Monday, May 05, 2014
Daphne Anson: BDSers Don't Care For My People – They Just Hate Jews ... We Should Respect & Support Israel's Sovereignty ... as a Jewish State" (video)
A practising Muslim, the personable Mr Zahran has kind things to say about Jews and Israel, and harsh things to say about the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic terrorism, the Jordanian monarch, Arab dictatorships, and the BDS movement.SJD - Mr. Mudar Zahran, Opposition-leader of the Palestinian's in Jordan)
"I came to this part of Stockholm, where Israel is hated, at considerable risk to my life, to tell the truth," the exiled leader of the Palestinian Jordanians, Mudar Zahran, declares. ".... There have always been Jews in that Holy Land, for thousands of years ..."
"Israel has served as the airbag for the West... If they did not have Israel to fight, they would be fighting you. We should respect and support Israel's sovereignty over all its land, as a Jewish State ..."
"Sooner or later, the weak King of Jordan is going to fall ... As a result we are going to have a Palestinian State for the first time ..."
Director of Halimi Murder Film: ‘Ilan’s Death Reflects a Sick Society’ (VIDEO)
French Jewish film director Alexandre Arcady said the murder of Ilan Halimi, a young Parisian Jew killed by a self-proclaimed Islamist, said, “Ilan’s death reflects a sick society,” according to French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche."Social Inequality Does Not Explain The Anti-Semitism, Nor The Misogyny ... Many Muslims in Europe are re-Islamizing Themselves"
Describing the housing development where the crime occurred, Arcady said, “Among 500 families living there, some knew what happened but no one spoke… My film is a warning against indifference.”
Arcady’s film, 24 jours: la vérité sur l’affaire Ilan Halimi, or “24 Days: the truth about the Ilan Hamili affair,” was inspired by a book with a similar title written by the victim’s mother, Ruth.
"I am pained to see that the French mode of European civilization is threatened. France is in the process of transforming into a post-national and multicultural society. It seems to me that this enormous transformation does not bring anything good....
It is presented to us as the model for the future. But multiculturalism does not mean that cultures blend. Mistrust prevails, communitarianism is rampant – parallel societies are forming that continuously distance themselves from each other."
So declares the famous French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, the son of a Holocaust survivor, in an interview with Der Spiegel online.
Ex-NYPD cop charged with hate crime over anti-Jewish graffiti in Brooklyn
A former NYPD cop, apparently in the throes of a mental meltdown, has been busted for spray-painting anti-Semitic graffiti in one of Brooklyn’s largest Orthodox communities.Boston Professor Critiques Israel From His Ivory Tower
Michael Setiawan, 36, who left the force in 2007 after two years of service, was accused Sunday of spraying swastikas and hate-filled words on the walls of a Jewish school, three other buildings and 15 cars in Borough Park.
Surveillance cameras filmed a bald man believed to be Setiawan wielding a spray-paint can during Saturday night’s vandalism rampage that left residents terrified. (h/t Bob Knot)
Bacevich’s analysis that turns peace talks into an Israeli attempt to subjugate the Palestinians absolves the Palestinians of any need to make concessions or responsibility for the conflict.Roger Waters Keeps Stoking BDS Flames
When Bacevich advocates “leveling the playing field” to strip Israel of its strategic advantages, he ignores the reasons why those advantages are necessary in the first place to protect Israelis from enemies such as Hamas still advocating genocide while even the supposed “moderates” of the PA have not expressed a willingness to bring the conflict to an end.
Ultimately though, Bacevich betrays his real sympathies and bias in this description of Israel:
And it is Bacevich’s use of the trope of ‘Zionist control’ over the U.S. that tells us what his real issues are with Israeli power and why he’d like to see it cut down to size.
They can’t get Scarlett Johansson or even Ellen DeGeneres, but at least the BDS Movement can always count on Roger Waters.The Fight Against BDS on the Left
Waters, the former leader of Pink Floyd, still maintains a sizeable fan base, at least among baby boomers. And he’s now expanding his reach by writing articles on Salon, the Internet’s oldest web-only magazine, urging people to support the BDS movement.
Late in March, I wrote about an “open forum” at Vassar College, at which 200 Vasserites gathered for the purpose of denouncing a planned trip to Israel. The trip was organized by two professors with impeccable liberal credentials and included a visit to a Palestinian refugee camp. But its purpose was not the delegitimization of Israel, so representatives of Students for Justice in Palestine found it unacceptable. Perhaps it did not help that the organizers were named Schneiderman and Friedman. As William Jacobson has reported, members of the Vassar community, in the presence of the dean of students and acting dean of the college, heckled and laughed at Jewish students who attempted to speak.J Street belongs outside the pale
Jill Schneiderman and Rachel Friedman have since written of the “climate of fear” that has “descended on campus” over the “past several years,” a climate that has stifled dissent. Parts of their letter are irritating. For example, they claim that they have been denounced by both the right and the left, even though their critics come almost entirely from the left. But they make one important point convincingly: the boycott, divestment, sanctions movement that ran them over wants to make people think less, not more.
J Street may be loud, they may have strong support from some liberal Jewish leaders, but I would strongly suggest that their support lies with a small minority of the American Jewish community. It is not without cause that their attempt to supplant AIPAC as the respected voice of pro-Israel advocacy has proven an utter failure. Most Jews see J Street as an organization attempting to do an end-run around Israeli democracy, badly out of sync with our brethren in Israel.Fighting back against disruptions of Israeli performances and lectures in the UK
It remains difficult to find a statement of PA President Mahmoud Abbas that J Street does not at least defend, if not explicitly endorse – even, most recently, responding “with caution” to reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, a terrorist organization still committed to the destruction of Israel and the annihilation of its Jewish residents, and urging the United States to “press forward with an even more assertive effort” to finalize a two-state solution.
As many readers will know, performances and lectures by Israelis in the UK have frequently been disrupted in recent years. In one serious example, a concert by the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall was interrupted by shouting and singing to such an extent that a simultaneous broadcast on BBC Radio 3 was taken off-air.Civil Rights Groups Urge NYU to Discipline ‘Mock Eviction’ Leafletters
Videos show the threatening atmosphere and the risk of a serious breakdown of order which could have resulted in mass casualties and this was also confirmed by eye-witness accounts.
The problem is not confined to Israelis. Other victims have included Mohamed El-Nabawy, whose lecture on the challenges faced by Egypt to a meeting of the SOAS Palestinian Society was stormed by Muslim Brotherhood thugs; David Willetts MP, talking to students at Cambridge; and Professor Alex Callinicos, whose lecture at Warwick University was abandoned due to disruption by an unusual combination of neo-Nazis and feminists.
In a letter to President Sexton and Vice Chancellor Linda Mills, the Brandeis Center and The Lawfare Project emphasized that the mock eviction notices raised “serious issues under federal civil rights law.” Specifically, the groups reminded President Sexton and Vice Chancellor Mills that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in programs that receive federal funds. “More broadly,” the two organizations wrote, “they raise questions about respect, civility, and mutual understanding and about sensitivity for the reasonable concerns of Jewish students.”Winnipeg shul drops speaker who allowed campus ‘apartheid’ week
Winnipeg’s leading synagogue withdrew an invitation for the University of Manitoba’s president to address its Yom Hashoah interfaith service following anti-Israel events on the university campus, the National Post reported.Want the Jewish state wiped off the map? Guardian approved NGO has an app for that!
David Barnard, the university president, allowed Israel Apartheid Week to take place over the objections of the U of M student government who feared the series of events would exacerbate a tense political climate on campus.
While the student government stripped funding from the U of M chapter of Students Against Israeli Apartheid last year, this year Barnard allowed an outside group to host the week of events criticizing the Jewish state.
“We were … concerned that by having him here we’re basically endorsing him as an individual who would be representative of the community in speaking about this,” Ian Staniloff, executive director of the Shaarey Zedek congregation told the Post.
Ian Black, the Guardian’s Middle East editor, wrote the following in a May 2nd article titled “Remembering the Nakba: Israeli group puts 1948 Palestine back on the map‘:Mainstreaming extremism on BBC Radio 4
Further in the article, Black alludes to the fact that Zochrot’s plans to “build a better future” in the region include an unlimited Palestinian ‘right of return’:
"Zochrot’s focus on the hyper-sensitive question of the 750,000 Palestinians who became refugees has earned it the hostility of the vast majority of Israeli Jews who flatly reject any Palestinian right of return. Allowing these refugees – now, with their descendants, numbering seven million people – to return to Jaffa, Haifa or Acre, the argument goes, would destroy the Jewish majority, the raison d’être of the Zionist project."
Black’s use of the term “Zionist project” is of course quite telling.
The Listening Project’s slogan is “It’s surprising what you hear when you listen”. What is most notable about this broadcast though is what audiences – despite listening – did not hear.
They did not hear the words ‘Free Gaza Movement’, or ‘International Solidarity Movement’ or ‘Hamas’ or ‘terror attacks on Israeli civilians’. They likewise did not hear anything about Adie Mormech’s involvement with both of the organisations mentioned above or his history of anti-Israel campaigning which includes support for the anti-peace BDS movement’s campaign to bring about the demise of Israel as the Jewish state.
And they certainly were not informed about the interview below which Mormech gave to Iran’s Press TV last year (not a one-off event, by any stretch of the imagination). Mormech’s fact-free rant in that interview, and others, raises serious questions regarding his reliability and credibility as a raconteur of anything intended to be described as ‘oral history’ to an institution such as the British Library.
A Melbourne ‘terrorist themed’ play praised by Fairfax Media
What is puzzling is why the reviewer calls it a piece of “documentary theatre”, which implies it is factually accurate, when it could more aptly be described as a fantasy or even a piece of pro-Palestinian propaganda.Jeremy Bowen’s one-man messaging continues on BBC TV
Wikipedia tells us more about Zwaiter:
"Wael Zwaiter was a Palestinian translator assassinated as the first target of Israel’s Operation Wrath of God campaign following the 1972 Munich massacre. Israel considered Zwaiter a terrorist for his role in the Black September group, while his supporters argue that he was “never conclusively linked” with Black September or the Munich massacre and was killed in retribution.
Zwaiter was the PLO representative in Rome. During his time in Italy, he was in the process of translating One Thousand and One Nights from Arabic into Italian…
Zwaiter was held for questioning by Italian police in August 1972 in relation to a bombing by the group Black September against an oil refinery, but was later released. The Israeli Mossad suspected him of being the head of Black September in Rome, and put him on an assassination list after Black September’s attack in Munich. When he returned to his apartment building on the night of October 16, 1972, he was shot 11 times by two Israeli agents, killing him".
Once again, Bowen leaves the broader issue of the Arab-Israeli conflict out of the frame.Brussels police disperse rally supporting banned far-right event
Considering that a number of the stances adopted by the PLO during the last nine months of negotiations have had public backing from the Arab League (including the refusal to agree to security arrangements in the Jordan Valley and the all-important issue of recognition of Israel as the Jewish state), the broader picture is obviously context which BBC audiences need in order to fully understand the subject.
Notably too, Bowen continues to describe the failure of past peace-making efforts in opaque and overly generalised terms. From the Arab League refusal to accept the 1947 Partition Plan, through the ‘three noes’ of Khartoum and the PA’s decision to start the second Intifada and right up to the Palestinian Authority’s refusal to accept several potential plans over the last twenty years or so, Bowen refrains from providing audiences with the vital background which forms the foundations of the story upon which he is now reporting.
His framing of history is no less selective: once again Bowen’s version of Middle East history begins in 1967 and thus denies audiences the ability to comprehend that the conflict in fact is rooted in events long before the Six Day War.
Riot police in Brussels Sunday used water cannon to disperse a crowd defying a ban on a gathering of controversial far-right figures including French comic Dieudonne, which critics called an “anti-Semitic hatefest”.U.S. Report: Several Mideast Countries Top List of Violators of Religious Freedom
Citing a threat to public order, the mayor of the Brussels district of Anderlecht banned both the meeting and any protests connected to it.
But organizers of the so-called “European Dissidents’ Congress” — a Brussels bookshop and a group called “Debout les Belges!” (Belgians, Rise up!) — urged supporters to head to the venue for “a surprise”, sparking the standoff with riot police.
Several Middle East countries have been identified as among the worst violators of religious freedom, according to an annual report issued by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.Obama opens Jewish Heritage Month, cites Kansas killings
According to the 209-page report, Iran and Saudi Arabia are listed as “Tier 1” or “Countries of Particular Concern (CPC).” Egypt, Syria, and Iraq are listed as “Tier 1” countries that should be added to the U.S. State Department’s CPC list.
Turkey is listed as a “Tier 2,” for countries that do not fully meet the criteria of being a CPC but still have serious violations of religious freedom.
The Kansas City shootings are a reminder that Americans must come together to reject intolerance, President Obama said in his Jewish heritage month proclamation.Biofishency offers cleaner, bigger catch for fish farmers
“Jewish communities continue to confront anti-Semitism — both around the world and, as tragic events mere weeks ago in Kansas reminded us, here in the United States,” Obama said in his, proclamation declaring May Jewish American Heritage Month, issued April 30.
“Following in the footsteps of Jewish civil rights leaders, we must come together across all faiths, reject ignorance and intolerance, and root out hatred wherever it exists,” he said.
The world’s fish stocks are depleting, matched with a growing global population and a steady appetite for fish and seafood. An important source of protein, farmed fish already comprise 45 percent of the world’s catch, with that number expected to rise to 62% by the year 2030, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.350 more Nepalese students to be trained in Israel
Since most of the cultured fish production is in developing economies, it would seem logical that fish-farming technologies would suit the needs of the people who grow the fish. But they do not, says Cobi Levanon, CEO of Biofishency.
Systems to improve yield are typically expensive and come packaged as an entire farm solution. A new monitor and filter product from Israel’s Biofishency will provide an affordable “black box” to fish farmers so they can grow healthier fish using less water — without replacing the whole farm. The box works for both freshwater and saltwater fish.
Israel has offered the opportunity for 360 Nepali students this year to take advanced agricultural training there, according to the Embassy of Israel in Kathmandu.Asia to Surpass U.S. as Israel’s No. 2 Export Target After Europe
The embassy has provided similar training for 205 students last year, the embassy informed during a press meet in Kathmandu on Wednesday. According to the embassy, the students will be selected through lottery and interviews.
Speaking at the press meet, Hanan Goder-Goldberger said that such training will enhance the performance of small farmers and the trained students will contribute toward the development of agricultural sector in Nepal. "Technology, skill and capital are needed for the farmers to boost agricultural production of Nepal. The training will provide opportunity to the farmers here in meeting these requirements to some extent," Goder said.
The European Union, with 32% of Israel’s trade remains Israel’s largest trading partner, and will likely remain so for the near future.
According to the Israel Trade Mission in China, nearly 300 Israeli companies are doing business there.
One of them, Solbar, has even won an award for its management practices from the Chinese government, a rare achievement for a foreign company in China.
In addition, Asian investors are starting to show an interest in trade with Israel. According to the report, Israel’s Catalyst Equity Management and Hong Kong-based Everbright Limited Investments have established a fund that invests in Israeli companies that have commercial ties with China.
