Friday Links Part 1

From Ian:

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Khaled Abu Toameh: Palestinians in Syria Killed, Injured, Displaced
Arabs, Human Rights Organizations, Media Yawn

The Arab League foreign ministers who recently met with US Secretary of State John Kerry in Washington did not even bother to raise the issue of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were forced out of their homes in Syria.
For these ministers and the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, construction in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank is more urgent than the lives of thousands of Palestinians and Syrians.
But it is not only the Arabs and the Palestinian governments who are turning a blind eye to the mass displacement of Palestinians. Human rights organizations and the mainstream media in the West are also ignoring the plight of the Palestinians. This is, after all, a story that lacks an anti-Israel angle.

Sarah Honig: Another Tack: The inconvenient truth

Indisputably, no national collective can afford the lackadaisical lunacy of waiting till after its own death. Definitive proof supplied by our demise would be of little use to us posthumously. The unavoidable bottom line for a sovereign state can only be self-reliance. No one else will come to our aid, not when it still matters.
Some things never change. It may be an inconvenient truth but what was, still is. We still upset the fine sensibilities of European and American self-styled adjudicators of international morality. To paraphrase Weizmann, the Jewish state’s squawks about Iranian nuclear designs “are regarded as provocation. Our very refusal to subscribe to our own death sentence becomes a public nuisance.”

Fellow ALS sufferer to ‘hero’ Hawking: Reconsider Israel boycott

Photojournalist Esteban Alterman, who met and photographed the astrophysicist before a 2006 lecture in Jerusalem, says misguided decision undermines battle against their shared disease
An Israeli photojournalist who suffers from ALS, the same disease as astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, has written a letter urging the professor, who he says was his hero, to reconsider his decision to boycott Israel.

UJS praises NUS vote against BDS

Today, a motion calling for the National Union of Students (NUS) to join the international Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) Campaign was voted down by the National Executive Council (NEC).
The voting record showed: 5 in favour, 15 against, 3 abstentions
The failure of this motion to pass reinforces the lack of support for the BDS within the student movement.

Cal. Univ. Pro-Israel Professor Harassed and Defamed
In the snake pit of academia, where unfashionable explicit Jew-hatred has morphed into enthusiastic and widespread over-the-top anti-Zionism, Professor Tammi Rossman-Benjamin stands out.

It is no longer remarkable that supporters of the most racist, misogynist, homophobic, intolerant, anti-free-speech and violent forces in the world today — for example, Hamas — take shelter behind Western concern for the complete opposite of all of those. They are expert at the game of political correctness (here is another example). At the same time, their behavior conveys veiled physical threats against their targets.

BBC Radio 4 programme on Jerusalem erases Jewish presence

In his diary account of the trip he made to Jerusalem in 1862, Albert the Prince of Wales recorded his meetings with Jerusalem’s Jews.
However, a listener to John McCarthy’s programme on Jerusalem from the series “In a Prince’s Footsteps” which was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on May 8th (available here for a limited period of time) would have no idea that any Jews lived in the city at all when Prince Albert visited it in 1862 – or indeed before or after that date.

Radical Muslim Cleric in Gaza: 'Palestine' Was Never Jewish

Israel has no right to exist, a radical Muslim cleric visiting Gaza declared on Thursday, encouraging rocket attacks on the Jewish State.
Yusuf al-Qaradawi warned that nobody was allowed to cede "any part of Palestine" during his visit to the Hamas-controlled region, according to AFP.

Israel’s Game-Changer with Hezbollah

Israel’s recent strikes in Syria, then, are not just about preventing the transfer of game-changing weapons — they are about changing the rules of the game in how it engages with Hezbollah and Syria. Furthermore, the strikes represent an eye toward a confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program in which Tehran may look to use Hezbollah as a tool in its arsenal.
Despite analyses to the contrary, Israel has not entered the conflict on behalf of any side. Israel has not attacked regime headquarters, its airfields and tank positions in a bid to assist the Free Syrian Army. The available intelligence does not suggest that Israel has attacked chemical weapons facilities in order to remove those weapons from the equation.

IHH president seeks at least $1 bln from Israel for flotilla victims

Turkey should demand a biting sum of $1 billion from Israel as compensation for its deadly raid on a Gaza-bound Turkish aid flotilla ship in 2010, according to the chairman of the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (İHH).

The farce is complete – Gilbert too gets his commander of the Order of St. Olav

It really sucks, and I am quite frankly unwilling to conceal my disappointment that persons who have worked tirelessly to propagate foul lies and contributed greatly to anti-Semitic attitudes in the general Norwegian population.
Purportedly Gilbert has gotten his prize for his surgical prowess, a claim hard to believe since he has celebrated the attacks against the twin towers in 2001 and other very questionable attitudes, among them hiding armed combatants in a medical compound and allowing them to carry out acts of war from said compounds.