10/12 Links Pt2: The Guardian celebrates Marwan Barghouti; The Ripple Effect of Media Bias

From Ian:

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Guardian celebrates Marwan Barghouti, and obfuscates his support for ‘armed resistance’

Note the curious decision by Black to add the hashtag #Intifada, presumably to generate interest in the op-ed among the radical, pro-“resistance” crowd.
Last year, in a UKMW post exploring the likely reaction by the Guardian in the event a new Intifada began, we came to the following conclusion:
There are quite a few factors which lead us to believe that many Guardian reporters and editors will likely lend moral support to the Palestinians in the event they launch another deadly intifada.
Specifically, the paper has shown a clear tendency in the past to license extremist commentators who reject peace and reconciliation with Israel and legitimize (if not justify) Palestinian terrorism. Additionally, their binary moral paradigm in which Palestinians are seen as immutable victims of Israeli oppression further necessitates at least tacit support for the Palestinians’ recourse to violence.
The Guardian’s decision to publish an op-ed by an unrepentant Palestinian terrorists responsible for the murder of several civilians, and the promotion of that piece by their Jerusalem correspondent and Middle East editor, serves as additional evidence that the media group can indeed be expected to provide moral cover for the next coordinated Palestinian onslaught against innocent Jews.

UN official who was hit by rocks says, May Allah forgive them

A senior UN official who was hurt when Palestinians threw rocks at his car wrote on Facebook that “Allah will forgive the rock throwers,” according to a report in the website NRG.
Mounir Kleibo heads the bureau of the International Labor Organization in the Palestinian Territories, a UN agency.
According to NRG, Kleibo’s Facebook profile is bluntly pro-Palestinian, despite his being an official of the UN and as such expected to be impartial.
Kleibo’s cover picture shows the dome of the al-Aqsa Mosque and his profile picture is the word “Shuhada” [“Martyrdom”] on a black background.
In one of his posts, Kleibo wrote that “we mourn not only our shahids but also ourselves, our eyes, our hearts, our consciousness and our humanity.”
In a post published after the stone-throwing attack, and accompanied by photos apparently taken from his hospital bed, Kleibo says he is okay and so is his wife, Tamara, and writes, “May Allah forgive those who throw the rocks at night.”
A Foreign Ministry official tells NRG that “one must regret the fact that the UN did not explicitly condemn all Palestinian stone throwers, who hurt, among others, a senior UN official. One can be even sorrier that the same official, a victim of Palestinian violence, continues praising it on his Facebook page.” (h/t Bob Knot)

Daphne Anson: 'Twas Da Joos What Did It, Suggests Gorgeous George

Well, well, well! Here's Gorgeous George, speaking on Iran's satellite propaganda channel Press TV a few days ago (8 October), proving that behind those icy baby blues is a sense of humour and a vivid imagination!
I mean, he'd hardly be likely to advance a blood libel, would he?
(Incidentally, George, it's "Western Wall" not "Wailing Wall," the latter being considered an offensive term.)

"For Internal Use Only"?

Hamas fighters in the Palestinian Security Forces? Not for public consumption.
Conclusions:
1. IF the Israeli gov’t were to publicize that the PA praised these murders, it would be difficult for this same government to describe the PA as an independent entity that could live as state, in peace, alongside Israel.
2. Since the Oslo Process in 1993, Israel has blocked info on PA media output.
3. When the Israeli security services publicized that Hamas members were nabbed for the recent murders, these sources would not admit that the PSF, the Palestinian Security Forces, armed by the Israeli government, includes Hamas fighters in its ranks.
Our research show that the PSF never vetted its members to determine if there were fighters in the PSF from Hamas, Islamic Jihad or the Al Aqsa Brigades.

Big lies threaten all of humanity

It has often been stated that the first casualty of war is truth. When it comes to the Arab-Islamist genocidal war against Israel, big lies are at the very center of the conflict and continue blocking any prospects for genuine peace. The big lie strategy against Israel is especially effective today, when emotive “narratives” are given preference to inconvenient facts.
Israel’s Middle Eastern enemies came out as top of their class as graduates of Nazi and Communist ideologies, which perfected the art of lying. The dedicated Nazi and former Jerusalem mufti al-Husseini, his successors Arafat and Abbas and many other despotic enemies of Israel, have followed the Nazi and Communist dictum to spread big lies and repeat them until they are accepted as “truths”. However, Nazism and Communism do not have monopoly on lying. The Muslim doctrine Al-taqiyya permits under certain circumstances lies and deception towards non-Muslims if it furthers the cause of Islam. The whole Oslo-process was one long and bloody taqiyya by Arafat against Israel and gullible Westerners. The current Orwellian big lie strategy against Israel turns reality upside down with a fervor, which would have made Nazi propaganda puppet master Goebbels proud.
In this fictitious parallel universe Jews become “occupiers” in their ancestral homeland, whereas Arab-Islamist imperialism is presented as “occupied Palestine”. In an ironic twist of history, the name “Palestine” which was one foreign empire’s term for occupied Judea, has become another foreign empire’s term for a never-never land “occupied” by the descendants of Judea. Israel, which has always supported territorial compromises for genuine peace, is still demonized as the “enemy of peace”. Unsurprisingly Israel’s Arab adversaries, which have rejected every peaceful two-state solution since the Peel commission 1937, are falsely presented as the “grieving” side.

JPost Editorial: Prosor’s departure

As Prosor noted in his farewell speech, “In my four years, I’ve seen hypocrisy, I’ve seen duplicity, I’ve seen triple standards – one for democracies, one for dictatorships and a special standard designed only for Israel.”
As one Foreign Ministry official put it in an interview with The Jerusalem Post, “This is the planet, these are the rules and it is what it is.”
We must give credit to Prosor for sticking it out on this planet, this parallel universe where the laws of right and wrong, good and bad, are suspended. One can only wonder what gave him the fortitude to persevere.
He must be relieved to be leaving. He can now return to his wife and three children who remained in Israel during his four-year stint.
We wish Danny Danon, Prosor’s replacement, much success. Indeed, Danon’s outspoken, pull-no-punches rhetorical style might be precisely what is needed to shake the UN up a little bit. But don’t expect any epiphanies.

The Society That Abandons Its Jews Abandons Itself

The greatest value of “The Twilight of French Jewry, the Twilight of France” lies in its shift of focus from the emigrating Jews to the society that, in betraying them, has betrayed itself. Anti-Semitism points at the Jews in order to deflect attention from the problems that beset the larger society. We fall into its trap when we similarly focus our own attention on weighing appropriate Jewish reactions to anti-Semitism rather than on the perpetrators of aggression and on the government that encourages or tolerates it. Naturally, Jews ought to do whatever is in their best interest, but those concerned with the world as a whole must concentrate on how anti-Jews figure in a country’s political landscape. Looking beyond the Jewish question to “the very special relationship that obtained between Jews and the French Republic in its heyday,” El-Mouchan sees how the current failure to eradicate anti-Semitism once again threatens the political foundations of France—“once again,” because the fall of the Third Republic in 1940 was likewise triggered by an assault on only the Jews.
American readers might consider all this as foreign as paté de foie gras and, in fact, El-Mouchan mentions the United States only glancingly when he discusses French strategies of avoidance, to the point where French authorities and the French media refuse to identify openly Islamist perpetrators as Muslims or their targets as Jews:
This refusal to identify either the culprits or their victims by their proper names—a refusal typical also of the Obama administration—has perversely combined with the swift posting of police and military guards at Jewish institutions to make Jews feel that at best they have become “protected citizens” in their own country, reinforcing the idea that they are no longer at home in France but are rather a new kind of dhimmi.

EU Ambassador: Labeling 'Settlement' Products Just the Beginning

Professor Aryeh Reich of Bar Ilan University, an expert in international trade, said that there was no regulation requiring labeling products made in such areas, and that the EU was itself guilty of violating international agreements by funding Palestinian building in Area C of Judea and Samaria, which under the internationally recognized Oslo Accords is under Israeli civilian and military control.
Professor Eugene Kontorovich of Northwestern University said that the EU was discriminating against Israel, as it had not demanded that products made in other disputed areas of the world be labeled as such.
Among those areas was the Western Sahara, which Morocco is occupying, and exports a large amount of fish products to the EU. Nevertheless, despite being produced in disputed areas, Moroccan fish sourced in the Western Sahara is not marked as such.
In response, Faaborg-Andersen said that “area is completely different,” although he declined to elaborate on those differences.

What’s Obama’s Next Move on Israel?

However, just as important as his faith in pressure on Israel is his animus for Netanyahu. The president’s defining characteristic in office is his arrogant belief in his own superior intellect and Netanyahu’s stubborn refusal to bow to Obama’s demands irritates him in a way that can only be described as disproportionate. As State Department veteran and former Obama staffer Dennis Ross describes in his new book that was excerpted yesterday in Politico, Obama and Susan Rice were so offended by possible Israeli opposition to the Iran deal that they kept Netanyahu in the dark about the talks with Tehran and then spread canards about his dissent being rooted in racism.
It would make political sense for Obama and the Democratic Party for the president to forget about his feud with Netanyahu, but that isn’t likely to happen. That’s especially true since the prime minister used his own UN speech to reiterate his criticisms of the Iran deal, something that was likely to drive Obama straight up the White House walls even though that’s a fight he’s already won.
Lastly, a new peace process push would let Obama preen on the international stage in a way that he likes. The president disdains and even mocks Putin’s muscular approach to international affairs, even though Russia’s advances come at America’s expense. But he really thinks that moves like appeasing Iran or putting Israel in its place enhance his prestige. That this is dangerous nonsense that only undermines American credibility seems never to occur to him.
The ultimate outcome of any new push for peace with the Palestinians is a foreordained conclusion. Neither Abbas nor his Hamas rivals are willing to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders might be drawn. Moreover, the violence that Abbas has incited in order to compete with Hamas may not be so easily kept in check. American neutrality about Abbas’ double game in which he stokes hatred with one hand and seeks to restrain it with the other may serve to only make the situation even more dangerous. Instead of allowing the president to claim that the U.S. is a force for peace, more pressure on Israel will just add to the toll of suffering in Iraq and Syria, that Obama’s misguided policies have created.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Explaining the Toxic Obama-Netanyahu Marriage

Goldberg: OK, so Obama says the status quo is not sustainable. The status quo in the West Bank is not sustainable; Israel’s legitimacy is eroding; its democracy is going to erode; its demographic balance is going to erode. And what Obama says—he doesn’t call the prime minister a coward—but I think he believes that the prime minister is an ostrich with his head in the sand. What you hear from people around Bibi is, “Who is this naive outsider who is telling us our best interests?”
Ross: Look, I think that Obama asks a lot of the right questions about Israeli policy. My concern about Obama is that he never asks anything about the Palestinians. He gives them a complete pass.
Goldberg: Because Israel has more power than the Palestinians.
Ross: The problem is that it makes it worse for the Palestinians. For the Palestinians, you have a political culture that is driven so much by this profound sense of victimhood and grievance—the idea that they should do anything towards the Israelis, they should make any accommodation towards the Israelis, is completely illegitimate. If it becomes clear that no one is ever going to ask anything of you, then why would you ever take the hard path where you actually have to confront your political culture to do the kind of thing that is necessary for you? When you focus all the onus on the Israelis, you give the other side an excuse to do nothing.
Goldberg: This is certainly something that predates this president, but it would be nice to hear a president say to the Palestinians, “Look, you guys have had five or six serious opportunities over the past 70 years or so to have a country of your own, and each time you’ve booted it. Why don’t you examine why this is so?”
Ross: Well to be fair, George W. Bush was trying to get at it when he first came out for Palestinian statehood and said, “Look, you can’t build a state based on corruption and terror.” But he wasn’t saying, “You know, you’ve had opportunities, and you haven’t taken advantage of it.”
Goldberg: The point of saying that would be to try to force the political elite among the Palestinians to—
Ross: —To own up.

The Myths of the U.S.-Israel Relationship

The obsession with the Arab-Israel conflict carries serious perils for American policy. Ross notes that Carter became so fixated on it that he was blindsided by the Iranian revolution. Obama, too, invested a huge amount of time, energy, and capital in pushing doomed-to-fail negotiations between Israel and Abbas, and was slow to react to other challenges in the region, like the Arab Spring and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Yet even as Ross does a fine job describing the false notions that glide from one administration to the next, impervious to evidence, he himself clings to the most egregious assumption out there—namely, that the Arab-Israeli peace process is actually leading to peace.
Since 1969, every administration has embraced the land-for-peace approach, urging Israel to surrender lands it captured in the Six Day War for a final-status peace agreement. Despite his failure over forty years to get anywhere with this approach, Ross has not woken up to the reality that the two-state solution is no solution, however obvious and reasonable it may be to Western policy-makers. Negotiations founder not primarily on territorial issues, but on the refusal of the Palestinians to concede the ‘right of return,’ the right of some 3-6 million Arabs to flood Israel, ending its own meaning and purpose as a Jewish state.
Ross’ departure from the concerns of previous administrations concerns tactics more than strategy. Ross titles his book Doomed to Succeed because he views the U.S.-Israel relationship as flourishing despite the difficulties. And this is true when it comes to military cooperation, which Ross helped formalize during the Reagan administration. But when it comes to achieving the unchanged U.S. policy of pressuring Israel to return to the armistice lines of 1949—which even the dovish Israeli diplomat Abba Eban called the “Auschwitz borders”—one has to hope that U.S. policy is doomed to fail.

Dennis Ross: Netanyahu agreed to West Bank pullout in 2010

Quoting Ross’ upcoming book, titled “Doomed to Succeed: the US-Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama,” Reuters reported that Netanyahu made the comments when asked by then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton what he could do to move the peace process with the Palestinians along.
“He did not want to give percentages, but he understood what the Palestinians wanted, and if the Israeli security needs were accepted by us and met, he could be generally responsive,” Reuters quoted Ross as saying in the book.
Ross told Reuters on Friday that he believed Netanyahu was deliberately vague at the time about the territory Israel would be willing to cede under the terms of a peace agreement. He said this was consistent with previous Israeli leaders, who had also been reluctant to clarify a bottom line, fearing that whatever Israel put on the table wouldn’t ever be enough for the Palestinians.

Report: France Advancing UN Resolution on 'Settlements'

France intends to advance a United Nations Security Council resolution on Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem, senior officials in Jerusalem and Western diplomats told Haaretz on Saturday.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius made a comment to that effect ten days ago, at a meeting in New York of the foreign ministers of the Middle East Quartet countries, according to the newspaper.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made use of the comment to convince right-wing members of his cabinet that new construction in Judea and Samaria in response to the recent wave of terrorism would cause Israel severe diplomatic damage.
The September 30 meeting in New York was due to include the foreign ministers of the Quartet countries — the United States, European Union, Russia and the United Nations — as well as those from Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The French foreign minister had other plans, however.

Indian president declares support for Palestinians ahead of Israel trip

India is unwavering in its committment to the Palestinian cause, President Pranab Mukherjee said in Jordan Sunday, ahead of a trip to the West Bank Monday and Israel the day after.
Mukherjee is scheduled to meet Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah on Monday before traveling to the Jewish state Tuesday, in the highest-ever level visit by an Indian official to Israel, and a sign of flowering ties between Jerusalem and Delhi.
During the three-day visit, Mukherjee will meet with with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein, and opposition leader Isaac Herzog.
Mukherjee is also slated to deliver an address at a special Knesset plenary session.

The Palestinian Victimhood Narrative as an Obstacle to Peace

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The false Palestinian narrative of one-sided victimhood is a major hindrance to all efforts in the direction of Israeli-Palestinian peace. Global actors need to help the Palestinians move beyond wallowing in self-pity and rituals of bashing Israel, and towards difficult compromises with Israel.
The speech delivered by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas at the UN General Assembly last week was proof, once again, that the Palestinian “narrative” of victimhood has become a threat to any practical prospect for peace. Palestinian leaders consistently advance an interpretation of history which is at odds not only with the facts but also with their people’s best interests.
At the core of Abbas’ plaintive narration is the notion of the Palestinians as innocent victims, whose right to statehood and independence has been taken away and brutally ignored for much too long. In this telling of history, the Palestinians deserve to be backed by coercive intervention, as soon as possible, so as to impose on Israel a solution which would implement their “”rights.”
This would include implementation of “all relevant UN resolutions” – meaning UN General Assembly resolution 194 (the so-called “right of return”) as well as the Arab (mis)interpretation of resolution 242 as demanding withdrawal to the June 4, 1967 lines.
Moreover, this is translated into the demand, explicitly made by Abbas, for “international protection” (Himayah Duwwaliyyah); a term of uncertain practical import, yet indicative of the Palestinian reluctance to settle down to the hard work of striking a workable compromise with Israel.

What to do when you realize there’s No 2-State Solution: Fisking Shlomo Avineri

Shlomo Avineri, renowned professor of Political Science at Hebrew University wrote an op-ed recently in which (without really saying that he was critiquing his own positions) he dismissed as fatally flawed the Oslo logic of “two states” because the Palestinians do not see the conflict in those terms and do not consider Israeli claims to statehood legitimate, and will never agree to such a deal. He then explains how the Palestinians do view the problem, and suggests a path of action for Israelis who acknowledge the fatal impasse of past peace-making.
It’s hard to imagine a more striking split between diagnosis and therapy. Having told us we can’t expect reciprocity from the Palestinians, he suggests Israel make unilateral sacrifices. The argument illustrates as well as any I know, why Political “Science” is crippled by its inability to factor into its analyses key factors — neither honor-shame, nor religious, dynamics appear in this discussion.
As a result, Avineri suggests that we deal with a conflict that has resisted all “positive-sum” solutions precisely because of the lack of reciprocity, by making positive-sum sacrifices without any demand for reciprocity.
Palestinian irredentists could not ask for better.

PreOccupiedTerritory: Gal-On Diagnosed With Pre-1967 Amnesia (satire)

Meretz Party Chairwoman Zehava Gal-On was informed by neurologists today that she suffers from an inability to process events that occurred prior to June 1967, a party representative said today (Sunday).
Meretz spokesman Akki Bush told reporters that Gal-On had long shown symptoms of the condition, in which violence by Arabs against Israeli Jews is necessarily understood as beginning only with Israel’s pre-emptive attacks on Egyptian airfields in June 1967, which led to a stunning Israeli capture of territory from the hands of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria over the following six days. No awareness or comprehension of Arab violence against Israel as existential opposition to a Jewish state appears in Gal-On’s psyche.
Just this morning, Gal-On had said in an interview on Kol Yisrael radio that the current wave of Palestinian incitement and violence stems from the political stalemate surrounding efforts to end Israel’s control of some of those territories, as opposed to the refusal to accept Israel’s existence, a refusal that long preceded 1967 and continues unabated. As such, Gal-On remains convinced that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be arrived at by resolving the status of the territories seized in 1967, a task for which she says Israel bears primary responsibility.

Iranian Ballistic Missile Tests Could Violate Nuke Deal

Iran’s recent test firing of a ballistic missile does not violate the recent nuclear deal, Obama administration officials said on Monday. However, nuclear experts disagree and are calling on the administration to hold Iran accountable for violating international agreements barring such action.
Iran announced over the weekend that it had successfully test-fired a domestically produced long-range surface-to-surface ballistic missile.
Iran maintained that the test does not violate the nuclear deal, though U.S. experts quibbled with this analysis.
Asked to address the reports on Monday, John Kirby, a spokesman for the State Department, said that the administration is “aware of reports that Iran is conducting a new round of missile tests.”
“We will take appropriate actions at the United Nations if these tests violate any existing UN Security Council resolutions,” Kirby said in the statement. “Separately, we remain confident in our ability to defend ourselves and our allies in the region. And we will continue to work closely with our regional partners to boost their capabilities to defend themselves against any threats by Iran.” (h/t MtTB)

Hillary Clinton Accidentally Denounces Iran Deal

Perhaps Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton should have chosen her words more carefully when she attacked the NRA yesterday:
Now the real answer to this is for gun-owners to form a different organization that supports the Second Amendment, supports their rights to own guns, use guns, go hunting, go target shooting, but stands against the absolutism of the NRA. You know, the NRA’s position reminds me of negotiating with the Iranians or the communists. There’s no possible discussion. And it’s for political purposes.
Setting aside the attack on the NRA… did President Barack Obama’s former Secretary of State really just say there’s “no possible discussion” to be had with the Iranians?

Iran-Backed Houthis Give Yemen's Last Jews an Ultimatum: Convert or Leave

The Iranian-backed Houthi insurgency in Yemen has given the country’s few remaining Jewish citizens an ultimatum: either convert to Islam or be exiled immediately.
Israeli Regional Cooperation Minister Ayoub Kara, a Druze lawmaker, told the Jerusalem Post on Sunday that Yemen’s Jewish community reached out to him with the panicked message.
Yemen’s ancient Jewish community, which predates Islam by over a thousand years, were told to “convert or leave the state,” Kara said, adding that Yemen’s Jewish leaders “requested that I” do something about their plight.
The Houthi terrorists in Yemen, who are backed by Iran, are notoriously anti-American and anti-Semitic, as proven by their motto, “God is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam.” Almost a third of the group is made up of child soldiers, and the outfit continues to battle Sunni forces for a stake in Yemen. In just the past six months, over 2,300 civilians have been killed due to the war.

Shocking: Iran Can’t Be Trusted, Convicts American Journalist

Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who has been imprisoned for over a year, has reportedly been convicted of espionage, along with a series of other charges yet to be revealed. What’s more, the Iranian judge hearing the California-born Rezaian’s case is apparently notorious for doling out “harsh sentences.”
News of a verdict in Tehran's Revolutionary Court initially came early Sunday, but court spokesman Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejei did not specify what the judgment was. In the State TV report late Sunday night, Ejei said definitively that Rezaian was found guilty.
Washington Post executive editor, Martin Baron is apparently shocked. Calling his employee’s guilty-verdict “an outrageous injustice.”
“Iran has behaved unconscionably throughout this case, but never more so than with this indefensible decision by a Revolutionary Court to convict an innocent journalist of serious crimes after a proceeding that unfolded in secret, with no evidence whatsoever of any wrongdoing,” Baron said in a statement

Fiery scenes as Iran MPs give partial nod to nuclear deal

Iran’s parliament gave a partial nod to a nuclear deal with world powers Sunday but only after fiery clashes and allegations from a top negotiator that a lawmaker had threatened to kill him.
Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, went on the attack for the government at the end of a boisterous debate where he and other officials were accused of having capitulated.
Ultraconservative lawmakers repeatedly warned of holes in the text of the agreement and criticized President Hassan Rouhani for suggesting MPs were deliberately delaying the deal.
Red with anger, Alireza Zakani, who headed a panel reviewing the accord, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, for two months, demanded “fundamental changes” to the text.
“This deal serves Wendy Sherman” and not Iran’s interests, Zakani said, referring to America’s senior negotiator in talks which resulted in the agreement in Vienna on July 14.

US warns governments, bankers Iran sanctions still in place

The Obama administration has privately reminded foreign governments and U.S. bankers that sanctions against Iran remain in effect, cautioning against a rush by Western companies to invest in Iran's oil industry and other businesses until the country fully complies with the July nuclear agreement.
The U.S. State Department recently cabled a message, known as a demarche, to embassies around the world to reiterate that sanctions on Iran are still in place, diplomatic and government sources told Reuters on Friday.
The demarche stressed that sanctions on Iran would not be lifted until the International Atomic Energy Agency verifies that Iran has complied with the terms of the deal.
"The United States wants to tell governments not to get ahead of themselves when dealing with Iran," said a London-based diplomatic source.
It is uncertain exactly when the layers of Western sanctions might be lifted, but experts have said some international financial transactions with Iran would be possible sometime next year if Iran is found in compliance.

Did Russia Use Cluster Bombs in Syria?

Human Rights Watch on Sunday accused Russia of being behind the use of new advanced cluster munitions in Syria, by dropping them from its warplanes or supplying them to the Damascus regime.
The New York-based group said that photographs it obtained showed that the cluster munitions were dropped on Kafr Halab, a village southwest of Syria's second city of Aleppo, on October 4, AFP reports.
"It's disturbing that yet another type of cluster munition is being used in Syria given the harm they cause to civilians for years to come," said Nadim Houry, HRW's deputy Middle East director. "Neither Russia nor Syria should use cluster munitions, and both should join the international ban without delay."

Iraqi air force: We hit convoy of ISIS leader Baghdadi

Several senior figures from Islamic State were killed in an air strike while meeting in a town in western Iraq, but the group's leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did not appear to be among them, residents of the town and hospital sources said.
Iraq said on Sunday its air force had hit the meeting and had also struck a convoy that was carrying Baghdadi to attend it. It said Baghdadi had been driven away from the convoy in an unknown condition.
The Iraqi military's announcement was the latest unconfirmed report of the possible death or injury of Baghdadi, who has survived a year of US-led air strikes and multi-sided wars in two countries since proclaiming himself caliph of all Muslims after his forces swept through most of northern Iraq last year.
The United States military declined to comment on the Iraqi military's report.

Honest Reporting: The Ripple Effect of Media Bias

However, we said earlier that the damage has already been done because far more people will have read the original piece — in which the existence of the temples is questioned — than will have seen the correction.
And the way news spreads through the Internet guarantees that once a major publication publishes an error, no correction will be able to stop it from spreading. The Irish Times has now republished the original New York Times story without the correction.
Even worse, they have added their own sub-headline stating as a fact that “no one really knows” whether the temples were on the Temple Mount. Perhaps they should ask any of the experts who are used as sources in the very article written below their factually inaccurate headline.

Unfortunately, odds are against the Irish Times being the only ones to spread this falsehood.
The media need to get the story right BEFORE it is put online for the world to see. Otherwise there is no stopping the “ripple” effect.

NY Times amends article questioning Jewish temples’ existence on Temple Mount

The article was amended the following day and a correction published in the newspaper.
The correction stated: “An earlier version of this article misstated the question that many books and scholarly treatises have never definitively answered concerning the two ancient Jewish temples. The question is where precisely on the 37-acre Temple Mount site the temples had once stood, not whether the temples had ever existed there.”
The tweaks to the article were shown in a post on the newsbusters.org website.
The corrected paragraph was edited to read: “The question, which many books and scholarly treatises have never definitively answered, is where on the 37-acre site, home to Islam’s sacred Dome of the Rock shrine and Al Aqsa Mosque, was the precise location of two ancient Jewish temples, one built on the remains of the other, and both long since gone.

Threatened Jewish academic assaulted in Paris

A French-Jewish university director who has been the subject of an anti-Semitic campaign of intimidation was assaulted outside his home near Paris.
An unidentified individual attacked Samuel Mayol, the director of the Technical University Institution, or IUT, on the evening of Oct. 9 while Mayol was walking his dog in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis, the Tribune Juive weekly reported.
The assailant bashed Mayol’s head three times against a wall, causing him a concussion and multiple lacerations. The assailant fled the scene after the attack.
Mayol, who was speaking to a friend on his cellphone when the attack occurred, sustained minor injuries. His attacker told him: “We are going to bump you,” which in French slang also means to kill. Mayol filed a criminal complaint for assault with police, who are investigating the attack as a possible hate crime.

Anti-Semitic indoctrination in Swedish schools

The Local Education Authority (LEA) of Gothenburg in Sweden has taken an unusually aggressive decision to expose the city’s schoolchildren to a highly controversial film entitled (in the English translation) “Even the dead have a name” produced by the pro-terrorist Ship to Gaza (StG) organisation.
This is a remarkably insensitive decision, especially bearing in mind that the film is a combination of both subtle and overt anti-Semitism, and also expresses undiluted anti-Israel sentiment.
The unsuitability and questionable legality of disseminating anti-Semitic material in schools should need no further discussion. Nobody who believes in democracy, equal rights and religious equality should have any reason to question the unsuitability of spreading anti-Semitic propaganda. Anywhere. Least of all in schools, to impressionable young children.

Rabbi-Turned-Designer on Mission to Hang 1,000 Israeli Flags Across South Florida

A rabbi-turned-designer says he has launched a personal crusade to hang 1,000 Israeli flags at homes across South Florida to express solidarity with the Jewish state amidst the wave of terror it is currently facing.
“We want the Israelis to know that here in Florida we support them,” Joseph Waks told The Algemeiner on Sunday. “America in general supports Israel and we have to show them we love them.”
Waks said he came up with the idea last week. On Thursday, the father-of-two posted a video on his Facebook page pitching his mission. Shortly thereafter, he was contacted by people interested in participating.
So far, he claims, 300 Israeli flags have been hung across South Florida, with the first now flying from the home of Simon Falic, chairman of Duty Free Americas.
Waks, who is originally from Australia, said he hopes the idea will spread across the U.S. He said Jewish leaders in other states have contacted him and asked if he would help launch the initiative in their locales. He recently ordered an additional 2,000 flags to distribute.

US aviator who fought for nascent state of Israel, dies at 92

Leon Frankel, an American aviator whose exploits fighting for the nascent State of Israel were featured in a documentary, has died at age of 92.
Frankel, who died Oct. 7 in his native Minnesota, had his exploits spotlighted in the 2014 film “Above and Beyond,” which describes the beginnings of the Israel Air Force.
Trained as a torpedo bomber pilot during World War II, Frankel took off in February 1945 from the aircraft carrier USS Lexington for the first US Navy raid on Tokyo. In a subsequent raid he was instrumental in sinking a Japanese cruiser and protecting his squadron commander, whose plane was badly damaged.
For his actions, Frankel was recognized with the Navy Cross, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, three Air Medals and two Presidential Citations.
In 1948, with the Jewish state about to declare its independence, Frankel traveled clandestinely to Israel. He joined the country’s first fighter squadron and flew 25 missions, ironically in the Czech version of Nazi Germany’s famed Messerschmidt-109.

WATCH: Settling the Negev in 1946

In 1946, directly after the Yom Kippur fast, Jewish settlers set up camp at 11 points throughout the Negev desert. They wanted to claim the land and ensure the area would be included as part of the Jewish State when Palestine was partitioned later in the year.
In this newsreel, settlers labor in a settlement near Kastina.
“The plan, which they called Operation Negev, was carried out at dawn on the 6th of October, just after the Day of Atonement,” the narrator reports, as the settlers toil away on-screen.
According to the announcer, this land was owned by the Jewish National Fund.
“This particular settlement, filmed about 24 hours after the start, could already show houses well on the way to completion, and the whole place surrounded by a barbed-wire fence,” he adds.