Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Maggid Of Mezeritch Reveals Gebrochts An April Fools Prank Gone Out Of Control (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Medzhybizh, Ukraine, April 19 - A chief disciple of the founder of the Hasidic movement revealed today that a practice he initiated of abstaining from the consumption on Passover of matza that has come into contact with liquid was actually a joke, and that he never intended for it to be adopted as a serious custom.

A rueful Dov Ber of Mezeritch, known as the Maggid of Mezeritch, told a reporter today that the widespread Passover stringency known as gebrochts was a practical joke he and several other followers of the Baal Shem Tov had devised for April Fools Day about 250 years ago, and that the families and communities that subsequently adopted the practice in good faith did so unaware that they were being trolled.

Gebrochts, referring to broken pieces of matza that are soaked in or mixed with liquids such as water, oil, and eggs, originated in the late eighteenth century as early devotees of Hasidism adopted the extra stringency of avoiding bringing matza in contact with water, out of a concern that any flour that had not been kneaded into the dough, and still remained unnoticed on or in the matza after baking, would become chametz when wet. While the Talmud and medieval authorities explicitly cite contemporary practice as unconcerned for such an eventuality, the extra measure of care for Passover's strictures caught on among the Hasidim, and became standard among Jewish communities influenced by the movement. The Maggid disclosed in an interview that the time had come to set the record straight, and that he never meant for people to take the concern seriously.

"Anyone who knows the sources, as a Hasid is expected to do, would know immediately it's out of line even with what our holy ancestors practiced," he explained. "What does it mean, after all, if the saintly Maharal, Rashi, and Rambam ate gebrochts - that we are somehow more devoted to the laws than those giants? My friends and I were sure that our disciples, who were learned men, would get the joke, and that would be the end of that. But it didn't happen that way. I guess we should have realized some people are so earnest they can't detect irony. Now Hasidim will never know the Passover pleasure of chicken soup with kneidlach, of matza brei, of matza meal chremzlach. And that's a shame."

He did, however, offer advice to aspiring entrepreneurs, suggesting that someone manufacture an oral insert to be sold to adherents of gebrochts, designed to prevent saliva from touching the matza in one's mouth, lest it become chametz before being swallowed.

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04/19 Links Pt1: Glick: General Mattis and the Fatah tautology; Marwan Barghouti Is No Nelson Mandela

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: General Mattis and the Fatah tautology

On Friday, US Secretary of Defense James Mattis will visit Israel as part of a tour of the region that will bring him to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Djibouti. The declared purpose of Mattis’s trip is to “reaffirm key US military alliances, engage with strategic partners in the Middle East and Africa, and discuss cooperative efforts to counter destabilizing activities and defeat extremist terror organizations.”
Ahead of his visit, Mattis should spend some time considering the hunger strike being carried out by the Palestinian terrorists imprisoned by Israel. A serious consideration of the strike will tell him more about the nature of the Palestinian conflict with Israel than a hundred “expert” briefings.
There are several important things for Mattis to consider in relation to the strike.
The first thing he needs to note is that all of the terrorists on strike are members of the Fatah terrorist group.
This fact should signal to General Mattis that Fatah is not a normal political party. In fact, it is a terrorist organization that has a political party.
The second thing Mattis needs to consider about the strike is that it is supported by the international Left.
To understand why, Mattis needs to recognize the Fatah tautology.

PMW: PA students are read letter glorifying terror written by terrorist murderer

In line with the Palestinian Authority's policy of teaching children to see terrorists as heroes and all violence as internationally accepted means to confront Israel, the PA Ministry of Education decided that a letter by imprisoned terrorist Marwan Barghouti should be read to all "students of Palestine."
Marwan Barghouti is serving 5 life sentences for orchestrating three shooting attacks that killed 5 people in 2001-2002.
Barghouti's dominant messages in the letter are that the imprisoned terrorists are the students' heroes and role models and that studies and terror go together.
Referring to himself as "the great prisoner and the free man," Barghouti addressed "all the young people of Palestine" presenting himself and his fellow imprisoned terrorists and murderers who "have already chosen the path of resistance" as examples to follow.
While he emphasized that studying and acquiring knowledge is a way of "resisting," even while in prison, Barghouti focused on his personal experiences as a prisoner: "I was arrested for the first time when I was in high school... Imprisoned for more than 23 years, expelled for seven years, and subjected to pursuit and assassination..." He then concluded: "I say this to you in order to emphasize to you that the path of studies and the national path go side by side" - the national path being his euphemism for violence, terror, and murder. Barghouti underlined how he himself has been able to study while imprisoned:

JPost Editorial: No Barghouti option

Those in Israel who support Barghouti remember him from before the second intifada. It was a period in the late 1990s when Barghouti opposed violent struggle and led the fight against corruption within the Palestinian political leadership.
But Barghouti was radicalized as a result of the collapse of the peace talks in 2000 between then-prime minister Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat. He turned to terrorism and became involved in the Tanzim, the military arm of Fatah which was responsible for some the most deadly terrorist attacks ever carried out against Israeli civilians.
Barghouti is a savvy political manipulator who has managed to remain relevant despite his incarceration a decade and a half ago. He is using the Palestinian prisoners as his latest ploy for self-advancement.
It is depressing that a man like Barghouti, with the blood of so many victims on his hands, has consistently been the most popular candidate to lead the Palestinian people. And it is not despite his murderously violent past, but precisely because of it, that Barghouti is able to beat a Hamas candidate for the Palestinian vote. This is the sad state of radicalized Palestinian politics that is the real obstacle to peace.
The idea that people can change is central to Judaism.
It forms the basis for Teshuva – roughly translated as repentance or contrition, but more properly expressed as a return to one’s true moral nature. If Barghouti were popular for a brave call to stop violent terrorism and embrace peace that would be laudable. If, however, he enjoys the support of the Palestinian street due to his track record as a murderer who inflicted pain and suffering on Israelis, that is intolerable.

While manic, radical energy tends to give individual Israel haters the zeal they need to continue their harassment and propaganda campaigns year after year, decade after decade, the drive towards ever-increasing radicalism tends to be a weakness of anti-Israel organizations, which explains why such groups have relatively short lifespans.

The Palestinian Solidarity Movement (PSM), which was responsible for much of the petition-driven divestment activity on college campuses in the early 2000s (years before the BDS movement was alleged to have been born, BTW), fell apart when their success led to ever-escalating attempts at infiltration by factions driven by different ideological agendas. In the end, it became easier to dissolve the organization, rather than spend all their time fighting off hostile takeover attempts.

During this same period, I saw a similar drama play out during an early municipal divestment campaign between 2004-2006 in Somerville, MA. You can read about the first two years of that battle here, but for purposes of this discussion the salient point was that each year the campaign continued the group behind those divestment efforts (called the Somerville Divestment Project, or SDP) imported more radical activists into their ranks, shoring up the leadership but horrifying and alienating less extreme members who were driven out.

We can see something similar happening to the organization Jewish Voice for Peace. While ostensibly founded in 1996 (their own documentation of organizational birthdates needs to be taken with as large a grain of salt as the BDS movement’s claim to have emerged from “Palestinian civil society” in 2005 – despite the rage of divestment campaigns years earlier), JVP really came on the scene over the last decade as BDS campaigners realized the importance of appearing to have Jewish support.

Claims that JVP members wearing t-shirts saying “Another Jew for Divestment” demonstrate genuine (vs. fringe) Jewish support for BDS have proven most convincing to the corrupt (such as the leadership of the dying Presbyterian Church) or the gullible (rank and file members of that same church). But as JVP grew from a small West Coast/Internet presence to a well-heeled organization with dozens of staff, able to fly scores of members to events like Presbyterian national assemblies, it also had to struggle with the same forces that have roiled similar war groups masquerading as peace warriors.

First off, while I and others have joked in the past about joining JVP in order to pretend to speak in the organization’s name, the scruples that prevent us from behaving in such a manner are not present among JVP’s “allies.” The organization claims over “200,000 supporters and 10,000 donors,” and while those numbers are wildly exaggerated, there has clearly been growth in their ranks in recent years – enough to support JVP branches on many college campuses which work in accord with groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) on projects like student government divestment measures and Israel Apartheid Weeks.

But as those ranks grew, there came an increasing readiness to embrace excess. To take one simple example, in 2012 the group published its first JVP Passover Hagaddah – a ludicrous (and easily parodied) text that made the group seem more delusional than dangerous. But this year’s Next-Year-in-Al-Quds edition demonstrates much more readiness to admit to the end game the organization is aiming for.

The roiling of the radical firmament, first with Black Lives Matter and then with “The Resistance” to the Trump presidency, created a new frenzy among single-issue groups to make sure their cause takes pride-of-place among emerging “intersectional” alliances. And, as history has shown, no cause is willing to play rougher than BDS to get other political “movements” to submit to its will.

One of the reasons extreme political groups are so unstable is that the radical cred of the leadership is forever being challenged by internal and external “allies” pushing leaders to embrace more and more extreme positions. Faced with such challenges, those leaders can stare down their friends (a nearly impossible task for ideologues), disband (as happened to PSM), or succumb. And this year’s JVP conference, where a convicted terrorist and immigrated fraud was wildly cheered, demonstrates which choice the organization has made.

On the plus side, this kind of behavior makes it even more obvious why the vast Jewish majority should continue to shun the group - all but destroying JVP’s ability to infiltrate the mainstream and derailing its hope of one day presenting itself as just one more voice within the “Big Tent” of Jewish America.

With that hope shattered, JVP will continue to become to become indistinguishable from the mobs shouting down Israeli speakers, harassing Jewish students and celebrating murder and mayhem – behavior that has currency among fellow activists, but little impact (beyond revulsion and rejection) among those JVP would ultimately have to reach to have any influence beyond its own increasingly narrow and isolated constituency.

From JPost:

The Fatah-affiliated Shabibah won a total of 41 of 81 seats on the student council at an-Najah National University in Nablus, while the Hamas-backed Islamic Bloc won 34 seats, Student Affairs Dean Musa Abu Dia told Wafa, the official Palestinian Authority news site, on Tuesday.

Student elections in the Palestinian territories are viewed as important barometers of public opinion, since Hamas and Fatah have not competed against each other in municipal, legislative or presidential elections since the 2006 legislative elections.

“These elections are an important indication of where the Palestinian street stands,” said Khaled Musleh, an-Najah Central Elections Committee spokesman.

Student elections at an-Najah have not taken place since 2013 because the various student blocs had previously failed to reach agreements to hold elections.

In the 2013 elections at an-Najah, Fatah won 43 seats, while Hamas garnered 33 seats.

Fatah is trumpeting its win, especially since Hamas has won several high-profile student elections recently especially at BirZeit University.

Hamas, for its part, is noting that it has increased its representation while Fatah's lead has eroded in Najah from 10 seats to 7.

If these elections are a bellwether for the Palestinian mood altogether, then Hamas very possibly would win a general election. Hamas is essentially banned politically from the West Bank (although it can operate freely on college campuses) and the full weight of the PA ensures that Fatah propaganda is dominant in official media. With all those disadvantages, Hamas still wins or does strongly in these student elections, putting to lie the Western fiction that the West Bank is somehow "moderate Fatah territory" while only Gaza is a Hamas stronghold.

While Hamas won't allow free elections in Gaza universities, it seems likely that Hamas student groups would enjoy landslide victories if such elections could be held in Gaza.

Polls show that while Fatah somewhat leads Hamas in mythical parliamentary elections, a huge percentage of the public is undecided. As we saw in the last elections in 2006, Hamas has the ability to get most of these undecided votes.

The reality is that most Palestinians do not want anything close to what would be considered a real peace with Israel. But this simple truth is one that must be hidden by the Western media and pundits because they have an idea that mentioning the truth is somehow racist.

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Recently, UNRWA floated the idea that it would modify the curricula of Palestinian Arab students to slightly reduce bias against Israelis and Israel. As I noted previously, some of the proposed changes (actually addenda that teachers could use to supplement textbooks) to Grades 1-4 textbooks leaked in Arab media included:

* Removing maps of "Palestine" that include all of Israel
* Replacing the phrase "Jerusalem is the capital of the Palestinian state" with the words "Jerusalem is a holy city for all Abrahamic religions"
* Replacing a picture of a wedding that showed only men with one that showed men and women
* Stopping referring to Israelis cities as "Palestinian"
* Removing some pictures of evil Israeli soldiers and innocent Palestinian victims.

The Palestinian Authority education ministry responded by cutting off contact with UNRWA.

As I predicted, UNRWA has caved:

The Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency UNRWA Pierre Krähenbühl reiterated the full commitment of the agency to the Palestinian curriculum and emphasized that no change may affect these curricula.

This came during a meeting this afternoon with the Minister of Education and Higher Education Dr. Sabri Saydam...

Krähenbühl stressed that the Ministry of Education is a full partner, especially in the educational field, stressing the right of Palestinian children to receive quality education and to preserve their identity and culture...stressing that any enrichment to Palestinian textbooks will be in coordination between the ministry and the agency.

This is a violation of UNRWA's own stated educational principles of creating students who are "tolerant and open minded, upholding human values and religious tolerance, "

It is also a violation of the UN Charter which UNRWA is obligated to uphold in its mandate. The UN Charter includes the obligation "to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace."

UNRWA textbook showing all of Israel as "Palestine"

UNRWA's Palestinian curriculum does nothing of the sort, as has been shown numerous times in examinations of the textbooks and teacher materials used by UNRWA. The UNRWA curriculum (both its written curricula and what UNRWA teachers themselves call the "hidden curriculum") is heavily biased, anti-Israel, anti-peace and often antisemitic.

This statement by UNRWA's head shows that given a choice of adhering to UN standards or teaching hate, UNRWA consciously chooses to continue to teach hate. This episode proves that UNRWA's denials of teaching students to hate Israel ring very hollow, as they are explicitly agreeing to accept the biased Palestinian textbooks without any modification (even though they do add extra materials to Jordanian textbooks to add teaching about the "Nakba" and other anti-Israel propaganda.)

UNRWA has just stated that they will ignore their own and the UN's own principles in favor of a curriculum of hate. The only language UNRWA will understand is if Western funders hold them to their own stated standards.

UPDATE: Based on a series of tweets from Times of Israel's Dov Lieber and IMPACT-SE, which follows PA textbooks, UNRWA did publish a list of 53 specific issues to counteract problematic PA textbook materials; you can see a small part here:

The questions are whether Kraehenbuhl and UNRWA are going to follow through on this given the pushback, whether these addenda are actually ever incorporated into school curricula, how teachers can use these addenda without being able to edit the textbooks themselves which the students still have, and whether Kraehenbuhl's words mean that he agrees not to incorporate these addenda to begin with since that is a change of curriculum.

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Tuesday, April 18, 2017

04/18 Links: The NYTs stands with terrorists; Allies knew of Holocaust in 1942; What North Korea Should Teach Us about Iran

From Ian:

Khaled Abu Toameh: Palestinians' Real Enemies: Arabs

The Arab heads of state and monarchs do not like to be reminded of how badly they treat Palestinians and subject them to discriminatory and apartheid laws.
It is not comfortable or safe to be a Palestinian in an Arab country. Scenes of lawlessness and anarchy inside Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank have also driven many residents to move to nearby cities and villages. Most refugees in the West Bank no longer live inside UNRWA-run camps.
Let us end where we began: with the Palestinian (non)leadership. What has it done to help its people in the Arab countries? Nothing. No Palestinian leader will urge an emergency session of the UN Security Council to expose the ethnic cleansing and killing of Palestinians in Arab countries. No Palestinian leader will demand that the international media and human rights organizations investigate the atrocities perpetrated by Arabs on their Palestinian brethren. We are sure to see more such criminal silence when Abbas meets with the president of the United States.

Michael Oren: Palestinians were Six Day War’s ‘biggest winners’

Deputy Minister Michael Oren declared Tuesday that the biggest winners of the 1967 Six Day War were the Palestinian people.
Speaking at an event in Jerusalem marking 50 years since the conflict, he noted that before 1967, the concept of a “Palestinian” did not exist as we now know it.
Oren, now deputy minister for diplomacy in the Prime Minister’s Office, spoke more as a historian than a parliamentarian at the event, which was organized by The Israel Project and took place at the headquarters of the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research.
His comments drew on research he completed for his seminal 2002 book, “Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East.”
He remained mostly mum on the issue of where the peace process with the Palestinians stands today.
“We are in a process, but I can’t speak too much about that,” said Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States.

Alan Dershowitz: What North Korea Should Teach Us about Iran

We failed to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. As a result, our options to stop them from developing a delivery system capable of reaching our shores are severely limited.
The hard lesson from our failure to stop North Korea before they became a nuclear power is that we MUST stop Iran from ever developing or acquiring a nuclear arsenal. A nuclear Iran would be far more dangerous to American interests than a nuclear North Korea. Iran already has missiles capable of reaching numerous American allies. They are in the process of upgrading them and making them capable of delivering a nuclear payload to our shores. Its fundamentalist religious leaders would be willing to sacrifice millions of Iranians to destroy the "Big Satan" (United States) or the "Little Satan" (Israel). The late "moderate" leader Hashemi Rafsanjani once told an American journalist that if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons, they "would kill as many as five million Jews," and that if Israel retaliated, they would kill fifteen million Iranians, which would be "a small sacrifice from among the billion Muslims in the world." He concluded that "it is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality." Recall that the Iranian mullahs were willing to sacrifice thousands of "child-soldiers" in their futile war with Iraq. There is nothing more dangerous than a "suicide regime" armed with nuclear weapons.
The deal signed by Iran in 2015 postpones Iran's quest for a nuclear arsenal, but it doesn't prevent it, despite Iran's unequivocal statement in the preamble to the agreement that "Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire nuclear weapons." (Emphasis added). Recall that North Korea provided similar assurances to the Clinton Administration back in 1994, only to break them several years later -- with no real consequences. The Iranian mullahs apparently regard their reaffirmation as merely hortatory and not legally binding. The body of the agreement itself -- the portion Iran believes is legally binding -- does not preclude Iran from developing nuclear weapons after a certain time, variously estimated as between 10 to 15 years from the signing of the agreement. Nor does it prevent Iran from perfecting its delivery systems, including nuclear tipped inter-continental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States.

Sunday, April 16, 2017

Chag Sameach redux

The second part of Passover is coming.

I will not be blogging until Tuesday night, when I will frantically be trying to catch up on all the news I miss over the next two days (like the beginning of a new hunger strike by Arab prisoners starting tomorrow with PA support.)

Here's a Passover video I missed in my roundup last week.

Chag sameach - and a happy Easter too!

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One MILLION arrests by Israel? LOL (updated)

From Ma'an:

Israeli authorities have detained approximately one million Palestinians since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip in 1967, according to a joint statement released Saturday by the Palestinian Committee of Prisoners’ Affairs, the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS), and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS).

I've been following this fake statistic since the claim from similar groups that 750,000 had been arrested by 2009.

(Update: Don't be fooled by the word "detained," in the past they have said "arrested" explicitly and the press release from the PCBS says "cases of arrest" in English and Arabic.)

Last year they also claimed a million arrested, so I guess no one was arrested this year at all. As I wrote then:

The April 2015 report from the same groups said that the number of Palestinians arrested from 1967 to 2015 was 850,000.

150,000 arrests in one year?

In 2014, they said the number was 800,000.

That number had been pretty constant since 2006, when they claimed 700,000.

As I have shown in the past, these numbers are completely made up.

150,000 arrests in a year would mean over 400 a day and nearly 3000 arrests a week.

If you look at arrest statistics from Palestinian sources themselves, they range from a few hundred to a few thousand a year, not the 50,000-150,000 that these committees and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics claim.

These statistics are complete fiction. And the Western media regurgitates them over and over again.

It also shows how unreliable the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics is. If they lie about this, then they could be lying about, oh, I don't know, maybe population?

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Egyptian "scholar" now claims the burqa comes from the Torah

We've discussed Amna Nossier before, the Egyptian "scholar" who is against the Islamic veil and who claims that it really comes from Judaism, using fake quotes from Maimonides to prove her point.

Now she says that the Torah itself forbids women from showing their faces.

An Egyptian lawmaker has said members of parliament are drafting a law that would ban women from wearing the burqa in government institutions after alleging the Islamic full-face veil was a "Jewish tradition".

Amna Nosseir said on Sunday that the proposed ban would be in the best interest of Egyptian society and that she has been battling against the burqa over the past 40 years.

Nosseir, who wears the hijab, said on Wednesday that the burqa - known in Arabic as the niqab - had its origins in Jewish religious law.

"In the Old Testament, you find in chapter 38 that the Jewish religious authorities tell you that if Jewish women leave the house without covering the face and head then they are breaking Jewish religious law," the lawmaker said during an interview with local media.

"I have gathered around 20 texts by Jewish religious authorities that completely forbid women from showing their faces and heads," Nosseir said while discussing also banning female university students from wearing "ripped jeans" in lectures.

She added that this part of Jewish law became entrenched in pre-Islamic Arab tribes of the Arabian Peninsula and then spread throughout the Middle East with the Muslim conquests.

She is referring to Genesis 38 which actually says the opposite, mentioning that at the time prostitutes were known to cover their faces, which proves that normal women of course didn't.

The only place that Jewish women ever covered their faces were when they lived in Arab countries, as a mishna in Shabbat chapter 6 says. Rashi there comments that "it is the custom of Arab women to cover their heads and faces except for their eyes" saying the garments were called the Reulot in Arabic (a variant of that word is still used in Hebrew today to mean "veil.") Jewish women in Arab countries followed the local custom, probably more out of fear than anything else.

It is fascinating that Egyptian "scholars" who want to fight against the burqa feel that they must associate it with Judaism in order to make the naturally antisemitic Arabs turn against it.

(h/t Bill P)

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04/16 Links: Kay Wilson: A letter to the bereaved parents; UNRWA Bluff; Another Empty Palestine Museum Opens

From Ian:

Kay Wilson: A letter to the bereaved parents

As a British-born Israeli Jewish tour guide, I endured a similar experience to your Hannah, but lived to tell the tale. In 2010, while guiding an American Christian tourist, we were accosted by two Palestinian terrorists. They found my Israeli ID and minutes later, my client, Kristine Luken, was dead. When I faced the terrorists in court, I learned that her brutal murder was an unfortunate case of mistaken identity: The terrorists assumed she was Jewish, too.
Hannah's death is intertwined with Kristine's. Both women came to learn about our people. Both came to learn our language and both came to explore our land. Yet both were murdered due to mistaken identity. How unfathomable it is that they are now inscribed in the annals of our history.
Since the terrorist attack, I have been telling my story all over the world, educating people about Israel. I describe how, thanks to our democracy, it was an Israeli Arab Muslim surgeon who saved my life. I also speak about the incitement in the Palestinian Authority, where children are taught that Jews are pigs and monkeys and unworthy of life. I speak about the financial incentive that the corrupt Palestinian Authority government offers terrorists in the form of monthly salaries drawn from monies donated by Western tax-payers.
I also speak for those who are no longer with us, those who have been senselessly and brutally murdered because they were Jewish -- or assumed to be.
Next time I tell my story, Hannah will be foremost in my mind.

Daphne Anson: 'So Why "Free Palestine"?'

At the site of the attack in Jerusalem that took the life of a young British exchange student and wounded two other people, a mindless anti-Israel activist, asked the above question, splutters a response:
Perhaps now she's in the Middle East she might care to confront these situations instead.

JERUSALEM TERROR ATTACK - FREE "PALESTINE"?

BBC reports on British student murdered in Jerusalem exclude the word terror

Originally titled “Jerusalem stabbing: British woman killed in train attack”, the report was amended numerous times and its headline changed as details emerged and the victim was identified – but the word terror does not appear in any of its thirteen versions.
An additional report on the same story appeared on the BBC News website’s ‘England’ page on April 15th under the title “Hannah Bladon Jerusalem stabbing: Family ‘devastated’ at attack“. The word terror is likewise absent from all versions of that article.
When British tourists were murdered in Tunisia in 2015, the BBC accurately described the incident as a terror attack. When an attack in which some of the victims were visitors to Britain took place in London in March 2017, the BBC similarly used accurate terminology to describe it to its audiences.
However, when visitors to Israel have been murdered in terror attacks perpetrated by Palestinians, the corporation has consistently refrained from using accurate language to describe those attacks.
Once again, the BBC’s double standards on terrorism, together with the redundancy of its inconsistently applied guidelines on ‘Language when Reporting Terrorism’, are glaringly apparent.

The official Palestinian Wafa news agency "reports:"

Thousands of Christian followers of the Orthodox and Catholic faiths from all over the world gathering at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem’s Old City celebrated Easter Holy Saturday with the emergence of the holy fire from the location of the tomb of Jesus Christ.

However, only a few privileged Palestinian Christians, mainly those living in East Jerusalem or Israel, were able to attend the celebrations. Thousands of their brethren from the locked West Bank and Gaza Strip, only few kilometers away from Jerusalem, were not able to attend them.

Israel does not allow Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza to reach the walled-in East Jerusalem without special army issued permits.

As in every year, Israel issued a ed number of permits for West Bank and Gaza Christians to enter Jerusalem during Easter. But then it imposed a week-long closure on the occupied territories for the Jewish Passover holiday, which coincided with Easter celebrations, thus deeming all permits void for this week.

At the same time, Israeli police set up blockades around the Old City of Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher preventing thousands of pilgrims from reaching their holy sites.

We've seen these lies before.

Israel issues tens of thousands of permits for both Christians and Muslims to enter Jerusalem, even during Passover.

We saw on Friday that some 30,000 Muslims, including from the West Bank, entered the Temple Mount - according to Arab media - during the Passover "closure."

The crowds in Jerusalem are expected to be even higher than usual this year. The churches themselves have to limit the number of people that can visit because of the crowds. Wafa is pretending that these are all Israeli restrictions aimed at Palestinian Christians, and this is not true.

Anyone who ever visited the Old City knows how narrow the streets are and how difficult it is to manage tens of thousands of pilgrims visiting. Of course there have to be restrictions, but they are not aimed at any particular group.

Also, the permits work even with the pseudo-closure of the territories for Passover, contrary to what the PA's mouthpiece says.

300 Christians from Gaza were allowed to come to Jerusalem this year, and there are only 700 Christians in Gaza altogether.

I don't know how many total permits were issued this year and I don't know how many applications were denied. In the past some 20,000 permits were given for Palestinian Christians. There are always some who are denied permits because of security reasons, and they are a minority.

Either way you slice it, this Wafa story is simply filled with lies.

UPDATE: This Arabic news story says "Thousands of Palestinians and foreign Christians flocked to Jerusalem, despite military checkpoints and the security cordon imposed by the occupation to secure the Jewish Passover celebrations."

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Ein al-Hilweh

From Ma'an:

Gaza’s power authority on Friday temporarily cut off electricity to all districts of the besieged Gaza Strip in protest of “unfair measures” imposed on the coastal enclave, as Hamas and the Fatah-ruled Palestinian Authority (PA) have continued to blame each other for a deepening crisis in the small Palestinian territory.

The authority said in a statement earlier on Friday that the decision was in response to “popular events” that have been organized lately to protest recent measures imposed on Gaza, notably the drastic cut of salaries of PA employees in the besieged territory and renewed conflict over the taxes on electricity levied on Gaza amid a deepening electricity crisis.

Electricity will be cut off completely in Gaza from 7 p.m. until 11 p.m. on Friday, the statement said.

The PA responded to the decision, holding Hamas responsible for the statement released by Gaza’s power authority, adding that it was “part of Hamas’ attempt at creating a new crisis in the Gaza Strip.”

PA spokesperson Youssef al-Mahmoud said that the PA was committed to covering the costs of Gaza’s electricity originating from Israel and Egypt. The PA has paid 40 million shekels ($10,931,732) a month for Israeli electricity and seven million shekels ($1,913,053) for Egyptian, he said.

Al-Mahmoud added that if the power authority carries out the electricity cuts, then “it must be ordered by Hamas, who controls the electricity company and power authority.”

Al-Mahmoud noted that over the last three months the power authority was supplied with Qatari-funded fuel -- the last shipment of which arrived in Gaza on Friday and is expected to completely run out by Sunday. “Hamas’ electricity company,” he said, has collected 100 million shekels ($27,329,329) worth of electricity fees from residents of Gaza while not paying anything to receive the electricity.

After the Gaza power authority warned that Gaza’s sole power plant would stop operating on Sunday when the Qatari-funded fuel is expected to run out, they said that the primary reason for the potential shutdown was the PA decision to continue imposing taxes on fuel. If taxes were abolished, the authority would be capable of buying fuel from the PA to guarantee that the electricity plant keep operating.

This is nothing new. Hamas has engineered fuel crises in Gaza many times before and their bickering with the PA over fuel taxes has been a sore point for years.

The PA could waive taxes, or Hamas could pay them. Either way, either party would lose some money but their people would have fuel and electricity, which is the important thing, right?

I'll wait while you stop laughing.

There is an underlying theme that escapes most media analysis about the Palestinian leaders, which is that both Hamas and the PA are prioritizing their own survival over the well being of the Palestinians they supposedly care for.

Israel tries to help Jews in the Diaspora, but Palestinian leaders tell their own people in other Arab lands to go to hell.

Right now Palestinians in the Ain al-Hilweh camp in Lebanon are suffering greatly from infighting, their houses being destroyed and the camp looking like war-torn areas of Iraq, and Palestinian leaders are doing next to nothing.

The death toll of Palestinians in Syria is approaching 3500, but Palestinian leaders have told them it is better for them to die in Syria than to compromise on Palestinian principals to destroy Israel.

This is all because of the number one principle that is obscured behind tens of thousands of pages of false analysis, hundreds of UN resolutions and tens of millions of NGO dollars: Palestinians don't want to build a country, they want to destroy one.

This is manifested by theses leaders consistently and cynically using Palestinian Arabs as cannon fodder or as cheap PR gimmicks rather than actually doing anything positive for them.

The Arab world is catching on to this deception but the Western world has been blind to the obvious facts for way too many years.

The real question is, why should the world care more about Palestinians than their own leaders do?

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Middle East Monitor reported last week:

The Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education is suspending contact with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) it announced, Thursday. The move came in protest at UNRWA’s intention to amend the Palestinian curriculum in West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip schools.

The Ministry said in a statement that “Any distortion of the Palestinian curriculum is a flagrant violation of the laws of the host country,”.

“Changes in any character, to appease any party, is a betrayal of the Palestinian narrative and the right of the Palestinian people to preserve its identity,” it added.

Commenting on the decision, Minister of Education and Higher Education Sabri Sidem said that “Palestine will not surrender to anyone, and will not accept to give up our dignity, history and decades of struggle to protect the Palestinian narrative,” he said.

What were the changes that were proposed by UNRWA?

According to stories leaked in March, they include the following revisions in textbooks aimed at grades 1-4:

* Removing maps of "Palestine" that include all of Israel
* Replacing the phrase "Jerusalem is the capital of the Palestinian state" with the words "Jerusalem is a holy city for all Abrahamic religions"
* Replacing a picture of a wedding that showed only men with one that showed men and women
* Stop referring to Israelis cities as "Palestinian"
* Remove some pictures of evil Israeli soldiers and innocent Palestinian victims.

UNRWA's own principles for teaching human rights include "the building and maintenance of peace." Its educational vision is one "which develops the full potential of Palestine Refugees to enable them to be confident, innovative, questioning, thoughtful, tolerant and open minded, upholding human values and religious tolerance, proud of their Palestine identity and contributing positively to the development of their society and the global community”.

A 2011 study of the UNRWA human rights curriculum said in its section of the omissions from the program:

What is missing from this list - with no justification - is freedom of religion, religious equality and religious tolerance. In fact, the books are totally devoid of any mention of religion.

· The Middle East war is absent from the books. None of the values mentioned: peace, tolerance, peaceful resolution of conflicts, non-violence, etc. is given an interpretation in connection to the conflict. On the other hand, there are few references to aspects of the conflict - all presenting the Palestinians as victims. For example, an exercise includes a picture of two girls sitting next to a tent with a demolished house in the background. The caption reads: "A family whose house was demolished lives in a tent" (Human Rights Curriculum, Grade 3, Part 2 (2010) p. 34). In another example the children of Gaza fly kites "in spite of the [Israeli] siege" (Human Rights Curriculum, Grade 5, Part 2 (2010) p. 66).

· [The books'] contribution to a peaceful solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is nil, if not negative.

There have been plenty of other studies that show that the Palestinian textbooks used by UNRWA promote hate and intolerance.

This episode with UNRWA shows that all of this is true.

We've seen this play before, and we know that UNRWA will cave and not change anything.

In the past when they tried to introduce, for example, Holocaust education in their programs, UNRWA workers leaked the potential programs to the Arab media, the Arabs freaked out, and UNRWA was able to quietly table the idea of changing the curriculum without admitting anything.

The PA's refusal to deal with UNRWA based on these unofficial curriculum changes indicates that not only will UNRWA cave and not implement these changes, but also that the PA simply refuses to teach peace to its students.

Given that the PA has existed now for over 20 years, an entire generation that could have been raised on the desire for peace has instead been taught nothing but hate for Israel.

Now that the PA publicly admits that it refuses to teach peace and basic facts like Israel's existence, UNRWA and the PA will need to explain to their Western funders why they both adamantly insist on teaching incitement and hate.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Saturday, April 15, 2017

NYT Easter bias against Israel, 1954

The New York Times, April 16, 1954, reported that Israel barred a priest from visiting holy places on Easter!

Then, way down the article, in parenthesis, it reports on a possible reason why:

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04/15 Links: Why I don’t identify with the Israeli left; Silence in Paris; Highbrow Fascism on Campus

From Ian:

Meet The Men Who Fought Hitler — And Fought Dirty

In the hours and days following the invasion of Normandy, allied soldiers sacrificed their lives on the northern shore of France for one goal: to establish a beachhead. The time had come to fight Adolph Hitler’s army and push it eastward toward the German border, but to do that they first needed to gain a solid foothold on the continent. While many are familiar with the heroism of the soldiers who stormed the beaches, few know about a much smaller group of men and women behind enemy lines who helped to ensure their success.
In preparation for D-Day, a highly secretive British department known as Baker Street worked to drop 250 saboteurs behind enemy lines with one purpose: to stop the German army from sending supplies and reinforcements to Normandy. These guerillas were tasked with a massive coordinated sabotage mission to frustrate and block Hitler’s war machine in any and all ways possible. Especially important was stopping Germany’s most lethal division, the 2nd SS Panzer Division, Das Reich.
One saboteur destroyed all of Das Reich’s tank transporters by replacing the axle oil with axle grease mixed with an abrasive, forcing the division to travel by road and damaging six out of every 10 tanks. A separate team then barraged Das Reich with sabotage after sabotage, including felling trees in their path and planting bombs beneath them. In the end, what should have been a 72-hour journey took Hitler’s crack tank division 17 days—enough time for the allies to establish their beachhead.
Baker Street is the focus of Giles Milton’s latest book, Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Defeat, which follows the department from its inauspicious beginnings in a small office in Caxton Street to its hundreds of successful sabotage missions around the world, culminating in the allied landing in Normandy.

Anti-Semitism envoy post to be filled, State Dept. says

The Trump administration will appoint a special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, according to State Department spokesman Mark Toner.
The envoy post has been vacant since Trump took office in January. On Thursday, JTA reported that the envoy’s office staff could be eliminated soon due to new State Department employment rules. The envoy is responsible for keeping tabs on global anti-Semitism and advising other countries in fighting it.
In a statement to JTA Friday, Toner didn’t address whether the staff would remain intact. But he said the department will continue its work to protect religious freedoms globally, and that it has selected candidates for the envoy post. Toner did not say when the envoy would be appointed.
Several senior positions at the State Department remain vacant.
“The Department remains committed to advancing the protection of basic human freedoms and values including the unimpeded practice of religion and protection of communities of faith from persecution in every form,” the statement said. “There have been no actions taken to limit or close the offices in the Department dedicated to this pursuit. Candidates have been identified for this role.”

Silence in Paris

What does it mean when no one talks about a brutal murder?
As every married person knows, silences can be pregnant with meaning, even if the meaning is not immediately clear. The silence in the French press about a recent startling event in Paris is surely pregnant with meaning. On Monday, April 3, an Orthodox Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, a doctor aged 66, was thrown out of a window to her death by an African man aged 27. He was her neighbor in the flats where she lived. According to witnesses, whose testimony has yet to be confirmed, the man, who had been harassing her with insults for several days, shouted “Allahu akbar!” as he threw her.
Also, according to unconfirmed reports, neighbors had called the police because of the young man’s behavior. Three policemen came but did nothing, deciding that it was up to other authorities, presumably psychiatric, to act. At any rate, the young man was transferred to a psychiatric clinic almost immediately after his arrest.
He had a history of delinquency and in all probability had taken drugs. It seems likely that he was in a state of psychotic excitement, whether drug-induced, drug-exacerbated or purely endogenous, at the time of his crime.
But it has been known for a long time that the delusions of madness take on the coloring of the culture of those who suffer them. (De Quincey says, in The Confessions of an English Opium Eater, that if a man thinks of oxen, his opium dreams will be of oxen.) It would be stretching credulity to suggest that the young man’s victim was chosen at random, that he might just as well have chosen someone else. If this is so, it reveals something unpleasant about the man’s cultural milieu.

Friday, April 14, 2017

04/14 Links Pt2: PBS Islamic Lesson Plan Encourages Students to Identify with Radical Jihadists; Tuvia Tenenbom's American Jewish ‘Nightmare’ After Visiting Synagogues Across US

From Ian:

PBS Islamic Lesson Plan Encourages Students to Identify with Radical Jihadists

A new lesson from PBS teaches your kids the glory of martyrdom.
The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is home to Big Bird, Frontline, and other “programing made possible by viewers like you,” including lesson plans instructing teachers how to show kids to be more sympathetic to radical Islamic suicide bombers in Palestine.
“Dying to be a Martyr.” That’s the name of a lesson plan offered to students and teachers at no cost by the Public Broadcasting Service, a taxpayer-funded nonprofit, and some of the material seems to encourage students to learn to sympathize with radical Islamic terrorists.
The “Dying to be a Martyr” lesson plan is offered through PBS’ LearningMedia website, “a media-on-demand service offering educators access to the best of public media and delivers research-based, classroom-ready digital learning experiences,” according to the PBS website.
The stated “objectives” for the lesson plan, which is designed for use by students in grades nine through 12, include analyzing “why the Middle East conflict began and continues today,” discussing “how religions can unite or divide people” and explaining “why individuals and groups sometimes turn to tactics of terrorism, and evaluate how terrorism affects the world we live in.”

Seth Frantzman: Whaaaa – The NYT just published a column supporting ISIS in Syria?!

The New York Times just published a column by Thomas Friedman (‘Why is Trump fighting ISIS in Syria’) that argues for supporting ISIS in Syria. Surely that can’t be, you say? Well, the sick and twisted column really does say “In Syria, Trump should let ISIS be Assad’s, Iran’s, Hezbollah’s and Russia’s headache.” Friedman argues for treating the Nazi-like Islamist extremist group that carried out genocide of Yazidis and still holds thousands of Yazidi women as slaves, “the same way we encouraged the mujahedeen fighters to bleed Russia in Afghanistan.” A reminder: The US spent hundreds of millions supporting the mujahedeen.
You need to read the Friedman piece to believe it.
He starts out by asking “Why should our goal right now be to defeat the Islamic State in Syria? Of course, ISIS is detestable and needs to be eradicated. But is it really in our interest to be focusing solely on defeating ISIS in Syria right now?”
Friedman claims that ISIS “controls pockets in western Iraq and larger sectors of Syria. Its goal is to defeat Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria — plus its Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah allies — and to defeat the pro-Iranian Shiite regime in Iraq, replacing both with a caliphate.”
What evidence is there that ISIS has spent its main resources fighting Assad? It has spent most of its resources fighting the Kurds in Syria and persecuting minorities, blowing up religious shrines and historical sites and committing crimes against humanity. ISIS has also undermined the Syrian rebellion through fighting other Syrian rebel groups. On April 9th ISIS attacked a Syrian rebel base near Jordan. If you want to know what ISIS has been doing since 2014 read the accounts of Yazidi women sold into slavery and raped by the group. See the photos and videos of ISIS mass graves.

More Evidence The Anne Frank Center Misrepresented Itself

Yesterday, I asked the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect some questions, relating to some inconsistent stories relating to their founding and relationship with Otto Frank and the Anne Frank Fonds.
They did not respond.
Someone who did respond was writer Daniel Greenfield, who drew my attention to a piece he wrote on them over a month ago, exposing them as frauds.
He’s right. Anne Frank Fonds did sue the Anne Frank House in 2013, and made clear they are the only representatives of Anne Frank’s legacy.
What is interesting is, as I posted yesterday, the Anne Frank Center’s website at the time linked itself to Anne Frank House…
Founded in 1977 by Anne’s father Otto, The Anne Frank Center USA, a partner of the Anne Frank House…
But in 2016, changed the description to this..
In 1959, Otto Frank, Anne’s father, founded our organization as the Anne Frank Foundation, the American partner of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the Anne Frank Fonds in Basel.
In other words, well after the court case which made it clear Anne Frank Fonds is the sole legitimate organization established by Otto Frank, the Anne Frank Center amended their description to add a supposed connection to Anne Frank Fonds. It seems to me this was a deliberate move to make themselves sound more legitimate (even though still mentioning Anne Frank Foundation in the same breath seems like a dumb move).
Given this further information and the Center’s silence in the face of my genuine questions, I believe they are frauds co-opting Anne Frank’s name and playing up a relationship with Anne Frank Fonds that simply does not exist.

Portland to lose $4.5 million a year to avoid dealing with BDSers and other social justice warriors

From The Oregonian:

Portland is getting out of corporate investing altogether. The Portland City Council voted unanimously on Wednesday to end the practice following pressure from activists to withdraw from companies that are problematic for the environment, human rights or government.

The city has $539 million invested in corporations this year, City Treasurer Jennifer Cooperman said.

Activists for months have urged the Portland City Council to divest from controversial companies. They pleaded with them in December to withdraw from Wells Fargo due to its investments in the Dakota Access Pipeline and from Caterpillar, a company that makes trucks and bulldozers, some of which they say are used to harm Palestinians in the Israel Palestine conflict.

Instead, commissioners decided not to invest it in any corporations period, in part to avoid the trouble of having to perpetually decide which corporations the city considers bad actors.

Cooperman estimated divesting could cost the city a minimum $4.5 million or more this year and even more the following year. The mayor estimated that amounts to more than 200 affordable housing units or more than 600 new shelter beds based on current costs.

"I think the hit is too hard," Wheeler said. "I'm erring on the side of doing what I was elected to do."

Commissioner Dan Saltzman told the activists that he based his decision on having limited time that he'd rather spend addressing the city's housing crisis and potholes than regularly evaluating which companies belong on the do-not-buy list.

"I fully respect and appreciate what you're saying, but I think it's the wiser course to get out of the business altogether because I don't want to do this every year," Saltzman said.

BDSers were among the groups that were trying to get Portland to divest from various companies.

The city had the choice of losing millions of dollars from all corporate investments or losing hundreds of hours of time listening to activists whining about their pet causes.

They chose to lose the millions of dollars.

The subtext is that BDSers and other "social justice warriors" are really disliked even in the most liberal cities in the US.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.