – like every garden variety Israeli leftist politico – apparently follows the Democrats on everything related to American public affairs automatically, Benenson shapes Democratic positions. Benenson served as Barack Obama's senior political strategist in the 2008 and 2012 elections and as Hillary Clinton's senior political strategist in 2016.
In 2015, Wikileaks published Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta's emails. Several email chains included internal campaign discussions in which Benenson participated. In two discussions, Benenson advised Clinton not to mention Israel in public events.
Now Benenson is directing Blue and White's campaign, and there is little reason for surprise at the seamlessness of his move from Obama and Clinton to Gantz. The Israeli left has been intertwined with the Democratic Party.
Look instead at the reaction by the Palestinians. Not the reaction by the Palestinian Authority, which was merely the latest of their many rejections of a state of their own alongside Israel.
Look at the Palestinians themselves for whom that state is intended. What is their reaction to the offer of more than 80 percent of the land for such a state? They're furious.
This isn't because it's not 100 percent of the land. They're furious at the idea that they might find themselves living in such a state. So furious that they demonstrated in the thousands against the prospect.
Palestinian leaders and their Western supporters are shrieking that the plan would strip the Israeli Arabs in the Jordan Valley and the "Triangle" area of their Israeli citizenship, and transfer them into Palestine by the simply expedient of drawing its border around their villages.
This is untrue. The Trump plan states that they will be able to choose between remaining citizens of Israel and becoming citizens of Palestine. So they wouldn't be "stripped" of their citizenship at all. Changing it would be their choice.
And surely, they would all choose to become citizens of Palestine – the outcome we've been told is the absolute precondition for ending the Arab-Israel conflict?
The [Ibziq Mixed Primary] school is the tenth in a string of “Al-Tahadi” or “challenge” schools established by the Palestinian Authority in the Israeli-controlled Area C of the occupied West Bank, staff told Defense for Children International - Palestine. The central goal of these schools is to ensure access to education and “support the steadfastness” of Area C residents. Al-Tahadi schools are usually small in size and placed in marginalized, rural communities or those facing large vulnerability factors from Israeli forces or settlements.
As documented by the Regavim NGO, many times these communities themselves are built up from scratch as well, also illegally. I saw dozens of them in Area C, where they steal water from Israeli villages and build willy-nilly on hills chosen specifically to place Arabs between Jewish settlements. I once made an animation of satellite imagery showing several such Arab villages being created over only a few years.
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Who can forget the embarrassing vote to reinstate language recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital at the 2012 Democratic National Convention? Convention chairman Antonio Villaraigosa had to call a voice vote three times before declaring it for the "Ayes." Anyone who heard the catcalls knows it was at best a tie, nowhere near the two-thirds votes required to make the change.
Some congressional Democrats are trying to fight the anti-Israel forces typified by Omar and Tlaib. The 41 Democrats who visited Israel this month is an example. Democrats on July 23 overwhelmingly supported a resolution which said BDS "promotes principles of collective guilt, mass punishment and group isolation, which are destructive of prospects for progress towards peace."
But Democrats have been afraid to take Omar and Tlaib head-on. Not only are they scared of their base, they’re fearful of antagonizing American Muslims, a voting bloc they have begun to woo. That is why their effort in May to pass a resolution condemning anti-Semitism, again sparked in reaction to Omar, was rewritten and watered down so as to be meaningless.
If American-Jewish organizations wish to help Israel, they’d encourage Democrats to go further in their efforts to push back against Omar-Tlaib. AIPAC, the ADL, the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and all the others who see their job as defending Jewish interests should be encouraging Democrats to isolate this hateful duo and cut them off from the rest of the party.
Instead, they’ve strengthened Omar and Tlaib by giving moral backing to the position that these two should have been admitted to Israel regardless of their agenda, that it was Israel that was in the wrong. But Israel was right. It acted sensibly, stopping a propaganda-fest from being carried out on its home turf.
The House vote condemning BDS was 398-to-17. Five voted present. Two of the nays were Omar and Tlaib. This is a fight U.S. Jewish groups can win. Once they stop putting the ball in their own net.
The decision to bar Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar from entering Israel is a story that combines political interests in Washington and Jerusalem, the BDS movement, the future of bipartisan support for Israel in the United States and much more.
On the one hand, it is a decision that has the potential to create irreparable damage to Israel. Still today, members of the Democratic Party recall Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “insult” – as they call it – to President Barack Obama when he spoke before Congress in 2015 against the Iran deal. Many refer to that moment in time as the breaking point in ties between the party and the Jewish state.
The decision not to let Omar and Tlaib into Israel – on Friday the government agreed to let Tlaib cross into the West Bank to visit her grandmother but she has decided not to – could be remembered as another moment like the 2015 speech.
By reversing an earlier decision to let the congresswomen in, Israel – in one fell swoop – aligned the entire Democratic Party behind its two most radical and extreme members. It essentially gave Tlaib and Omar a gift they could not have imagined – propelling them to a status that even the mighty country of Israel is afraid of what they would do if allowed inside its borders.
The decision by Israel to bar Reps. Rashid Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) due to their support for the anti-Israel BDS movement has generated international deadlines while at the same time sparking further partisan divide and debate. The controversy over the congresswomen, however, comes shortly after of a visit to Israel by 72 fellow members of the US House of Representatives that seemed to highlight rare public goodwill between Democrats and Republicans, as well as the broad bipartisan support that Israel still enjoys among lawmakers.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said “all members should visit Israel if they come with open minds, open eyes and open ears – ready to hear all sides.”
He told JNS that “coming to Israel and seeing it for themselves transforms every member from simply believing that the United States should support Israel to feeling the strong bond the United States has with Israel.”
McCarthy led the Republican contingent of a visit to Israel that wrapped up this week, sponsored by the American Israeli Education Foundation (AIEF), a division of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Both Omar and Tlaib rejected the AIEF-sponsored tour.
Despite their known hostility towards the Jewish state, Israel initially permitted Omar and Tlaib to visit the country “out of respect for Congress.” However, after it emerged that the two congresswomen’s visit would be one-sided and include only meeting with BDS groups, some with ties to terrorist organizations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reversed course.
“[T]he itinerary of the two Congresswomen reveals that the sole purpose of their visit is to harm Israel and increase incitement against it,” he said in a statement.
Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib changed her mind Friday on visiting the West Bank, hours after Israel said it would allow her to visit relatives in the Palestinian territory on humanitarian grounds.
The about-face was the latest in a series of maneuvers by both Tlaib and Israel and came a day after Jerusalem announced it would bar her and fellow congresswoman Ilhan Omar from entering the country in their capacity as US lawmakers because of their backing for the boycotting of Israel.
Taking to Twitter, Tlaib posted a photo of her grandmother and said Israel’s agreement to allow her to visit only under certain terms was humiliating. She stated that she would not “bow down to their oppressive & racist policies.” Tlaib had been heavily criticized by Palestinian groups for initially agreeing to Israel’s terms for a family visit.
“Silencing me & treating me like a criminal is not what [my grandmother] wants for me. It would kill a piece of me. I have decided that visiting my grandmother under these oppressive conditions stands against everything I believe in — fighting against racism, oppression & injustice.”
Her comments came following Interior Minister Aryeh Deri’s decision to allow her to go to the West Bank, after she submitted a letter requesting to be allowed in despite the ban, citing her elderly grandmother, and promised not to promote boycotting Israel during her visit.
In response to Tlaib’s announcement that she would not coming after all, Deri tweeted: “Apparently [her request] was a provocation to make Israel look bad. Her hatred for Israel is greater than her love for her grandmother.” (h/t IsaacStorm)
There was nothing principled about it. The BDSers told her she shouldn't come so she caved to the haters - and blamed Israel.@RashidaTlaib threw her grandma under the bus to avoid criticism from harder-left BDSers.
When we first met @RashidaTlaib's sity-grandma the tweet featured a happy, vivacious woman in a thriving Arab city. (OOPS! THAT IS NOT THE APARTHEID NARRATIVE!) The second, politically-posed photo, was more "Occupationy" - a broken old woman on an "ancestral" Middle East set. pic.twitter.com/iod9qBS6XV
The Office of the Prime Minister of Israel revealed that Omar and Tlaib had also planned on meeting with organizations during their visit that have expressed support for terrorism against the nation.
"However, the itinerary of the two Congresswomen reveals that the sole purpose of their visit is to harm Israel and increase incitement against it," the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel tweeted. "In addition, the organization that is funding their trip is Miftah, which is an avid supporter of BDS, and among whose members are those who have expressed support for terrorism against Israel."
Omar and Tlaib had described their trip as a "Delegation to Palestine," even though Palestine does not exist legally, and they did not request to meet any Israeli officials.
A closer examination of Miftah, which Israel's PM noted was funding Omar and Tlaib's trip, reveals that the non-governmental organization (NGO) is extremely anti-Semitic, has ties to terrorist sympathizers, and has falsely accused Jews of using "the blood of Christians in the Jewish Passover." Miftah has also reportedly praised suicide bombers and deems terrorists as being national heroes.
One of the most stunning findings on the group is that they have, on their website, promoted content from a neo-Nazi organization which promotes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that Jews control the media. The author of the article is "the Research Staff of National Vanguard Books," which the Southern Poverty Law Center notes is a neo-Nazi organization.
Worth emphasizing again: Miftah, who were meant to be the tour guides for @RashidaTlaib and @Ilhan, published a neo-Nazi article that complained about Jewish control of the media and how it portrays white racists negatively.
A closer look at the travel itinerary for Omar and Tlaib shows that they also planned on meeting with additional extremist organizations, including the Defense for Children International - Palestine (DCI-P), which has ties to terrorism.
BTW, Miftah STILL has their attack on me for exposing their antisemitism on their website - even after supposedly apologizing for publishing the article that Jews kill Christian children for Passover matzoh. https://t.co/Q0X5jsyUU2pic.twitter.com/5F3UNjSFAT
Question for reporters covering @IlhanMN@RashidaTlaib trip to "Palestine"--as their itinerary refers to all of Israel--have u noted that the organization sponsoring the trip, Miftah, has claimed that "Jews use the blood of Christians in Jewish passover"? https://t.co/KyRqim4DYQ
In politics, once can be an oversight. But twice is a pattern.
When U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., was photographed with an avowed Hizballah supporter in January – just after being sworn in to the U.S. House of Representatives – she claimed she didn't know the guy or what he stood for.
But just two months later, Tlaib did it again. In a March photograph just discovered by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Tlaib poses with Nader Jalajel, a Palestinian activist who last year mourned the death of a terrorist who led a shooting attack that murdered a rabbi.
"Allah Yerhamo," or "May God have mercy on him," Jalajel wrote above an image of the terrorist, Ahmed Jarrar, brandishing a gun. He died "after a long battle resisting the brutal Israeli occupation and defending his people and his land," the image said. "We will never forget."
Jalajel offered similar condolences Sunday after Israel killed four Hamas terrorists who crossed the border from Gaza armed with assault rifles, grenades and anti-tank rockets. "LONG LIVE THE RESISTANCE!!!" Jalajel added.
Advocates of academic boycotts of the Jewish state are fond of claiming that they are motivated by a desire to punish Israel for its restrictions on Palestinian universities—in part, writes Jonathan Marks, as a counterargument to those who would point out that their movement seeks specifically to restrict the free exchange of ideas. But the boycotters have nothing to say about Turkey, where the government has severely restrained the ability of professors to write or teach on sensitive topics:
Turkish President Recep ErdoÄŸan’s government, the Times explains, has engaged in a large scale purge of academics. Thousands have been fired. Some have been jailed. Freedom House reports that “academics and students [in Turkey] continued to be prosecuted for expressing critical views of the government or for peaceful political action in 2018.” Moreover, “government and university administrations now routinely intervene to prevent academics from researching sensitive topics.” In short, academic freedom doesn’t exist in Turkey, and its universities are, insofar as the purge has been successful, vehicles for political indoctrination.
About the only thing the BDS National Committee seems to dislike in Erdogan’s repressive government is its incomplete rejection of Israel. But BDS advocates don’t mind taking advantage of his hospitality, perhaps because he whispers sweet nothings like, “whoever is on the side of Israel, let everyone know that we are against them.”
The indifference of BDS advocates to the academic freedom they pretend to cherish when it suits them is nothing new. But their championship-level hypocrisy continues to impress.
The New York Times has long history of whitewashing the extremism of the BDS movement.
BDS stands for “boycotts, divestment, and sanctions,” and the BDS campaign seeks to leverage those tools to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Arab-majority state.
Although BDS leaders openly admit they seek to disenfranchise Jews by eliminating the country’s Jewish majority — BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti has admitted his goal is “a unitary state where, by definition, Jews will be a minority” — the Times has consistently downplayed the movement’s goals by reporting, for example, that BDS merely “seeks to pressure Israel into ending the occupation of the West Bank,” or that the its activists are simply “critical of Israel’s policies toward the West Bank.”
Language of this type had prompted Tablet’s Yair Rosenberg to charge the paper with having “dramatically misrepresented [BDS’s] stated aims and implicit goals, whitewashing the movement’s radicalism.”
Another Whitewash?
Days after the U.S. House of Representatives delivered an overwhelming, bipartisan rebuke to BDS with a 398-17 vote explicitly opposing “the Global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement,” the New York Times jumped in with a piece titled “Is B.D.S. Anti-Semitic? A Closer Look at the Boycott Israel Campaign.”
The piece purports to provide “answers to some of the most difficult questions” about BDS. And this time, the paper did manage to acknowledge that the campaign opposes the existence of the Jewish state, an improvement over earlier coverage that falsely cast the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement as merely anti-occupation. In that respect, at least, it is a needed improvement. Still, the article relies on distortions and omissions to make BDS extremism more palatable to readers.
While the competition may be stiff, few mainstream periodicals in the English language distinguish themselves in their contempt for Israel to the extent of the Guardian. But it was not ever thus, explains Robert Philpot. C.P. Scott, who served as the British newspaper’s publisher from 1872 until 1929, was in fact a crucial supporter of Zionism: That role began in November 1914 when Scott met Chaim Weizmann, a leading player in Zionist politics, by chance at a charity tea party to which the latter’s wife had been invited. Thus began the remarkable friendship and partnership between the publisher and Israel’s first president. . . . Weizmann instantly impressed the editor. For Scott, he was “extraordinarily interesting, a rare combination of idealism and the severely practical which are the two essentials of statesmanship.”
After their second meeting, Scott made Weizmann an offer: “I would like to do something for you. I would like to put you in touch with the chancellor of the exchequer, [David] Lloyd George.” He also reminded Weizmann that “you have a Jew in the cabinet, Herbert Samuel.”
Unbeknownst to Weizmann, Samuel was a committed Zionist himself, and, thanks to the favorable impression made by Weizmann, Lloyd George soon became one as well. Scott continued to provide the Zionist leader with advice and assistance, once at a highly fortuitous moment: [I]n April 1917, Scott stumbled across a crucial bit of news. At a meeting with a French journalist he discovered that the French planned to assume control of northern Palestine—areas that the Zionists hoped would become part of a Jewish homeland under British protection—while the rest of the land would fall under international control. . . . Scott immediately tipped off . . . Weizmann and began making inquiries back in London. Weizmann, too, began frantic efforts to uncover more details, pushing at the Whitehall doors Scott had previously unlocked for him.
Critically, Scott’s discovery led the Zionists, in [the words of then-Guardian columnist Harry] Sacher, to realize the urgency of getting from the British government “a written definite promise satisfactory to ourselves with regard to Palestine.” In November 1917, in the form of that famous letter from Balfour to Lord Rothschild, they finally obtained it. Days later, Scott penned a Guardian editorial welcoming the Balfour Declaration.
Similarly, the fact that Judea and Samaria have always been considered by Jews to be part of their patrimony of the Land of Israel; or that they were an undisputed part of the territory promised to the Jewish people as its “national home” by the 1917 Balfour Declaration, subsequently ratified by the League of Nations; or that the 1949 armistice line between Israel and Jordan, drawn at the end of Israel’s War of Independence, was never recognized by Jordan as more than a makeshift demarcation that would be erased by Israel’s destruction; or that it was Jordan that started the 1967 fighting; or that the UN’s post-1967 resolution 242 did not require Israel to withdraw from all of the West Bank; or that Jordan ceded its claim to the area to the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1988; or that many of the administrative powers there have been delegated by Israel to the Palestinian Authority (PA); or that the PA itself has not taken the kind of steps that might enable the “Occupation” to end—all of this, though true, doesn’t change the letter of the law.
Indeed, starting with 1967, Israel itself repeatedly invoked the Fourth Geneva Convention as a legitimation of its presence in Judea and Samaria, and Israel’s High Court of Justice has accepted this as the basis for various rulings on Israel’s actions there. This was a convenient position for Israeli governments to take. On the one hand, it made it easier for Europe and the United States to accept Israeli control over the West Bank while objecting to some of its features, such as the settlements. On the other hand, it served as an excuse for government after government in Jerusalem to put off making politically difficult decisions about the ultimate disposition of Judea and Samaria by postponing those decisions to a theoretical day when a peace settlement could be negotiated with the Palestinians and the Arab world.
But how long can a “temporary” occupation last? The French and Belgian occupation of the Rhineland after World War I lasted twelve years. The British occupation of Iceland during World War II lasted five years. The postwar U.S. occupation of Japan lasted seven. So did the Allied occupation of Germany. The Israeli “occupation” of Judea and Samaria has lasted 52 years. This strikes the world, not entirely unreasonably, as a perversion of the concept and contributes to giving “the Occupation” its bad name.
It is interesting to compare Israel with some other countries in this respect. India, when it took possession of Kashmir in its 1948 war with Pakistan, didn’t invoke the Fourth Geneva Convention or claim to be “occupying” the territory it conquered. Nor did the Turks in invading Cyprus in 1974 or the Russians in Crimea. All behaved according to the right of conquest. Although all have been or are accused of human-rights violations in these areas, none is today cowering in fear of the wheels of international justice. Nor can they be charged, as Israel repeatedly has been, with hypocritically violating the Fourth Geneva Convention’s provisions, which they never agreed to apply.
Perhaps it is indeed time to begin to “end the Occupation”—not by Israel’s acceding to the demand that it engage in an impossible and undesirable withdrawal from all of Judea and Samaria as demanded by its enemies (with whom IfNotNow needs to be classed) but by its confronting the need to decide, or at least seriously and openly to debate, the area’s permanent future in a way that its governments have avoided doing until now. A 52-year-old occupation, whatever its excuses, is indeed a bit too long.
The 41st Session of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) (June 24 – July 12) continued the bias and hypocrisy that has come to define the UN in general and the UNHRC in particular. NGO Monitor was present, speaking before the Council and documenting the numerous false accusations made by self-proclaimed human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
The statements made during the session and side events by NGO officials, many of which receive large portions of their funding from European governments, are summarized below, highlighting the inflammatory and false allegations.
Item 7
UNHRC Permanent Agenda Item 7, purporting to address Israeli human rights violations, is the only permanent agenda item targeting a single country. Numerous Western countries democracies boycott this agenda item because of this discrimination.
In contrast, NGOs used Item 7 as a platform to promote demonization and BDS. In particular, Human Rights Watch (HRW), Defense for Children International (DCI), and Palestinian groups reinforced and echoed the rhetoric of the “vital importance of item 7” promoted by the dictatorships on the Council.
For example, HRW called for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to publish the discriminatory database of companies doing business over the 1949 Armistice line, which is being prepared by the Council’s bureaucratic arm – the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. The purpose of the list is to bolster BDS campaigns against Israel. HRW also delegitimized the concerns raised by Western countries regarding Item 7.
DCI read a statement prepared by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)-linked Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCI-P), calling on the UN to include the IDF on the UN Secretary-General’s list of the worst violators of children’s rights. Offenders currently on the list include Boko Haram, Al Qaeda, and ISIS. (See NGO Monitor’s report “UNICEF and its NGO Working Group” for more on this campaign).
Finally, Palestinian NGOs BADIL and Al-Haq claimed that Israel is preventing Palestinians from adapting to climate change.
Former US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley blasted a UN council on Thursday for singling out Israel for alleged violations of women’s rights.
The UN Economic and Social Council resolution was approved by a 40-2 margin, with nine abstentions. Among the countries voting yes were Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Pakistan, all notorious for often misogynistic policies and denying basic rights to females.
“It amazes me how the U.N. condones votes like these,” Haley tweeted. “It is a total mockery of human rights to allow Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and Yemen to name Israel as the world’s only violator of women’s rights.”
Much of the resolution — which only the US and Canada voted against — did not deal with women’s rights at all, but rather parroted generic anti-Israel rhetoric, accusing the Jewish state of numerous crimes and alleged violations of human rights.
One clause, however, “[r]eaffirms that the Israeli occupation remains a major obstacle for Palestinian women and girls with regard to the fulfilment of their rights, and their advancement, self-reliance and integration in the development of their society.”
LEFT: Morris Abram, civil rights leader & founder of UN Watch, member of UNHRC sub-commission, 1964.
RIGHT: Jean Ziegler, founder of the Moammar Qaddafi Human Rights Prize, member of same body (now called UNHRC Advisory Committee), in session this week.https://t.co/uVAjFGI8Jvpic.twitter.com/uMNUlM5L3I
The Palestinian Authority is again crying wolf over the financial crisis it is currently facing. Let there be no mistake: this is a fake, self-created crisis that is a direct result of the PA's "pay for slay" policy. Since its creation, the PA has paid monthly salaries to imprisoned terrorists and allowances to the families of dead terrorists. These are not dependent on social need but are simply financial rewards for terrorism. Moreover, if a terrorist spends five years in an Israeli prison, he is entitled to a guaranteed "pension" for life.
In 2018, Israel passed legislation according to which any sum expended by the PA on "pay for slay" during a given year would be deducted from the tax revenues Israel transferred to it the following year. Accordingly, in February 2019, the Israeli cabinet decided to deduct $11.7 million a month from tax transfers to the PA - the sum the PA had publicly admitted to paying to terrorist prisoners.
While this monthly deduction was no more than 6.2% of the total amount to be transferred, PA leader Mahmoud Abbas decided to plunge the PA economy into the abyss by refusing to accept any tax revenues. True to form, instead of castigating the PA for squandering billions on incentivizing and rewarding terrorists, French President Macron, the EU and the UN are pressuring Israel to capitulate to Abbas' blackmail and find a way to give the PA all the funds.
The Palestinian Authority is refusing to accept any funds transferred from Israel because Israel has begun deducting the value of stipends the PA pays to terrorists and their families. As a result, the PA is now telling the world it faces economic collapse. PA President Mahmoud Abbas is trying to scare Israel and the world community into believing the result will be chaos and terror. The PA leadership is emulating Hamas' behavior by threatening that a humanitarian disaster will ensue unless more financial aid is rendered.
One way to reject the forthcoming American peace proposal and yet not be blamed is to engineer an economic crisis that diverts attention from continuous Palestinian intransigence regarding any and every attempt at peacemaking.
Israel is doing more than its share to bolster the Palestinian economy - providing jobs to Palestinians in the Israeli labor market; supplying water, electricity and health services to Palestinians; and keeping Hamas from overthrowing Abbas' PA.
While it is best for all concerned to ensure a decent standard of living for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, it is highly unlikely that the PA will collapse since it is a source of significant income for Abbas and his coterie.
In this regard, there should be a sea-change in the prevailing perception of the significance for Israel of the collapse of the PA and with it, of the entire mendacious Oslowian edifice.
After all, if the only way for the PA to endure is for Israel to collaborate in the financing of the slaughter of its own citizens by transferring “pay-to-slay” funds to perpetrators of terror, grave doubts must be cast on the prudence—indeed, the sanity—of sustaining this state of affairs.
Moreover, for Israel to back down on this issue would not only greatly undermine its credibility—and hence its deterrence capabilities—but would constitute a sharp slap in the face for its staunch allies in the US Senate, who passed the Taylor Force Act to curtail American support for the PA—unless it halts payments to perpetuators of terror and/or their families.
It is generally considered that the imminent financial collapse of the PA comprises a threat to Israel, heralding increasing instability and security problems.
Although this may be true to some extent in the short run, it must be rejected as a long term constraint on Israeli strategic thinking. Indeed, rather than a threat, the impending collapse of the PA should be perceived as an opportunity to extricate the nation from the hazardous cul-de-sac into which the deceptive Oslo process lured it.
NEW LEGISLATION PROPOSED by Rep. Betty McCollum, a Minnesota Democrat, would ban Israel from using any of the billions of dollars in military assistance it receives from the United States every year to pay for the detention, interrogation, or torture of Palestinian children living under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank.
McCollum’s bill, HR 2407, would amend the Foreign Assistance Act to prohibit funding for the military detention of children in any country, including Israel. The proposed law would also provide $19 million a year to American, Israeli, and Palestinian nongovernmental organizations to monitor the treatment of children detained by Israel’s army and offer physical and psychological treatment.
This bill is heavily influenced by "Defense of Children International - Palestine," which is promoting the bill on its website. It appears that McCollum worked with DCI-P to craft the language of the bill. Indeed, the bill quotes from a DCI-P report to "prove" how Israel mistreats children:
The nongovernmental organization Defense for Children International Palestine collected affidavits from 739 West Bank children who were detained between 2013 and 2018, and concluded that 73 percent of the children endured physical violence following arrest...
We've looked at DCI-P before. It's methodology is to interview these children with leading questions and to prompt them to answer what they want. They almost admitted this in previous reports, saying that first they seek out people to write affidavits, and then "Lawyers and human rights documentation professionals reviewed testimonies and other documentation for accuracy and assessed any gaps that required further research." - meaning if there were problems with the "testimony" they would try to fit the evidence to their preconceived notions.
We know that DCI-P does not adhere to the "UN standards" they claim to use for interviewing people. During the 2014 war, it ludicrously claimed that the IDF kept a 16-year old son of a Hamas terrorist for five days to go, alone, into Gaza houses to look for Hamas tunnels and to dig for them with his bare hands. These were all obvious lies compounded by his father saying that the family disposed of the too-large clothes that the IDF supposedly gave him and "forgot" to take photos of his many injuries at the hands of the Israelis. (The New York Times reported this as fact, too.) These are laughable lies. UN standards for interviewing include being skeptical of what people say and how to corroborate the stories. DCI-P prompts or believes anything that makes Israel look bad.
In addition, DCI-P has listed children known to have been killed while involved in terror attacks as being innocent, and to count those killed by Hamas rockets as being killed by Israel. They know that some of the children they count as innocent victims are terrorists themselves - they've admitted it on Palestinian TV - but their official reports never mention that.
In other words, DCI-P reports have nothing to do with reality.
It would be bad enough if DCI-P was merely another NGO with dubious methodology whose entire purpose is to smear Israel. There are lots of those. But DCI-P is far worse.
DCI-P is associated with the PFLP terror group.
NGO-Monitor has documented many workers for DCI-P who were also officials of the PFLP. For example, here is DCI-P General Director Rifat Odeh Kassis addressing PFLP and DCI-P member Hashem Abu Maria’s memorial service in front of the PFLP flag and pictures of the group’s founder, George Habash:
HR 2407 doesn't just rely on bogus research by a NGO with known terror ties. It wants the US to give millions of dollars to that NGO!
FUNDING.—There is authorized to be appropriated not less than $19,000,000 each fiscal year to the Secretary of State to be made available to nongovernmental organizations from the United States, Israel, or the Occupied Palestinian Territory for the following purposes:
(1) MONITORING HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES ASSOCIATED WITH ISRAEL’S MILITARY DETENTION OF PALESTINIAN CHILDREN.—
(A) IN GENERAL.—Nongovernment organizations with human rights experience are eligible to receive funding under this subsection.
Such funding shall be used to monitor, assess, and document incidents of Palestinian children subjected to Israeli military detention, including interviews with victims, family members of victims, relevant community members, health care providers, legal advocates, civil society monitors, and Israeli military officials.
This is exactly how DCI-P describes itself! The rest of the description of the role of these "NGOs" - annual reports showing affidavits from children - shows that DCI-Palestine is the only organization in the world that adheres to the requirements of the bill.
A US member of the House of representative, Betty McCollum, is introducing a bill to give millions of dollars annually to a fake NGO, associated with a US-designated terror organization, that knowingly and consistently lies in its reports.
This is scandalous and sickening.
(h/t Daled Amos)
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Abbas’s response was again quick to come. If Israel dares to implement the law, he will refuse to accept any of the remaining taxes.
Without these funds, the PA will no longer be able to provide essential services to the innocent Palestinian population or pay the tens of thousands of its law-abiding civil servants.
As if positively choosing to deprive the law-abiding Palestinians of hundreds of millions of shekels a year while instead squandering it to pay financial rewards to terrorists was not enough, Abbas is now positively choosing to inflict financial ruin on all the Palestinians. The PA has announced that public employees and employees in the private sector will have to take pay cuts in order for the PA to continue paying terrorist murderers in full.
In the absence of any other clear legacy, Abbas will certainly be remembered as the PA chairman who paid the most in financial rewards to terrorists, at the expense of and to the detriment of the millions of law-abiding and productive Palestinians.
The writer is head of legal strategies for Palestinian Media Watch, and a retired lieutenant-colonel who served for 19 years in the IDF Military Advocate General Corps, most recently as director of Military Prosecution in Judea and Samaria.
Since seizing power in a 2007 violent coup, Hamas has developed a range of cynical ways to exploit civilians in the Gaza Strip to build up its military wing and promote lethal terrorist activities.
Within Gaza, around its borders, and away from it, Hamas's military wing sends out tentacles disguised in civilian camouflage.
These tactics including importing equipment for its military build-up program, embedding rocket launchers in civilian neighborhoods, using human shields to protect its armed operatives, digging attack tunnels into Israel, and exploiting civilian infrastructure needs for terrorist purposes. Hamas regularly exploits humanitarian efforts, designed to save Gazan lives, in order to enable terrorist atrocities designed to kill Israelis.
Exploiting humanitarian traffic
Hamas frequently tries to exploit Israel's practice of allowing humanitarian crossings in from Gaza to send cash and explosive materials to its West Bank terror cells.
For example, when the Palestinian Authority stopped medical equipment supplies to Gaza, as part of its pressure tactics against Hamas last May, and reduced the number of medical referrals for Gazans that allow them treatment in West Bank hospitals, Israel increased the number of permits allowing Gazans to visit Israeli hospitals.
Israel did this despite having multiple intelligence warnings of Hamas intentions to take advantage of the measure.
A 65-year-old Gazan woman, received a permit last April to receive cancer treatment in an Israeli hospital. The woman was stopped at the Erez border crossing with enough explosives to blow up four buses.
On February 23rd, 2019, a 15 year-old Palestinian, Yusef al-Daya, was shot in the chest at a weekly event called the March of Return. The event is held every Friday at the Gaza border. Al-Daya was rushed to a local hospital where he was resuscitated but a short time later, succumbed to his wound.
Prominent media outlets such as Reuters stated; “Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian teen.” The article makes no mention of important facts about al-Daya and what he was doing at the security fence.
This is a common framing of the “protests” at the security fence, which portray the participants as civilians and highlight people under 18 (“children”) killed. The death received considerable media attention, and came not long before the UN Human Rights Council issued a report condemning Israeli killings of “civilians” at the Gaza security fence.
Al-Daya wasn’t just a civilian protesting, he was a member of the Palestinian Mujahideen Movement who have a military wing called Mujahideen Brigades.
"The Palestinian Mujahideen Movement mourns its knight: The knight of the Mujahideen / Yusuf Sayeed al-Daya, who was martyred during his participation in the March of Return and Breaking the Seige east of #Gaza." #Israel pic.twitter.com/tRGtLYnZgK
— Joe Truzman (@Jtruzmah) February 22, 2019
While curtailing U.S. support for Pakistan, the Trump administration has been working steadily to solidify a strategic alliance with India. Most significantly, last September, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis met with their Indian counterparts in New Delhi and signed an agreement that increased the interoperability of the U.S. and Indian armed forces, paving the way for Indian purchase of U.S. military technology that had been out of bounds until then.
That brings us to Afghanistan. The current U.S. policy is to leave after finalizing an agreement with the Taliban and other stakeholders through ongoing talks in Geneva. The talks are reportedly leading to an outcome that will see the Pakistan controlled-Taliban return to power in Afghanistan supported by Turkey on the one hand, and Iran on the other. This outcome, which may be inevitable in light of the balance of forces on the ground, is not one that redounds to the U.S.’s benefit.
Given that the outcome of the talks will not be a good one for America, the U.S. has no interest in being a party to such an agreement. The U.S. would be better off not signing any deal and walking away, rather than acquiescing to a settlement that isn’t in its interest. By walking away with no agreement, the U.S. would reserve its right to attack enemy targets, as it deems necessary, in the future.
Pakistan’s policy of using terrorism and nuclear brinksmanship to force India to accept its belligerence, like its policy of sponsoring the Taliban and other groups attacking U.S. forces in Afghanistan even while serving as the logistical base for U.S. operations, shows that it is well nigh time for the U.S. to follow through on Trump’s campaign policy of walking away from Afghanistan.
Just as there is nothing to be gained by taking a neutral stance between India and Pakistan, so there is no point in permitting Pakistan to play the U.S. for a fool in Afghanistan.
There are downsides to walking away from Afghanistan and Pakistan, but they are far smaller than the price the U.S. pays by funding the wars Pakistan wages against it.
The Palestinian issue—once at the heart of Arab political discourse in our region—has been pushed to the margins. Mahmoud Abbas might still be able to extract a promise out of the elderly Saudi king not to go "behind the Palestinians' backs," but the entire world knows about the business his son conducts with Israel. The Arab world has a hard time understanding what the Palestinians want, and why they allow themselves to continue managing their affairs in such a failed manner.
"If you want to free all of Palestine—ahlan wasahlan ('welcome'), but you need to unite. If you want a state alongside Israel, why do you keep saying 'no' again and again when offered one?" one Egyptian TV anchor wondered.
Since automatic Palestinian refusal is a given, what exactly motivates Jared Kushner, Trump's point man on the peace process? Is he still hoping the Palestinians change their minds when they learn the details of the plan? Probably not. He didn't even bother giving an interview to a Palestinian media outlet, and instead directed his comments to the Arab world, mostly the Gulf nations (Sky Arabic, to which he gave the interview, is funded by the United Arab Emirates). In other words: he's thinking about the day after the Palestinian "no," when Arab countries could come to them and say: "You once again rejected a generous proposal, we won't remain hostages to your intransigence."
It seems farfetched, but work preparing the Arab street for relations with Israel that could be defined as "on the scale of normalization" has been going on for a few years.
"If the Palestinian leadership used the money donated by the Arabs since 1948 for Palestine, it would've already built 50 cities like Tel Aviv, 40 cities like Dubai and 30 cities like Riyadh," tweeted an Iraqi journalist this week —and got a shower of likes.
Impending PA financial crisis follows Abbas decision to not accept Israeli transfers of approx. 670 million shekels/month after Israel decided to deduct 41 million shekels/month from PA tax money equivalent to the amount PA pays terrorist prisoners
“PA Minister of Finance announced that the [PA] government will pay the salaries of the public employees on time, but they are likely to be partial, other than the pension stipends and the allowances of the families of the Martyrs, the wounded, and the prisoners, which will be paid in full.”
PA TV: “Our Martyrs and prisoners (i.e., terrorists and murderers) are the source of our glory and pride. They are more honorable than all of us.”
PA Prime Minister: “The payment of the money to the prisoners and Martyrs' families is our responsibility, not a gift or grant but rather an inseparable part of the social contract between the state and its citizens.”
PA Minister of Finance: “There is an official decision... not to accept the tax money if even a single penny is missing from it."
PA Minister of Finance explains pay cuts: Terrorists keep a full salary, but public employees and private sector must sacrifice
The Temporary International Presence in Hebron is Israel's perpetual own-goal. The special task force oversees Jewish areas of Hebron and – beyond its members' diplomatic passports – is similar in its activities to left-wing rights groups such as the B'Tselem and Breaking the Silence. At the end of the month, Israel will have an opportunity to send TIPH home.
Israel has more observers than any other country, from the U.N. presence in Jerusalem's Armon Hanatziv neighborhood to the U.N. Disengagement Observer Force on the Golan Heights. But the TIPH is an entirely different animal. It isn't operated by the U.N. yet it is still an international force in Hebron. And unlike other such forces, which only the U.N. can abolish, it maintains an ongoing presence in Hebron because Israel says it can.
Israel was pressured to accept TIPH's presence after Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994. The organization received its current mandate as part of a 1997 agreement stipulating that its validity must be renewed every three months – hence its "temporary" status. For 20 years now Israel has renewed the hostile organization's mandate to operate in Hebron. Otherwise, its presence would have ended long ago. It is now one of the oldest observer forces in the world, and it contributes to Israel's image as an outlaw state that demands special observation.
The anti-Israel bias of TIPH is built into its mandate, which tasked organization members with the one-sided mission of "promoting by their presence a feeling of security" for Palestinians in Hebron. Protecting Jews from constant terrorist attacks is not part of their job description. Members of the organization even "succeeded" in veering from this narrow definition by attacking Jews in Hebron in the last year. The attackers were later pulled out of the country by the TIPH leadership without ever having to stand trial. TIPH has cooperated with radical groups like Breaking the Silence and leaked confidential reports to the press. The organization's reports are full of anti-Israel claims that have no connection to its stated task. According to media reports, TIPH asserts that Jews have no right to any presence anywhere in Hebron.
Via the inestimable Hillel Neuer, I learned that the UN elected Yemen to the vice-presidency of the organization that promotes gender equity.
No joke: @UN_Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, just elected 🇾🇪 #Yemen — ranked as the worst country in the world on gender inequality (149th out of 149) — to be Vice-President of its Executive Board. pic.twitter.com/sW3x9KofSt
You should read his whole tweet-storm. Yemen is not a woman-friendly place.
But this is yet another example of how the worst actors flock to the organizations charged with “fixing” various problems. Human-rights abusers race like moths to a flame to sit on human-rights bodies, precisely because that is the best way to protect themselves from international condemnation and, all too often, focus international fury on Israel. Also via Hillel:
Why dictators actually LOVE the UN Human Rights Council.
A Palestinian non-governmental organization (NGO), Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCI-P), has, in two documents, compiled information demonstrating Palestinian violence along the Gaza border during the “Great March of Return.” Despite DCI-P’s claims that the march is a series of “protests” led by “civilians,” the actual evidence provided in their documentation proves otherwise.
For example, in its December 31, 2018 “Year in Review” report, DCI-P states that “protestors’ activities have involved…burning tires, efforts to pass through the perimeter fence on foot or the Israeli-enforced ‘no go zones’ at sea on fishing boats, launching incendiary balloons across the perimeter fence, and throwing stones, molotov cocktails, firebombs or other objects toward the perimeter fence” (emphasis added). Individuals committing these acts of violence are combatants, or civilians directly participating in hostilities.
DCI-P labels other undoubtedly military acts as civilian, claiming that “some civilians have developed other protest strategies such as the ‘night confusion unit’ whose goal is to create distractions for Israeli forces late at night with loud sounds and fireworks. Another group has self-organized to construct large kites with flaming tales to be flown across the perimeter fence in order to start fires in Israeli agricultural fields and forests” (emphasis added).
In the second publication, “Two children died from Palestinian armed group activities,” DCI-P simultaneously claims that children participating in the violence along the Gaza border were both “recruited and used” as child soldiers and killed as civilians. For instance, DCI-P states that “a 15-year-old boy killed by Israeli forces on May 14, was a member of Islamic Jihad’s youth ‘Scouts’ program, known as Al-Faris” adding that “According to eyewitness testimony, Ahmad was throwing two tires toward the remnants of burning tires…he was unarmed and dressed in civilian clothing” (emphasis added).
DCI-P also explains that a 16-year old was “shot him while he was attempting to set fire to a tire near the perimeter fence…while wearing civilian clothing and unarmed”.
His Labour handlers claimed Corbyn was there to commemorate some four-dozen Palestinian militants killed in an Israeli air strike against a Tunisian PLO base. But hang on: “On a visit to the cemetery this week, the Daily Mail discovered that the monument to the air strike victims is 15 yards from where Mr. Corbyn is pictured—and in a different part of the complex. Instead, he was in front of a plaque that lies beside the graves of Black September members.”
Corbyn himself has described the conference as one “searching for peace,” but the Daily Mail on Monday debunked that apologia, as well. The gabfest—titled the “International Conference on Monitoring the Palestinian Political and Legal Situation in the Light of Israeli Aggression”—featured leading members and ideologues for the Gaza-based terror outfit Hamas. One such leader, Oussama Hamdan, offered a “four-point vision to fight against Israel” and hailed Hamas’ “great success on the military and national levels.”
This comes on top of everything else we know about Corbyn’s Labour: the unreconstructed Stalinist party spokesman, the anti-Semitic outrages from local councilors and top MPs alike, the Labour leader’s stints as a broadcaster for state-run Iranian television, his invitations to Hamas and Hezbollah, which he has called “our friends.” And on and on and on. The noxious ideological fumes wafting from a once-honorable party of the center-left are suffocating.
There was a time when conservatives, including Americans like yours truly, took a certain pleasure in Labour’s Corbynite woes. Corbyn was so extreme, the thinking went, that his hostile takeover of Labour would ensure Tory ascendance for a generation. The man’s goofy manners—his tweed jackets and bad ties, his bicycling and gardening—only added to the fun. But the joke stopped being funny long ago. The Tories under Prime Minister Theresa May are in a shambolic state, Brexit has stalled, the pound sterling is in a downward spiral, and the electorate is deeply polarized. He really could pull it off.
To avert that dreadful prospect, Britons of good will should set aside quotidian policy differences and rally around the “Never Corbyn” standard. The outcome of Brexit, taxes and welfare, immigration and the National Health Service—none of these questions is more important than ensuring that the Jew-baiting, Black September-honoring, Hamas-befriending crank from the People’s Republic of Islington gets nowhere near No. 10 Downing Street.
Prior to his being questioned at Israel’s international airport on Sunday, CNN political commentator and Israel critic Peter Beinart admits to consulting a George Soros-funded radical anti-Israel organization about “what to do if I were detained” upon entering Israel.
Beinart seems to have anticipated that he may be questioned upon landing at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport, and claims that he was detained for about an hour and questioned over “my beliefs.”
Beinart wrote in a column at the liberal Forward newspaper that prior to his latest visit to Israel this week, he previously participated in a protest in the West Bank city of Hebron, and that he “become involved in the protest” through the Center for Jewish Nonviolence.
The Center seeks to “bring an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza.” Israel refers to the West Bank, which houses ancient Jewish communities, as disputed and not occupied territory. Eastern Jerusalem includes the Temple Mount, Western Wall, and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City.
Liberal American-Jewish commentator Peter Beinart gave a provocative speech on Wednesday, in which he said Israel essentially deserved the wave of Arab terrorism targeting its citizens.
Beinart - who despite his regular attacks on the Jewish state insists he is "pro-Israel" - was speaking at "Beth Chayim Chadashim Progressive synagogue in Los Angeles, which was set up as a "gay-friendly" congregation.
His comments were recorded approvingly by the anti-Israel Mondoweiss website. (h/t steelraptor from Saturn)
Ben Shapiro to Peter Beinart: "Hamas Celebrates When You're on TV"
The Holocaust was a lie, Anne Frank’s diary was a fake, and Jews are barbaric and unsanitary: All those are posts that are still available on Facebook despite being reported to the social media giant.
According to an investigation by the British Times, “scores of examples of material designed to incite hatred and violence against Jews” still remain on Facebook. “Some of it,” the newspaper reported, “had already been flagged to the company. When the material was highlighted to Facebook yesterday some was taken down but several antisemitic posts and pages remained up last night.”
In part, that’s because the company’s guidelines designate anti-Semitic posts as hate speech that is slated for removal, but does not view Holocaust denial the same way. Earlier this month, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg sparked a controversy when he said in an interview that he believed Holocaust deniers were making nothing more than an honest mistake.
“I’m Jewish,” he said, “and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened. I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong.”
After critics and Jewish communal organizations criticized Zuckerberg’s comments, his sister and former Facebook executive, Randi Zuckerberg, rushed to his defense and applauded him for “navigating this incredibly difficult new world where the notion of free speech is constantly changing.”
As the Times‘s investigation shows, however, navigating anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial on Facebook means little more than simply letting vile and violent expressions stand. Responding to the newspaper’s report, several Members of Parliament blasted Facebook for its inaction. Yvette Cooper, chairwoman of the home affairs select committee, said: “Facebook are providing people with a huge global platform to incite racial hatred and to deliberately spread lies that fuel antisemitism. They can’t just shrug their shoulders and pretend it has nothing to do with them. What is the point of them even pretending to have community standards or social responsibility if they turn a blind eye to the promotion of violence and extremism?”
When Samuel Green talks about Israel’s West bank security barrier with the Birthright groups he guides, he first explains the Israeli view that the barrier was built to prevent Palestinian terrorists from breaching Israeli territory and that Israelis generally feel it has saved lives.
But then he’ll talk about what the barrier – which is part wall, part fence – means for Palestinians: how it cuts into West Bank territory, how it has separated people from their farmland, how they see it as an imposing wall.
“It’s a disservice to the people in front of me to leave out such information,” Green said. “So if you’re trying to understand why there’s conflict, you have to understand why people are annoyed. It’s important to talk about.”
That approach contrasts with the one viewed by 2.7 million people in a viral Facebook video taken by activists of IfNotNow, a group of young American Jews who oppose Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. In the video, a Birthright tour guide spars with a participant on a Birthright bus over the status of the West Bank.
Rather than aim to present a range of views on Israel’s control of the territory, the guide says “Israel sees the West Bank as part of Israel” – a misleading claim that does not accord with the legal status of the territory or encompass the variety of ways Israelis see it.
Soon after the bus argument, several participants on that Birthright trip staged a walk-off from the tour and visited Palestinian areas. It was one of three such walk-offs conducted in recent weeks – all organized by IfNotNow – to protest what the group calls Birthright’s silence on Israel’s occupation.
The walk-offs have sparked a debate over whether Birthright – a popular 10-day free tour to Israel for young Jews — has a responsibility to grapple with Israel’s control of the West Bank. Some 40,000 young Jews, mostly from North America, go on Birthright every year. For some it is their first exposure to the country.
But Birthright tour guides say the debate is unnecessary. While acknowledging that they speak from an Israeli perspective, the guides said they make an effort to represent a range of opinions on the tour – including Palestinian views – and are happy to answer any questions.
In a week when three of Britain’s Jewish newspapers have united in a joint front page that warns of the “existential risk” of a Corbyn government to British Jews, some might answer that the existential risk applies to Britain as a whole. One doesn’t have to share this apocalyptic viewpoint to see that the underlying concern revolves around how, precisely, a Corbyn government would behave towards those opposed to its program.
As resilient as the structures of British democracy are, Corbyn might well try to borrow from the political playbook of his hero: the late Venezuelan socialist dictator Hugo Chávez. In times of both boom and bust in this oil-rich, historically stable nation, Chávez found that antisemitism — a phenomenon that was virtually unknown in Venezuela — had its political uses. Chávez asserted himself as the lynchpin of the global alliance against imperialism with repeated attacks on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, deploying the imagery of the Jews as “crucifiers” that he calculated would resonate in the deeply Catholic country. Taking that position did not advance the Palestinian cause, nor did it alter Israel’s strategic advantage, but it did contribute to the majority of Venezuela’s Jewish community of 20,000 fleeing Chávez and his successor Nicolas Maduro for safety abroad.
I am not saying that exactly the same process will unfold in Britain should Corbyn come to power. But it is notable that there has been, once again, a rise in discussion among British Jews about whether they have a future under a government led by Corbyn. The fear that he has normalized antisemitism in the Labour Party, coupled with unwavering loyalty to the Palestine solidarity activists who have dragged Labour into the mire of Jew-baiting, leads many to conclude that what has already happened in the party will unfold next in the country.
My own view is that it is too soon to draw such a conclusion, although I certainly understand why others do. The possibility remains that the scandal of Labour antisemitism will backfire badly on Corbyn, as a growing number of Britons express disbelief at the amount of time he spends on the job fighting with a community of 300,000 souls, when they know that an opposition leader serious about securing power would be focused on sweeping away the most divided and unstable British government this century. On this front, Corbyn has yet to convince.
In a never-before-released interview, journalist and activist filmmaker Ami Horowitz journeys to the West Bank to meet with a high-ranking Hamas leader to ask him about female jihadists, the Palestinians' mission of "redeeming" all of Israel, and what a man like him does to "relax."
After working through "several layers" of contacts to finally land a meeting, Horowitz traveled to Qalqilya in the West Bank to meet with Abdul Rahman Zedain, the Northern West Bank Commander of the terrorist organization Hamas. Horowitz told The Daily Wire that his contacts said Zedain spends most of his life "underground" because he is a wanted man, and is rumored to be behind the horrific Passover Massacre in Netanya that killed 30 people.
On the drive into Qalqilya, Horowitz asks his driver if where he is going is "really dangerous." His guide answers, "No, no, no," then adds for clarification, "A little bit." As the two approach the place where the commander is residing, the guide tells Horowitz, "Please, whatever you do, don't say you're Jewish." Horowitz doesn't comply.
After revealing that he's Jewish to Zedain's apparent consternation, Horowitz tries to ease the tension by asking the military leader what he does to "relax," to which Zedain replies, "I am a devout Muslim."
In the year 2000 the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) had 2.5 million members. Now it is down to 1.4 million. and the number is still falling. The age profile of members, according to a Pew study, suggests how this happens: 38% of members are 65 or over, while only 8% are under age 29. The denomination is also 88% white, and making no apparent inroads into Black, Asian, or Hispanic communities. But perhaps the members simply lack time to expand, given the time they must dedicate to condemning Israel.
The PCUSA’s 223rd General Assembly (GA) has been meeting, and Israel is one issue that continually attracts the attention of these GAs when they assemble every two years. I think it fair to say PCUSA has shown more hostility to Israel over a longer time than any other denomination. For example, at the GA last week a resolution was passed 393-55 demanding that the real estate firm RE/MAX stop doing business in Israeli settlements in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem. Another resolution asked Israel to be in compliance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (no similar demand of North Korea, Iran, Cuba, China, Russia, Venezuela, etc etc). Another referred to Israel as an apartheid state. A resolution that would have terminated the church’s reference to Israel as a “colonial project” failed. A resolution against legislation (usually at the state level) that opposes BDS (boycotts, divestment, sanctions) passed. Perhaps worst of all, a resolution on the violence along the Israel-Gaza border was rejected as insufficiently critical of Israel—because it also mentioned Hamas. An amended resolution was proposed that removed all mention of Hamas, and it passed 438-34.
Last Thursday, Palestinian Media Watch revealed that the Palestinian Culture Ministry proclaimed a National Reading Day in honor of Baha Alyan, a terrorist who murdered three civilians on a Jerusalem bus in 2015. This was just the latest of hundreds of similar examples of the Palestinian Authority’s glorification of terrorists, a practice the international community has been dismissing as unimportant for a quarter century now. Thus, it might be useful for Americans to look at the issue through the prism of a more familiar problem: school shootings. Because, as investigations into the shooters’ motivations reveal, those shootings have quite a lot in common with Palestinian terror.
As the New York Times reported last month, school shootings seem to have become “contagious.” Each new shooter is inspired by his predecessors, and especially by the media attention they receive. In a cellphone video made prior to February’s deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida, for instance, the gunman declared, “I’m going to be the next school shooter of 2018 … It’s going to be a big event. When you see me on the news, you’ll all know who I am.”
Similarly, after another gunman killed two people on live television in 2015, one 26-year-old man wrote on his blog, “I have noticed that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are … Seems the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight.” A few months later, that man murdered nine people in a shooting spree at an Oregon community college.
Investigators have consequently concluded that alienated or mentally disturbed young men see such shootings as a way “to get the attention of a society that they believe bullies, ignores or misunderstands them,” the Times reported. And media attention plays a major role in this, according to researchers at Western New Mexico University. As the Times put it, “The role of the media in turning school gunmen into household names and perpetuating ‘the infamous legacy they desire’ can be shown to have inspired additional attacks.”
AUSTRALIAN taxpayer funds are being funnelled to a Palestinian aid organisation that has employed and supported a leader of a terrorist group in Gaza.
The Daily Telegraph can reveal the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has given at least $21 million in the past decade to a Sydney-based charity set up by the unions, Union Aid Abroad (APHEDA).
This charity then channelled millions of dollars to the MA’AN Development Centre — a Palestinian organisation that employed a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
The revelations have prompted Foreign Minister Julie Bishop to announce an audit of the union funding, understood to have been decided by her department.
PFLP has been on the official terror lists of the United States, European Union and Canada as a result of its hijacking of planes, assassinations and suicide bombings, while Australia has the group on its “Consolidated” list of organisations subject to financial sanctions as a result of security threats.
One of the MA’AN Development Centre’s 36 staff working in Gaza was Ahmed Abdullah Al Adine, 30, who held the job of Project Co-ordinator and Field Monitor since 2012.
Al Adine was also a leader of the PFLP in Gaza until he was killed in border protests last month. The terror group now hails him as a “martyr” and gave him a grand funeral last month, attended by at least a dozen PFLP terrorists.
President Donald Trump will soon meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. When he does, he must respond to a challenge Putin threw down in Syria, on the heels of Trump’s diplomatic breakthrough with North Korea.
How Trump and his administration respond to that challenge will affect not only the future of U.S.-Russian relations, but also Trump’s ability to operate credibly on the international stage. And, more acutely, it will impact the prospect for a major war in the Middle East.
Last July, despite nearly desperate Israeli opposition, Trump and Putin concluded a ceasefire accord regarding southern Syria. Jordan was also a party to the deal.
On Saturday, in a highly destabilizing and contemptuous move, Putin threw the deal into the garbage can.
The deal, the “Memorandum of Principle for De-escalation in Southern Syria” had three main components.
First, it defined the area of southern Syria below Quneitra and Suwayda as an “exclusion zone” for fighters of “non-Syrian origin,” including Iranian forces and their proxies, and fighters linked to al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State.
Second, the deal called for maintaining existing governance and security arrangements in opposition-held areas in southwestern Syria. In other words, it barred the Syrian regime from seeking to retake the border area with Jordan and Israel.
Finally, it called for unimpeded access for humanitarian aid workers and the creation of conditions to allow the 650,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan to begin to return home.
When Palestinians marked the anniversary earlier this year of the death of arch-terrorist Abu Jihad who was responsible for the murder of at least 125 Israelis, a PA TV host quoted the terrorist, encouraging death for "Palestine":
Official PA TV host: "Thirty years since the death as a Martyr of Khalil Al-Wazir Abu Jihad, the First Bullet and the First Stone. On this day we remember what Prince of Martyrs [Abu Jihad] said: 'Our heads will remain in the sky and our feet are planted in the homeland. With our skulls we are paving the path to certain victory and return. The compass will never err and the path will continue to guide towards Palestine.'" [Official PA TV, Good Morning, April 20, 2018]
Palestinian Media Watch has documented that PA and Fatah leaders have turned terrorist Abu Jihad into a role model for Palestinians. Fatah, for example, recently named a futsal championship after him.
PMW has also exposed that the PA encourages Martyrdom-death, for example a song on PA radio stated that "Palestine is etched on the heart of the fetus, a proud Martyr in his mother's womb," and Abbas' Fatah broadcast this song, asking Allah to grant Palestinians "Martyrdom" in Jerusalem:
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