The lies and the myths of the anti-Israeli crowd
Yet over the last decade or so, fuelled by a growing body of anti-Western culture in our democracies, a rise in anti-Semitism that may be partially linked to the new demographics and a distinct and understandable discomfort amongst many Jewish people over the status quo, the type of abuse about Israel that was once only in the forums of the white supremacist sites, has entered mainstream society. Whereas in the past, such discourse would be shouted down, ridiculed and opposed as soon as it entered the conversation, the middle ground is shaking under a barrage of distortions and myth making that demonize Israel in every way that is imaginable.Ryan Bellerose: Why Matisyahu Put The Nail In The Coffin Of BDS
These myths are now not only apparent in the writing of self-hating or Arab ‘academics’, but can be seen in mainstream news outlets, regurgitated and repackaged in left wing circles and of course spreading wildly on the university campus. You are now likely to hear one or more of these myths told as ‘fact’ around almost any dinner table. Aided by a strategy that follows Goebbels’ ‘big lie’ principle, the most absurd labels are being applied, the most daring rewrites of history are occurring and the basic elements of logic are being discarded. If you doubt this, try to explain how LGBT movements are standing alongside some of the most homophobic groups on earth to line up against the only nation in the Middle East that the gay community can reside freely in. What unites them is simply unreasonable hatred supported by a quivering mountain of lies.
This isn’t about political opinion, it is about falsehoods taking a firm grip on the narrative and demonizing Israel to the point that even some staunch supporters of Israel are become desensitised and unable to differentiate between truth and myth. So having recently read yet another batch of hate driven nonsense, I thought I would simply extract the most flagrant myths and distortions and address them in turn.
The entire point of BDS is to alienate, marginalize and silence Jews. BDS winning doesn’t require people actually boycotting Israel; it only requires them to marginalize Jews.Matisyahu says he felt threatened during Spain gig
When Jews take the attitude “It’s not worth it so I’m not gonna bother,” BDS wins. Every single time a Jew decides not to attend an event because they may or may not encounter asshattery, BDS wins. When Jews decide to keep their Jewishness on the downlow to avoid problems, BDS wins.
So when does BDS lose? When Jews are visible, and unapologetic, when Israel supporters are loud and unabashed. That’s when BDS loses because it has no way to counter those things without revealing itself to be what it is – a movement calculated to attack Jews and isolate them.
Matisyahu just showed the pro-Israel world the blueprint on how to beat these people, and it didn’t involve the classic “not rocking the boat” as some mainstream Jewish organizations would have us believe. I couldn’t believe that I saw people advocating for Matisyahu to stay home, to collect the money for being cancelled but to not perform. In truth, nothing would have been worse; if he stayed away, it would have been a victory for those who want to silence any Jewish voice that doesn’t parrot their anti Israel garbage. By staying unseen, he would have given them what they wanted.
By going and by performing the songs he performed, Matisyahu not only showed that BDS failed but that it failed in an abject manner; that he was unafraid, not intimidated and unbowed. It was actually a heroic thing to do and he should be applauded.
It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to be a reggae artist, accustomed to festivals filled with marijuana-induced serene audiences, facing a crowd of raised middle fingers along with chants to get out—and feeling physically threatened for the first time in one’s life as a performer.Israellycool And Readers Get Shirley Temper’s Name Splashed Across Daily Mail (Updated)
That’s the exact scenario American Jewish reggae rapper Matisyahu found himself in when he took the stage August 23 at the Rototom Sunsplash festival in Benicassim, a town near Valencia, Spain.
While standing back stage, Matisyahu noticed a Palestinian flag in the audience, but when he stepped on to set up “about 20 flags came out,” he told The Daily Beast in a phone interview. “People were standing on each other’s shoulders with flags giving me the middle finger. It was intense. It was not peaceful. It was like ‘F__k you, Matisyahu.’ I’ve never had the experience of anything like that, as a Jew or anything in my life.”
Matisyahu said that the Rototom performance marked one of the only times he’s ever felt unsafe taking the stage.
“I just assumed everyone in the festival was going to be regular reggae festival-goers, so I got really nervous. I felt totally open and that anyone could do whatever they want,” he said.
Israellycool readers recognized the biting girl as the Pallywood star “Shirley Temper”, whose exploits I have documented comprehensively on this blog. Exploits which involve deliberately trying to provoke IDF soldiers under the watchful and encouraging eye of her parents, in order to produce great images for propaganda.
And they might have gotten away with it too, had it not been for those meddling yids!
Readers inundated the Daily Mail with links to this blog showing what Shirley Temper and her family have been up to. And Brian of London also contacted an editor over at the paper.
And the Daily Mail responded – by changing the tone of the story entirely, providing context to it and revealing Shirley Temper’s history.
Telegraph and Daily Mail retreat in face of Pallywood story about child ‘activist’
The Daily Mail initially ran with the desired Pallywood tale of cruel Israeli soldiers attacking innocent Palestinian children, but later changed the headline and tone of the piece, presumably after a myriad of complaints. Remarkably, the DM’s revised headline explained that the girl had “been revealed” as a Pallywood star.Israel Could Have Prevented this Shameful Display
But, even more interesting is what occurred at The Telegraph, which initially ran with the headline ‘Palestinian women wrestle Israeli soldier off injured small boy’, but later pulled the entire story from their website.
Though we weren’t able to find a cached version of the story, we did locate the text from Lexis-Nexis. As you can see, it completely bought into the Pallywood tale.
The video shows a soldier failing to arrest an Arab boy near Nabi Salah in Samaria who just moments earlier had been throwing rocks at security forces. After initially catching the boy, the soldier is quickly surrounded by Arab women and children who scream at, punch and bite him until a colleague is forced to extricate him, leaving the rock-thrower to go free.Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters
The video has triggered an outcry in Israel, with calls for the IDF to review its rules of engagement, which many have argued are too soft. Yisrael Beytenu leader MK Avigdor Liberman led calls for an urgent inquiry Saturday, contending that political weakness in the face of organized campaigns by foreign-funded NGOs to provoke and prosecute IDF soldiers had led to servicemen feeling powerless to use even the most basic level of force in operations.
But Landes, who is well-known for his efforts in exposing Palestinian propaganda, insists that had the IDF simply filmed its version of events and widely disseminated the footage immediately, the effects of the clip would have been minimal.
"The IDF should have been filming, there should be another version of events," he said. In particular, the fact that the boy had his arm in a sling was cited as "proof" that he was simply an innocent bystander. Had the IDF filmed him throwing rocks prior to the arrest, that claim would have been neutralized.
Landes notes the entire incident is a classic example of "Pallywood," a term he coined "to describe staged material disguised as news" by Palestinians and their allies.
Back in March 2013, we wrote ["A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns"] about several of the people who appear prominently in today's photos: about their town; about its systematic abuse of its own children; about how a place hell-bent on acts of lethal violence directed against Jews and Israelis has succeeded in camouflaging itself thanks to the willingness of gullible reporters, photographers and editors who provide them with the exposure they crave like oxygen; about the girl - the one in the pink t-shirt in the photo above - who for years has been paraded in front of the cameras in a variety of spunky-on-demand poses (all based on the certainty that IDF personnel are required to be careful and considerate when facing children - this isn't Syria, Ramallah or Gaza) and who has fully earned the nickname given to her by insightful observers who understand the artificial nature of the provocations in which she is the central performer. They know her as Shirley Temper: it's a totally fitting stage name.Slandering Israel in Nabi Saleh
From our March 2013 post
That article remains the most viewed post we ever wrote. But most news consumers unfortunately have no idea of the points we made and are making now.
We reviewed the contents of that 2013 post tonight in light of what happened on Friday. And we were struck by something interesting that unfortunately we failed to notice much earlier. Here's part of what we said in 2013:
The Wikipedia entry for Nabi Saleh describes the village of some 550 people .... Today, it’s the scene of weekly protest demonstrations and, to judge from Wikipedia’s English-language version, a place where things are done to passive inhabitants and for no apparent reason. Now if you go to the Arabic-language version of Wikipedia, you see a quite different emphasis. It's not at all a direct translation of the English version. It's created by different people for a different audience and different sensibilities. The Arabic Wikipedia entry depicts Nabi Saleh as a place of “popular resistance” that boasts of having taken a prominent role in two Intifadas, providing “hundreds of prisoners” and 17 so-called “martyrs on the altar of freedom”... The most prominent of the prisoners (Wikipedia's description) is a woman called Ahlam. Her surname is shared with almost every other inhabitant of the village: Tamimi.
If you go to the Arabic Wikipedia entry for Nabi Saleh today, you will see only a small fraction of what we saw then. Every single reference to the village people's adoration of jihad, martyrdom and death to the Israelis has been erased. The place is filled with virgins all over again.
In the latest incident in Nabi Saleh, this patient and restrained response was likely the reason why the Israeli soldier was unable to deal with his attackers and was consequently beaten and bitten by them. The incident has already prompted calls by Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Lieberman for an emergency meeting of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee to discuss the IDF's rules of engagement.Real or Pallywood? Activist’s children confront Israeli soldiers on eve of his U.S. Speaking Tour
"We are talking about an incident which severely harms the deterrent capacity of the IDF," Lieberman said. "The pictures -- which show an IDF soldier being hit by Palestinian women and children, and in the end giving up on [arresting] the rock-thrower who started the whole incident -- broadcasts weakness and helplessness on the part of the IDF and Israel."
One thing that would contribute toward the ending of such incidents would be the emergence of some semblance of ethics on the part of the international media, which help manufacture these scenes, as is abundantly clear from Tenenbom's description of events at Bi'lin. It is an outrage that the media, which are supposed to be independent and critical, are such an active player in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, literally creating the news. And it is a disgrace that the general public continues to devour, uncritically, the skewed and shameful outpourings in newspapers and on TV as a result of this scandalous kind of "reporting."
This may be coincidence, but I doubt it.Aljazeera Arab Readers Shocked by Restraint, Kindness of IDF Soldiers in Nabi Salah
Bassem Tamimi is about to leave for his 2015 U.S. Speaking Tour, sponsored by several anti-Israel organizations including Jewish Voice for Peace, the Chicago branch of Amnesty International, Interfaith Peace Builders (which sends activists to visit with the Tamimi family), and Sabeel – North America.
Indeed, Sabeel organizer Ariel Gold from Ithaca, who met the Tamimi family during a trip at the end of last year, is coordinating the tour:
As recently as a week ago Gold was still trying to drum up additional speaking locations and attendence for Tamimi. Those locations and larger audiences won’t be hard to find now.
So, knowing now what you know, here is the video that is making the rounds and going viral, produced, of course, by a Tamimi — in this case Bilal Tamimi.
A hat tip to Facebook user Shay Ket, who translated those comments into Hebrew, which JNi.media translated into English:Parents urge firing of teacher seen at soldier’s mobbing
Ahmed Elsayed wrote: “When I saw an Arab child dying of hunger and another drowning in the sea and the fish eat it when he escapes death to the West …. I became convinced that the worst thing produced by the Arab countries are the Arab rulers.”
Ahmed Issa: “Many commentaries say ‘The Israeli soldier is kinder than Arab soldiers,’ and this is true. But don’t forget that the Arab soldier follows the orders of tyrannical Arab leaders, and he’s not interested in his image, while Israel markets itself to the West as a bastion of democracy and human rights, and every Israeli soldier has a thousand faces: in front of the camera and behind the camera.”
Tita: “If it had happened in Egypt, they would have shot that boy with live ammunition instead of being so considerate.”
Amin: “Honest to God, it’s a shame that women are fighting and the men look on.”
Osama: “Note how although he had a weapon, and although he is a soldier of the Zionist entity, he did not shoot him in the head. Imagine the same thing [happening] in Arab countries, how our people would have acted…”
Parents of pupils at an Israeli high school on Sunday demanded the firing of a teacher who took part in a demonstration over the weekend at which an IDF soldier was lightly injured by protesters who mobbed him as he tried to arrest a young boy.Antisemitic Pallywood Street Theater– Gaza Blood And Rubble Bucket Challenge
The parents of children attending the ORT Ebin school in Ramat Gan told the principal they were not prepared to have Herzl Schubert, a history teacher, educate their children, the Hebrew-Language NRG website reported.
Although the teacher in question didn’t take part in the attack on the soldier, he was seen in a video clip confronting other soldiers during the demonstration at the village of Nabi Saleh in the West Bank.
Don’t watch this on an empty stomach. It will make you sick, and not because the evil Jew torments the poor benighted Palestinian. It will make you sick because it’s dishonest.Hamas Demands UN Secretary-General Resign for Believing Israel
This little bit of street theater has it that Jews kill innocent Arabs and when the world calls them on it, they say, “But they’re terrorists!”
The fact is that Jews loathe war and do everything possible to avoid killing innocent civilians when it becomes necessary to engage in defensive operations. That is why, for instance, the IDF drops leaflets warning of imminent operations and including maps of safe areas. That is why the IDF uses the roof-knocking technique to warn civilians to evacuate to safe places.
The Arabs, on the other hand, have no compunction about using human shields in order to drive up the number of civilians deaths to gain world sympathy for their plight.
Hamas has made an official request to fire United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon "in light of his covering up criminal acts by the Israel Occupation Force in the Gaza Strip."Hamas Accidentally Admits to Committing War Crimes
Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri said in a Facebook post that an investigation into the missing Israeli soldier Hadar Goldin, which was broadcast on al-Jazeera on Thursday, includes embarrassing details about Ban Ki-moon.
According to Abu Zuhri, Ban accepted the "false" Israeli narrative which claimed that Hamas broke a ceasefire. He claims that the narrative ignores the deaths of more than 170 people in Rafiah that day.
Hamas demands that Ban apologize and resign his position due to "his involvement in this serious crime." It also insists that the "Israeli occupation" is responsible for the escalation and attacks in Rafiah two hours after the ceasefire began.
Hamas is upset with UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, and are calling on him to resign, and in the process admitted to committing a different act of “unlawful perfidy”, otherwise known as a war crime.Congressional Fight on Iran Deal Is All But Over
Ban Ki Moon has gone on the record of agreeing with the Israeli timeline on the kidnapping and murder of IDF officer Hadar Goldin in Gaza — that the Hamas attack occurred after the cease fire was in place.
Hams has now decided they don’t like that timeline, as it makes them guilty of breaking the truce, so they’ve come up with a new narrative.
Hamas now says they attacked, kidnapped (and murdered?) the IDF soldier before the ceasefire was in play.
But they decided to add another detail in their statement, apparently as part of their ongoing psychological warfare against Israel, and in part to try and explain how their narrative works in the real world.
Hamas claims that Israel found the body of their fighter Walid Tawfiq Mas’oud, who participated in the ambush of Goldin, and the IDF confused him with the Israeli soldier, because their Hamas fighter, who participated in the Goldin kidnapping/attack, was wearing an IDF uniform.
While the laws of war are split on whether its acceptable to wear an enemy uniform to move forward or retreat, it is clear to all nations that wearing an enemy uniform during an actual attack constitutes “unlawful perfify” under international law, or in simpler terms, a war crime.
Opponents of the Iran nuclear deal in Congress admit they can no longer kill the accord. Their focus now is making sure there will be a vote on the agreement at all, and salvaging some political benefit from their well-funded bid to stop it.Vote tally for Iran nuclear deal rises to 31 in Senate
Lawmakers, Congressional staffers and lobbyists opposed to the deal reached in Vienna last month tell us they are now fighting to get more than 60 votes in the Senate for a resolution of disapproval to avoid a filibuster by Democrats supporting President Barack Obama. That is a far cry from the 67 votes in the Senate needed, along with two thirds of the House, to overturn an expected presidential veto of that resolution.
Yes, overturning an Obama veto was always a longshot. House Speaker John Boehner in April was privately warning Republicans that his party didn't have the votes to stop the deal. Now Republican leaders are saying this out in the open.
Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Wednesday it was “very unlikely” there would be 67 votes against the deal in the Senate, but there would be a “bipartisan majority” voting to disapprove of the deal. As of now, only two Senate Democrats and 14 House Democrats have come out against the pact. (The Republicans hold 54 seats in the Senate.)
Oregon’s Democratic senator Jeff Merkley on Sunday became the 31st senator to announce support for the Iran nuclear deal, as momentum builds behind the agreement the Obama administration and other world powers negotiated with Tehran.Cheney: Iran deal 'tragically reminiscent' of Munich deal
Merkley’s backing puts supporters within reach of the 34 votes required to uphold a presidential veto of a congressional resolution disapproving the agreement, which curbs Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for billions of dollars in sanctions relief.
Republicans are unanimously against the deal. But with an overwhelming number of Senate Democrats in favor, some have now begun aiming to amass 41 yes votes, which would allow them to kill the disapproval resolution outright in the Senate and protect Obama from having to use his veto pen.
The nuclear deal reached last month between world powers and Iran "makes war more, not less, likely," former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published on Friday.PM: Israel not opposed to a civilian nuke program for Iran
"The Obama nuclear agreement with Iran is tragically reminiscent of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's Munich agreement in 1938," the op-ed, titled "Restoring American exceptionalism," said. "Each was negotiated from a position of weakness by a leader willing to concede nearly everything to appease an ideological dictator. Hitler got Czechoslovakia. The mullahs in Tehran get billions of dollars and a pathway to a nuclear arsenal. Munich led to World War II. The Obama agreement will lead to a nuclear-armed Iran, a nuclear-arms race in the Middle East and, more than likely, the first use of a nuclear weapon since Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday said Israel does not object to allowing Iran to have a civilian nuclear program, only a military one.'Three Israeli officers killed in operation in Syria' Iranian media claims
In a meeting with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, Netanyahu said last month’s nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers allows the Islamic Republic to retain infrastructure that would be unnecessary for a peaceful nuclear program.
The prime minister was apparently responding to comments Friday by US President Barack Obama, who suggested critics of the Iran deal were against the Islamic Republic having any sort of nuclear program, “even a peaceful one.”
“Let me make clear, Matteo, that Israel doesn’t oppose a civilian nuclear program in Iran. We oppose a military nuclear program in Iran,” Netanyahu said during an official visit to Italy. “And regrettably, the deal with Iran allows it to keep and expand a formidable nuclear infrastructure that is completely unnecessary for civilian nuclear purposes, but is entirely necessary for the production of nuclear weapons.”
At least 42 soldiers were allegedly killed in a Syrian air raid in Daraá, including three supposed Israeli officers, reported Fars News, an official Iranian news agency, on Saturday.BBC’s ‘Hardtalk’ keeps Arafat conspiracy theory going
According to the report, military sources have reported the death of senior Israeli and Jordanian officers in Southern Syria following an air raid operation in the region. The report refers to the Israeli officers as "terrorist commanders."
Over 100 soldiers were killed in a similar operation on Friday according to the report. An additional 46 troops we killed on Thursday.
The BBC’s flagship interview programme ‘Hardtalk’ is broadcast on both BBC World News and the BBC News channel. On August 27th, both those channels showed a repeat of a previous edition of the programme originally aired in January 2015 (and previously discussed here) in which Zeinab Badawi travelled to Malta to interview Suha Arafat.Drive-by shooting victim: Living in Samaria is a game of Russian roulette
As readers may recall, Badawi made no effort at the time to correct the inaccurate impressions given to audiences by Suha Arafat via statements such as:
“When there’s a rocket on Israel we have 1,000 people who are killed in the same day.”
“Gaza…the most crowded city in the world…”
“…more than 1,000 people who are still in the coma…” [after the conflict last summer]
“….nothing happen [with the peace process] because Israel continue to do settlements, Israel continue to build the wall….”
Obviously the corporation supposedly committed to editorial standards of accuracy and impartiality did not identify any problem in repeating the broadcast of such inaccuracies.
The synopsis of the repeat states:
“Earlier this year Zeinab Badawi went to Malta to meet Suha Arafat – the widow of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Ten years after his death, Mrs Arafat gave a rare broadcast interview about their marriage, why she believes her husband was assassinated and why she has chosen to live in Malta and not amongst the Palestinian people who so revered him.”
Two months after the original interview took place, French experts ruled out the possibility of foul play in Arafat’s death.
An Israeli civilian sustained a gunshot wound to his hand in a terrorist drive-by shooting in the Samaria region of the West Bank on Sunday.Soldiers on patrol escape vehicular attack near Hebron
A gunman in a vehicle fired shots at an Israeli driver at the Jit Junction, before speeding away.
An IDF guard at the nearby Efraim territorial division evacuated the man to the Meir Medical Center in Kfar Saba. The army said the man was lightly injured.
An army spokeswoman added that security forces launched sweeps of the area in search of the terrorists.
An attempted vehicular ramming attack near Hebron late Saturday night miraculously ended without anyone being seriously injured.PreOccupied Territory: Breaking The Silence Publishes Mossad Testimonies (satire)
A Palestinian driver swerved his vehicle toward four IDF soldiers on foot patrol in the area. The car ran over the foot of one of the soldiers, who opened fire, damaging the rear of the vehicle.
The driver fled toward Hebron. The soldier was lightly wounded and received medical treatment.
The ramming attack was the latest in a string of similar attacks against Israeli security personnel and civilians.
IDF forces find weapon magazines hidden in teddy bearOne agent’s testimony in the report revealed: “The shark attacks in Egypt in 2010? That was us. The sharks were never supposed to attack though, they went rogue, as so many agents do.” The agent added that his conscience was still bothering him over the fact that the entire cohort of Mossad-trained sharks had to be euthanized to prevent further failures or leaks.“I cannot keep silent any longer, my conscience won’t allow it,” read another testimony. “Right from my first interview, when they asked me if I’m good at keeping secrets, I had a bad feeling about joining the Mossad. And I was right.” That agent recalled how he and several colleagues had to trap migrating birds and affix leg tags to them – tags that appeared to be nothing more than ornithology tracking devices for research purposes, but were in fact sophisticated espionage equipment for reconnaissance in enemy territory. “The way it ruffled those feathers was just…awful,” he said.Another guilt-ridden agent confessed: “I could handle the shark and the dolphin missions, and sending the vultures to Saudi Arabia and Sudan, and the kestrel to Turkey. But when they started thinking up missions just for fun, I could not accept that.” According to the agent, one spy dared another to sneak into the home of Asghar Bukhari, a founder of the UK’s Muslim Public Affairs Committee, steal one of his shoes, leave it in the neighbour’s garden, and make it look like a lion did it. “It was cruel and inhumane. They turned Bukhari into a worldwide laughing stock. I’m sure there’s a war crime in there somewhere.”In another testimony, an agent confessed that under pressure from his colleagues, he created an account for radical Islamic preacher Hamza Andreas Tzortzis on the adultery website Ashley Madison, and then leaked the data of its membership. “I will forever bear the burden of my actions,” he said.Asked to comment on the report, a Breaking the Silence spokesman said “we just want to make Israel a better place.”
IDF forces discovered a cleverly hidden weapons cache in a raid on a Palestinian home on Tuesday.
Soldiers raided the Palestinian home overnight and discovered a stock of weapons including six rifles and a handgun.
Additionally, the IDF forces discovered a teddy bear with a hidden zipper installed in the back. Several firearm magazines were removed from inside the children's toy.
‘Largest Mediterranean gas field’ found off Egypt coast
The Italian energy company Eni said Sunday that it has discovered a “supergiant” natural gas field off Egypt, describing it as the “largest-ever” found in the Mediterranean Sea.3 arrested for swastika vandalism at Michigan Jewish camp
The news came a day after Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi met in Cairo with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, the Egyptian leader’s office said.
Eni said the discovery — made in its Zohr prospect “in the deep waters of Egypt” — could hold a potential 30 trillion cubic feet of gas over an area of 100 square kilometers (38.6 square miles).
“Zohr is the largest gas discovery ever made in Egypt and in the Mediterranean Sea and could become one of the world’s largest natural gas finds,” Eni said in a statement. “The discovery, after its full development, will be able to ensure satisfying Egypt’s natural gas demand for decades.”
Three men were arraigned on Friday in rural Michigan on charges of vandalism at a Jewish youth camp last month when they allegedly sprayed swastikas on property at the site.Rapper Kosha Dillz fighting anti-Semitism one rhyme at a time
Dakota Burnett, 20, Xavier Mulac, 18, and Cody Emelander, 18, are facing charges of destruction of a building, two charges of destruction of personal property, and one count of malicious destruction of a sign at Van Buren County District Court in South Haven.
If convicted the men could face up to a year in prison.
The charges relate to an incident on July 26 when the accused allegedly spray-painted a swastika on a sign outside Camp Agudah Midwest, a Jewish Orthodox overnight camp in South Haven.
Following the controversy with Matisyahu at the Rototom reggae festival in Spain, other Jewish artists are speaking up about the new type of anti-Semitism they face, influenced by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.Neurologist Oliver Sacks, scientific consumer of life, dies at 82
One such musician is Rami Matan Even-Esh, who goes by the stage name Kosha Dillz [Billboard Interview]. He is an American rapper born to Israeli parents and currently based in Los Angeles. He made a name for himself precisely for putting his Jewish and Israeli identity at the forefront of his work. And despite the apolitical nature of his music, he said people bring up anti-Israel sentiments as soon as they can.
This phenomenon is called neo-anti-Semtisim, said Even-Esh, " which is anti-Semitism disguised as 'I really don't hate you, I just hate everything [you're about] and where your family is.'"
He often faces people yelling "Free Palestine" or "Allahu Akbar" at shows, as well as receiving death threats in the past. On his first tour in Europe, for example, Even-Esh said that as soon as he mentioned he was an Israeli American, one person he met kept mentioning that Israelis are Nazis throughout the conversation, though the man did not say anything directly against Jews.
A preeminent consumer of life, Oliver Sacks, 82, died Sunday from stage IV ocular melanoma.NFL’s Julian Edelman discovers Israel
His personal assistant for many years, Kate Edgar, told The New York Times that he died of cancer.
In a distinctly Sacks fashion, he wrote his own obit in a moving February 2015 New York Times oped in which he discusses life and the progression toward death from the cancer that eventually consumed him.
Sacks made a name for himself as a neurologist, albeit one who was able to bring the mysteries of the brain to life through narrative storytelling.
The prolific author wrote innumerable publications and books, including 1973’s autobiographical “Awakenings,” which was turned into a feature film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, 1985’s “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” and his 2015 memoir, “On the Move.”
A scientific thrill-seeker, the neurologist incessantly experimented on himself — through psychedelic drugs, body building, and miles and miles of highway motorcycling. He still swam a mile a day at 81.
From the Western Wall to riding a camel, from slathering mud on himself at the Dead Sea to biting into a falafel sandwich, New England Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman is the star of a new video highlighting Israel as a great travel destination. The NFL Super Bowl champion is seen at every typical tourist attraction around the country in the three minute video.9 Incredible Muslims that Support Israel
“This was an amazing, memorable, once-in-a-lifetime experience for me, made possible by CJP and this amazing work they do,” Edelman told The Times of Israel about his summer trip, organized by Combined Jewish Philanthropies. “I was so lucky to be able to share it with an incredible group of people who made this experience even more memorable.”
Edelman was filmed during a 10-day visit in June, in which he also explored his Jewish heritage in Israel. The video clip called Yalla (slang for let’s go) went live on August 24.
Sheikh al-Adwan was born in 1952 and raised in Amman, Jordan and studied Islamic Sharia at the College for Islamic studies in Amman. In Muslim circles he’s considered incredibly controversial as he not only supports Israel, which is rare for a Jordanian, but believes it is a religious duty for all Muslims to support the Jewish State.Muhammad Zoabi – I have risked my life
Sheikh Ahmad al-Adwan
He believes Islam commands Muslims and Jews to be friends
He believes the Quran bequeaths Israel to the Jews
He believes antisemitism can be defeated through correct interpretation of Islam
He believes according to the Quran, Palestine should not exist as a country
He believes Israel is a peaceful nation and the Jews a peaceful people
I have risked my life
Got disowned by many of my family.
Been almost killed.
Fled the country and could barely live as a teenager.
Came back home, knowing that its still dangerous, knowing that my life would never be the same.
I am still being threatened and harassed by many of those who’re against the simple right of the Jewish people to have a state of their own. It’s not only me being harassed and threatened, almost every non Jew who dares to stand with the Jewish people and their right to be an independent nation amongst the nations of the Earth put their lives at risk.
And all of that was because i dared to speak my truth.
Its all because i dared to proudly and with no hesitation say that i am in indeed a proud Arab, but also a proud Israeli Zionist!