Saturday, October 17, 2015
Jeffrey Goldberg: The Paranoid, Supremacist Roots of the Stabbing Intifada
In September of 1928, a group of Jewish residents of Jerusalem placed a bench in front of the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, for the comfort of elderly worshipers. They also brought with them a wooden partition, to separate the sexes during prayer. Jerusalem’s Muslim leaders treated the introduction of furniture into the alleyway in front of the Wall as a provocation, part of a Jewish conspiracy to slowly take control of the entire Temple Mount.
Many of the leaders of Palestine’s Muslims believed—or claimed to believe—that Jews had manufactured a set of historical and theological connections to the Western Wall and to the Mount, the site of the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, in order to advance the Zionist project. This belief defied Muslim history—the Dome of the Rock was built by Jerusalem’s Arab conquerors on the site of the Second Jewish Temple in order to venerate its memory (the site had previously been defiled by Jerusalem’s Christian rulers as a kind of rebuke to Judaism, the despised mother religion of Christianity). Jews themselves consider the Mount itself to be the holiest site in their faith. The Western Wall, a large retaining wall from the Second Temple period, is sacred only by proxy.
The spiritual leader of Palestine’s Muslims, the mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, incited Arabs in Palestine against their Jewish neighbors by arguing that Islam itself was under threat. (Husseini would later become one of Hitler’s most important Muslim allies.) Jews in British-occupied Palestine responded to Muslim invective by demanding more access to the Wall, sometimes holding demonstrations at the holy site. By the next year, violence directed against Jews by their neighbors had become more common: Arab rioters took the lives of 133 Jews that summer; British forces killed 116 Arabs in their attempt to subdue the riots. In Hebron, a devastating pogrom was launched against the city’s ancient Jewish community after Muslim officials distributed fabricated photographs of a damaged Dome of the Rock, and spread the rumor that Jews had attacked the shrine.
The current “stabbing Intifada” now taking place in Israel—a quasi-uprising in which young Palestinians have been trying, and occasionally succeeding, to kill Jews with knives—is prompted in good part by the same set of manipulated emotions that sparked the anti-Jewish riots of the 1920s: a deeply felt desire on the part of Palestinians to “protect” the Temple Mount from Jews.
Amb. Danon: “Palestinian leaders have established an incubator to raise children as terrorists”
Amit Heumann, Israel's Legal Adviser addresses UN on the Rule of Law
Netanyahu Rebukes BBC Journalist: ‘Are We Living on the Same Planet?’ (VIDEO)
Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu admonished a BBC journalist who asked at a press conference on Thursday if he was ready to resume negotiations with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.Israel PM Netanyahu to BBC: Get with the programme - BBC News
“Are we living on the same planet?” Netanyahu sharply responded to Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet. “I’ve been calling day in, day out, in every forum… I’ve called on President Abbas to resume unconditional negotiations immediately.”
Netanyahu urged Doucet to instead ask Abbas if he is willing to talk to the Israeli prime minister. “Right now, as we speak, we can meet,” he said. “I’m willing to meet him, he’s not willing to meet me.”
“And you ask me about the resumption of negotiations?” he continued. “Come on, get with the program. These people don’t want negotiations. They’re inciting for violence. Direct your questions to them.”
Bennett on the BBC: You Don't Talk to a Murderous Regime
Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Mahmoud Abbas must stop inciting against Israel, Jewish Home chairman Naftali Bennett told the BBC in an interview on Friday.
“This guy is responsible for the wave of murder that’s going on in the streets of Israel,” Bennett said, adding, “About 10 days ago he called upon Muslims to prevent Jews from going up to the Temple Mount with their ‘filthy feet’...so as long as he incites his own people to murder Jews, I don’t see what we can talk to him about.”
“Would anyone talk to ISIS? Would anyone talk to bin Laden?” he continued, when asked whether he would support talks with Abbas.
“We’ve got a murderous regime who’s trying to kill as many Jews as possible right now. If you’d have people running around the streets of London stabbing dozens and hundreds of British citizens, you wouldn’t be talking to [those who carried out the stabbings]. You’d be fighting them and defending yourselves, and that’s exactly what Israel is doing right now,” Bennett stated.
Congress Looks to Cut U.S. Aid to Palestinians Amid Terror Campaign
Momentum is building on Capitol Hill for a new congressional resolution that would cut more than $5 billion in U.S. aid to the Palestinians as a result of an increase in violence that has claimed the lives of at least eight Israelis and wounded many more, according to a copy of the measure viewed by the Free Beacon.Brooke Goldstein OBLITERATES defender of Obama’s moral equivalence between terrorists and Israelis
The bill comes amid criticism from lawmakers about the Obama administration’s response to the terrorism and efforts to blame Israel for the violence.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Tex.), among others, has demanded that Secretary of State John Kerry resign his post in light of accusations by the administration that Israel has fostered the violence as a result of its policies to combat Palestinian terrorism.
Rep. Martha McSally (R., Ariz.), a retired Air Force colonel, is now seeking to hold the Palestinian Authority directly responsible for the terrorist acts by cutting off U.S. taxpayer aid to the governing body, officials of which have called for more violence against Jewish people in recent days.
The resolution, a copy of which was obtained by the Free Beacon, calls on the Obama administration to more strongly condemn the Palestinian violence and seeks to condition continued U.S. aid on the Palestinian government’s acceptance of a Jewish state.
Brooke Goldstein went on the Kelly File tonight to excoriate the Obama administration for equating the terrorist attackers of Israelis to Israel defending itself from those terrorists. Attempting a feeble defense of the new Intifada was Mark Hannah, but Goldstein devastated his arguments at every turn. At one point he made the stupid argument saying that if your little brother was fighting in a schoolyard you wouldn’t jump in and help him fight. Uh.. why wouldn’t you?! Especially if it was clear that one side is the aggressor and the other is merely defending itself.
A New Palestinian Poster Child
The poster child of the second intifada was Muhammad al-Dura, a young boy who was supposedly gunned down by Israeli army fire and died in the arms of his father during a firefight near the border between Israel and Gaza. That moment was caught in an iconic photograph and film footage taken by French TV. As it turned out, the claim that Israelis killed the boy was false as every serious investigation of the incident concluded. The film footage was highly edited. We don’t know much about what really happened with some even claiming the child never died. Yet the incident — which took placed in the context of an armed attack on an Israeli position by Palestinians — was widely publicized, leading people around the world to see the boy as a Palestinian martyr who had been murdered by heartless Israelis. That was an image that no amount of debunking or investigative reporting could ever undo, and al-Dura became the misleading symbol of a terrorist war of attrition that was misperceived as a story of Israeli oppression. As it happens, the third intifada, if indeed the current surge of bloody Palestinian violence comes to be known by that name, will also have an icon. But the true story of 13-year-old Ahmed Manasra won’t take years to unravel because the tale of the boy that Palestinian Authority leader said on Wednesday had been “executed” in “cold blood” by the Israeli army had collapsed even before those falsehoods passed his lips.How a Liberal Understands ‘Intifada’
Manasra became famous this week as millions viewed a video clip on Facebook and other social media that showed him lying in the street bleeding, setting off outrage among Palestinians. Abbas mentioned the boy in his speech to the Palestinian people on Wednesday night and cited his fate as an of how Israel was “executing our boys in cold blood, as they did with the boy Ahmed Manasra and other children in Jerusalem and other places.”
The only problem was that Manasra wasn’t dead but was, in fact, resting comfortably in an Israeli hospital being spoon fed by nurses.
At Berkeley this Tuesday, at a rally sponsored by purportedly nonviolent supporters of BDS, demonstrators chanted “Intifada! Intifada! We support the intifada!” It seems safe to assume that activists engaged in the Israel-Palestine issue were well aware that, as they were chanting, Israel was experiencing a wave of stabbings and other acts of violence that had already left several civilians dead.Who’s Desecrating Holy Places?
They would also have been well aware that people were asking whether the unrest had yet escalated to the point where it was fair to speak of a “third intifada.” They would consequently have been aware that a rational human being, listening to them shouting for an intifada, would take them to be in favor of further attacks on Jewish civilians in Israel and the West Bank.
Representatives of Students of Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Student Association were quick to claim that the word intifada “is used in response to violence and as the rallying call for equality, justice and liberation of Palestine.”
In light of the BDS movement’s recent call for solidarity with the “popular resistance,” a call that has discarded even the pretense of renouncing violence, that claim doesn’t pass the laugh test.
But the campus left is too busy ferreting out micro-aggressions to notice when their friends stand in solidarity with a “youth-led Palestinian uprising,” whose weapon of choice is the knife.
The fictional narrative that has motivated the current surge in Palestinian violence is that it is a reaction to Israeli plans to harm the mosques on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and/or to alter the status quo there. This is the story that Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas has been feeding his people via official PA media for the last year, but lately the incitement has been raised to new levels. Told by their leaders that their faith is in danger, individual Palestinians have taken to the streets in a spirit of holy war and sought to kill any Jews they found. This intifada of the knives has added a new layer of terror to the conflict that has deepened the divide between the two peoples. Abbas’s decision to double down on it in a speech on PA TV Wednesday night that recycled the same lies about the Temple Mount while adding new ludicrous ones about Israeli executing Arab teens makes the situation even more dangerous. Yet, incredibly, U.S. officials have repeated the canards about Israel intending to alter the status quo in Jerusalem at times.The Guardian - Op Ed: The terror in Jerusalem is based on a lie
To a world that tends to wrongly view the entire dispute as one in which the Israelis are the aggressors, such tales have resonance. Yet if the international community were really interested in protecting holy places, they wouldn’t be worried about what Israel is doing. Yesterday’s assault on Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus — a site that has long been a place of Jewish worship — serves as a reminder that it has always been the Palestinians that pose a lethal threat both to the safety of ancient shrines in the country as well as the right to worship freely at them.
Located in the middle of an Arab city on the West Bank, the synagogue at Joseph’s Tomb has always been a sitting duck that is deeply vulnerable to Palestinian attack. The shrine was attacked at the start of the second intifada in 2000 by an Arab mob that pillaged and burned it while desecrating Jewish texts. Large numbers of Palestinians took part in an attempt to dismantle it piece by piece. One Jew was killed in that assault which took place soon after a misguided decision by then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak. But even after order was restored, that wasn’t the end of violence or sacrilege at Joseph’s Tomb.
The current horror for my country is that attacks such as this are a regular occurrence. Before they stabbed the boy, his assailants had made an equally random attack on an Israeli man walking down the street – one of several similar incidents on Monday. Every day since, more have followed: Palestinians suddenly turning on Israeli civilians who were simply minding their own business, using whatever weapon they could to kill or injure.Joel Pollak: Palestinians Are Too Sick for Statehood
I’ve spent the last week in Jerusalem, where, as the minister of public security, I have witnessed first-hand what an explosive device, a knife or even a screwdriver can do in the hands of a Palestinian intent on murdering civilians. More than 100 Israelis have been injured in the past two weeks; some have died from their wounds, murdered by terrorists as they were walking down a street or riding a bus.
Some speak of “lone wolf” attacks when describing this wave of terror. But these attacks are being fuelled by violent incitement on social media, on official Palestinian radio and in sermons delivered in Gaza’s mosques. When Hamas posts an “instructional clip” on YouTube teaching viewers how to murder Israeli civilians, when Palestinian radio plays songs of praise to the “martyrs”, and when preachers in Gaza stand at the pulpit with a raised knife to demonstrate how to stab an Israeli, then we shouldn’t be surprised that young people decide to take a knife and commit murder.
Just as Isis murders innocent people because of its extremist jihadi ideology, so is the case with Palestinian terrorism, which is based on the same murderous ideology.
The Palestinians today are a sick people–too sick for statehood.Blaming the Victims of the Palestinian Death Cult
An example: on Oct. 10, the Palestinian Bar Association awarded an honorary law degree to Muhannad al-Halabi, a 19-year-old law student who stabbed and killed two Israelis in the Old City. Al-Halabi had attacked a young family on their way back from prayers at the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site.
The attack was partially caught on video. In footage provided to the Times of Israel–if you can bear to watch it–you can hear Adele Banita scream as Al-Halabi attacks her, her husband, and her two small children.
Banta told reporters as she recovered in the hospital that Arab shopkeepers nearby did nothing to intervene: “I yelled ‘please help me!’ and they just spat at me,” she said. A Jewish man nearby who did intervene was also stabbed to death.
That is what the Palestinian Bar Association has chosen to honor. The group of professionals who would be called upon to shape the institutional foundations of a future Palestinian state have declared proudly that it is not only legal for an Arab to murder innocent Jewish men, women and children, but that it is in fact honorable to do so.
You cannot build any kind of functioning, let alone self-governing, society from such rotten, morally diseased material.
Kerry’s remarks were absurd on their face. Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. who has served in government as a specialist in Middle East policy, went further in criticizing Kerry. He called Kerry’s remarks “morally obtuse and factually wrong.”IDF soldier stabbed in Hebron; Palestinian attacker shot at scene
First of all, the issue that social media has been using to fire up the Palestinian assailants to engage in their recent attacks is not so much focused on the settlements. It involves the false rumors about alleged Israeli plans to change the status quo at the Temple Mount or, as Muslims refer to it, Haram al-Sharif. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly stated that Israel is fully committed to maintaining the status quo at the compound. But that has not stopped exploitation of the false rumors by social media and by Palestinian leaders including Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
Secondly, when Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and uprooted all of the settlers living there, the Palestinians failed completely to seize the opportunity to build a prototype model of a state. Their “frustration” before Israel’s pull-out from Gaza did not give way in the least to constructive action after all the settlers and Israeli forces had left. Instead, the Palestinians squandered the opportunity in Gaza and irresponsibly rejected offers by successive Israeli governments for a peace agreement that would have given them much of what they have asked for in the West Bank.
With regard to the settlements in the West Bank, good faith moratoriums on settlement building have been ignored by Palestinian leaders. Moreover, as Abrams pointed out, there has not been either a massive increase in the number of settlements or in settlement size. The growth in settlement population that has occurred, Abrams observed, has occurred largely “in the major blocs–such as Ma’ale Adumim–that Israel will clearly retain in any final agreement.”
Violence is not the Palestinians’ last resort, born of frustration after seeing that nothing else has worked. It is the Palestinians’ first reflexive action in dealing with their own self-inflicted plight. The Palestinians regularly lie to the world with their propaganda campaign aimed at exonerating themselves of all responsibility and at delegitimizing the Jewish State of Israel. For the Obama administration to parrot the propaganda and join the “international community” in blaming the Jewish victims of terrorism for defending themselves is tantamount to anti-Semitism.
A Palestinian assailant stabbed an IDF soldier in Hebron on Saturday evening, in the fourth such attack on Israelis on the same day, and the third in the West Bank city.Policewoman: Attacker tried to stab me in the neck, so I shot her
The soldier was lightly to moderately wounded and evacuated to Hadassah Medical Center in Ein Kerem, the IDF said. The attacker was shot at the site and is in serious condition.
A correspondent for Israeli daily Haaretz said on Twitter that Jewish residents of Hebron were blocking access for the ambulance that was evacuating the Palestinian stabber. According to one report, Chaim Levinson said, one of the wheels on the ambulance had been punctured. (h/t Yenta Press)
A Border Policewoman who shot dead a knife-wielding female attacker in Hebron said Saturday that she acted “without hesitation” when her assailant tried to stab her in the neck.Three Palestinians attempt stabbings in Hebron, Jerusalem, and are killed
“The terrorist approached the post and asked for directions to a certain place in the area. I told her the name did not sound familiar and that she should ask the locals when she arrived, when to my surprise she pulled out a knife and tried to stab me in the neck,” said the sergeant, who has been identified only as M.
The policewoman was standing at the checkpoint at the entrance to the base near the Cave of the Patriarchs when the Saturday morning attack occurred.
The attacker only managed to hit M’s vest, causing minor injuries to the policewoman’s hand. “I took a step back and I shot the terrorist without hesitation,” M said, according to Channel 10 news. “I responded like any fighter in the Border Police would have done.”
She added: “I do not take pleasure in the fact that the incident ended in this way and not without casualties.” (h/t Yenta Press)
Massive blaze destroys dozens of buses near Tel AvivEarlier Saturday, a Palestinian man died of his wounds after being shot by an Israeli man he had tried to stab in a Jewish neighborhood of Hebron.The attacker was identified by Palestinian and Hebrew media reports as Fadel Muhammad Kawasmeh, 18, from Hebron.According to initial reports, Kawasmeh approached his would-be victim, pulled out a knife and lunged; he was shot by the armed Israeli man, who was not hurt in the attempted attack.
A massive fire broke out Saturday at the Dan Public Transportation company terminal in Ramat Gan, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, causing heavy damage to the site and burning 32 buses to a shell.Abbas’s son in spotlight for nightclub video
No injuries were reported in the incident.
Over two dozen firefighting crews rushed to the scene of the blaze Saturday afternoon, after residents of the area reported seeing smoke and hearing explosions from the site. Dan drivers were also called to the scene in order to move parked buses away from the terminal, in an attempt to prevent any additional vehicles from catching fire.
By sundown, the firefighting teams managed to extinguish the flames.
According to the Ynet news website, the cost of damages from the fire was estimated to be upwards of NIS 30 million (about $7.82 million).
The cause of the fire was not immediately clear, and investigators are looking into the possibility of arson, according to Channel 2 television.
Amid rising Palestinian terror and violence, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is taking flak in pro-Hamas media for a video published online claiming to show his son, Yasser Abbas, drinking booze at a Dubai night club.Fatah's armed wing calls for more attacks against Israel
The shaky video clip, which was allegedly filmed on Friday night, uploaded to YouTube and quickly made its way to the Palestinian press, appears to show the president’s son at a table in a darkened night club.
The clip surfaced amid weeks of violent protests and bloody terrorist attacks carried out by mostly young Palestinians in recent weeks.
The veracity of the film could not be confirmed, but the footage has been presented by Hamas media as an imbroglio for the PA president.
The Fatah movement's armed wing, the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades, called for more attacks against Israel on Friday.Hamas said to be plotting big West Bank terror attack
The military arm of Fatah, the secular organization which has dominated the Palestine Liberation Organization and is under the control of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, posted on its Twitter account an explicit call for Palestinians to carry out attacks against Israelis.
Earlier on Friday, Palestinian gunmen fired shots at an IDF vehicle near the Palestinian village of Silwad, east of Ramallah.
There were no injuries in the incident. The army said it spotted three suspects fleeing the scene. Units began a search of the area.
Hamas operatives in the West Bank are plotting a major terror attack against Israelis, Channel 10 quoted unnamed Palestinian security officials saying Friday.PM rejects ‘absurd’ call for international observers on Temple Mount
While Palestinian Authority forces are working to prevent attacks, their rivals in the Islamist movement are investing considerable resources in trying to carry out a large-scale attack in the West Bank, the channel reported.
Such a strike may seek to draw Israel into a broader conflict against the group which rules the Gaza Strip.
PA security forces arrested more than 19 Hamas members in the West Bank suspected of planning to carry out stabbing attacks over the past few days, according to Palestinian sources. The IDF also arrested five members of a Hamas cell based near Nablus earlier this month who claimed responsibility for the deadly shooting of Eitam and Naama Henkin on October 1.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday slammed a French proposal to deploy international observers to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in response to the current round of violence, calling it a fundamentally absurd idea.Israel will never agree to international forces at Temple Mount, Danon says
France submitted a draft proposal on the issue to the UN Security Council on Friday evening, according to the French newspaper Le Figaro.
“Those who brought in explosive devices and threw fireworks were Palestinians who turned the Temple Mount into a terror warehouse,” Netanyahu said, according to the Ynet news website. “Israel is upholding the status quo [at the site] and is committed to that.” (h/t Think of England)
Israel will never agree to the stationing of international forces on Temple Mount, Jerusalem's new envoy to the United Nations, Danny Danon, said on Friday.'If violence continues, Israel to begin banishing Palestinians to Gaza'
“If you are serious about promoting peace, if you are really committed to advancing co-existence in our region, make a clear statement against the incitement that fuels terror, support direct negotiations,” Danon said on Friday, addressing the international community and the UN Security Council.
Danon held a press conference just before the council’s emergency meeting on the situation in the Middle East, which has seen an escalation in violence.
“When a Palestinian child opens the television he doesn’t see Barney or Donald Duck, he sees murderers portrayed as heroes,” he said. “When he opens a textbook to do his homework, he doesn't learn about math and science, he is being taught to hate.”
"If the terrorist attacks continue, we will begin deporting the families of terrorists to the Gaza Strip," Channel 10 TV quoted a senior Israeli defense official as saying on Friday.Responsibility for 'incitement' falls on both Netanyahu and Abbas, Obama says
The remarks came against the backdrop of a noted decrease in the number of acts of violence in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel proper on Friday.
While security officials are pleased at the initial signs of a waning uprising, intelligence experts cannot say for certain when this latest wave of Palestinian violence will end.
Israel's political establishment, however, is mulling additional punitive measures against the families of Palestinian assailants in the event that more acts of violence are perpetrated against Jewish civilians and security personnel.
Both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas are responsible for rhetoric stoking a wave of violence between their peoples, US President Barack Obama said on Friday, in his first comments on the crisis.Jordanian protesters call for end to peace treaty with Israel
"We condemn in the strongest possible terms violence directed against innocent people, and believe Israel has a right to maintain basic law and order," Obama said. "We're very concerned about the outbreak of violence."
In a bloody two weeks for Israel and the Palestinians, scores have been wounded and over 39 have died, including eight Israeli citizens and several of their attackers.
"We also believe that its important," Obama said, for both Netanyahu and Abbas "to try to tamp down rhetoric that may feed violence or anger, or misunderstanding."
While the US State Department has characterized the recent wave of attacks against Israelis as "terrorism"– as well as an attack in Dimona by an Israeli Jew against his fellow Arab citizens - Obama declined to use the term on Friday, speaking at a press conference with the president of South Korea at the White House.
He rejected criticism of his secretary of state, John Kerry, for comments he made at Harvard University earlier in the week, which suggested a linkage between Israel's settlement activity in the West Bank and the current terror wave.
Thousands of Jordanians took to the streets Friday calling on the government to scrap its peace treaty with Israel, which they accuse of violations in Jerusalem’s Temple Mount compound.Dutch lawmakers mull extra protection for Israeli tourists
Demonstrations broke out in several cities after weekly Muslim prayers, with around 5,000 rallying in Amman, where they torched an Israeli flag.
“No Zionist embassy on Jordanian soil,” chanted the demonstrators, who rallied at the call of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood.
They demanded the cancellation of the 1994 Jordan-Israel peace treaty, carrying signs that said “scrapping the Wadi Araba treaty is the response” to Israeli “violations” against Palestinians in Jerusalem.
“The land is ours, Jerusalem is ours and Allah is with us,” read another banner.
Senior lawmakers for the Netherlands’ ruling party suggested beefing up security for Israeli tourists following a threat.CNN Changes Headline About Joseph’s Tomb Arson Attack After Complaints
Han ten Broeke and Sjoerd Potters of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy made the suggestion in a parliamentary query they filed Thursday with the kingdom’s minister for foreign affairs and his counterpart in charge of social affairs and employment.
The query followed the publication on Facebook of a call to “smite down” Israeli tourists published by Younnes Ouaali, a café owner and a representative of the Dutch aid group World Wide Relief, as revenge for perceived attacks on Palestinians by Israel.
“What travel advice does the Israeli government employ for the Netherlands?” the lawmakers asked the ministers. “Are you planning to take extra measures for the protection of Israeli tourists?”
A pro-Israel media watchdog says CNN changed the headline to a story about Palestinian arson at a West Bank holy site on Friday after it was contacted by the group.BBC coverage of wave of terror in Israel criticised by its former chairman
The original headline, shown in the image below, stated that Joseph’s tomb had caught fire.
CAMERA responded incredulously. “OK. So Joseph’s Tomb just ‘caught fire.’ Really? How? Was it an ‘electrical fire?’ like the one that the Palestinian Authority says took place at Charbel Monastery in Bethlehem a while back?” the group asked, referring to the fire at a Bethlehem monastery last month that Church leaders blamed on Palestinian Islamists.
The nonprofit said it reached out to CNN to change the headline, which was later on Friday changed to reflect an attack.
“No, Joseph’s Tomb did not ‘catch fire.’ Palestinians set it on fire. They torched it. They set it ablaze. They initiated its combustion. It did not ‘catch’ fire. It did not spontaneously combust,” CAMERA continued, saying CNN’s reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has held Israel to a “disgusting and dishonest double standard.”
As noted here previously, the BBC’s coverage of the current wave of terrorism in Israel has already come under criticism from Sir Eric Pickles. On Friday, a former BBC chairman added his voice to the critique.Sir Eric Pickles: ‘We deserve better reporting of these evil attacks’
“Former Chairman of the BBC, Lord Grade of Yarmouth CBE, has expressed concern about the BBC’s coverage of the recent violence in Israel and the West Bank, in a letter to the organisations’ Director of News and Current Affairs, James Harding.
In his complaint, Lord Grade said that the BBC coverage was at times misleading and failed to provide a wider context of what is an “undoubtedly complex issue”.
Lord Grade criticised the BBC’s inability “to fulfil its obligation to viewers” by not showing viewers examples of Palestinian Authority officials praising the attacks and calling for more. The former BBC Chairman underlined that Palestinian incitement, “has played an undeniable part in stoking tension recently and is an important part of the story”.
The complaint was directed at a report by Orla Guerin on Sunday October 11th, about the recent wave of attacks across Israel.”
Lord Grade noted:
“Additionally, it was improper of the correspondent to claim that “there’s no sign of involvement by militant groups”, before immediately showing footage of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) banners at the home of a 19 year-old terrorist who carried out a deadly knife attack at Lions Gate in Jerusalem on 3rd October. PIJ is a well-known Palestinian terror organisation and it has since claimed responsibility for the attack and praised by Hamas, another internationally proscribed terror organisation. This directly misleads viewers”.
Selecting someone for an attack or death on the basis of their religion of race is pure evil. Whether a person is Jewish, Muslim, or Christian, hate crime should receive universal condemnation – but apparently not universal reporting.US confirms Iran tested nuclear-capable ballistic missile
Israel has been shaken to its core in recent weeks. Israelis are being attacked for little other reason than because they are Jewish. As the attacks have escalated in number and severity, the relative silence of the international media has been deafening. The little coverage that there has been is all too often inexcusably one-sided. Let’s look at two examples, one from broadcast the other the press, to speak for the many.
The BBC – legally obligated to display total impartiality – set a very low standards in its reporting. On Sunday, 11 October, correspondent Orla Guerin produced an extraordinary report on the recent wave of attacks that claimed “there’s no sign of involvement by militant groups”, before immediately showing footage of Palestinian Islamic Jihad banners at the home of a 19-year-old terrorist who carried out a deadly knife attack at Lions Gate in Jerusalem on 3 October.
The BBC’s original coverage of this attack also attracted controversy, with a headline being amended four times from its misleading original version that read: ‘Palestinian shot dead after Jerusalem attacks kills two’.
The United States has confirmed that Iran tested a medium-range missile capable of delivering a nuclear weapon, in "clear violation" of a United Nations Security Council ban on ballistic missile tests, a senior US official said on Friday.Syria Death Toll Tops a Quarter Million
"The United States is deeply concerned about Iran's recent ballistic missile launch," US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said in a statement.
"After reviewing the available information, we can confirm that Iran launched on Oct. 10 a medium-range ballistic missile inherently capable of delivering a nuclear weapon," she said. "This was a clear violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1929."
The United States is preparing a report on the incident for the Security Council's Iran Sanctions Committee and will raise the matter directly with Security Council members "in the coming days," Power said.
Council diplomats have told Reuters it was possible to sanction additional Iranian individuals or entities by adding them to an existing UN blacklist. However, they noted that Russia and China, which have opposed the sanctions on Iran's missile program, might block any such moves.
More than a quarter of a million people have been killed in Syria's brutal conflict since it began with anti-government protests over four years ago, a monitoring group said Friday.Physical Attacks Taking Place in Israel, Verbal Ones in Westchester, NY
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it has documented the deaths of 250,124 people, including at least 74,426 civilians.
The civilian toll includes 12,517 children and 8,062 women.
Compiled by the British-based Observatory, which relies on a network of sources on the ground in Syria, the toll is an increase from the 240,000 figure it announced in August.
It puts the toll for rebel fighters at 43,752, and the number of foreign jihadists killed at 37,010.
At least 91,678 pro-government forces - among them 52,077 regime soldiers and other allied Syrian and non-Syrian fighters - have also been killed.
It is hard to understand why American institutions, especially ones in heavily Jewish areas, would feel it incumbent upon themselves to host virulently anti-Israel speakers, especially at this time when brutal, random, terrifying attacks against innocent Jews are taking place in Israel on a daily basis.Orthodox Jewish father has his car window smashed as he left a synagogue by a racist thug who told him: ‘We need to kill all Jews’
But that’s what Greenburgh, N.Y. (in Westchester County) elected officials have chosen to do.
Gideon Levy, one of the best-known anti-Israel journalists (at Haaretz, of course) and an Arab Palestinian promoter of the BDS (Boycott of, Divestment from and Sanctions against Israel) Movement, Suhail Khalilieh, are scheduled to speak at the Greenburgh Town Hall on Monday evening, Oct. 19.
A prime sponsor of this event is the group Jewish Voice for Peace, a “Jewish” organization that uses its religion to stab its homeland at every opportunity. JVP is one of the main proponents of the BDS Movement and admits it does not care whether Israel continues to exist or not.
A man smashed the window of an Orthodox Jewish father's car before saying 'we need to kill all the Jews'.Greek drug firms’ rep warns parliament of Jewish conspiracy
The 28-year-old was sitting in his vehicle, after leaving a synagogue, when the unprovoked incident happened near Clapton Common in Hackney, East London.
The attacker approached the car, before smashing the front passenger window and hurling the anti-Semitic abuse.
Avram Pinter, principle of Orthodox Jewish school, Yesodey Hatorah School, said that the victim was a parent there and knew him well.
He said: 'This is a natural outcome of prejudice.
'It's not good, but these things have happen, they have happened and they will keep happening.
'It is very troubling.'
The head of a group representing pharmaceutical firms in Greece warned that a pending bill to open up the country’s drug market to cheap generic drugs was the result of a conspiracy between Germany and Jewish groups.Prosecutors Seek Six-Month Prison Term for Dieudonne
During Wednesday’s debate in parliament, Dimitris Giannakopoulos, the president of the Hellenic Association of Pharmaceutical Companies, said 11,000 Greek jobs would be lost and blamed the measure on pressure from Jewish groups in order to benefit Israeli generic drug makers.
He called for a parliamentary investigation into the role of former Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, Greek-Israeli businessman Sabi Mionis, and David Harris, the director of the American Jewish Committee, in creating the bill.
Giannakopoulos said the move was also at the behest of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, accusing her of “imposing a contract of death on Greece” and referencing the 2010 takeover of the German generic drug maker Ratiopharm by the Israeli pharmaceutical giant Teva.
Controversial French comic Dieudonne should serve six months in jail for alleged racist and anti-Semitic comments he made during a show in Belgium, a prosecutor said Wednesday.‘Esquire’ Mag: The Best New Restaurant in America Is an Israeli One (Duh)
"His show is filled with defamatory and insulting comments which would make anyone want to throw up," the Belga news agency quoted prosecutor Damien Leboutte as telling a court in the eastern city of Liege.
Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala, a Shia Muslim convert, was not in court.
In March, a French court handed him a two months suspended sentence and fined him heavily for anti-Semitic remarks after he caused uproar by suggesting he sympathized with the attacks against satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in Paris.
"I feel like Charlie Coulibaly," he wrote on Facebook, a play on the slogan "Je suis Charlie" that became a global rallying cry against extremism and Amedy Coulibaly, one of the Islamist terrorist attackers.
The performer, who made his name in a double act with Jewish comedian Elie Semoun, is infamous for his trademark "quenelle" hand gesture, an inverted Nazi salute which has since been adopted by a wide range of anti-Semites.
Esquire magazine—which I last bought when I was 24 because it was a manly thing to do or something (this, however, and this, is worth your time)—has released its annual list of the best new restaurants in the U.S. Notably, of the fourteen selected food joints, four of them are located in New York and three in Chicago. But “the restaurant of the year” it turns out, which offers a modern take on Israeli cuisine, is located in New Orleans, Louisiana aka The Big Easy.CAMERA to Hold Hispanic Christian-Jewish Conference on Islamic Extremism
Shaya was chosen as the top pick by Josh Ozersky, Esquire‘s former restaurant editor who died in May. Writer Tom Junod recalls Ozersky in an essay in which he worried—not “for the obvious reason, which is that I couldn’t eat like Josh. No one could eat like Josh—that Shaya would not “portend an evening of extravagance:”
Now, I love Israeli food, love Jerusalem: A Cookbook, love the homey exoticism, the fusion forged in the crucible of an eternally contested crossroads. I just didn’t know if I would love Israeli food in New Orleans. Friends who live there said that Shaya had the best pita bread, hummus, and tabbouleh they had ever tasted. But who goes to New Orleans for pita bread, hummus, and tabbouleh? It’s like going to a bordello for Bible instruction.
Junod’s review and experience at Shaya is worth reading, if only whet your appetite. In my opinion, Israeli (and largely Mediterranean) food is tops anywhere (Chinese a close second; Nathan’s fries a close third), and I don’t need any goading to stuff my gut full of it. If you hold any doubt, begin by looking at this picture, or by reading the words “Louisiana Shrimp Shakshouka,” which you’d just have to order on a visit to Shaya just because.
The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) has announced its sponsorship of an upcoming Hispanic Christian-Jewish conference on anti-Zionism and Islamic extremism.How a Kuwaiti Muslim made a Jewish home in Jerusalem
According to CAMERA, the bilingual conference—slated for Nov. 4 at Beth Torah Benny Rok Campus in North Miami Beach, Fla.—will tackle a number of important issues to Hispanic evangelical Christians, and to Jews, such as Hezbollah’s rise in Latin America, the portrayal of Israel in Spanish-language media, evangelical Christian support for Israel, the persecution of Mideast Christians, and the BDS movement on college campuses.
“This conference crystallizes the common interests of Hispanic Evangelicals and Jews,” said Masha Gabriel, Spanish media research director for CAMERA. “Both religious groups understand the importance of fellowship when facing the rise of a common foe in the Americas.”
According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, Hispanics are one of the fastest-growing segments of the evangelical Christian population, with 16 percent of American Hispanics identifying as evangelical in 2013, up from 12 percent in 2010.
As a child in Kuwait, Mark Halawa’s normal included proudly donning his PLO boy scout uniform to march in the troop’s regularly scheduled and virulently anti-Semitic parades. Storming the streets of Kuwait City, the boys were encouraged to burn Israeli flags and chant against Jewish demons and infidels who “rape” the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque.Matisyahu Calls on All Jews to Keep Shabbat Next Week
His Palestinian refugee father, a secular Muslim, was a dedicated nationalist who had worked as a government water engineer alongside Yasser Arafat in the 1960s. He, like much of the Palestinian diaspora, tithed from his paycheck significant regular contributions to Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization.
Fast-forward almost 30 years.
Today Halawa is an observant Jew and resides in Jerusalem with his Jewish wife and daughter — when he’s not touring the world singing Israel’s praise, that is.
“Quite a jump,” he agrees, sitting recently in The Times of Israel’s Jerusalem office.
It was a zigzag as well as a long jump that saw Halawa — bespectacled and sporting a black kippa and informal button-down shirt on this hot summer day — both reclaim his halachic Jewish birthright and formally convert in an ultra-Orthodox religious court.
In a wide-ranging interview and follow-up telephone conversation, Halawa gives snapshots of his life — as a Kuwaiti youth, a refugee in Jordan during the first Gulf War, a privileged playboy in Syria, and finally, a Canadian college student who came to discover that his Muslim identity was not, in fact, immutable.
Next week on Shabbat, starting in the evening of October 23 and lasting through to the following evening, Jews worldwide are asked to take part in the project by keeping the Sabbath. A video promoting the project shows Jews from around the world reciting the Kiddush blessing said on Friday night before the meal.
The Shabbat observance will include hundreds of events in Israel, including festive Shabbat meals with mayors.
Matisyahu has released a special rendition of the Kiddush for the project.
"The idea standing behind the Shabbat has a special ability to bring people together, who in different situations might not come together," said the singer.
"The ability to ponder G-d while we are completely disconnected from all distractions is unity in its most basic form," added Matisyahu. "It's an honor for me to have been asked to take part in the project and contribute my part in the attempt to increase the unity between our brothers and sisters."
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