Monday, May 04, 2015
Col. Kemp: Media Encourage Terrorists to Use Human Shields in War
Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, told a legal conference that the Western media have encouraged terrorists to use human shields in war by focusing attention on civilian casualties in such a way that Western military forces were effectively deterred from responding to terrorist attacks. He suggested that legal doctrines might need to be adjusted in order to remove the operational advantage human shields provide terrorists.Memorial to slain French Jew Halimi vandalized
The West’s collective failure to innovate to confront the tactical problems posed by human shields, Kemp said, “has had the effect of making them more effective, and encouraging their use.”
“I’m not in any way advocating the unlawful slaughter of civilians on the battlefield,” Kemp added. However, there needed to be creative legal and operational thinking about how to prevent civilians from being used, willingly or unwillingly, to help terrorists win asymmetric conflicts against superior military forces, he said.
For example, the doctrine of proportionality might need to be expanded to consider overall military objectives, not just short-term objectives of specific attacks, he suggested.
The problem with focusing on specific attacks is that the calculation–weighing the military objective against the risk to civilians–would often discourage attacks against terrorist targets, which in turn would ensure that terrorist groups would use human shields again in the future.
French authorities said vandals damaged a memorial plaque honoring a young French Jewish man tortured and killed in 2006.Jewish Group ‘Outraged’ After Plaque Honoring Paris Murder Victim Desecrated
The incident targeting the monument to Ilan Halimi came amid heightened religious tensions in France, after radical Islamic gunmen attacked a Paris kosher market and newspaper Charlie Hebdo in January.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said in a statement Sunday that prosecutors have opened an investigation into the damage to the monument in the Paris suburb of Bagneux.
Halimi’s death stunned many in France, especially in the Jewish community, Europe’s largest. Driven in part by anti-Semitism, a gang held him captive for weeks and tortured him, then left him naked and handcuffed near railroad tracks. The 23-year-old Halimi died en route to the hospital.
On Friday, French anti-Semitism watchdog group BNVCA reported that two Jewish men were attacked in Paris in the middle of the day by a pro-Palestinian gang, leaving them slightly injured.
The men, in the early 20s, were attacked by a gang of about 40 people, identified as being members of Gaza Firm, a pro-Palestinian group, and involved in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
A major Jewish group expressed shock on Sunday after vandals in Paris desecrated a plague in memory of Ilan Halimi, a French Jew who was kidnapped in 2006, tortured and ultimately killed.Body of Israeli hiker Asraf retrieved in Nepal
“Outrage!” the American Jewish Committee (AJC) wrote on Twitter, adding, “1st they tortured & killed Ilan Halimi, a French Jew, in ’06. Now the plaque in his memory has been destroyed in a Paris suburb.”
The memorial plague was found smashed on Saturday night in Bagneux, a southern suburb of Paris, and has since been removed for repairs, according to French daily Le Figaro. The vandals have yet to be identified.
Bagneux mayor Marie-Hélène Amiable on Sunday said she was “extremely shocked” by the incident and described the vandalism as “outrageous” and “unacceptable.”
Israeli rescue teams on Monday morning retrieved the body of the 22-year-old Israeli hiker who was killed in Nepal’s devastating earthquake over a week earlier.
Or Asraf’s remains were airlifted from a remote village in the Langtang village to Kathmandu, and will be flown Tuesday to Israel.
A member of the Israeli team that found his remains, Oren Morgan, told Israel Radio that several European hikers were also killed in the area.
He said evidence collected during the search for Asraf was handed over to the UN base in Nepal in order to form a better understanding of what happened to hikers from around the world who were declared missing following the earthquake.
Asraf, 22, was the only Israeli fatality from the 7.8 magnitude earthquake, which flattened villages and killed over 7,000, according to Nepalese authorities.
Loath to end their trip, Israeli tourists lend a hand in Nepal
After the original panic of the earthquake subsided, Sharlo thought about what she wanted to do next. “We really have nothing to do in Nepal — I’m not going to go on a trek now — so really the only thing to do is to come and help,” she said. “I wanted to come and lend a hand, instead of sitting around eating desserts and delicious shakes.”Pocket device helps Nepal victims breathe
Sharlo served in the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, in the Israeli media internet and radio section. She said many of the journalists she worked with at Walla and Ynet called to check in on her. When she heard that the IDF was sending a full field hospital with more than 260 personnel, she knew where she could be most useful.
Sharlo arrived on the first day the IDF field hospital opened. She assisted with the crush of media interest in the first few days, from both Israeli and international outlets, and helped register Nepali patients before triage. In quieter moments, she entertained the children at the hospital, both patients and those who accompanied family members, playing with soap bubbles and balloons.
“I’ve been traveling for four months, and I was so excited to see the [Israeli] flag when I got here,” she said.
Sharlo said she almost didn’t come to Kathmandu. Hysterical Israeli media reports had painted a picture of a city that had devolved into anarchy. “We heard that all of the buildings had fallen, that there were people looting and you would immediately get robbed in the street,” she said. “Many of my friends were too afraid to come to Kathmandu.” Once she arrived, however, she was surprised to find that the city was functioning almost as normal.
Among the Israeli medical innovations that paramedic Dov Maisel brought to Nepal to treat victims after last month’s devastating earthquake was the Pocket BVM (bag valve mask), a uniquely collapsible version of an essential device that emergency medical crews need for manual resuscitation and respiratory support.IsraAID Vanuatu - Cyclone Pam Emergency Aid
Maisel isn’t only a user of the Pocket BVM; he’s also one of its inventors.
On the market since 2007 from the Jerusalem-based company MicroBVM, the inexpensive Pocket BVM folds into a protective case, allowing EMS workers to fit 20 of the devices into the space of two regular-sized resuscitators — yet once unfolded, the units look and operate the same as regular ones.
For responders to mass casualty scenes such as in Nepal, the ability to carry several BVMs is critical.
Some 100,000 units of the Pocket BVM are in use all over the world. It has become the resuscitator of choice for all branches of the US military, NATO forces, the Israel Defense Forces and civilian emergency medical response teams around the globe.
One to Watch: Jerusalem conference on Law of War
Among many notable aspects of the BBC’s coverage of Operation Protective Edge last summer was the extensive promotion of pseudo-legal claims made by both political NGOs and some of its own correspondents. Concurrently, BBC audiences heard reporters make frequent use of legal language such as ‘collective punishment’ and ‘disproportionality’ – although not necessarily always in its correct context – and particularly notable was the BBC’s ‘creative’ interpretation of the issue of Hamas’ use of human shields.Former IDF chief Gantz: Hezbollah turned living rooms into missile rooms
Readers with an interest in such topics may like to know that the Israel Law Center is holding a two-day conference in Jerusalem this coming week – May 4th and 5th – titled ‘Towards a New Law of War’. Conference sessions will be live-streamed (registration is available at the above link under ‘live stream’) and include two panel discussions which may be of particular interest to our readers.
Speaking on Monday at Shurat Hadin’s conference on “Towards a New Law of War,” just retired IDF chief-of-staff Benny Gantz said that, “Hezbollah has turned villages into missile villages and living rooms into missile rooms.”Terror Conference Kicks off in Jerusalem: 'New Law of War'
Gantz was summarizing the challenges of asymmetrical warfare being highlighted at the conference including terrorist groups’ abuse of the law of armed conflict such as using human shields or stationing weaponry in civilian homes,
Shurat Hadin’s Director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner said that the purpose of the conference was to try to help empower the IDF and other Western militaries to be able to fight more effectively against such terror groups by updating the law of armed conflict.
Gantz echoed some of those themes, saying he was making an unusual appearance as a civilian “about a very important issue being promoted here for all human kind, human rights and society.”
The former IDF chief stated, “war has changed. The civilian population became both the target of the terrorists and their human shield at the same time.”
As police scrambled to contain a possible terror attack on a Mohammed cartoon contest in Texas, legal scholars and activists gathered in Jerusalem for a conference on terrorism and its implications for the laws of war.‘Unity Day’ to Honor Memories of Slain Israeli Teenagers
The conference is hosted by Shurat HaDin, an organization that sues terror organizations and terror-supporting regimes on behalf of the victims of terror. Recently, Shurat HaDin won a $330 million judgement against the government of North Korea for kidnapping, torturing and killing pastor Kim Dong-Shik, who was a U.S. permanent resident. Earlier this year, Shurat HaDin won a large judgment against the Palestinian Authority on behalf of American victims of the second intifada.
The purpose of its litigation, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner told the conference in her opening remarks Monday morning, is to cut off funding to terror groups, force them to cut their operations, and win justice on behalf of victims and their families.
Senior Israeli officials will hold two events next month in memory of a trio of teenagers who were abducted and murdered last summer by Hamas terrorists.Boycott Movement Gang Attacks Two Jews on Paris Street
Unity Day, to be held on June 3rd, and the Jerusalem Unity Prize, will promote tolerance and cooperation between different sectors of the Jewish people in Israel, and the Diaspora – according to organizers. The prize winners – organizations and individuals who have excelled in promoting messages of unity through their work – will share an NIS 300,000 award in a ceremony to be hosted by Israeli President Reuven Rivlin.
The events were organized by the Mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, along with the parents of Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrah. The boys were abducted from a bus stop south of Jerusalem last year by two Hamas terrorists, who shortly after shot them, and hid their bodies.
“The Jerusalem Unity Prize and Unity Day serve to memorialize the three boys by strengthening the common bonds that exist within our Jewish people and encouraging greater tolerance and mutual respect between all sectors of our greater community,” Barkat wrote in a statement to the Tazpit News Agency.
Barkat lauded “…the ideals that were so remarkably exhibited during that most difficult period in the wake of the boys’ kidnappings and truly revealed this all-important aspect of our national identity.”
We have documented many times the role in the spread of anti-Semitic violence in Europe played by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.Why are Germans so quick to remove Israeli flags?
The gross demonization and dehumanization of Israeli Jews by BDS contributes both directly and indirectly to acts of anti-Semitism. We have seen it on the streets of Copenhagen, Malmo, Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, The Hague, London and elsewhere.
It’s why Walking While Jewish is dangerous in many cities in Europe. In Paris, Reporting While Jewish is risky as well.
While in theory anti-Zionism can be distinct from anti-Semitism, in reality on the streets of Europe they have merged.
Now there is yet another example, via Algemeiner, 40 Person Mob Assaults 2 Jews on Paris’ Boulevard Voltaire:
The gang of attackers was associated with the anti-Israel groups Gaza Firm and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, according to security personnel responsible for protecting the Jewish community.
The police removal of an Israeli flag unfurled at a soccer match in Berlin last week to preempt Palestinian anger is part of a longstanding practice of shunning the Jewish state’s flag in Germany.When Antisemitism Is Inevitable
The pattern typically unfolds in three acts.
Act 1 involves German Muslims and leftists protesting against Israel for defending its territory against Hamas rocket attacks or other self-defense measures to blunt Islamic terrorism. Act 2 unfolds with the police seizing Israeli flags at solidarity protests to placate anti-Israeli activists. Act 3 results in the authorities issuing an apology for outlawing Israel’s flag from demonstrations.
Rewind to 2009. During an anti-Israeli demonstration organized by the Turkish Islamic group, Millî Görüş, and attended by 10,000 protesters, two police officers stormed the apartment of a pro-Israel activist and seized Israeli flags hanging on the balcony and inside a window. The Duisburg police chief justified the removal of the flags to “prevent an escalation.” Prior to the storming of the apartment, Islamists pelted the flags with objects.
Pro-Israeli activists, including one with a flag, were taken into police custody in the city of Düsseldorf during Operation Cast Lead against Hamas. The raw anger of members of the “Mainz initiative for peace in Gaza” compelled five young men holding an Israeli flag to flee into a department store in the city of Mainz.
One of Britain’s leading Islamist sites, MEMO (Middle East Monitor), has published an article entitled “Antisemitism Is Not Inevitable”. The article is clearly heartfelt, and it is welcome and unusual that an Islamist site would carry such unequivocal rejections of antisemitism, e.g. “we [Europeans] should be ashamed that even a modicum of anti-Jewish hatred remains. Something must be done”.Attacking Free Speech is a Core Element of Terrorism
Despite this, the article is deeply flawed, due to its author’s anxiety to disprove Benjamin Netanyahu’s call for French Jews to emigrate to Israel. In trying to prove why Antisemitism Is Not Inevitable, the author, Alistair Sloan, makes serious factual omissions that he, but more especially his Islamist audience, need to hear.
In what may well be a first for MEMO or similar sites, Sloan begins by decently acknowledging the inclusive nature of Jewish-led Holocaust commemoration. He notes how this remembrance coincides with “fears of a resurgence of European anti-Semitism. It comes as Zionism becomes an increasingly unpopular and perhaps discredited ideology. The confluence of both phenomena is complex, not totally understood and highly politicised”.
This grossly undersells the demonisation of Zionism that dominates within MEMO and the wider Islamist hinterland, including Hamas, with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its charter: but it is Benjamin Netanyahu, not extreme anti-Zionists, whom Sloan is arguing with here.
Contemporary extreme “anti-Zionism” in its diverse Islamist, far Left, far Right and New Age settings coalesce in mirroring pre-Holocaust antisemitic motifs about Jews. This reflects old antisemitism and fuels new antisemitism, fulfilling the same psychological and scapegoat function for its adherents.
Afshin Ellian has a thing or two to say about terrorism.Shots fired at Texas exhibit with depictions of prophet Muhammad; 2 gunmen killed
He also has a few things to say about Islam – specifically political Islam – but many don’t particularly like to hear it. In fact, the threats against his life from radical Muslims, particularly in the Netherlands, where the Iranian dissident now lives, have become so frequent that at least one bodyguard accompanies him anywhere he goes.
But Ellian, a professor of jurisprudence at the University of Leiden, also knows a thing or two about freedom: he has spent his life pursuing it since his days as a student in Iran, where in 1978 he took part in the uprising against the Shah. After the revolution, the Ayatollah banned political discourse; threatened with execution, Ellian fled the country. He settled briefly in Kabul before further ideological conflicts led him to escape again, arriving as a political refugee in the Netherlands in 1989.
Now the human rights and counterterrorism expert works valiantly to protect the freedom that he so long fought for – even as he finds the most precious quality of that freedom itself now under threat: the principle of free speech.
Texas police shot dead two gunmen who opened fire on Sunday outside an exhibit of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad that was organized by a group described as anti-Islamic and billed as a free-speech event.NGO Monitor: Europe to Breaking the Silence: Bring Us As Many Incriminating Testimonies As Possible
Citing a senior FBI official, ABC News identified one of the gunmen as Elton Simpson. The Arizona man was the target of a terror investigation. FBI agents and a bomb squad were searching Simpson's Phoenix home, ABC said.
Phoenix's KPHO TV reported that the second man lived in the same apartment complex as Simpson, the Autumn Ridge Apartments. He was not identified, and the second man's apartment was searched, the station said, quoting an FBI agent.
FBI spokeswoman Katherine Chaumont in Dallas said she had no more information about the suspects. An FBI evidence team began to go over the scene at 4:15 a.m. CST (0915 GMT) and was still working, she said in an email.
The shooting in a Dallas suburb was an echo of past attacks or threats in other Western countries against art depicting the Prophet Mohammad. In January, gunmen killed 12 people in the Paris offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in what it said was revenge for its cartoons.
Initial AnalysisFIFA to vote on Palestinian proposal to suspend Israel
BtS makes sweeping accusations based on anecdotal, anonymous and unverifiable testimonies of low level soldiers. These “testimonies” lack context, ignoring the fact that during the 2014 Gaza War heavy fighting took place between Israel and terror groups in Gaza, and that soldiers faced grave danger throughout the conflict from rockets, mortar shells, and terrorists emerging from tunnels dug beneath private homes. These distortions and erasures dovetail BtS’ ideological agenda and fuel delegitmization campaigns against Israel.
A careful reading of the testimonies reveals that IDF soldiers conducted themselves according to the norms expected of soldiers (Israeli or from other democratic countries) when faced with the challenges of high-intensity fighting. The testimonies (if indeed reliable) that portray questionable incidents should be fully investigated. In such instances, the testimony and relevant individuals should be referred to the Military Advocate General Corps, which can order an investigation to be opened. That BtS did not approach the MAG Corps raises serious questions regarding the NGO’s motives.
FIFA’s 209 member federations will be asked to consider suspending Israel from world soccer just before they elect their president this month.Playing offense against BDS
FIFA published an agenda Monday for its election congress on May 29, including a late proposal by Palestinian soccer officials to suspend Israel.
The move, needing a three-quarter majority to pass, is unlikely to succeed after FIFA President Sepp Blatter said last month he opposed it.
Palestinian officials insist Israel’s soccer federation should be punished for restrictions imposed by security forces which limit movement of players, opposing teams and equipment.
We all know the old adage “the best defense is a good offense.” In an era of boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS), investing in Israel’s economy has become our greatest form of offense.Lauryn Hill pressured to cancel Israel show
While it has long been a sound financial decision, today, investing in Israel takes on added relevance as an expression of confidence that the country’s economic resilience will continue despite geopolitical instability and BDS tactics. Through every challenge, Israel’s economy remains an outstanding example of innovation and progress.
The statistics speak for themselves: Israel’s 2014 Q4 growth was 7.2 percent, double initial projections. The country’s debt-to-GDP ratio – a key indicator of the strength of the economy that helps determine credit ratings and interest payments – decreased by 0.5 percent to 67.1 percent. This is lower than many developed countries. U.S. debt-to-GDP is 105.6 percent; the Euro Zone average is 107.7percent; and the OECD average is 94 percent.
For a small country like Israel, which has no real export markets in its region and is constantly in a state of heightened military preparedness, this is a considerable accomplishment
Only three days before Lauryn Hill's concert in Israel, the American R&B, soul and hip hop singer-songwriter is under heavy pressure to cancel the show.Instructor calls for freedom to ‘express anti-Semitism’ on campus
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement has been urging Hill to boycott Israel for the past month. Last week, pro-Palestinian activists posted a video edited to the sounds Hill's performance of "Killing me Softly" as part of her former band The Fugees, which shows her alongside IDF soldiers in the territories and compares Israel to an apartheid state.
"The presence of artists is routinely used by Israel to legitimize its policies and maintain its reputation as a normal member of the international community," the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation said in an action alert calling on people to press Hill to help the Palestinians by calling off her concert in Israel.
A recent statement by an Australian academic in favor of anti-Semitic speech elicited anger from that country’s Jewish community, which termed such sentiments “morally bankrupt” on Sunday.UK Funding Granted to Palestinian Play Portraying Hamas Terrorists as Freedom Fighters
Supporters of the Islamic State terrorist group have the right to “express their anti-Semitism,” Sydney University lecturer Yarran Hominh said, according to a Friday report on the news.com.au website.
“I would say yes, we should ‘allow’ them to express their anti-Semitism — within bounds, of course,” Hominh asserted.
In response, Peter Wertheim, the executive director of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, told The Jerusalem Post that such an “attempt to justify anti-Semitic discourse on campus highlights the morally bankrupt dead end to which the entire campaign to delegitimize Israel and deny the reality of Jewish peoplehood logically leads.”
“The BDS depiction of the Jewish State as innately evil and beyond redemption is a repackage of a classical anti-Semitic trope. Nevertheless, we do take some comfort from the fact that several University of Sydney academics, including some from the anti-Israel Center for Peace and Conflict Studies, denounced these views and were not prepared to align themselves with Islamist theo-fascism. Perhaps the scales are starting to fall from their eyes,” he said.
The UK Taxpayer is to fund the British tour of a play which sympathetically portrays the actions of Palestinian terrorists who killed Israeli citizens. Jewish leaders have reacted angrily, saying that they are “extremely concerned” that the play promotes “terrorism as legitimate”.IsraellyCool: Blumen Fail: Max Blumenthal’s Web Address Still Advertising Israeli Company
The West Bank-based theatre group behind the production has already received cash from the EU and the British council, allowing them to stage the play in the Palestinian territories, the Mail on Sunday has reported.
Now Arts Council England is adding another £15,000 to that tally enabling them to take their show on tour across the UK. It will be staged in ten British cities over the next few months, starting in Manchester in mid-May.
The Seige tells the story of gunmen and bombers from Hamas and the Al Asqa Martyrs’ Brigade who, in 2002, took refuge inside the Church of the Nativity Bethlehem, revered as Christ’s birthplace. Their stand-off against the Israeli military forces surrounding the church lasted for 39 days, only being brought to an end when a deal was struck granting 13 of the ring leaders safe passage and sanctuary in Europe.
The two directors of the play, one of whom is British, traced those men across Europe in order to record their version of the events. It is from their partisan testimonies only that the script was constructed.
Last month, I posted about Israel hater Max Blumenthal’s stunning hypocrisy: having his personal website created with Wix, an Israel-made product.“Might Have Been Better Worded”
When this was pointed out to him, Blumenthal used a rather lame excuse.
Well, apparently it is hard to get it replaced. Because 3 weeks later, and www.maxblumenthal.com still looks like this:
That’s a big advertisement for an Israeli company right there.
Looks like his “web designer” is snoozing on the job. Perhaps Max should chase him down to make the changes.
During the Gaza conflict last Summer, the BBC’s Orla Guerin filed a video report from Gaza. We were shocked that in the report, broadcast on BBC One’s “News at Ten” and on the BBC Website, she declared that despite Israeli allegations that Hamas had been using human shields, there had been “no evidence” of such a practice.Financial Times revives misleading ‘discarded Ethiopian blood’ narrative
We published our own video (“Shocking Claim by Biased and Clueless BBC Journalist“) showing that there was, in fact, massive evidence of Hamas using this tactic. We urged viewers to submit formal complaints to the BBC that Guerin had misled viewers by her statement.
Well the BBC Trust has reviewed the complaints. They did agree that her statement about “no evidence of human shields” was inaccurate. Here is what they said:
“To refer to the ‘evidence’ put forward by one side would not necessarily endorse their version of events and to that extent I would agree that this might have been better worded.”
But this is as far as they would go. The BBC Trust claims that during the piece, she did refer to the firing of rockets in close proximity to residential neighborhoods. They claim that viewers should have been able to figure out that Hamas had indeed been using human shields.
Sorry but “Might have been better worded” is just not good enough.
The case Reed is referring to dates back to 2013, and his account of the row is extremely misleading. Whilst the MDA (Israel’s equivalent of the Red Cross) did refuse to accept blood from an Ethiopian Jewish lawmaker, Pnina Tamano-Shata, in Dec. 2013, the selective quote attributed to the MDA volunteer in question – suggesting that Ethiopian-Israelis have “a special type of blood” – is taken out of context.‘Just not in my backyard’ for planned Dutch Holocaust memorial
As the director of the MDA’s blood service said after the row erupted, Ministry of Health regulations prohibited the use of blood donations from all people who had lived for more than a year in countries (such as Ethiopia) which have a high rate of HIV infection.
Racism has nothing to do with the Israeli policy on blood donations from citizens of Ethiopian descent. Indeed, MDA allows blood donations from native-born Israelis of Ethiopian descent who have not actually lived in Ethiopia.
Further, as Elder of Ziyon pointed out in a related post, “anyone calling Israel racist based on a policy of not accepting blood from some African countries may want to read the American Red Cross guidelines for people they don’t want to donate blood for fear of AIDS”:
It’s the Dutch Holocaust memorial everyone says they want to see built — just not in their neighborhood.Jewish gravestones used to build outhouse in Polish village
Early last year, Amsterdam’s mayor endorsed the creation of the Netherlands’ first Holocaust memorial to include the names of more than 102,000 Jewish victims deported and murdered from that country. It was relatively clear sailing until memorial planners zoomed in on secluded Wertheim Park — close to what the city declared a Jewish Cultural Quarter in 2012 — as their preferred site.
Claiming they were presented with “a done deal” last March, a group of residents living close to the park has consistently opposed constructing the $6.8 million Holocaust memorial in their neighborhood. “Not in our garden” has been a common refrain, with opponents demanding the city have the Shoah edifice built anywhere but in the heart of their leafy Plantage district.
Named for a prominent nineteenth century Jewish philanthropist, Wertheim Park is close to Amsterdam’s surviving historic synagogues, as well as buildings connected to the deportation of Dutch Jewry during the Holocaust. Just around the corner is the legendary Artis Zoo, where dozens of Jews hid among the animals to avoid capture by the Nazis and Dutch “bounty hunters.”
The tiny Polish town of Pilica hides an infuriating secret: Homeowners who lived in the town after World War II used Jewish gravestones to build an outhouse and parts of their home, apparently in an effort to defile the memory of the Jews.40 Percent Rise This Year in Global Immigration to Israel, Report Shows
The sight of dozens of gravestones bearing Hebrew writing as part of a structure that serves as an outhouse is unsettling. The home, which has been abandoned in recent years after its owners passed away, is littered with broken gravestones, an open wound in the heart of the polish village.
Jonny Daniels, the head of the From the Depths organization that honors the memory of Holocaust victims, was summoned to the house by one of the group's volunteers in the area. He was appalled by what he found.
"I felt rage and sadness at the same time when I saw the egregious disrespect that our brothers' and sisters' gravestones had been shown," Daniels recalled. "The only thing we leave behind in this world is our good name and our burial place. The moment that is taken from us, and used to build a house or worse, an outhouse, it is deeply insulting. It wasn't enough that the Nazis tried to kill the Jews who were alive, the Poles later tried to destroy all traces that the Jews had lived."
A new report shows that Jewish immigration to Israel from around the world rose more than 40 percent in the first three months of 2015, the UK’s Guardian reported on Sunday.Entrepreneur boasts sprinkler could end world hunger
A total of 6,499 Jews arrived in Israel between January and March of this year, according to an interim report by the Jewish Agency for Israel. The vast majority of immigrants came from Europe, specifically eastern Europe. 1,971 immigrants came from Ukraine to the Jewish state, the most of any country listed, marking a 215 percent rise from the same period last year. The number of Russian immigrants rose to 1,515, an almost 50 percent increase.
French immigration to Israel rose by 11 percent to 1,413 while immigration from Britain saw a 43 percent rise to 166. Immigration from North America decreased by 7 percent with only 478 new arrivals between January and March.
Experts predicted a wave of immigration to Israel in 2015 – specifically from France – following a rise in antisemitic attacks against Jews in recent years across western Europe, the Guardian reported. It was anticipated that a large number of Jews would leave France after the killing of four Jews in January in the HyperCacher kosher supermarket attack in Paris.
Making a bold statement, NaanDanJain chief agronomist Maoz Aviv says he believes his company will be able to solve some of the worst problems of world hunger.A life-saving Jewish connection, if new UK princess named Alice
“It’s hard to believe that a little sprinkler could do so much, but our new rice drip irrigation product really has the potential to vastly improve the lives of people in the developing world,” Aviv said.
One might be inclined to take such a claim with a grain of salt (or rice). But NaanDanJain – an Israeli-Indian firm, created in 2007 when Israeli irrigation tech firm NaanDan merged with India’s Jain Irrigation Systems – is one of the world leaders in drip-irrigation, filters, climate control systems, sprinkler systems for agriculture, and other hardware and control systems used in farms across India and the rest of Asia, as well as in North America, South America and Europe.
Bookmakers Sunday touted Alice and Charlotte as the most likely names for Britain’s newborn princess, the second child of Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge, who was born Saturday.
The name Alice has particular resonance for the Jewish people: The newborn’s great-great-grandmother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, is buried in Jerusalem, and was recognized by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial as a “Righteous Among the Nations” and by the British government as a “Hero of the Holocaust.”
During the Nazi occupation of Greece, Alice hid a Jewish woman and two of her children from the Nazis.
In 1994, the newborn’s great-grandfather, Queen Elizabeth II’s husband Prince Philip, visited Israel for a ceremony to mark his mother’s valor. [The name has now been announced it's Charlotte Elizabeth Diana]
