Thursday, June 12, 2014
Study: Nation Facing Greatest Threats Home to Developed World's Most Optimistic Parents
Threats of annihilation from a nuclear Iran, growing tensions with the United States, and a global campaign to isolate them through boycotts and sanctions seem unable to break Israelis’ optimism about their country and their children’s future in it. So much so, in fact, that a new Citi Research global survey of parents shows that Israeli parents are the developed world’s most optimistic.Islamic Antisemitism: Czech President Checkmates The OIC
According to the Citi survey, only 27% of Israeli parents believe their children will be worse off financially they are, by far the lowest among the ten advanced societies included in the CITI poll. France topped the charts in the global pessimism survey with 90% of French parents believing their children will be worse off financially than they are. In America, 62% of parents are pessimistic about their children’s future.
Czech president Miloš Zeman, whose under-reported outstanding speech on Israel's Independence Day, in the wake of the recent Brussels atrocity, regarding Islamic antisemitism and violence prompted an angry reaction from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).‘Who’s Behind the Hate at NYU?’ Asks New Ad Campaign
'There was a hideous assassination in the flower of Europe in the heart of European Union in a Jewish museum in Brussels. I will not let myself being calmed down by the declaration that there are only tiny fringe groups behind it. On the contrary, I am convinced that this xenophobia, and let’s call it racism or antisemitism, emerges from the very essence of the ideology these groups subscribe to.The OIC demanded an apology. But the courageous Miloš Zeman is standing his ground. To quote his spokesperson Jiří Ovčáček:
So let me quote one of their sacred texts to support this statement: “A tree says, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. A stone says, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” I would criticize those calling for the killing of Arabs, but I do not know of any movement calling for mass murdering of Arabs. However, I know of one anti-civilisation movement calling for the mass murder of Jews.
After all, one of the paragraphs of the statutes of Hamas says: “Kill every Jew you see.” Do we really want to pretend that this is an extreme viewpoint? Do we really want to be politically correct and say that everyone is nice and only a small group of extremists and fundamentalists is committing such crimes?'
“President Zeman definitely does not intend to apologise. For the president would consider it blasphemy to apologise for the quotation of a sacred Islamic text.”All praise for a European head of state who puts most of the rest of them to shame!
Advocacy group The Israel Project funded the campaign.Western Washington University Student Gov't Passes Anti-BDS Bill
The ad was delivered by Google AdWords on news sites and went to a landing page entitled Peace Not Hate.
The campaign asks, “Why is NYU supporting academic bigotry?”
“Last year, the American Studies Association (ASA) joined the hate-campaign against Israel by voting to boycott Israeli professors,” it said.
“NYU should have immediately pulled their funding of the group, like other universities. But NYU has continued to fund its ASA chapter.”
“By steering university funding to a group that fuels academic bigotry, NYU is betraying its students and its own commitment to academic openness.”
In an unprecedented move, the student government on the campus of Western Washington University passed a bill stating that it will not consider divestment resolutions from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
The resolution, titled "A Resolution regarding International Divestment, Boycott, and Sanctions" the student officials slammed the BDS movement:
WWU Student Alysa Kipersztok, a StandWithUs Emerson Fellow, brought the anti-BDS resolution to the ASWWU because “I’ve seen how divisive anti-Israel BDS campaigns have been on campuses across the country. Western is a warm, respectful, inclusive community. Our mission statement states that WWU ‘brings together individuals of diverse backgrounds and perspectives in an inclusive, student-centered university.’ BDS has been a source of disconnect and resentment among students, creating a hostile environment. It divides students, marginalizing those who support Israel."
Why We Can’t Have Peace Now
To my mind, if you want to know what’s going to happen in the peace process, you really should be following what’s going on at Al-Quds University, just outside of Jerusalem in Abu Dis. Never heard of it? Too bad, because it holds the secret to the “peace process”. If you want to know what the odds are for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, forget Obama and Netanyahu, John Kerry and Tzipi Livni. You should be focusing on Professor Mohammed Daoudi. Never heard of him? Too bad, because he knows a lot more about the chances for peace than all the DC mavens put together.Palestinians Damage Their Cause: The Pope's Visit to the Middle East
You see, Al-Quds University is theoretically the centre of “moderate” Palestinian thought…you know, educated Palestinians with Ph.D.’s. Theoretically, they and their students are the people that you can make peace with. And, in fact, you could probably make peace with Professor Daoudi. I don’t know. I never discussed the political process with him. What I do know is that he’s an honest academic who decided to break the taboo of the Holocaust in Palestinian society. By doing so, he committed a grave sin as far as the other “moderates” are concerned. Professor Daoudi who, until a few days ago, headed the American Studies Department and served as Chief Librarian at Al-Quds, took a group of Palestinian students to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps in Poland. His students appreciated the trip but many of his colleagues, other Al-Quds students and members of the public denounced him as a “traitor” and “collaborator”. In Palestinian society, these are code words for “you’re going to die”. I think I’m the only Western journalist whoever filmed a “collaborator interrogation”. It’s not a pretty picture. Then the death threats got explicit and, after 40 years at the University, Professor Daoudi resigned.
Most incongruously, the Mufti was both patronizing and arrogant in pretending to care about Christian interests at a time when senior sheikhs are responsible for the murder and persecution of Christians in the name of Islam throughout the Palestinian Authority and the Arab states.A Muslim imam invited to participate in last weekend’s “prayer for peace” event at the Vatican went off-script and asked Allah to help him gain victory over the unbelievers.
Given the Palestinians' strategic mistakes during the Pope's visit, it was not surprising when he expressed his reservations about Palestinian militancy and terrorism by saying, simply, "May no one abuse the name of God through violence." The Pope thereby rejected the Palestinian and Islamic propaganda inciting violence against Christians and Jews as well as to jihad in the name of "Allah."
The Palestinian tragedy of errors worsened even further with the success of the Jews during the third and final phase of the Pope's visit to Jerusalem, where he met with Israeli President Shimon Peres and Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. The Pope laid a wreath on the grave of Theodor Herzl, the visionary behind modern Zionism, and visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum and the memorial for the victims of terrorism.
The top management at the Vatican (CEO Francis and the Board of Cardinals) were taken by surprise by what happened, since the translated script they were handed in advance by the imam contained nothing controversial. And none of them understood the Arabic.Paris Jew Suffers Taser Attack After Tear Gas and Axe Incidents
A third anti-Semitic attack over the course of about a week occurred in Paris. On Tuesday, six teenagers of African origin attacked a religious Jewish teenager with a taser gun at the Place de la République square, after which point they escaped the scene, reported the French-Jewish online magazine Alliancefr.com.J Street Supporter Fights Straw Man
The incident comes just days after two Jewish friends wearing yarmulkes were attacked in Sarcelles, a northern suburb of Paris, by three men seemingly of North African descent who sprayed the Jewish friends with tear gas. The attack was captured on video surveillance revealed Monday.
On Tuesday, J Street supporter Richard Frenkel took the fight to the ultimate straw-man: those that prefer "blindly supporting the policies of the current Prime Minister whatever they happen to be." In doing so, Frenkel declared that his fringe organization is "mainstream."IsraellyCool: Jason Isaacs Gives BDSHoles The Middle Finger
Unable to address the legitimate concerns raised by those critical of J Street, Frenkel stated that, "Of course there are those, especially on the right, who disagree with the J Street’s positions, and they have been vociferous in their denouncement of J Street and indeed anyone who calls for a moratorium on settlement building or even suggests giving up of any land won in the 67 war to a future Palestinian state."
Entirely absent from the article is any mention of the real concerns that many Americans have about the situation in the Middle East, including the Iran threat and Palestinian terror. Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe highlighted some of the legitimate issues plaguing Israeli-Palestinian peace:
I have written about Harry Potter actor Jason Isaacs on a number of occasions before, the last time being regarding an interview in which he spoke of why his parents moved to Israel.Rabbis Equate BDS Movement with Biblical Theft, Murder
“After the hangings, my dad was cowering with his family in his flat in Liverpool while people were breaking windows and shouting: ‘Burn the Jews! Burn the Jews!’ I thought he was confused, but he wasn’t: these things were happening to him after the war when he was 16.
“So to discover that a country had been set up where this wouldn’t happen to you, where there wouldn’t have been a chance of you being carted off and put in gas ovens, moved him and my mother all the way through raising their children
So it hardly comes as a surprise that he would give the BDSholes the middle finger, which is what I believe he is pretty much doing in this exchange published by Ali “Abumination” Abunimah.
The Rabbinical Alliance of America – a major American mainstream rabbinic organization – has equated support for the BDS movement with being an accessory to Biblical theft and murder."Free Arabs" Falls for Mendacious Maps, Fictitious Facts
The organization urged fellow Jews to reject absolutely the ‘boycott, divestment and sanctions’ movement against Israel rather than risk transgressions of those and other Biblical prohibitions.
The 800-member organization warned in a statement issued at its recent rabbinic convocation there is a “rising tide of anti-Semitism worldwide and [the] anti-Jewish rhetoric associated with the BDS movement against the people and the State of Israel.”
The maps, prepared by a group called Visualizing Palestine, show huge swaths of land that are supposedly kept empty of Arabs, and speak about the impact of what Free Arabs describes a "grossly discriminatory Israeli ID system" in which the right to vote is seemingly granted and denied based on ethnicity.BBC’s Donnison returns with inaccurate promotion of armistice lines as ‘borders’
The second map in the series, for example, depicts gray areas that are supposedly empty of Israeli Arabs. "Palestinian citizens of Israel," the accompanying text states, are "barred from living in 68% of all towns in Israel by admissions committees." But both the map and the text are wrong. It is simply absurd to depict, as the map does, that an Arab resident of (blue) downtown Haifa is not permitted to move to (gray) downtown Jerusalem. Likewise, it is a lie to suggest Israel's Arab citizens are barred from living in Ashdod or Ashkelon, two cities in the grayed portion of the map. (Just ask any of the hundreds of Arabs living there.
The supposedly Jews-only gray area is also the site of Bir Hadaj, a new town Israel is developing for some of its traditionally nomadic Bedouin citizens.
As someone who spent over three years reporting from the Middle East, Donnison should be capable of avoiding the breaches of accuracy and impartiality evident in other parts of this article.Kantor: European leaders need to ‘wake up’ to spike in anti-Semitism across continent
“Jerusalem is at the heart of the Middle East’s most intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.”
Donnison provides no evidence for his claim that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is “the [..] most intractable” in the Middle East or that it is any more intractable than, say, that between Sunni and Shi’a which has been going on for considerably longer and with much more lethal consequences.
European Jewish Congress President Viatcheslav Moshe Kantor said that anti-Semitic acts over the last few months in Europe “completely changed” his understanding of the safety of Jews in the continent and that political leaders there have to “wake up” to the situation.Jews of Marseille ‘Bunkerize’ after Brussels Museum Shootings
“I have more serious thoughts than before,” Kantor told The Jerusalem Post in an interview on Tuesday, adding that incidents in Europe over the last several months “completely changed my understanding of the situation.”
The political leaders in Europe do not understand the problem and “have to wake up” to what is going on, he said.
French police are guarding ninety synagogues and Jewish schools in Marseille after the shooting attack at the Jewish Museum in Brussels killed four people last month, the UK Guardian reported on Wednesday.ADL rejects anti-Semitism in Nike ad
Michèle Teboul, the leader of a regional Jewish organisation, was quoted as saying that Marseilles’s 80,000-member Jewish community had no alternative other than to “bunkerize.” The city has 850,000 people, a quarter of whom are Muslim.
Contrary to a Knesset member’s charge that a Nike World Cup ad is anti-Semitic, the Anti-Defamation League dismissed such claims saying that six points do not an anti-Jewish image make.Holocaust-denying bishop has Australia visa canceled
“Anyone who thinks this is anti-Semitism is certainly off base,” an ADL spokesperson said in a statement, rejecting a remark to that end by MK Shimon Ohayon of the Yisrael Beytenu party. “You can put anything in a configuration of six. Just because it appears to look like the Star of David, it does not mean it is.”
Australia canceled the visa of a British Catholic bishop who has denied that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust.Germany: Looted Matisse belongs to Jewish family
Richard Williamson was scheduled to speak in rural Australia this month but his visa was canceled this week, the Australian Jewish News reported.
The Australian Jewish News said it had contacted the Department of Immigration last week to alert them to Williamson’s visit.
A department spokesman told the newspaper this week that “the individual’s visa has been canceled,” the paper reported.
The German task force investigating a huge trove of art recovered from a Munich apartment says one of the paintings — Henri Matisse’s 1921 “Woman Sitting in an Armchair” — was looted from Jews by the Nazis and belongs to the descendants of Paris art dealer Paul Rosenberg.World Cup drones from Tel Aviv bring fall of Rio kingpin
The painting was one of more than 1,500 works found in 2011 in the apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of an art dealer who worked with the Nazis.
In a statement, the task force’s head Matthias Henkel said he couldn’t be sure how Gurlitt acquired the painting, but it is clear it is the “rightful property” of Paul Rosenberg.
Police intelligence officer Adriano Barbosa tracked the drug gang leader known as “Little P” for almost a month as part of Brazil’s push to curb violence in Rio de Janeiro’s slums before the World Cup starts today.Remember this moment Frank Underwood: ‘Hostages’ just beat you
The real-time reports on Little P’s whereabouts weren’t coming from police informants. Nor from undercover officers. Barbosa had a more high-tech tool for the hunt that led to the March 26 arrest: a Heron drone outfitted with a heat-sensing camera. The drone, produced by Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd., allowed Barbosa to monitor Little P at night, far from view and earshot.
Israel’s highly acclaimed drama Hostages has recorded a double win at the 54th Festival de Télévision de Monte-Carlo, the television counterpart to the Cannes Film Festival.Israeli fish are rare bright splash in global nature report
The Israeli original drama series won the Golden Nymph for Best International Drama TV Series while the Golden Nymph for Outstanding Actress in a Drama TV Series was presented to Ayelet Zurer for her role as Dr. Yael Danon.
Hostages competed against popular series including Downton Abbey and House of Cards, while previous winners in these categories have included crime drama Breaking Bad and trend-setting period drama Mad Men.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature said Thursday that it had raised its rating of the Yarkon Bream, a fish found only in Israel, from extinct in the wild to vulnerable.Jerusalem of Gold - The Holy City Decks Out in Light
Its habitat was wrecked by drought and drawing water for irrigation, but it was saved by taking 120 of the last wild fish into a captive breeding program at Tel Aviv University.
Its population has increased significantly since 9,000 laboratory-born Yarkon Bream were released into restored habitats in the Yarkon and other Israeli rivers, the IUCN, which works closely with governments, the United Nations and other environmental groups, said.
The light show is an initiative of the Jerusalem Development Authority, the Ministry of Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs, the Jerusalem Municipality and the Ministry of Tourism.Light in Jerusalem 2014
This year's Festival particularly emphasizes interactive displays that involve the audience. Exhibiting the variety of the show, one of the many fascinating displays is an illuminated house of cards featuring Biblical figures in the Hurva Square.
The creations of seventeen renowned international light artists, along with various talented Israeli artists, will be featured in the Festival. Also, for the first time, students at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design will display light fixtures at the show as well.
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