Thursday, July 03, 2014
Chloé Valdary: Grand Larceny
Palestinian identity has been forged out of a vacuum of historical nothingness. It culturally appropriates the history of the other (namely the Jew) and adopts it as its own. Consider the so-called “Nakba” – what the Arabs call the alleged tragic alleged expulsion of Arabs from “their” land and the subsequent mourning and longing to return. Does this sound familiar to you?Mazin Qumsiyeh compares Lubavitcher Rebbe to Hitler
It should.
This is nothing more than Jewish history repackaged in 21st century fashion for the politically correct kleptomaniac, i.e. the Omar Barghouti types.
It was Jews who were kicked out of their land and Jews who longed to return to their homes, who had keys, (the real ones, not the fake gigantic ones Palestinian Arabs would have us believe fit into tiny keyholes in 1940) and prayer books, and Torah scrolls, etc. as proof of their history. For 3,000 + years they longed to return and mourned their exiled existence. Palestinian identity merely takes that true story, applies it to Arabs, and Viola! the crime of theft is complete.
Our friend at Elder of Ziyon has documented the antisemitism of Mazim Qumsiyeh in the past.Clifford D. May: Salaries for terrorists
Mazin Qumsiyeh has just hit bottom. Writing in Facebook on the 20th yahrzeit of the famed Lubavitcher Rebbe's death Mazim Qumsiyeh has compared the renowned Rebbe to Hitler.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Scheerson may very well be the the most influential rabbi in modern history. His wisdom, his compassion and his insights have inspired hundreds of thousands. He helped organize outreach programs, social-service programs and aid to all those in need. After his death, Congress awarded the Rebbe the Congressional Gold Medal , honoring him for his "outstanding and lasting contributions toward improvements in world education, morality, and acts of charity".
I pay lots of taxes. Some of my money supports U.S. special forces, and that pleases me. I have no problem helping fund the U.S. Park Service or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I am, however, a tad uneasy about my tax dollars — and yours — going to support terrorists.Israel's Attorney General, Hamas' Defense Attorney
You think I’m joking? The U.S. government gives more than $400 million a year to the Palestinian Authority (PA). Last week, the Israeli prime minister’s office presented figures on the PA’s payments to terrorists imprisoned in Israel: In 2011-12, the PA’s Ministry of Prisoners Affairs transferred $150 million to imprisoned terrorists, released terrorists and the families of terrorists. Some prisoners are better paid than Palestinian police officers.
One might argue that these payments are charity — that most of the money goes to women and children who have no breadwinner at home. However, Palestinian Minister of Prisoners’ Affairs Issa Karake has not made that argument. He recently said that the salaries are paid “out of esteem for [the] sacrifice and struggle” of those who, under Palestinian laws, are seen as “martyrs,” “prisoners of war” and resisters of “occupation.”
In other words, both incentives and rewards are in place for the killing of Israelis (and, in some cases, Americans and other foreigners) anywhere in Israel — not only in the so-called Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza.
To win a verdict against a terror organization is one thing, to go out and collect the money is quite another. Since confiscating Hamas assets in Gaza or in Arab states is not possible, Advocate Nitzana Darshan-Leitner, head of "Shurat Hadin" which was representing the family, asked to put Hamas companies into their receivership, something which would allow in-depth investigation of Hamas finances in Israel, which is funneled through various Islamic charity organizations.
The idea was feasible, being based on various precedents of terror victims filing similar lawsuits in the United States and elsewhere. Aside from providing the victims' families with their compensation, such a move has huge political ramifications, allowing, for the first time, terror victims to directly "drain the swamp" of terrorist finances.
It therefore came as quite a shock when it turned out that the person blocking this move was none other than then Attorney General Meni Mazouz. Mazouz argued that the lawsuit must be set aside because "the right of the State of Israel or a public interest may be affected or involved in the process before the Honorable court." (h/t Yenta Press)
The Presbyterians’ Judaism problem
The process initiated by John XXIII led to the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 declaration Nostra Aetate, which made four remarkable claims: 1) that Jews are not now —and never were — collectively responsible for the death of Jesus, 2) that God’s covenant with the Jews is eternally valid, (3) that Jews should never be treated as if God had abandoned or cursed them, and (4) that anti-Semitism has no place whatsoever in Christianity.Andrew Klavan: Who Put the BS in BDS?
Today, Jews and Catholics continue to work at deepening understanding and cooperation. Even when Jews have had political differences with the church, these were discussed with an attitude of respect for the fundamentals of Jewish identity — a level playing field for dialogue.
Many Protestant denominations took up the same process of theological soul-searching. The Episcopal Church dealt with the issue of with the issue of supersessionism and the validity of the Jewish covenant in a resolution in 1988; the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America in 1994; the United Methodist Church in 1996. These other mainline Protestant denominations have wrestled with their theological relationship to Judaism. They have developed a language of understanding and respect upon which to respectfully engage with Jews on political questions.
The Presbyterians have not done this.
In which our host, Andrew Klavan, points out that the leftists behind the current Boycott, Divestment and Sanction, or BDS, efforts against the State of Israel are not at all anti-semitic. They just hate Jews and want to kill them...
Chomsky says BDS tactics won't work, may be harmful to Palestinians
Writing in The Nation, Chomsky warns that the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign could end up harming the Palestinian cause since the demand for a "right of return" for Palestinian refugees has failed to muster significant international support.WeDivest Week of Anti-Israel Actions 2014: From Boston to San Francisco
Chomsky also said that while Israel critics invoke the South African model of apartheid to describe the situation in the West Bank, "the necessary educational work has not been done," as public opinion in the United States has yet to mobilize against Israel the way it did against South Africa.
Yawn. There is another anti-Israel BDS week of rage. Expect some lame flash mobs, geriatric hippies holding incomprehensible signs and lots of self-congratulatory messages on social media.BDS Defeats "Palestine"
The WeDivest Week of Actions 2014: From Boston to San Francisco is scheduled July 6-13th, marking 13 years of BDS fails.
If you are planning a counter-protest or buycott, let us know, and we'll be happy to publicize it. And if you aren't planning a counter-protest or a buycott, well, why not?
Here's the schedule of hate. We will fill in the details as they become available.
Kerry and Abbas were both victims of BDS, since both of them apparently believe that the Palestinian Arabs can’t be expected to cede territory that belonged to Jordan before 1967. When the pre-1967 lines existed, the only countries on earth that recognized them were Jordan and Great Britain. After the 'West Bank' was lost by Jordan, which made the mistake of joining the Arab side during the Six Day War and attacking Israel, the cease-fire lines, now called the Green Line, became holy.Musician Phil Soussan Continues To Hit The Right Notes
Leftist academics, who form the core of the BDS Movement, have also become its victims. Now Leftists have to be silent about gay-rights and women’s-rights causes. Their response to the Boko Haram Movement has been wishy-washy. Their objection to the executions of homosexuals in Iran and northern Nigeria has been feeble. Leftists are not free to protest the persecution of women and homosexuals in Muslim areas because doing so might indirectly make Israel look less bad.
The BDS Movement has made the Left powerless when it comes to protesting injustice against gays and women committed by Muslims.
Ughh... a sad day - After 16 days of relative silence, Obama finally expressed concern over the 3 boys kidnapped by Hamas in Israel. As usual, a day late and a dollar short as their bodies were just found today, slaughtered in cold blood. This is the terror machine that the US government just chose to sponsor by giving them $400M US taxpayer dollars.Targeted Jewish Student Responds to Smear Campaign
This kidnapping happened as a direct consequence of US pressure on Israel to remove some border checkpoints as "an act of good faith", despite Hamas continuing agenda, as the kidnappers took advantage of the reduced security to carry out their plan.
With this act of terror and murder, Obama has now got to acknowledge that any support for Hamas, whether tied to any other organization or not, is a direct support of a terrorist group and therefore liable in accordance with US Code
The targeting of Jewish students in the University of California school system continued last week when the University of California Students Association’s Board of Directors passed a motion to conduct an emergency meeting after students misrepresented facts and questioned the supposed financial and political conflict of interest of student-regent designate nominee Avi Oved.Brandeis SJP Keeps Anti-Semitic Cartoon On FB Page
The campus of UCLA, where is Oved is a student, was the launching pad for vicious anti-Israel initiatives in the spring of 2014. The attacks against the Jewish state and Jews included a smear campaign targeting a Jewish student government candidate, Israel being wiped off the map in an Arab sorority flyer, and an "ethics statement" which most student government candidates signed pledging that they would not travel to Israel on pro-Israel trips. The student government also rejected a proposal to divest from Israel, a manifestation of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, in February.
Brandeis University's Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has posted two blatantly anti-Semitic photos on their Facebook page and has not removed them.Two Guardian cartoonists agree: Jewish life is overvalued by the media
The first photo, seen below, shows Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a hooked nose while paving a brick wall over the screaming bodies of Palestinians, using blood as mortar. This, of course, hearkens back to the fraudulent "Jewish blood libel" used to persecute Jews in the past. The photo first appeared in The Sunday Times of London back in 2013, but later the paper apologized and removed the cartoon after severe blowback.
The second photo, also seen below, shows a keffiyeh draped over the statue of Judge Louis B. Brandeis, a Jewish pro-Israel lawyer.
The interesting thing about the consistency between the two cartoonists in depicting the loss of Jewish and Palestinian life is how their visual agitprop comports with the broader Guardian narrative of the conflict.Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent re-tweets the hate site, Mondoweiss
The Guardian sees its mission as, to quote Rowson, ‘afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted’; The Palestinians, so says the Guardian, are the weaker (“afflicted”) party in the conflict, while Israeli Jews represent the comfortable; Therefore, when contextualizing the loss of life on both sides, it is the duty of ‘progressive’ political cartoonists to advocate for the weaker Palestinians.
Of course, it would have been news to Eyal Yifrach, Naftali Frankel and Gilad Shaar that they represented the ‘comfortable’ and their kidnappers were the ‘afflicted’ as multiple shots were fired at them at point-blank range, penetrating their bodies and ending their young lives.
Before we address the content of the site in question, let’s briefly note that the claim in the post per the headline (‘Israeli soldiers destroy kidnapping suspects’ family homes in retribution attack) is not true. News reports clearly indicate that the homes of the two suspects (Marwan Kawasme and Omar Abu Aysha) in the murder of three Israelis were damaged but clearly not “destroyed”.Syrian Chemical Weapons Loaded onto American Ship
However, more important than the content of this particular story which Beaumont chose to Tweet to his 10,000 followers is the fact that Mondoweiss is an extremist site which trades in antisemitic calumnies. Though you can read a post (Mondoweiss: Hate as “Progressive” Jewish Politics) this writer published at Elder of Ziyon to get a sense of the hateful material, here are a few examples:
The international operation to destroy Syrian chemical weapons entered its final phase on Wednesday, with the stockpile being loaded onto a U.S. military ship equipped to dispose of them.ISIS Releases Map of 5-Year Plan to Spread from Spain to China
According to AFP, hundreds of tons of mustard gas and ingredients to make Sarin nerve gas were transferred from a Danish freighter in the southern Italian port of Gioia Tauro amid tight security.
An exclusion zone was set up around the port in the Reggio Calabria region as the vessels moored stern-to-stern, and the containers were moved from one ship to the other by crane and a vast climbing platform.
The jihadists terrorists of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)-- now trying to rebrand as simply the "Islamic State"-- have released a new map that outlines the territory they aspire to conquer within the next five years. That territory spans from Morocco and Spain out to Sri Lanka and the border of China.Syria Jihadists Pledge to Retake Spain, 'The Land of Our Ancestors'
The map, which surfaced on Twitter and has begun to be distributed widely throughout social media, paints in black every territory ISIS wishes to incorporate into the newly announced caliphate, which currently only spans, according to ISIS officials, throughout Syria ("al-Sham") and Iraq. The Daily Mail notes that the westernmost territory of the map, labeled "Maghreb," is the Western Sahara, including Mali, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and a host of other nations. In Europe, the western limits of the empire are Spain-- "Al-Andaluz"-- a territory once controlled by Muslims in the Middle Ages. The map then incorporates almost every nation between Spain and the borders of China, as well as "Greece, Romania and Bulgaria - extending its territories in eastern Europe as far as Austria, which appears to be based on a pre-First World War borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire."
In the footage, a young fighter introduces another "friend and brother" saying that "we're going to speak in Spanish". The second militant, wearing a kefiah scarf around his head, says:Saudi Arabia Sends 30,000 Troops to Iraqi border
"We are in the Holy Land [Syria], the land of Islam and I tell and warn everyone: we are living under the Islamic flag and we will die for it until we open those locked lands from Jakarta to Andalusia. And I say: Spain is the land of our ancestors and we will open it with the power of Allah".
The deployment comes as Saudi-owned news channel Al Arabiya aired an interview with an Iraqi border police officer, in which he testified that his forces had been given unexplained orders to abandon their posts, despite there not being any present danger to them. The officer expressed confusion as to why the orders had been ordered.Elliot Abrams: Reagan and the Iran talks
The gulf state's sizable deployment is yet another alarming sign that the rapid disintegration of the Iraqi state and accompanying sectarian warfare - spurred on by a Sunni rebellion led by the radical Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), which recently declared an "Islamic State" or "Caliphate" - is threatening to spread beyond that country.
This is a message worth keeping in mind as our negotiators, and those of other P5+1 nations, meet with Iranian officials to seek a nuclear agreement before the July 20 deadline. The road to peace does not lie through weak agreements with brutal dictatorships. In the end, peace and reconciliation between Iran and the United States are certainly possible, indeed likely -- but not between the Islamic republic and the United States.Kerry Op-Ed: “Community of Nations” Demand Iran’s Compliance with Security Council Resolutions
"The quest for peace must serve the cause of freedom," Reagan rightly said, and any agreement that strengthens the Iranian regime -- that enhances its reputation, that gives it greater leverage in the Middle East, or that strengthens its stranglehold on the Iranian people -- serves neither the cause of freedom nor that of peace.
In marked contrast to Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s impolitic, mendacious and contentious op-ed last month, Kerry’s tone is mostly conciliatory. But the core of Kerry’s argument is a point that Zarif never addressed:Violating Agreement, Iran Exceeds Oil Export Restrictions for 8th Straight Month
"Iran’s claim that the world should simply trust its words ignores the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency has reported since 2002 on dozens of violations by Iran of its international nonproliferation obligations, starting in the early 1980s. The U.N. Security Council responded by adopting four resolutions under Chapter VII, requiring Iran to take steps to address these violations. These issues cannot be dismissed; they must be addressed by the Iranians if a comprehensive solution is to be reached. These are not just the expectations of any one country, but of the community of nations."
Reuters on Tuesday published new figures indicating that Iran has for the eighth straight month violated crude export restrictions set by the interim Joint Plan of Action (JPA), with the outlet quoting a range of experts suggesting that the Obama administration has been deliberately looking the other way as Tehran busted through the caps:The $7 device that will revolutionize personal computing
Not since Israeli serial entrepreneur Dov Moran changed the world with his DiskOnKey flash drive has anyone come up with a similarly disruptive idea: using Moran’s invention as the basis for Keepod, a fully portable operating system.GI Joe and Barbie, meet your match - Menachem Begin and Golda Meir
Nissan Bahar of Israel and Francesco (Franky) Imbesi of Italy discovered that five billion people, or 70% of the world’s population, have no access to personal computing. Knowing it is neither possible nor environmentally responsible to manufacture enough computers to fill needs, they came up with the idea of loading a $7 DiskOnKey with a unique version of Google’s Android 4.4 operating system.
Look out, GI Joe. Watch your back, Barbie.
Now, there are other action figures vying for the affection of collectors – Moshe Dayan, David Ben-Gurion, Theodor Herzl, Golda Meir, and Menachem Begin.
Asaf Harari, an Israeli graphic designer from Yavne, has introduced a new line of historical action figures from Zionist lore.
Harari and his wife, Naama, opened up Piece of History, a studio that offers a range of Jewish and Zionist-themed collectible items.
