Tuesday, September 01, 2015
UK Labor Front-Runner Campaigned to Free Israel Embassy Bombers
The man likely to be elected head of the UK's major opposition party, Labor MP Jeremy Corbyn, campaigned in support of two terrorists convicted for bombing Jewish and Israeli targets in London, it has been revealed.Douglas Murray: Jeremy Corbyn isn’t alone in thinking that Osama bin Laden’s death was ‘a tragedy’
It is just the latest disturbing revelation of the Labor front runner's connection to extremists, including terrorists and virulent anti-Semites.
Corbyn led the campaign to release Palestinian terrorists Jawad Botmeh and Samar Alami, who were convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison for bombing the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish charity headquarters in 1994.
14 people were injured in the embassy attack, while six were wounded in the attack on the offices of the United Jewish Israel Appeal (UJIA) just one day later. Both attacks involved car bombs packed with high explosives.
Botmeh and Alami were found in possession of five pounds of explosives, which investigators say were were used to make the bombs, and a sizable cache of guns. But while they admitted possession of the arms the convicted terrorists protested their innocence, saying they weren't intended for use in the UK. Botmeh even claimed Israel had bombed the sites themselves to gain sympathy.
But a 2001 appeal against their conviction was rejected, with the prosecution noting the "overwhelming" evidence of their involvement in the plot - though their suspected accomplices have never been caught.
Undeterred, Corbyn took up their cause in 2002, signing five early day motions in Parliament between 2002-2006 and calling for their parole, according to the Jewish Chronicle. He called for the pair's release repeatedly, and in 2003 questioned then-Home Secretary David Blunkett over the investigation, suggesting the men had been framed.
His support for the bombers continued after their release from prison as well.
The news that Jeremy Corbyn thought the death of Osama bin Laden ‘a tragedy‘ because he was never put on trial is not very surprising. Nor is it as far-out-there as most of his comments.Emails Show Blumenthal Pushed Son’s Anti-Israel Activism On Hillary
I did a BBC Question Time immediately after bin Laden’s death where I got the impression I was the only person in Britain not to feel sad about the terrorist’s death. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Paddy Ashdown and most of the audience seemed horrified by the terrorist’s early demise and were most exercised of all over whether or not he had been given an appropriately ‘Islamic’ burial.
Fortunately there was a woman in the audience (in Hammersmith, London) who had been on the Tube on 7 July and had seen people ripped from their lives far more brutally and with far less reason than Osama bin Laden was. But most people in the room were far too high on ‘liberal’ fury to care about that or about commuters murdered on the transport most of them would use each morning.
All of which is to say that people should beware of thinking Corbyn is in a minority on this one. It is possible – I have certainly thought for some time – that a liberal death-wish, as exemplified by weeping over your enemies, is fairly mainstream in our country these days.
In response to a tweet from The Daily Caller’s Jamie Weinstein asking the younger Blumenthal if he was an “informal adviser” to Clinton, Blumenthal responded, “I warned her about the danger of #JSIL. She didn’t listen.”Israeli-Palestinian Faceoff - on a Welsh Mountain?
The JSIL (The Jewish State of Israel in the Levant) hashtag on Twitter is the creation of Max and fellow anti-Israel writer, Rania Khalek. The hashtag is meant to compare Israel to the terrorist organization ISIL.
In June 2010, Sid sent Clinton a piece Max wrote about the Gaza-bound flotilla carrying pro-Palestinian activists, which ended in a deadly raid by Israeli commandos after the flotilla refused to turn around when it attempted to break through Israel’s coastal territory.
The incident remains in dispute to this day. In his piece, Max claims that Israel provided no proof the flotilla passengers had terrorist connections and Israeli media was playing along with whatever the Israel Defense Forces told them.
Sid sent Clinton another Max article that attacked Israel over the flotilla incident in June 2010. The piece is titled, “The Flotilla Raid Was Not ‘Bungled.’ The IDF Detailed Its Violent Strategy In Advance.”
A few months later in August, Sid sent Clinton an email with Max’s piece that described Israeli teenagers who spent their summer demolishing Palestinian structures in the Bedouin village of Al-Arakib. Max calls it the “Summer Camp Of Destruction.” (h/t Effect)
Now that's commitment: When a group of British pro-Israel activist got wind of a fund-raising event for a terrorist-linked charity they decided they had to act.
Dozens had already signed up for the fundraiser for Interpal, a charity which is banned in the US for funding Hamas, but which is still legal in the UK, despite Hamas also being a proscribed terrorist group there.
Hamas is responsible for the murder of thousands of Israelis and the maiming of many more, mostly civilians. Its charter details its commitment to the destruction of the State of Israel and the ultimate genocide of the Jewish people.
Joseph Cohen, founder and leader of the Israel Advocacy Movement, decided to arrange a counter-protest in response. A simple enough task - except the fund-raiser was a hike up the highest mountain in England and Wales, Mount Snowdon.
But that didn't deter the half-dozen Israel activists who, together with Cohen, schlepped all the way from London to Wales for a mountaintop showdown.
They decided the most appropriate response would be to dedicate their own hike to the One Family organization, which helps survivors of terrorist attacks and bereaved families deal with their physical, psychological and emotional wounds.
However, not wanting to tip-off the pro-Palestinian group, they only announced their own fundraiser after the event.
The Dutch Owe Jews a Real Apology for Their Role in the Holocaust
In our article, we pointed out that The Netherlands was the Western European country where by far the largest percentage of Jews was murdered during the war. Of the 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands at the outbreak of the Second World War, 107,000 were deported, mainly to German extermination camps in Poland. Of these, 102,000 were murdered. Following the recent apologies of Luxembourg and Monaco, now all other Western European countries have either apologized or admitted to their war-time predecessors’ responsibility and misdemeanors in great detail.The "Naqba" Was no Holocaust - Far From It.
In our article, we focused solely on the main misdemeanors of the Dutch government-in-exile. This government only inquired about the fate of the deported Jews a year and a half after the deportations had begun, despite the fact that both the Dutch and Polish governments in exile were located in the same building in London. In the meantime, in the occupied Netherlands, the Jews to be deported to the death camps were arrested by Dutch policemen, transported by the Dutch railways, and guarded by the Dutch military police.
In 1943, Henri Dentz, a Dutch government-in-exile employee was tasked to write a report on the deportations. He estimated that 90% of those deported had been murdered. He declared before a post-war Dutch parliamentary commission, that no one in the government was willing to read his report.
The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute has announced an evening program to mark the publication of their book “The Holocaust and the Nakba – Memory, National Identity and Jewish-Arab Partnership”, which ““invites the readers to think of ways to remember and discuss the Holocaust and the Nakba together, and investigate the possibility of such combined thought – not because the events are identical or even similar, but because they are both traumatic and identity-constructing. The Nakba and the Holocaust both molded the two peoples’ destinies and identities, albeit in totally different ways.”NYTs: Faking Doctors’ Notes to Escape Gaza War Zone
According to many Palestinian groups the term ‘Al-Nakba’ (“Catastrophe” in Arabic) was invented after 1948 and refers to the War of Independence in 1948 where the small State of Israel emerged victorious after being attacked by the surrounding Arab countries.
However, past studies and research have shown that the term ‘Al-Nakba’ was not a product of the events of 1948. The first recorded use of the word came about in 1938 and was coined by a premier “historian of the Palestinian People” George Antonius. According to his book The Arab Awakening, written in 1938, before Israel was even founded, the term ‘Al-Nakba’ refers to the events of 1920 when Arabs living in Palestine were cut off from their Syrian counterparts and rioted in response to their identifying with the Syrian nationality.
In an attempt to put a stop to the event and publication of the book, several prominent pro-Israel organizations have started public campaigns and have tried to reach out to the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.
In response to the announcement of the forthcoming program at the Institute, Im Tirtzu sent an urgent letter to Prof. Gabriel Motzkin, the Institute’s director, demanding cancellation of this event.
With Egypt having all but shuttered its border with Gaza, Israel allowed about twice the number of Gazans to exit through its Erez crossing in the first half of 2015 as in the same period the year before. But the permits are reserved mainly for merchants and medical patients, and some Gazan doctors and residents, as well as officials involved in the issuing of permits, say they have seen a parallel uptick in fraudulent referrals, slowing approvals for legitimate cases.PreOccupiedTerritory: How Much Can I Write About Gaza Misery Without Mentioning Rockets? By Jodi Rudoren, NY Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief (satire)
There is no firm data on how prevalent the practice is. The World Health Organization reported that 2,148 Gaza patients applied for permits in June, the highest monthly number since the agency began monitoring the process in 2006; 80 percent got through, a drop from the previous three months. The nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights wrote to the Israeli authorities last week complaining that eight patients who it had helped apply for medical transfers were denied permits in August, up from a typical two per month.
“We have a lot of cases of both fake papers and fake requests, and also just people that don’t really need to get this treatment outside,” said the Israeli official who heads the permit division, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of his sensitive role. “Sometimes we find ourselves digging deep in certain requests just to make sure they’re real, and other real requests are waiting.”
Patient applications from Gaza nearly quadrupled in less than a decade, to more than 18,000 in 2014 from 5,470 in 2006; there were 10,034 requests in the first half of 2015. Dr. Bassem al-Badri, a Palestinian dermatologist who runs Gaza’s medical-referral office, and Anita Vitullo, manager of the W.H.O.’s health-advocacy project for Palestinians, both said the main drivers are Gaza’s swelling population and the shortage of medicine, equipment and personnel in its overburdened hospitals, especially since last summer’s war with Israel.
But Dr. Badri said that “about 10 percent” of applicants did not actually need treatment and that there were doctors in Gaza who charged patients $200 to $2,000 for unnecessary referrals. He blamed Israel for the growing black market, calling it “one of the crimes of the occupation.”
Take my most recent article, which discusses the rampant fraud in the system for gaining passage out of the Gaza Strip for medical treatment. I challenge you to find the words “Hamas,” “rocket,” “tunnels,” or “terrorism” in there. With those factors going completely unmentioned, I don’t need to hit the reader over the head with the hammer of the “Occupation” – I only need to mention it a couple of times, quote somebody who calls the fraud a “crime of the Occupation,” and done. To tell the truth (which I take pride in doing only partially), that was an easy one.How Social Psychology Explains the Erosion of the Bipartisan Pro-Israel Consensus in America
Sometimes, though, it is simply an impossible task. Perhaps Arab media outlets can get away with ignoring Palestinian violence and only reporting Israel’s response, but we at the Newspaper of Record don’t always have that luxury. Under those circumstances, the best we can manage is to load the report with qualifiers that call into question Israeli objectivity or reliability: “Israel says,” or “the Israeli military claimed” – while appending no such phrases to Palestinian claims. You have to take the symbolic victories when they come your way, or you may end up with nothing. I learned that from the people I refuse to mention.
The challenge is so compelling that I’ve actually made it editorial policy at the bureau, and the correspondents have responded well. Diaa Hadid, especially, excels at amplifying the anti-Israel angle in subtle ways, and I’ve asked her to hold workshops with the other writers to help them improve their skills in this regard. One day we might compete with Al Jazeera, but that quality of journalism also seems to go along with serious misogyny.
Of course we could just blame that on the Occupation.
There is a prominent liberal meme concerning “yoostabees”: people who supposedly “used to be a Democrat” until 9/11 changed everything—including on issues wholly unrelated to 9/11. The joke usually takes the form of a mock declaration that “I used to consider myself a Democrat, but thanks to 9/11, I’m outraged by Chappaquiddick.” The idea is that while it is perfectly plausible that the September 11th attacks might change one’s views on foreign policy, there is no reason why it should affect beliefs about Ted Kennedy’s decades-past car crash—or any liberal domestic policy initiative like universal healthcare.Why won't NSW Police charge Hizb ut-Tahrir's Ismail Al-Wahwah for calling on Muslims to kill Jews?
And yet, many of us have met such people, or their conservative counterparts—Republicans who turned into Democrats after souring on the Iraq war, for instance. This oddity is actually reflective of an interesting new branch of inquiry in social psychology known as “cultural cognition.” Cultural cognition suggests that most of us form our beliefs based not on reasoned and independent appraisal of evidence, but rather based on whether they align with our cultural predispositions and communities. In other words, most of our beliefs, most of the time, are mediated by the degree to which they are in harmony with our cultural priors. People prefer not to be outliers; they tend to decide ambiguous or contested arguments in a way that is consonant with the beliefs of their peers. This includes liberals and conservatives.
This phenomenon explains why the “since 9/11” crowd seemed to shift political positions not just on foreign policy but tout court. Their move from one cultural community to another altered which of their beliefs were in harmony with their new cultural cohorts and which ones were anomalous and needed to be jettisoned. More generally, cultural cognition explains why liberals tend to reject out-of-hand policy positions culturally coded as “conservative,” regardless of their merits, and why conservatives do the same to ideas viewed as “liberal.”
What does all this have to do with Israel? One of the great successes of the pro-Israel community has been its ability to keep “pro-Israel” a non-partisan issue. Unlike, say, debates over gun regulation, for most of the past few decades being pro-Israel has not been marked as a particularly liberal or conservative position. There was no oddity or strangeness to either a Democrat or a Republican considering themselves to be “pro-Israel.” This cultural neutrality is what allowed strong and stable bipartisan support for Israel to sustain itself.
In March this year Jason Morrison and I watched a youtube video of a crazed Muslim calling on Australian Muslims to kill Jews.. A week or so ago we reported again on news that he hadn't at that stage been prosecuted.Young people in the Middle East must embrace peace
Ismail al-Wahwah is a radical Islamist, the leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir and a danger to society. The NSW Police Commissioner has advised the Anti-Discrimination Board that al-Wahwah won't be prosecuted over what he said in the video. The report below in today's Daily Telegraph suggests a convoluted and frankly weird position taken by police on this matter - the question of who uploaded the YouTube video of al-Wahwah's incitement to kill Jews seems to me to be of only peripheral importance. Al-Wahwah was inciting people with a known propensity to commit acts of terror to go out and do precisely that - i.e. to murder Jews.
I'd hate to think al-Wahwah wasn't prosecuted because of fears of another Muslim riot like we saw on the streets of Sydney in 2012.
I have always wondered about the reason for hate in this world. Why are we programmed to hate certain races or religious groups? I was lucky enough to have traveled around the world and experienced many people, cultures and religions.Zionist Lobby - Anti-American Bogeyman
Being raised Muslim in Morocco, I did not really get a chance to meet many Moroccan Jews. Even though Jews and Muslims have co-existed in Morocco for a long time, that doesn’t necessarily mean they like each other.
We were raised with the idea that the Jews are evil, satanic. As a kid when you did something bad you would be called a Jew. We were programmed with Jew-hatred.
While attending a Catholic boarding school in the United States, I had my first opportunity for an encounter with a Jewish family. The decision to go took me longer than it should.
I had to think twice, about whether God would be mad at me, or whether my parents be mad at me. I finally decided to attend that dinner; after all I was attending a Catholic high school. Everything went great and all the propaganda that surrounded me in my younger years appeared surely to be false.
Time has not sapped the clout of the Zionist Lobby. Never the political force of anti-Semitic claims, yet the myth of a lobby powerful enough to bend the will of government to what opponents consider unpatriotic interests – Jewish interests – remains a handy cudgel for the right moment. Heads of state still keep the Jewish scare on ice to blame for big disruptive acts. War and bogus Zionist power go together like horse and chariot. Monarchs and icons of the past found it so.In Nabi Saleh, an all too predictable black eye for Israel
They wheeled out the bogeyman to blame for European wars. It was blamed for the first modern type, the Anglo Boer War. Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh blamed the bogeyman for World Wars I and II respectively. In the build-up to the Anschluss Hitler warned that it would be the work of manipulative Jews. On the outbreak of war, the Fuehrer hitched the bogeyman to the hell he was going to unleash.
Then Zionists plucked sovereignty out of nowhere, and the bogeyman had to get a new face. Israel now took the blame for making war not peace. Israel was saddled with a unique sin called Occupation. It was the old bogeyman in new clothes that wouldn’t gift the Palestinians a state. And when Israel did make offers or overtures, they were never good enough for the powers that be. A Prime Minister of Israel once took a walk on the Temple Mount, and the world erupted in furious disgust. So did a Palestinian uprising known as Intifada. Never mind that their leader, Yasser Arafat, had planned the Intifada long before the bogeyman walked.
Was there no limit to blameworthiness? It seemed not when a member of Europe’s parliament traced climate change to the bogeyman. Clare Short complained that Israel “undermined the international community’s reaction to global warming.” How did the bogeyman contrive such a thing? Wily is as wily does. An Israel that refuses to make peace, explained her accuser, “prevents leaders from attending to the threat of carbon that, if left unregulated, will end the human race.” So, when the human race ends, it will be laid at the bogeyman’s door.
I was there with the media pool, working on a story for The Times of Israel about the larger dynamic between neighboring Palestinian villages and Jewish settlements. It was my first time at the weekly protest. For everyone else there, it was ritual. They greeted each other like members of a football team before taking the field.Leading Israeli paper features UK Media Watch report on Nabi Saleh ‘Pallywood’ row
Once I arrived at the demonstrators’ rendezvous, I asked someone standing next to me what to expect from the impending protest.
“We’ll start marching down the road, then the army will be waiting for us. Once we get to a certain point, they’ll start throwing tear gas at us, then kids will start throwing rocks at them on top of the hill,” he said. “And then it will go back and forth like that.
“And we’ll take lots of pictures,” he added.
...
Ten minutes later, almost all of the demonstrators were outside the boy’s home. Someone from the Palestine Red Crescent Society was making calls about two other demonstrators who had been detained. While the boy was lying down, people tried to comfort him and see if he was all right.
The Red Crescent worker then showed the boy pictures he took of the incident. “Good job,” he told the child. He then got up to talk with other activists and journalists about getting to Ramallah and disseminating the photos and video.
“We got them,” he said.
Yedioth highlights our analysis, as well as the graphics we used showing the changing headline at the Daily Mail and the completely deleted story at The Telegraph.IsraellyCool: Muhammad Tamimi and the Case of the Ambidextrous Cast
Here’s a CAMERA translation of the first paragraph of the Yedioth article:
The international media sets a new trend: An altercation last Friday in Nabi Saleh north of Ramallah, between a Golani fighter who detained an 11-year-old boy suspected of throwing stones and female members of the boy’s family, resulted in highly problematic coverage for Israel’s image in the international media. But according to the pro-Israel site UK Media Watch, which monitors and analyzes coverage of Israel in the British media, coverage of the incident changed following claims that the Tamimi family, which was involved in the incident, and especially the girl who was photographed biting the soldier, is a known serial provocateur of Israeli soldiers for the benefit of journalists’ cameras.
Yedioth goes on to agree with our main take-away from the Daily Mail and Telegraph retreats, and Guardian non-coverage: that even the British media – at the forefront of delegitimization efforts against the Jewish state – may be tiring of the transparent efforts by Palestinian activists to manipulate their coverage of the region.
Meet little Muhammad Tamimi. You may know him as broken-arm kid. He’s your average 12 year-old kid, who does what any 12 year old kid does.Daphne Anson: More Anti-Israel Agit Prop in London (videos)
Here he is working on his pitching arm for little league with a broken left arm.
And here he is in May 2014, sitting on a rock with his broken right arm.
Wait a second. Right arm?
Either this kid is the most accident-prone kid in town or that cast is just a Pallywood accessory. Just like his sister Ahed’s Tweety Bird shirt, I’m going with Pallywood accessory.
Either way, we should all be focusing on the abusiveness of parents who stand around filming their two kids attack armed military personnel week after week. Where else is this behaviour rewarded?
First, footage early in August of the Big Ride for Palestine as the intrepid pedallers all the way from Edinburgh (and locations en route) hove into the home stretch.Roger Waters, Israeli parents don’t need your education
Secondly, similar foes of Israel a couple of days ago, in Slough, a bedroom suburb of London that's not known for its beauty, even though it's not that far, as the crow flies, from the pretty village Stoke Poges of Gray's Elegy fame.
But what would Roger Waters, the co-founder of Pink Floyd and prominent proponent of BDS, tell his kids if they attended school today in the Gaza Envelope? Would he tell them what he told Gideon Levy of Haaretz, in an interview published last month:Another Wall and not a peep from the Israel haters?
“They [the rockets] are completely useless, everybody knows it. They’re a gesture of resistance, that’s all. They might hit something, but they won’t. And if they do, they might kill one person, or two people?”
A six-year old got off the bus at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai today. Her school threatened to strike yesterday – because it lacked and still lacks the requisite number of miguniot, fortified shelters. The Islamic Jihad launched a rocket in the school’s direction this morning, just as she arrived for her first day of school – ever.
You could barely see her head above and her scrawny legs below the pink Hello Kitty backpack stuffed with every book, neon marker, and One Direction and Taylor Swift notebook that she will need for the entire year. Suddenly the siren went off. She ran to take the hand of the nearest adult – a gray-haired woman who could have been her teacher, the principal, or someone’s grandma, for all she knows. The woman walked her to a sheltered room where she waited for the all-clear signal with everyone else who was in range of that shelter at that moment.
If she was like most six-year olds, she wasn’t even certain she could find her new classroom before this – much less a fortified shelter.
Yes another wall and where, oh where, are the Israel haters.Fanta Erases Israel From MapWant a Fanta?
Until a week ago I was under the impression at the last count there were more than 45 walls separating countries and territories. Now it seems there are more being built elsewhere in Europe.
In Hungary the government is rushing to complete a 109-mile-long barbed wire border fence along its southern frontier with Serbia.
Where's Israel?Muhammad cartoon editor gets Norway prize
Fanta, owned by Coca-Cola, does not have an Israeli website, but does have a Hebrew Facebook page and YouTube channel. One of Fanta's Israeli YouTube ads was among the most-watched in Israel in May 2015, according to Globes.
The drink remains ubiquitous on store shelves and in restaurants nationwide.
Israel is still listed on parent company Coca-Cola's website.
Danish newspaper editor Flemming Rose will receive 100,000 Norwegian kroner (roughly 80,000 Danish kroner) from the free speech group Fritt Ord for his “steadfast defence of free speech” over the past decade.Phyllis Bennis Mendaciously Bashes Israel on C-SPAN While Promoting ISIS Book
Fritt Ord wrote in a press release Monday that Rose has consistently pushed forward the notion of free speech as a basic human right.
“On September 30, 2005 Jyllands-Posten published a page with 12 different cartoons, each of them caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. That was the start of one of the most important debates over freedom of expression in modern times. Ten years later, it is still not finished,” the group wrote.
Rose currently serves as Jyllands-Posten’s foreign editor but was the culture editor who commissioned the Muhammad cartoons. He was very vocal in the aftermath of January’s Charlie Hebdo attacks in January and has been a frequent presence in the international media speaking about threats against the freedom of speech.
But Edward Said's false explanation as to “why there is no peace” is still contradicted by the facts. The Arabs continue to refuse to accept Israel as a Jewish state (evidently 22 Arab Muslim states is fine but one Jewish state is one too many) and continue to insist on the right of return of Palestinian Arabs and their descendants to Israel which would result in engulfing the state. The result would be the replacement of Israel by a 23rd Arab Muslim state. The basic propaganda narrative underlying the Arab “right of return” to Israel is the so-called “nakba” (Arabic for "catastrophe") myth, which falsely claims that Palestinian Arabs in 1948 suffered a forced exodus at the hands of Israeli Jews comparable to the Holocaust suffered by European Jews at the hands of the Nazis and their sympathizers. Nakba Day on May 15 is marked by Arab protests (including in recent years confrontations along Israel's frontiers) while Israel's birthday is celebrated on May 14, the modern Jewish state of Israel having declared its independence on May 14, 1948, in keeping with the U.N.'s 1947 partition plan. Furthermore, according to authoritative sources, in the wake of Israel's War of Independence in 1948, the overwhelming majority of Arab refugees from what became the Jewish state were not expelled by Israelis. But, ironically, a much larger number of refugees, Jews who had resided in Arab countries for many generations, were forced to flee their native lands. Thus the Jewish "nakba" dwarfed the Arab "nakba" and moreover, while the new Jewish state welcomed and assimilated these Jewish refugees, the Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendants were cynically penned up by their Arab brethren in refugee camps – a condition which still persists. Unfortunately, C-SPAN viewers never hear information like this.Turkey Holds Vice News Reporters On 'ISIS Terrorism' Charges
Bennis “great mentor” (see below) Said was more of a propagandist than a true academic (he taught at Columbia University). CAMERA's Dr. Alex Safian exposed much of Said's propaganda. Safian refuting a Said propaganda staple, wrote,
… in fact, the great majority of Palestinians were not expelled, and that most, like Professor Said and his family, chose to leave. (See for example, Karsh's Were the Palestinians Expelled in Commentary, July-August 2000; Justus Reid Weiner, My Beautiful Old House and other Fabrications by Edward Said, Commentary, September 1999)
A plethora of NGOs and civil society groups have demanded that Turkey release two British journalists, along with their driver and translator, who were imprisoned on Thursday for “engaging in acts on behalf of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” (ISIS).Mission creep in BBC Trending report on Egyptian graduate’s speech about Israel
The journalists, who are employees of the New York City-based VICE News, were reporting on the rift between Turkish police and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is designated as a terrorist group by both the U.S. and Turkey.
Although the reporters continued to be detained, no formal charges appeared to be filed against them, according to a VICE spokesman, who told Poynter.
But that changed Monday when a Turkish court remanded the VICE journalists in custody, according to AFP.
A few days ago we posted here a video of a speech made by Tel Aviv University valedictorian Haisam Hassanein who was born in Egypt.Holocaust Denier to Lead Death Camp Tours
Nine days later, BBC Trending produced a video relating to the same topic which was promoted on social media and in the ‘Features’ section of the BBC News website’s Middle East page.
The video – made by BBC Arabic’s Mai Norman – includes frames of excerpts from Haisam Hassanein’s speech interspersed with comment from the video maker, edited written responses to the original film and comment from two interviewees.
The ostensible reason for BBC Trending’s pick-up of this story is that the video of Haisam Hassanein’s speech got a lot of views on You Tube. Although BBC Trending claims that its mission is “[r]eporting on what’s being shared and asking why it matters“, rather than exploring – for instance – why so many people found the film interesting or what causes citizens of Egypt to hold such obviously mistaken beliefs and stereotypes about Israel, BBC Trending seemed to be more interested in discrediting Hassanein’s impressions and presenting counter views to what it described in the synopsis to this filmed report as his “surprising take on Israel”.
Why was that mission creep deemed editorially acceptable?
Holocaust denier and self-styled historian David Irving is leading tours of concentration camps, the Daily Mail reports Monday - at the hefty price of £2,000 ($3072) per person.Supremacist convicted of killing 3 at Kansas Jewish sites
In September, he is due to take a group of "international guests" to Latvia and Poland to visit four concentration camps, as well as one of Hitler's fortresses. The tour begins and ends in Warsaw, and will stop at Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Majdanek.
Irving, 77, is known as one of the world's most vocal and prominent Holocaust deniers, after he sued Penguin Books and American scholar Deborah Lipstadt for libel in 2000 over the term - bringing his revisionist views to life.
Among other beliefs, Irving insists that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler did not know about the Holocaust and has played down the Holocaust's magnitude and severity.
Irving encourages travelers to "make up your own minds" about the Holocaust, according to the Mail.
The man who admitted killing three people at two suburban Kansas City Jewish sites was convicted of murder and other charges Monday, shortly after he told jurors he hoped to “die a martyr” for the shootings.Hungarian official booed off Jewish festival stage
It took the jury of seven men and five women just over two hours to find Frazier Glenn Miller guilty of one count of capital murder, three counts of attempted murder and assault and weapons charges.
After the verdict was announced, Miller, 74, of Aurora, Missouri, said: “The fat lady just sang.” As jurors were filing out of the courtroom, he told them: “You probably won’t sleep tonight.”
Next, the jury will deliberate the sentence for Miller, who could get the death penalty.
During the prosecution’s closing, District Attorney Steve Howe cited a “mountain of evidence” against Miller, who is charged with capital murder in the April 2014 shootings at two Jewish sites in Overland Park, Kansas. Although he has admitted to killing the three people, he has pleaded not guilty, saying it was his duty to stop genocide against the white race. None of the victims was Jewish.
“He wants to be the one who decides who lives and dies,” Howe said of Miller.
A government official in Hungary was booed off the stage at the nation’s Jewish culture festival after he defended an allegedly anti-Semitic singer.WATCH: Palestine Post offices burned in 1948
At the opening event of the Budapest festival on Sunday, audience members loudly heckled Csaba Latorcai, deputy state secretary of the Prime Minister’s Office, preventing him from finishing his speech. The heckling was in response to Latorcai’s defense of Maria Petras, who had been scheduled to appear at the festival but was disinvited amid allegations of anti-Semitism.
Latorcai said the charges against Petras were “unfounded” and “based on lies.”
Festival organizers canceled Petras’ appearance after some Jewish activists reported that she had performed at nationalistic and ultrarightist events, along with a memorial service for the late anti-Semitic Hungarian writer Albert Wass.
This newsreel captures footage from a car bombing and subsequent fire at the Palestine Post offices in Jerusalem on Feb. 1, 1948. According to the Post’s own reporting, the attack left one dead and about 40 injured.WATCH: Students protest France’s arms embargo
“The offices of the Palestine Post were partly demolished and set on fire,” the British narrator reports, as the camera pans over the rubble-filled street and charred “Palestine Post” sign. “A score of people were injured, and the flames not only made rescue difficult, but also gave the firefighters a very tough time.”
The attack was later attributed to Palestinian Arab irregulars and two British army deserters.
According to this newsreel, some 15,000 students demonstrated outside the Tel Aviv French embassy in 1969, protesting Prime Minister Charles de Gaulle’s decision to stop France’s supply of arms to Israel.Australian immigrant realizes dream, joins IAF pilot course
Though France had been a chief weapons supplier during the 1950s, de Gaulle’s administration imposed an embargo after the 1967 Six Day War.
“Mr. Eshkol, the prime minister, said that any weakening of Israel’s forces would threaten peace in the Middle East,” the British narrator reports.
In the crowd, students wave banners, read Scripture, and chant slogans as guards struggle to hold back the throng of angry youths.
Staff Sergeant Y., an Australian immigrant serving with the IDF's Maglan Unit, which specializes in operations deep behind enemy lines, should have joined his comrades who, after three years of grueling military service, are gearing for their release, but instead he has decided to volunteer for the Israeli Air Force and has enlisted in its pilot training program.Amazon chooses Israeli firm for big India rollout
The 23-year-old, who came to Israel from Melbourne as a lone soldier, dreams of becoming a fighter pilot. His older brother, Maj. G., 36, is an IAF helicopter pilot.
"I left my parents in Australia and came to Israel to follow in my brother's footsteps, but unfortunately it didn’t work out. My other choice was to serve in an elite unit, and that's how I ended up in Maglan," he told Israel Hayom on Sunday.
"When I was a child, visiting family here, I felt a connection to Israel. My father was a major in the IDF, and I heard a lot about Israel from him, and when I graduated from high school I made the decision make aliyah, join the military and contribute to the country's security.
Israeli mobile monetization firm MobCo Media has been selected by Internet retail giant Amazon to spread the word about its new app for customers in India.2 Israelis make MIT's prestigious '35 Innovators Under 35' list
“The Internet is changing and large parts of it are moving to mobile,” said Tomer Hen, CEO of MobCo. “With the deployment of the Amazon app in India, one of the biggest countries and markets in the world, we are directing the campaign of one of the biggest media and book stores in the world. This is a significant accomplishment for our company, and will further strengthen our position in the world mobile advertising market.”
Under its contract with Amazon, MobCo will market the Amazon app, encouraging users to download it and use it to make purchases. According to company officials, India is Amazon’s number two target market, right behind the US, and the company has committed to investing over $2 billion there.
Launched in India two years ago, Amazon has steadily gained market share in the country, and is now second in online sales to homegrown Flipkart. Now Amazon is looking to MobCo to push it to the number one slot, especially via the marketing of its mobile app, which can reach hundreds of millions of cellphone users in India’s countryside who do not have access to a computer.
Two Israelis have made MIT's prestigious "35 Innovators Under 35" list for 2015, which the university published on Monday.Revealing the Buried Secrets of the Temple Mount (h/t Yenta Press)
One of the Israelis is Cigall Kadoch, 30, who holds a doctorate from Stanford. She is the daughter of an Israeli and was raised in San Francisco. Her field of expertise is cancer research, with a focus on breast cancer.
Gilad Evrony, 33, the second Israeli on the list, is a Harvard Medical School researcher. Evrony helped make a surprising discovery: Brain cells sitting right next to each other don't always have the same genetic codes.
According to the MIT's Technology Review, Evrony's discovery "could provide insight into age-related cognitive decline and brain disorders such as epilepsy and schizophrenia."
For the first time in history archaeological artifacts from the Temple Mount are being uncovered, and you have the chance to be part of it!
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