Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Douglas Murray: The EU fails to ban Hezbollah
Still – at least we can look forward to watching this unfold in the coming months and years. I almost look forward to British and EU officials trying to explain whether it is the political or military wing of Hezbollah which is currently massacring non-Shiites in Syria. And in a way I will relish watching them trying to explain why future suicide bombings like that in Bulgaria come from an organisation called ‘Hezbollah’ and not an organisation called ‘Hezbollah’.ADL: EU Hizbullah Decision 'Flawed Counter-Terrorist Strategy'
The Anti-Defamation League has called the European Union’s decision to designate the military wing of Hizbullah as a terrorist organization “a positive political statement, but a flawed counter-terrorism strategy.”Israel to start supplying EU with intel on Hezbollah
The organization reiterated profound concerns that the partial blacklisting of Hizbullah would be largely ineffectual, because law enforcement will not be able to comprehensively target Hizbullah’s financial activities in Europe.
Law enforcement authorities, homeland security officials and intelligence agencies in the EU’s 28 countries will need a plethora of information to make sure that Hezbollah’s military wing does not continue to operate on the continent, the officials added.Prosor: EU's Hizbullah Blacklist is Not Sufficient
Addressing the UN Security Council, Prosor likened the separation between Hizbullah’s “military” and “political” arms to trying to distinguish between one’s left arm and right arm.Robert Fisk on Hezbollah and its Europe ban needs a double fisking
"This is indeed a necessary step to block Hizbullah’s financing channels but it is not sufficient. Distinguishing between Hizbullah’s military wing and its political arm is an illusion, a fiction, that will not stand the test of time," he stated.
One of Britain's most outspoken Israel haters and apologists for all who oppose the Jewish state has written one of the weirdest pieces I have seen for a while.Cageprisoners, Rowntree Trust and “Jews did 9/11”.
It's so truly bizarre, especially when he starts bringing in the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, Poland etc (all in the name of opposing the EU's ban on people who actually would have had much in common with the original Nazis) that I'm going to ask anyone who can be bothered to do a proper "fisking" and send it in to the submissions at The Commentator, who will probably be delighted to consider it.
The article is by Kevin Barrett, an American who runs Truth Jihad Radio, talks of “Zio-Nazis” (here, disgracefully with United Nations Human Rights rapporteur Richard Falk), and seems determined to prove that no Muslim perpetrated 9/11.UN’s Falk Tries to Dissociate from “Zionazi” Epithet, Kevin Barrett
Barrett’s article comes from the website of Iranian state broadcaster Press TV, where you can find numerous grotesque antisemitic articles (ranging from Holocaust denial to Jews run global narcotics).
Falk expressly acknowledged reading this text — he called it “defamatory” — and it caused him to flip out and turn the opening of his annual UNHRC report into a rant crying for UN Watch to be shut down.BBC tweaks Hizballah statement, promotes its conspiracy theories
How can Falk possibly argue that he had no idea what Kevin Barrett represents? Will anyone hold him to account?
Muir’s failure to present any balance to the Hizballah party line, his promotion of the conspiracy theory-based notion of the EU designation as being a “politically motivated” cave-in to a mysterious Israeli master plan and his resulting relativist whitewashing of Hizballah’s very long history of terror and crime is not only inaccurate and partial, but deliberate misinformation.Indy’s Alistair Dawber refers to Palestinian terrorists as “Political Prisoners”
Regrettably, this is far from the first time that we have seen Jim Muir promoting the concept of “resistance”, whitewashing Hizballah’s violence, trivialising Hizballah’s role in the destabilisation of the region as a whole and gratuitously advancing the anti-Israel conspiracy theories of Hizballah and its supporters.
As we argued previously, to refer to violent Palestinian criminals and terrorists (many of whom committed cruel and sadistic crimes against innocent Israelis) as “political prisoners” represents an egregious corruption of the term – propaganda of terror apologists legitimized by those in the media ideologically sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.Muslim Anger over Virtual ‘Third Temple’
A Jewish website that aims to teach Israelis about the Temple has been met with an angry backlash from the Arab Muslim community.US appeals court: Americans born in Jerusalem not from ‘Israel’
The Har Hakodesh (lit. “The Holy Mountain”) website includes educational material about the history of the Temple Mount, which was the site of the First Temple and Second Temple. The Temples were the focus of divine service for the Jewish nation.
The statement called the court decision “misguided,” and noted, “Federal government agencies have recognized in official documents and statements to the media that Jerusalem is in Israel. The State Department’s passport policy remains an isolated holdout, denying what is universally acknowledged, to the detriment of a right that a duly enacted law gives to American citizensWhich Nations Hate The U.S.? Often Those Receiving U.S. Aid
None of these examples suggest cause and effect. In other words, U.S. assistance may not cause countries to dislike the U.S. But in these cases we've noted, U.S. money certainly doesn't seem to help.Stand With Us The Newest Battlefront against Israel: Kangaroo Courts
Also, the correlation between getting U.S. aid and disliking the U.S. is far from absolute. To cite just one counterexample, the leading recipient of U.S. aid is Israel, which gets more than $3 billion annually, and 83 percent of Israelis surveyed had a favorable view of the U.S., making it one of the most U.S.-friendly places on the globe.
BDS activists try to forestall opposition. They frequently delay putting resolutions on the agenda until the last minute to take opponents by surprise. Pro-Israel students, pre-occupied with college life, have little time to prepare a response. They can also feel overwhelmed by the lurid accusations and hostile atmosphere. At UC Berkeley, for example, one speaker claimed that IDF soldiers use rats to sexually violate Palestinian women. Outside the student senate, groups like Students for Justice in Palestine often demonstrate, chanting, “From the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea, Palestine will be free,” a clear call for wiping Israel off the map.PA Arabs May Have to Go Hungry and Naked to Boycott Israel
With Fox’s entry into Ramallah, PA activists, the International Solidarity Movement’s paid protesters living in Judea and Samaria, and European Union officials are welcome to stand fast and back the boycott, do without Fox clothes and stick to a diet of Arab-made pita.EU's Ashton Adds to 'Settlement' Discrimination
Fox, Rami Levi and Orgad are making mincemeat out of the idea of the PA ideology of an Arab apartheid state.
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton is pushing for comprehensive guidelines to introduce separate labeling for products made by Jews in Judea and Samaria, Israeli-daily Haaretz reported on Tuesday.Israeli Military Exports Reach Record High
According to the report. Ashton sent a letter to European commissioners urging them to draft the guidelines by the end of 2013.
According to figures released Tuesday by the Defense Ministry, Israel sold $7.473 billion in defense products last year.Brig.-Gen. (res) Shmaya Avieli, who heads the Defense Exports Directorate (SIBAT) warned at a news briefing that the country’s fiscal slump may also affect military sales.Bionic contact lenses turn touch into vision
Much in the way Braille allows people who are blind to “see” the written word, a bionic contact lens invented by Israeli researcher Prof. Zeev Zalevsky “presses” images onto the surface of the eye to help the brain decipher through touch what the wearer is looking at.Peace prize for Jewish and Muslim leaders of United Hatzalah
The lens, still in a prototype stage, uses electrical signals sent to it from a small transponder, clipped to a pair of glasses or downloaded to a smartphone. A regular off-the-shelf camera, like the one inside a phone, “looks” at a crosswalk, items for sale in the grocery store, or at a loved one’s face, and transmits the encoded image via the lens to the wearer’s cornea. The image gets translated into a tactile sensation that can be interpreted visually.
When Jerusalem resident Eli Beer implemented a neighborhood-based volunteer emergency response system to Israel in 2006, he wasn’t dreaming of prizes, only of saving lives.
But in recognition of the fact that United Hatzalah of Israel has brought together some 2,100 trained volunteers from every sector of Israeli society to respond to medical emergencies in Arab and Jewish neighborhoods without discrimination, Beer and Arab-Israeli United Hatzalah-East Jerusalem leader Murad Alyan were chosen to receive the 2013 Victor J. Goldberg IIE Prize for Peace in the Middle East from the New York-based Institute of International Education.
