Tuesday, August 08, 2017
Ryan Bellerose: Unassailable
Pro-Israel advocates and activists need to understand that we do not have to say things like “ Jews are indigenous BUT….” Or “ The Arabs have rights too….” Of course the Arabs have rights of longstanding presence but those rights are not the same as indigenous rights.IsraellyCool: Why Is The News Fake?
The indigenous argument is important, because its airtight. The only arguments against it come from people who don’t even understand indigenous rights or indigenous status. The people who say “but the Arabs are indigenous” are only doing so because they have been force-fed false history and lies. The Arabs are indigenous… TO ARABIA, the Hejaz where their language, religion, customs and genetics all come from. If they self-identify as Arabs then they cannot self-identify as indigenous to non-Arab lands and that means any land outside the Hejaz, because truthfully the Arab world should be called the “Arabized” world. Indigeneity is site specific – Jews are not indigenous to the entire Middle East any more than Arabs are, any more than Amazigh are or Bedouin. It’s time to start calling out false narratives, not empowering them.
Jews can trace their lineages back several thousand years. They can show the genesis of their spiritual mode and method and trace it back to Israel, their evolution as a people, their cultural and linguistic coalescence, all of it comes right back to Israel, every path, every creek and stream, every hill, all have a story attached, that’s how you know the Jews are home. How can you expect that to be balanced with a group of people who started showing up in the 7th century and never actually built anything other than some scabby villages and a few mosques?
So get off the fence, you don’t need to be – besides some of you have been fence-sitting so long your ass must be getting sore by now. Take a side, take a stand, because we are the good guys and we are tired of having to carry your ass. No more virtue signaling, no more weak and vacillating arguments that give equal time to the enemy. It’s time to tell the truth.
Jews are indigenous to Israel. Jews are from Judea, Arabs are indigenous to Arabia. It’s not complex, it’s not fair, it’s not balanced, it’s simple unfettered truth.
Have you ever wondered what I know about how the News Wires like AP, Reuters and Agence France Press (AFP) operate which leads me to be so contemptuous of most of their coverage. This is the first time I’ve told this story in public.
When Matti Friedman first came out and exposed the goings on at Associated Press (AP) in Israel, I recognised the pattern. I had a chat with him and told him the same story I told above: he had never been to the APTN offices in London and wasn’t working directly with the video side but as soon as I told him he started to rethink about things he’d seen while working at AP in Israel.
His original whistle blowing article had put the finger on the problem completely: there is a filter through which the news passes. Stories painting Israel in a positive light very often get blocked, negative stories pass. Negative stories about Palestinian leadership almost never see the light of day.
If you want to see a written version, I first put this down in 2006. It was republished in 2010 largely unchanged. If I have to stress one point about what I saw at the offices of AP TV News in London it is this: why are over half the staff I saw working in a London office speaking and working almost exclusively in Arabic?
Melanie Phillips: Lionising the fringe elements
The key fact about Jackie Walker, however, which has merely been reinforced by her Edinburgh travesty, is that she is troublingly obsessed by Israel and the Jews. In any normal universe, such a person would be treated as a (truly) fringe wacko of repulsive views and ignored. Instead, she is lionised. At Edinburgh she received a standing ovation (ok, there were only about 30 people in the audience, but still) with a banner fixed to the front of the stage reading: “Anti-Semitism is a crime. Anti-Zionism is a duty”.
Across the Atlantic a not dissimilar scene was being enacted by the far left Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) at a convention in Chicago last Saturday. That passed a BDS motion, with 90 percent approval of the 697 delegates from 49 states, to wild applause while participants chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. In other words they were chanting their support for the extermination of Israel. This is, of course, what the BDS movement is all about.
You can watch that horrible scene here.
As with the British Labour Party’s Jew-baiting and Israel-bashing bigots, the issue that should cause such concern is the tacit or overt support for such views – or at the very least, the conspicuous failure to confront them.
The DSA claim that they now have about 25,000 dues-paying members nationwide, up from 8,000 in recent years. A similar rapid increase is true of Labour’s far-left Momentum caucus. The real problem, however, is the failure by the Labour Party to kick Momentum out, and the silence of the Democratic party in the US over the DSA spectacle – for even though the DSA is a separate organisation, this is the general direction in which the Democratic party itself has gone.
The deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee Keith Ellison, who has been associated in the past with the virulently anti-Jewish Nation of Islam, has made a number of questionable remarks including recorded comments at a 2010 private fundraiser in which he said that American foreign policy was “governed” by Israeli interests.
In other words, both Jackie Walker in Britain and the DSA in America are holding a mirror up to the so-called moderate left. Like Caliban in The Tempest, those self-described centrists may be recoiling from what they see in that glass – but it’s their own reflection from which they are flinching.
Imam Who Called for Annihilation of All Jews Is in Fact Routine
To defend himself, Shahin said the translation was not accurate and that he was misquoted. As a native Arabic speaker, I saw the translation and found it 100% accurate. After the "victim of misquoting" card failed, Shahin came out and offered an apology in a press conference. Interestingly, questions were not allowed in the conference, probably to avoid simple questions such as, "why did you call for this in the first place?" Or, "do you mean by apologizing that this hadith is not correct?"Khaled Abu Toameh: The Palestinians' "Creativity for Hate"
Some would argue that Shahin made a mistake, said things he did not mean, and then apologized; end of the story, right? No. Like Imam Shahin, I was born and raised in Egypt. Let me assure you that this is not an isolated incident. What the imam said is what everyone would hear at the congregational prayers that Muslims hold every Friday. On Friday afternoon, everyone could hear the sermons, because each mosque has big outdoor loudspeakers to ensure that all the neighbors hear the prayers and the sermons, whether they want to or not. I cannot tell you how many times I heard the imams asking God to destroy the Jews and Christians and take revenge on them.
In addition, this hadith was printed and put on stickers all over Egypt: in buses, subways, schools, universities ... everywhere. In the upper middle-class neighborhood where I lived, some Islamists put one in the elevator of our building, so that all the people in the building would have to read it each time they used the elevator.
Palestinian teenage girls are facing ridicule and hate for attending a summer camp for coexistence in the US. The camp, which brings Palestinian and Israeli girls together, is organized by Creativity for Peace, an organization in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Since 2003, up to 20 Israeli and Palestinian girls, aged 15 to 17, each year have participated in the Creativity for Peace camp.IsraellyCool: Antisemites Call For My Arrest
Photos of the Israeli and Palestinian girls enjoying their time together have enraged many Palestinians and other Arabs, who took to social media to express their disgust and outrage over the event and hurl abuse at the Palestinian participants.
The angry reactions to the joint Palestinian-Israeli camp in the US should be seen in the context of the Palestinians' strong opposition to all forms of "normalization" with Israel.
The Palestinian girls who attended the coexistence camp are being accused, among other things, of injuring the feelings of their people by "promoting normalization" with the Israeli "enemy."
Palestinian activists have waged a long-standing war against any form of "normalization" with Israel. Activists have repeatedly targeted even meetings between Israelis and Palestinians, especially in Ramallah and east Jerusalem, on the pretext that such encounters pave the way for "normalization" with Israel.
Some of these activists have resorted to threats, intimidation and violence to prevent such meetings from taking place.
This morning, I noticed this tweet being retweeted by assorted scum and villainy, including the Gaza Boat Convoy.Visit France see a play on the Toulouse Jew-murderer
My “crime”? Exposing the antisemitic posts of so-called “anti-Zionists” – in this case, this piece of work.
Note what I have done with such posts – shone a light on these haters’ own social media posts espousing the worst kinds of Jew hatred. I do not call for any violence or anything of the kind against them. I just expose them in order to show how so often “criticism of Israel” is really coming from a place of Jew hatred.
Incidentally, Gaza Boat Convoy – who retweeted this call to arrest me – is just as bad as the antisemite Sheri Tompkins I exposed in the post to which I liked above.
On December 9th and 10th, the new piéce will be staged in Mont-Saint-Aignan. Meanwhile, the pièce had a fairly successful run at the Avignon festival that ended last week.‘We have to share the land somehow. But for peace, the Palestinians must change their narrative’: an interview with Yossi Kupperwasser
In France, where 40,000 Jews left for Israel in ten years, where the kippah is becoming a forbidden symbol in the streets, where 12 Jews have lost their lives in five years of terror attacks, where the relatives of the murdered Jewish woman named Sarah Halimi are waiting for justice, a butcher of innocent Jews becomes the symbol of the excluded and the victims of the French society.
The pièce “Moi, mort, è l'aime, comme vous aimez la vie”, written by Algerian Mohamed Kacimi and produced by the Rouen National Drama Center, tells of the last hours of Mohammed Merah, the terrorist who killed in cold blood three French soldiers, before gunning down two Jewish brothers, their father and a seven-year-old girl at a Jewish school in Toulouse.
Israeli Culture Minister Miri Regev wrote to her French counterpart, Françoise Nyssen, asking to ban the work on the Jihadist. “We should forbid performances and theatrical performances that encourage feelings of forgiveness and sympathy for terrorists”.
As long as the narrative of the Palestinians espouses a commitment to all of Palestine, it is clear they continue to refuse to accept Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. The Palestinian narrative says there is no such thing as a Jewish people, and because of this, Palestinians argue that Jews should not be allowed a state of their own.Germany: Referendum on 'legality of Israel'
"Incitement" is the broad effort to incubate in the hearts and in the minds of Palestinians the following elements of the Palestinian narrative: That there is no Jewish people, that Jews don't have any sovereign connection to the Land of Israel, that Jews are a problematic people that should be demonized, that Israel is an apartheid state, that the struggle against Zionism should continue until the end of Zionism, and that any kind of activity to these ends is justified, including terrorism.
This narrative justifies the Palestinians paying salaries to terrorists and considering terrorists to be heroes. In the Palestinian narrative, the Jews cannot be victims and cannot complain about being attacked because they insist on living here.
Q: Is the status quo sustainable?
Kuperwasser: Israel can manage the situation for a long time. The stupidest thing for us would be to insist on moving away from an unpleasant status quo to another status quo that is even worse. There is not much sense to all the ideas of unilateral moves that would give something to the Palestinians and enable them to carry out attacks from a better striking position. As long as nobody offers a preferable alternative, the situation is sustainable, and we will sustain it.
The reason the Palestinians have not changed their narrative - and the reason why there is no progress for peace - is because the Palestinians have never felt that there is an international expectation or pressure for them to change their narrative. Now there is a golden opportunity to make progress on this front because the new administration in the U.S. is willing to speak a different language to the Palestinians and the U.S. Congress is discussing the Taylor Force Act that calls upon Palestinians to stop paying salaries to terrorists.
Authorities in the northern city of Bremen banned a pro-Iranian organization on Saturday from holding a public referendum on whether Israel was an illegal state.Hold UNICEF Accountable for Falsehoods on Iraq
The group, called "The Feather," published on its website that unlike other municipalities, the municipality in Bremen "did not allow us to show or vote on the slogan 'Israel is illegal.'"
Last year, the group conducted public surveys on Israel's right to exist in the cities of Dalmenhurst and Hanover, in Lower Saxony.
The group was founded in 2007. On its website is a picture of Iranian leader Ali Khamenei, describing its members as "supporters of the Islamic revolution."
The German-Israeli Friendship Association, known as DIG, held a protest against eight activists from "The Feather". DIG praised the authorities in Bremen for their decision to prevent the referendum and to "learn that the continuation of the organization's activities ... under the guise of freedom of expression, calls for the destruction of Israel."
The British Journal of Global Health has found that the idea that sanctions on Iraq killed 500,000 children was a fiction dreamed up by Saddam Hussein’s government to fuel propaganda against the West. Liz Sly at the Washington Post reported:Is the ACLU Still Committed to Free Speech?
“The government of Iraq cleverly manipulated survey data to fool the international community,” the report said, describing the figure of 500,000 deaths as “a massive fraud.” “Following its creation and dissemination the deception received considerable attention and was widely believed to be true. Moreover, it continues to be influential,” said Tim Dyson and Valerie Cetorelli, who wrote the report and are with the London School of Economics. “Unfortunately, however, the more mundane truth that has emerged has received much less attention than the original spectacular lie.”
The origin of the 500,000 dead children calumny was an issue which I had addressed in the Middle East Review of International Affairs in 2001, after returning from an academic year teaching in Iraqi Kurdistan.
In short, UNICEF laundered propaganda for the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Saddam’s government refused the United Nations to conduct its own surveys inside Iraq and so UNICEF accepted figures provided it by Saddam’s Ministry of Health. Using those figures, UNICEF estimated that sanctions killed 1.2 million Iraqis. Some non-governmental organizations—the International Action Center, for example—placed the number even higher.
Amatzia Baram, at the time a professor at the University of Haifa and a decades-long expert in Iraq, was the first voice to disprove allegations that sanctions had led to mass death in Iraq. To do so, he compared the country’s population growth rates over the last three censuses and found almost no difference between Iraq’s population growth rate between 1977 and 1987 (35.8 percent) and over the following decade (35.1 percent).
There were other warning signs to suggest that the UNICEF report was detached from reality. UNICEF suggested the mortality rate for children under five-years-old and the infant mortality rate increased after the adoption the oil-for-food program doubled caloric intake for Iraqis. This should have raised red flags about the veracity of the report because it would mean that the reduction of sanctions increased child mortality. The UNICEF study also said that child mortality had more than doubled, but neither independent observers in Iraq nor Iraqis traveling abroad ever reported seeing a rise of such huge magnitude.
At the heart of the recent controversy surrounding a bipartisan effort to prevent anti-Israeli discrimination is a letter written by the American Civil Liberties Union that argues that the legislation—introduced in the Senate earlier this year—constitutes a violation of the First Amendment. Coming from an organization so many, including many Jews, consider a staunch defender of free speech, the argument was potent enough to persuade Sen. Kristin Gillibrand, an early champion of the bill, to remove her support. And while she does not agree with the ACLU’s interpretation, the senator told a town hall meeting in Queens last week that she believed the civil rights group arrived at its interpretation honestly, which was reason enough to reconsider the bill in its current form.Dutch Socialists reject activist over anti-Semitic tweets
It’s hard to tell how the ACLU arrived at its conclusions. It’s harder still, reading the bill, to imagine how anyone might interpret its strict commercial confines to a restriction of an individual’s right to free speech. But anyone seeking clues as to what might be guiding the ACLU in its recent venture would do well to inquire after the letter’s signatory, the organization’s national political director, Faiz Shakir.
A former senior aide to both Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, Shakir was also a longtime vice president of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a progressive think tank with deep ties to both Barack Obama’s administration and Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign. Throughout his career, Shakir was frequently criticized for taking or defending positions that many considered troublingly anti-Israeli and, at times, anti-Semitic.
As a member of the Harvard Islamic Society, for example, Shakir co-chaired the annual Islamic Awareness Week in 2000, an effort that culminated with a fundraiser for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a major supporter of Hamas that was designated as a terrorist organization by the federal government the following year. Shakir’s student group remained unmoved even after the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish groups urged them to drop their support to the foundation.
The Dutch Socialist Party distanced itself from an activist for the movement after he wrote that seeing Israeli soldiers made him “proud” of German ones during World War II.North Carolina Pride event rescheduled to avoid Yom Kippur conflict
A spokesperson for the party’s branch in Castricum, a town 13 miles west of Amsterdam, wrote last week on Twitter that Jan van der Weiden, a former Socialist Party candidate and ex-treasurer, “has for a long time been neither a member nor active for us.”
The statement followed a complaint of hate speech filed with police by the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel against van der Weiden over a series of anti-Semitic statements published under his Twitter handle.
Last month, he wrote in English: “The more I see Israelian (sic) soldiers, the more proud I am on German soldiers during the Second World War.”
Organizers of North Carolina’s gay pride parade and festival have altered the event’s schedule in order to accommodate the Jewish community.First National Bank of Northern California no longer listed as sponsor of Reem's food n' farm tour
The NC Pride parade had been scheduled for September 30, which this year is Yom Kippur.
Following the announcement of the date last month, organizers apologized for scheduling the parade for Yom Kippur and said they could not change the date. They said the parade has been held on the last Saturday of September for the past 17 years.
But NC Pride organizers announced Friday that it had rebranded the event as “NC Pride @ Night,” a street fair that would start in downtown Durham and in downtown Raleigh at 4 p.m. on September 30 and run until 4 a.m. on October 1. The Pride Parade would be canceled for this year but is scheduled to return for 2018.
Several Jewish groups have marched in the parade in recent years.
Reem's Bakery in Oakland, notorious for its mural glorifying convicted terrorist Rasmea Odeh is being featured on a new food & farm tour, with the theme Crickets and Community: Women Changemakers Food Tour. CUESA - the Center for Urban Education About Sustainable Agriculture is sponsoring the event.Terrorist Tool
As of yesterday, the First National Bank of Northern California was also listed as a sponsor. After a letter writing campaign that appears to have originated here, their name has been taken off the page promoting the event.
Its not clear if the First National Bank of Northern California has actually pulled their sponsorship of the event or has simply removed their name from the event page. In either case, they've recognized that they don't want to be publicly associated with the toxic plume of Reem Assil, and that is a good thing.
Its not over yet. Please contact the Center for Urban Education About Sustainable Agriculture's facebook page for the event, and let them know why hate, bigotry and intolerance will never be accepted in our community.
Anti-Semites are a dime a dozen on American university campuses nowadays. But Saleem Shehadeh, who graduated from the University of California at Davis in 2015, is a special case unto himself. During his undergraduate years, Shehadeh was heavily involved in the Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Hamas-inspired initiative that aims to use public protest and economic pressure to advance the Hamas agenda of permanently discrediting and destroying Israel as a Jewish state. Toward that end, BDS strives to create the false impression that Israel is a habitual human-rights violator guilty of subjecting its Palestinian neighbors to brutal campaigns of “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” and “genocide.”Disgrace and the Democratic Socialists of America
In support of BDS's views and objectives, Shehadeh served as the organizing chair of divestment on the UC Davis campus. He was also a member of the local chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a highly influential organization whose propaganda commonly echoes much of what is said by Hamas jihadists. Indeed, SJP's principal founder, Professor Hatem Bazian, has quoted approvingly from a famous Islamic hadith which calls for the violent slaughter of Jews and which appears in Hamas's founding charter.
During his college years, Saleem Shehadeh was a senator with the Associated Students of UC Davis (ASUCD), the university's student government. In April 2014, he was the lead author of an ASUCD resolution that called upon the university to divest whatever financial holdings it possessed in “corporations that aid in the Israeli occupation of Palestine and illegal settlements in Palestinian territories.” One of the targeted companies was Caterpillar, which, according to Shehadeh, “provides the Israeli army with bulldozers used to demolish Palestinian property.” Shehadeh made no mention of the fact that those demolitions were aimed exclusively at the homes and weapons-making facilities of Hamas terrorists and other jihadists. But hey, why quibble over details?
When an evenly divided student senate subsequently failed to approve Shehadeh's divestment resolution, Shehadeh co-authored an opinion piece lamenting that the ASUCD had effectively given “a stamp of approval” to “the University of California’s decision to invest in … companies that profit from the demolition of Palestinian-civilian structures, the ongoing Israeli settlement and colonization of Palestinian land, the detention and torture of Palestinian political prisoners, and the construction of the apartheid wall that runs through occupied Palestinian territory.”
The national convention of the Democratic Socialists of America voted the other day in favor of the boycott-Israel movement, or BDS, and the success of the pro-BDS resolution caused the assembled delegates to break out into a rousing chant of “From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free!” And that’s not the half of it. Among the outraged responses to the DSA resolution, perhaps the most prominent was the indignant complaint that DSA held its vote on a Saturday, when a certain sort of highly fussy religiously-observant Jewish Socialist would not be able to participate. The complaint about Saturday voting has come up several times over the last few years, whenever a student council somewhere has likewise voted to boycott Israel. There are people who consider the complaint to be a serious one. Do you want to know what is anti-Semitism? It is Saturday voting. Here is the mind-set that has led to the vote to abolish Israel.Jewish artist takes on Twitter for enabling anti-Semitism
The DSA resolution strikes me as a modestly sad event, not because of the part about Saturday voting. It is because of DSA itself and its meaning, faint but real, for the American Jews. DSA does have a political lineage, after all, which is ancient and noble. The original socialist party in the United States was the Socialist Labor Party, founded in 1876, a quarter century after the Republican Party. The Socialist Labor Party was committed from the start, however, to being a narrow and insignificant political sect—which perhaps reflected a fatal and dominant gene, destined to be passed down through the ages. Still, some of the party’s more serious members split away to organize, in a series of steps, the Socialist Party of America, with Eugene V. Debs as principal leader. The Socialist Party was sincerely opposed to superstitious and medieval bigotries of every kind. Therefore it became the first American party truly to open its arms to the Jewish immigrant masses, circa 1900. The first two Jewish members of the United States Congress were Socialists—Meyer London from the Lower East Side and Victor Berger from Milwaukee. The big Jewish trade unions, which improved life for a significant percentage of the American Jewish population and for a great many other people, as well, were products in one fashion or another of the Socialist Party of America. This was true also of the Jewish Daily Forward, which so deeply and positively influenced the American Jewish world, and it was true of the housing cooperatives that arose in New York.
An Israeli-German artist best known for his “YOLOCAUST” project, which combined selfies taken at Berlin’s Holocaust memorial with images of concentration camp victims, released a video Monday targeting Twitter’s failure to address online anti-Semitism and racism, with a series of offensive tweets drawn on the ground at the social media giant’s offices.
In the video, Shahak Shapira said that despite alerting Twitter of some 300 tweets containing offensive content, the company had failed to delete most of the messages. He added that in nine of the cases, he was told the tweets were not in violation of the company’s policies.
Due to Twitter’s inaction over the offensive tweets, Shapira decided that “if Twitter forces me to see those things, then they’ll have to see them too,” leading him to travel to the company’s Hamburg offices and draw 30 of the tweets outside the entrance using chalk from a spray can.
Among the tweets that Shapira painted on the ground were messages such as “JEWISH PIG,” “LET’S GAS SOME JEWS TOGETHER,” “GAYS TO AUSCHWITZ,” and “GERMANY NEEDS A FINAL SOLUTION FOR ISLAM,” next to which he wrote “HEY TWITTER: DELETE THIS CRAP.”
While the tweets drawn on the sidewalk outside the office were later cleaned, the messages written in the street and on the stairs across from the building were left untouched, which Shapira said “fits well with Twitter’s policy of cleaning in front of their own door and leaving the rest to be someone else’s problem.”
New York Times "Journeys" Corrects on Gaza Area "Settlements," "Palestine"
Following communication from CAMERA, Times editors have commendably removed to the reference to "settlements surrounding the Gaza Strip," replacing it with "communities surrounding the Gaza Strip."The Washington Post Minimizes Islamic Hate Preacher’s Sermon
As of this writing, though, The Times has failed to correct the second inaccurate use of terminology in the "Journeys" Israel trip promotional material. As Snapshots previously noted, The Times urges readers to "travel with experts from The New York Times, a leader in its evenhanded coverage of Israel, Palestine and the Middle East."
Referring to the West Bank as "Palestine" contravenes standard New York Times style. References to a modern "Palestine" in the West Bank and Gaza are inaccurate, and those areas should be referred to the West Bank and Gaza or, where appropriate "Palestinian Authority territories." National Geographic, The Los Angeles Times, and Voice of America have commendably corrected this very same point in recent weeks.
By inaccurately referring to the West Bank as "Palestine," The New York Times unintentionally tips off perceptive and informed readers that far from being "a leader in its evenhanded coverage," the Gray Lady has a longstanding tilt against Israel.
Update, 12:20 PM EST: Times Corrects 'Palestine' Reference
Following publication of this post, Times editors have commendably corrected the erroneous reference to "Palestine." The text now instead refers to "Palestinians."
A Washington Post report on a California imam’s calls to “annihilate” Jews minimized and obfuscated the cleric’s comments and overt antisemitism (“California imam apologizes for sermon seen as inciting to Jews, condemns antisemitism”).Political NGO gets unreserved BBC amplification yet again
As CAMERA has noted, on July 21, 2017 Imam Ammar Shahin delivered a sermon at the Islamic Center of Davis. Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a non-profit organization that monitors and translates Arab, Iranian and Russian media, translated the Shahin’s remarks—after it was first posted on the mosque’s website.
MEMRI highlighted that the imam called to “liberate the al-Aqsa mosque from the filth of the Jews,” and to “count them one by one and annihilate them down to the very last one,” among other statements. The imam’s exhortations happened after Palestinian violence against Jews occurred after Israel discussed increased security measures at the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, following a July 14, 2017 terror attack. During that attack, three Arab-Israeli citizens murdered two Israeli Druze police officers with weapons hidden in the al-Aqsa mosque that sits near the Temple Mount.
Major U.S. news outlets ignored the story. Writing at Legal Insurrection, a conservative blog that often focuses on the Middle East, antisemitism and other matters, David Gerstman noted that The Washington Post failed to report the imam’s comments until July 28, 2017—fully a week later and only after the mosque issued a non-apology apology that CAMERA termed “insulting (for more, see “Insulting Apology from Islamic Center of Davis”).”
Post reporter Michelle Boorstein noted that Shahin’s “widely distributed sermon about Jews in Jerusalem set off controversy and fear of violence.” Boorstein minimized Shahin’s call for anti-Jewish violence, claiming that the sermon merely “called [for] Muslims to come together to protest the closure” at the al-Aqsa mosque” and “prayer for God to destroy Muslims’ opponents at the site.”
Boorstein failed to report an earlier July 14, 2017 sermon in which Shahin called to turn “Jerusalem and Palestine into a graveyard for the Jews.”
As is usually the case, readers of this article find no mention of the obviously relevant issue of the political agenda of Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the fact that it engages in lawfare and campaigning against Israel.German police said to open probe into neo-Nazi music festival
Human Rights Watch was the foreign NGO most quoted and promoted by the BBC throughout 2016 and its reports, PR releases, campaigns and statements enjoyed similarly prominent amplification in previous years. Nevertheless, the BBC consistently fails to meet its own editorial guidelines on impartiality which state:
“We should not automatically assume that contributors from other organisations (such as academics, journalists, researchers and representatives of charities) are unbiased and we may need to make it clear to the audience when contributors are associated with a particular viewpoint, if it is not apparent from their contribution or from the context in which their contribution is made.”
Obviously that condition was not met in this latest article and so once again we see the BBC providing leverage for politicised messaging concerning Israel from an interested party touted as a neutral-sounding ‘human rights group’, without the required full disclosure to audiences of that political NGO’s anti-Israel activities and campaigns.
German police have launched an investigation into a neo-Nazi music festival due to its violation of the country’s anti-Nazi laws, the Daily Mail reportedAirbnb bans white supremacist rally attendees
Over 6,000 attendees, many donning t-shirts with slogans such as “I love Hitler,” were seen striking the Nazi salute at the ‘Rock against Foreign Domination’ festival, which featured performances from a dozen “radical right-wing bands,” according to the report Monday.
Authorities in the German state of Thuringia, where the July 15 festival took place, had characterized the country’s largest neo-Nazi gathering as “relatively peaceful.”
Nevertheless, six people were provisionally placed under arrest and 32 criminal offenses were filed over property damage, illegal drug use, verbal abuse, and the use of signs identifying with anti-Constitutional organizations, the report said.
Germany has strict anti-Nazi laws that include a ban on symbols that glorify Adolf Hitler’s regime or “re-engagement in National Socialist activities.”
Ahead of a massive white supremacy rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, this weekend, Airbnb has begun cancelling the accounts of users who have booked properties they intend to use for gatherings for the event.Czechs strike deal to move pig farm from Roma Holocaust site
The "Unite the Right" rally, which will feature prominent neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer and Baked Alaska, is being billed as a "free speech rally" and the biggest event of its nature in the millennium.
According to the event's Facebook page, the rally "seeks to unify the right-wing against a totalitarian Community crackdown" and to "affirm the right of Southerners and white people to organize for their interests just like any other group is able to do, free of persecution.''
Airbnb says that its users who plan to attend the rally and use their rented spaces to host gatherings for it are in violation of the company's Community Commitment, by which all users must abide. The commitment states that users must ''accept people regardless of their race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or age.'' Those users who do not comply with the commitment are subject to account deletion by the company.
Airbnb confirmed to Buzzfeed News that it was removing users who were using their service to host events related to the rally.
The Czech government said Monday it had struck a deal to move a pig farm from the site of a former Nazi concentration camp where hundreds of Roma perished during World War II.Israel's beaches designated an important dolphin habitat
Czech culture ministry spokeswoman Simona Cigankova said the contract for the property would be “finalized by September,” but declined to name a sum.
Between 1940 and 1943, Nazi Germany and its Czech collaborators imprisoned close to 1,300 Czech Roma at the concentration camp, located in Lety, a village 75 kilometers (50 miles) south of the capital Prague.
In all, 327 Roma, including 241 children, died at the camp staffed by an ethnic Czech commander and guards, while more than 500 were sent to Nazi Germany’s infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in occupied southern Poland.
The communist Czechoslovakian regime built the pig farm on the site in the 1970s.
The beaches of Israel have been declared an important habitat for dolphins by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.How An Israeli Folk Song Became a Hit on Japanese Video Game Soundtracks
Widely considered the world's most important international entity in the field of nature protection, the IUCN is known for its "red lists" of endangered species.
Israel was one of 26 spots in the Mediterranean region named as being of importance to marine mammal life after a yearlong scientific process by the IUCN. The process involved convening a panel of experts that included representatives from every Mediterranean country. Israel was represented by Dr. Aviad Scheinin, director of the Dolphin and Sea Educational Center in Ashdod, run by the nonprofit Israel Marine Mammal Research and Assistance Center and the Morris Kahn Marine Research Center at the University of Haifa.
"This makes Israel proud. We are a beam of light in the total darkness of an absence of information about marine mammals in the eastern and southern Mediterranean," Scheinin said.
The designation of Israel's coastal waters as an important habitat for dolphins could help promote a proposal the marine mammal research center recently submitted to various government ministries, first reported by Israel Hayom.
Do you know the song “Mayim Mayim?” Maybe you learned it at Hebrew School, or sleepaway camp. It’s a celebratory Israeli folk classic based on text from the book of Isaiah about, as the title suggests, water. The song’s composer is Emanuel Amiran-Pougatchov, who would go on to be the country’s Minister of Music Education, and in 1937 choreographer Else I. Dublin created the dance still used today.Simple drug regimen could help prevent cancer recurrence, Israeli study says
But other than your summer camp or Israel, the places you’re most likely to hear this song are Japan or Taiwan.
Seriously, everyone in Japan knows “Mayim Mayim.”
How did this happen? It began in the post-WWII occupation of Japan, led by General Douglas MacArthur. As part of the (admittedly somewhat forced) cultural exchange, the United States decided to teach the youth in Asia folk dances. They enlisted the aid of Rickey Holden, a prominent square and folk dance-caller, scholar, and educator.
Holden does not appear to be Jewish, but he did visit Israel to study folk dance. That’s most likely where he learned “Mayim Mayim.” Over the course of 1957 and 1958, he went on a world tour that included Japan and Taipei. It’s not clear if he’s solely responsible for teaching the dance in Japan, but in Taiwan it’s closely associated with him. (In fact, Israeli dance in general is popular in Taiwan, but it was “Mayim Mayim” that started it all.)
Israeli researchers said they may have found a way to reduce the risk of post-surgical cancer recurrence through the use of a drug regimen that includes the combination of two drugs that relieve stress and inflammation and have been on the market for years.Intel completes acquisition of Mobileye shares in tender
Most cancer-related deaths are the result of the regrowth of cancer cells after surgery, a so-called post-surgical metastatic recurrence. In metastasis, cells of primary tumors travel to other parts of the body, where they often proliferate into inoperable, ultimately fatal growths.
Now, researchers at Tel Aviv University in collaboration with the University of California at Los Angeles and three Israeli hospitals say they have found a specific drug regimen that, administered to patients before and after surgery, “significantly reduces the risk of post-surgical cancer recurrence.”
The medications are a combination of a beta blocker, which relieves stress and high blood pressure, and an anti-inflammatory drug. The treatment is safe and inexpensive. The two medications are similar in price to aspirin, and are easily administered to patients without contraindications, the researchers said in a statement. The study was published in Clinical Cancer Research.
US giant Intel Corp. and Israeli automotive technology firm Mobileye N.V. said on Tuesday that Intel has completed the acquisition of the outstanding shares of the Jerusalem-based company in a tender.Two Israeli natural gas fields to start pumping in 2020
The acquisition is expected to accelerate innovation for the automotive industry and positions Intel as a leading technology provider in the fast-growing market for highly and fully autonomous vehicles, the companies said in a statement.
The combination of Intel and Mobileye will allow Mobileye’s computer vision expertise — the eyes of the vehicle — to complement Intel’s high-performance computing and connectivity expertise – the brains — “to create automated driving solutions from cloud to car,” the statement said.
Intel estimates the vehicle systems, data and services market opportunity to be worth up to $70 billion by 2030.
The Energy Ministry officially presented its plan Tuesday for developing the Karish and Tanin natural gas fields, which sit alongside the larger Tamar and Leviathan deposits in Israel’s economic waters in the Mediterranean.The Day a Jewish General Invented a Muslim Country
The development plan “shows [Israel’s ability] to keep to the schedule” of development,” Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz said in a statement. Once the new fields are operational, “competition will increase and prices… will fall.”
The plan calls for Karish, or “shark,” to be developed first, followed by Tanin, or “crocodile,” if there is sufficient demand in the Israeli market.
The two fields are believed to contain some 55 billion cubic meters of gas, which the development plan says will flow to Israel’s shores by 2020.
And Bangladesh is free!IsraelDailyPicture: Remembering the Indian Soldiers Who Helped Liberate Jerusalem 100 Years Ago
The story might have ended there.
Except that the general behind the masterly coup that makes him godfather to a new Muslim country is Jewish. His name is Jack Jacobs.
He was born in 1924 in Calcutta into a Sephardic family that had arrived there from Baghdad two centuries before, leaving behind 2,000 years of history.
In 1942, learning of the ongoing extermination of Europe’s Jews, he enlists in the British army in Iraq, fights in North Africa and then moves on to Burma and Sumatra in the campaign against the Japanese.
And remaining in the military after the independence of India in 1947, he is the only Jew to rise high in the country’s military services, eventually coming to command the eastern army that, in December 1971, will be mounting the offensive against Islamabad’s legions.
It happens that I met this man 46 years ago. I was in rebellious Bangladesh, having responded to French novelist André Malraux’s call for the formation of an International Brigade to fight for a Bengali land still in limbo but suffering mightily under the hand of West Pakistan.
Welcome Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and thank you for the sacrifices made by your country’s soldiers who saved the Jews of the Land of Israel 100 years ago and eventually led to the Jewish state’s creation.
An idyllic fenced park is located in the middle of the Talpiot neighborhood in Jerusalem, just a four-minute Waze-directed detour from Hebron Road. This cemetery, which I visited for the first time last week, is the burial site for 79 Indian soldiers who died here fighting for the liberation of Jerusalem in 1917. Another cemetery for the Indian soldiers is in Haifa.
More than one million Indian troops fought with the British Army in WWI, at the Western front in Europe, in Africa, Mesopotamia, and the Middle East. On the Sinai-Palestine front, 95,000 Indian combatants served; approximately 10 percent were killed. In the 1914-1918 period, they fought the Turkish-German armies at Gallipoli, the Suez Canal, through the Sinai and Palestine and finally Damascus, with crucial battles in Gaza, Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, Nablus and Megiddo.
The Indian soldiers joined other troops in the Sinai-Palestine campaign from Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies, as well as the Jewish Legion. These auxiliary forces relieved British troops badly needed on the Western front in Europe.
First-Ever Volunteers From Thailand and Honduras Among Newest Batch of IDF Foreign Recruits
This summer, 153 foreign volunteers from 12 different countries are enlisting in the IDF, according to data published on Sunday by the Israeli Defense Ministry.Hebrew’s Survival, Renaissance, and Future
The group of new recruits — 122 males and 31 females — features the first-ever volunteers from Thailand and Honduras, the ministry said.
The leading source of soldiers from abroad in the current July-August draft cycle is the United States (68), with France coming in second (58). Other countries on the list include Britain, South Africa, Belgium, Mexico, Australia, Canada and Austria.
18-year-old Bangkok native Marisa Avram — the daughter of an Israeli father and a Thai mother who converted to Judaism — told the Hebrew news site nrg, “I think that serving in the IDF will be an amazing experience for me, and I’d be very happy to serve in a combat role.”
Aliyah and Immigration Minister Sofa Landver wished the volunteers a “pleasant and challenging service.”
“I’m sure you will [serve] with the same motivation that pushed you to come here,” she said.
For more than fifteen centuries after it ceased to be a spoken tongue, Jews preserved Hebrew in their writings, prayers, and even personal correspondence. They then—in a feat without parallel—revived the language as one of everyday life, not to mention of science, politics, modern literature, and many other things. Drawing on his book The Story of Hebrew, Lewis Glinert explains how this happened. (Video, 72 minutes. Audio for streaming and download available at the link below.)
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