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Friday, April 05, 2019

04/05 Links Pt2: GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw: BDS supporters operate in ‘fantasy world’; Anti-Israel lawyer Simone Burns jailed for six months after drunken racist rant on Air India flight

From Ian:
GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw: BDS supporters operate in ‘fantasy world’
Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw defeated Democrat Todd Litton in Texas’ 2nd Congressional District in the 2018 midterm elections to replace retiring Republican Rep. Ted Poe.

He was catapulted into the spotlight by “Saturday Night Live” actor Pete Davidson, who made fun of the patch that Crenshaw wears over his right eye, which was lost after the Navy SEAL was injured by an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan in 2012 during his third of five tours overseas (Davidson offered an apology to Crenshaw, who accepted it and even took some zingers at him, along with conveying a unifying message for the audience).

Along with five then-incoming freshmen members of Congress, Crenshaw participated on a trip to Israel in December organized by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s American Israel Education Fund to learn about the U.S.-Israel relationship.

JNS talked with Crenshaw in person. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: What’s your overall stance on the U.S.-Israel relationship since being there in December?
A: I’m supportive. It doesn’t get any simpler than that. We need to support the U.S.-Israel relationship. It’s important for Israel, our allies, but also for the U.S. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship.

Q: How’s it mutually beneficial?
A: Conflict in the Middle East never stays contained in the Middle East. The world is a small place, and so U.S. leadership abroad has always been an important part of maintaining the liberal global order that has been underwritten by the United States since World War II. With that in mind, we should always be looking for strong allies that share our values. The Jewish state clearly shares our values, so we should support it for moral reasons, and we should support it for strategic reasons.

Q: Having served abroad, were you able to see Israel’s threats firsthand?
A: My deployments in the Middle East gave me an insight into the human element there, gave me a more realistic understanding of what Israelis are dealing within the context of Middle Eastern politics and how different that is from Western civilization. A lot of people who are skeptical of Israel and the United States, who are forming a BDS movement, are operating in a fantasy world where they actually don’t understand what the Middle East is all about.

Being in Israel, you get a much more direct look at what they’re dealing with. You’re in a country whose population is close to that in my county. That’s pretty significant especially when you’re surrounded by your enemies. It’s hard for many Americans to imagine what that might be like; you really have to go there to understand that. You have Hamas fully in control of the Gaza Strip—well-armed, raining down rockets on Israeli civilians indiscriminately. You have Hezbollah to the north—digging tunnels to the Lebanese border, trying to infiltrate Israel for no other purpose than to kill Israelis. You have ISIS in Syria. There’s a long history of Israel’s Arab neighbors attempting to invade and end the Jewish state, so, for good reason, we should be worried about Israel’s security. And Iran, a powerful country that seeks to destroy Israel—and says as much and funds proxies both with Hamas and Hezbollah in order to meet those ends.

Anti-Israel lawyer Simone Burns jailed for six months after drunken racist rant on Air India flight
A prominent anti-Israel barrister has been jailed for six months after she was videoed ranting drunkenly on an Air India flight about how she was “an international criminal lawyer for the f***ing Palestinian people”, and spat in the face of a member of the cabin crew.

Simone Burns from Hove, also known as Simone O’Broin, was sentenced at Isleworth Crown Court on Thursday, having pleaded guilty to both assault and being drunk on an aircraft at her trial last month at Uxbridge Magistrates Court.

In footage of the incident filmed by a fellow passenger, Burns can be seen remonstrating with a member of the flight crew after being refused a fourth bottle of wine on a flight from Mumbai to London last November.

“I’m a leader of the f***ing boycott movement", she shouted at a member of the cabin crew.

“If I say "boycott" - f***ing Air India, done… I'm a f****** barrister. A human rights lawyer, and an international criminal lawyer.”

She also called airline staff “Indian, money grabbing c****," smoked a cigarette in the toilets and spat in the face of a female member of staff who refused to serve her more alcohol.

She was arrested by the police when the flight landed at Heathrow.

Burns has previously written a paper accusing Israel of genocide over its treatment of the Palestinians, whom she described as "a group struggling for self-determination against a colonial, racist regime”.
Billboard Outside NY Times Office Charges Paper with Anti-Israel Incitement
CAMERA has hung a giant, 35-foot billboard directly outside the New York Times building that spotlights the paper’s biased coverage against Israel.

CAMERA’s billboard looks into the New York Times newsroom in Manhattan.

At the center of the billboard is an image of a Molotov cocktail whose wick is lit by a flaming New York Times article with the headline: “Israel Bulldozes Democracy.”

Around the incendiary device, which is a favorite weapon of Hamas rioters, it says: “While Hamas firebombs Israel… The New York Times inflames with biased coverage.”

Andrea Levin, executive director of CAMERA, says that the Molotov cocktail in the ad is a symbol with a double meaning.

“One meaning is, obviously, to remind Times’ staff that Hamas is violent—violent against both Israel and its own people,” Levin says. “The Times absolutely needs this reminder because far too often their reporters ignore Hamas’s violent theocracy in the Gaza Strip.”

Levin points to a New York Times headline, published during the Palestinian riots on the border between Gaza and Israel, which said: “Battle Weary, Hamas Gives Peaceful Protests a Chance.”

“The headline is ludicrous,” Levin says. “Has Hamas traded in its rockets for John Lennon’s anti-war music? Those so-called peaceful Hamas protests include rocks, firebombs and explosives hurled at Israelis. Not to mention recent rocket fire into the Tel Aviv area.”



A New Book about Zionism and the Left Misses the Big Picture
In The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky, Susie Linfield examines a number of prominent leftist thinkers’ often contradictory and almost always logically and morally incoherent ideas about Israel. David Mikics finds the book both “compulsively readable” and “persuasive,” but notes that it fails to draw conclusions about the larger pattern it identifies:

Linfield seems unsure about the value of her famous thinkers, given their frequent traffic with facile, biased pseudohistory. And so she should be. The truth is that [the Marxist historian Isaac] Deutscher’s adoring portrait of Leon Trotsky is hardly less distorted than his feelings about Jewishness. The same is true for [Noam] Chomsky’s [apologias for] Pol Pot’s Cambodia. . . .

One of the hardest lessons for leftists to learn is that their intellectual heroes can have feet of clay. . . . Proclaiming men and women to be Great Thinkers is a dangerous game, especially when the Greats fail to observe basic rules of rational, fact-based argument. . . .

Albert Memmi, [the one thinker discussed in the book hostile neither to Israel nor to Judaism], who became a Zionist in response to Arab anti-Semitism in Tunisia, not to European prejudice, should probably have the last word. He realized that the left’s betrayals of the Jews were “so extensive and recurrent” that “they were intrinsic to left politics rather than random aberrations.” Just as when Memmi wrote, the left’s Jewish problem looks depressingly inevitable, and intractable.
The Less-Told Story of the Holocaust in North Africa
While the Nazi program of extermination never reached North Africa in full force, most of the region’s Jews found themselves in one way or another under Axis control, and suffered a great deal as a result. Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia were all French colonies when World War II broke out, and thus came under Vichy rule; Libya was an Italian colony even before the war. Reviewing a recent collection of scholarly essays on the subject, edited by Aomar Boum and Sara Abrevaya Stein, Lawrence Rosen writes:

In the years leading up to the war, roughly 470,000 Jews lived in the countries of North Africa: 240,000 in Morocco, 110,000 in Algeria, 80,000 in Tunisia, and 40,000 in Libya. . . .

In [the French colony of] Algeria, for example, the hostility of the resident colonists (later called pieds noirs) to the Jews was palpable. Theirs was indeed the anti-Semitism of European heritage, but even so it took on local coloration as a vehicle for asserting that the Muslims, too, were a distinct and inferior race. Local officials, working with Vichy, set up about three dozen camps in Algeria (along with two dozen in Morocco and a handful in Tunisia and Libya) where some resident Jews, political prisoners from Europe, and Algerian Jewish soldiers serving in the French army were incarcerated.

Treatment in those camps located at the edge of the Sahara was harsh, but actual murder was rare. Several of the contributors to the present volume note that in a number of instances Muslim guards refused orders to harm the Jewish prisoners. . . . Some prisoners from [Algeria and Tunisia] were sent to concentration camps—but not death camps—in Europe; most of them survived.
NGO Monitor: Episode 18: Martin Sampson of CIJA on Canada, UNRWA, and Funding Guidelines
Vice President of Communications and Marketing at the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) in Canada, Martin Sampson, joins the podcast to discuss guidelines for Canadian funding to UNRWA and others. Our Managing Editor, Becca Wertman, details Ottawa's support for a Palestinian, BDS group.

Host: NGO Monitor Director of Research Yona Schiffmiller

Guests: Martin Sampson, Vice President of Communications and Marketing at the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) in Canada and Managing Editor Becca Wertman
Podcast: Daniel Gordis on the Rift between American and Israeli Jews
The occupation; the Western Wall; the Nation-State law; the relationship between President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu. All of these issues and more have upset relations between American and Israeli Jews, and the upset seems to grow daily. How did this happen? Wasn’t Israel a point of consensus in the American Jewish community until just recently, the cause that united Jews across the political and denominational spectrum?

Daniel Gordis of Shalem College believes that the growing divide is not over what Israel does, but is, rather, over what Israel is. In a series of insightful articles as well as in a forthcoming book, Gordis argues that the two largest Jewish communities in the world are animated by different attitudes toward the purpose of Jewish life and what it takes for Jews to prosper. It is these more fundamental differences, and not, say, the policies of the Netanyahu government or the rulings of the Chief Rabbinate, that are the true cause of the widening rift between the Jews of Israel and the Jews of the United States.

What about Israel as, until recently, a point of consensus for American Jews? For the answer, be sure to listen as Daniel Gordis sits down with Jonathan Silver to discuss the relationship between these two communities. Among the many enlightening moments in this podcast, they review the long history of American Jewish ambivalence toward Zionism, explore the different ideas and beliefs that motivate American and Israeli Jews, and try to define what it means to be a Zionist living in America today.
Beto O'Rourke Slammed For 'Willful Trivialization Of The Holocaust' In Attack On Trump
At a campaign event in Carroll, Iowa, O'Rourke compared Trump to the Third Reich, which was the Nazi designation of Germany and under Adolf Hitler from 1933-45.

"Every year that I was in Congress we would go to a different elementary school around Valentine's day and pick up Valentine's Day cards for veterans that were hand-drawn by second grade or third grade classrooms, and then we would take them over to the VA and we would want to make sure that those veterans understood that the generation coming up cares for them and is grateful for what they have done for this country," O'Rourke said. "And this third-grade girl who's handing us the hand-drawn valentines, who happens to be Mexican-American, says, 'Why does the president not like me?'"

"What is that doing to her head and to her perception of herself and what she's able to contribute this country, when the president of the United States has called Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals?" O'Rourke continued.

O'Rourke then lied, claiming that Trump called "asylum seekers animals and an infestation."

Trump called violent MS-13 gang members — whose motto is "kill, rape, control" — "animals" and said that there was an "infestation of MS-13 gangs in certain parts of our country."

"Now we would not be surprised if in the Third Reich other human beings were described as an infestation, as a cockroach or a pest that you would want to kill," O'Rourke continued.

O'Rourke's remarks were quickly condemned by the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), which said in a statement: "The Zionist Organization of America condemns this type of hateful and ignorant rhetoric in the strongest possible terms. Mr. O’Rourke should immediately apologize for his willful trivialization of the Holocaust."
Rashida Tlaib takes a selfie with open antisemites, BDS advocates
“Not all heroes wear capes,” wrote Zahra Billoo, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, San Francisco Bay Area (CAIR-SFBA). “Some like Rep. @RashidaTlaib wear Congressional pins.”

Billoo was tweeting on Monday about Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI). The freshman lawmaker responded with her own tweet: “So good to see you sis! I will always speak truth to power because I got you to protect.”

But this friendship, as pointed out by Steven Emerson, executive director of The Investigative Project on Terrorism, in an article published by The Algemeiner could be a red flag for people concerned about antisemitism and anti-Israel bias in Congress.

Billoo, said Emerson, has attacked Muslims who engage in interfaith dialogue and has supported Palestinian terrorists attacking Israelis, openly calling for the destruction of the Jewish state: “From the river to the sea, #Palestine will be free.”
Family Matters: How a US Member of Congress was Raised by the Red-Green Axis
Most people’s worldviews are heavily influenced during their formative years. Those influences, and their roots, are important to discern among our national leaders.

The election of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is often seen as a celebration of diversity: An immigrant from the wasteland of Somalia, and one of the first two Muslim women, elected to the United States Congress.

Omar personifies the Red-Green Axis: an ideological and political combination of Marxism-Leninism and Islamism.

A look at Omar’s upbringing is a key to identifying her extremism, and where she wants to take the country that took in her and her family.
Family beholden to Communist-Islamist Somalia dictator

Omar spent the first ten years of her life as a member of a family that owed its livelihood to the regime of Mohammed Siad Barre. Her family is described as “civil servants and educators” – all dependent on the regime and executing its orders.

Her father was a “teacher trainer.” Omar has never explained exactly what a “teacher trainer” in Somalia was or did in the Siad Barre government.

A teacher trainer in any revolutionary communist regime is the political commissar who trains teachers on how to indoctrinate children.
Linda Sarsour whitewashes Rep. Ilhan Omar's antisemitism - StandWithUS
Women's March co-chair and BDS supporter Linda Sarsour whitewashed Rep. Ilhan Omar's antisemitism in a video released on Thursday by StandWithUS, a right-wing Israel advocacy group.

"But what has happened often from White Jews when they call you call an antisemite, is they look at Muslim women from an orientalist trope, that we are inherently antisemitic because we are Muslims, right?" Sarsour ranted in a speech as she was talking about Omar and her comments that many Jewish groups have called antisemitic.

"It's a stereotype that has been used often against the Muslim community. That we are antisemitic until proven otherwise. That we are guilty until proven innocent. It's not okay."

Sarsour also excused Omar's antisemitic comments because Omar is Somalian-born, and wouldn't have known better.

"She didn't know nothing in Somalia, about no antisemitism. This is something she is learning along the way now that she is a legislator."

It is not clear when the video of Sarsour as taken.

When StandWithUs posted the video it wrote, "Is anyone even surprised?"




Charging anti-Semitism makes you a racist
IN THE aftermath of the Christchurch terror attack a new phenomenon has emerged. According to the Left, and their fellow Islamist travellers, challenging anti-Semitism is now a form of ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘racism’.

While attending a vigil in New York for the victims of the Christchurch massacre, a pregnant Chelsea Clinton was hectored by activists who accused her of causing the attack and being part of a ‘bigoted, anti-Muslim mob’. Clinton’s crime was to call out Representative Ilhan Omar on her anti-Semitism. Being black and Muslim does not give Omar the right to spread her toxic anti-Semitism. But in the peculiar hierarchy of victimhood those who are the victimisers are now portrayed as victims.

Similar antics are afoot this side of the pond. Ongoing evidence shows that the Labour party is institutionally, and probably irreversibly, anti-Semitic. There can be no refutation, even for those who insist on the myth that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.

Labour members are obsessed with the Palestinians. They have fallen for the false narrative that all Jews are white and Palestinians people of colour and so have automatically granted them victimhood status, and Jews the status of racists. Racism is the buzzword of our time. Those that declare themselves anti-racist – even if the truth shows this to be false – think this imbues them with an invisible cloak of protection against accusations of anti-Semitism. But it doesn’t.

During last month Labour suspended Asa Winstanley and expelled Jackie Walker. Both anti-Semites, and their supporters, have railed against these decisions with accusations of Islamophobia and racism, perfectly illustrating this new trend.

Winstanley is a prominent blogger for a website called Electronic Intifada which peddles anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and blood libels against Israel. True to form, Jeremy Corbyn found himself sharing a platform with Winstanley at yet another dreary ‘I hate Israel’ gathering.
Corbyn Urged West to Confront “Zionist Lobby” Over Palestinian Blood Libel Cleric’s Ban From Britain
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called on the West to confront “the Zionist lobby” in an article published in July 2011, following the arrest of Palestinian hate preacher Sheikh Raed Salah, who heads the Hamas-aligned Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel.

In a 2011 article for the far-left Morning Star, Corbyn attacked the media for promoting “hysteria” about Salah, saying it was “time that Western governments stood up to the Zionist lobby which seems to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.”

It continues: “[Raed Salah] wishes to remain here long enough to fight for his name. The sadness is that his is a voice of Palestinian people that needs to be heard.”

By the time Corbyn was writing, Salah had been accused of spreading the anti-Semitic blood libel that Jews drink the blood of children during a speech in East Jerusalem in February 2007.

In 2012, Corbyn invited Salah for tea in parliament and described the hate preacher as “a very honoured citizen” whose “voice must be heard.” Saleh was found by a British court to have used the blood libel and was excluded from Britain because of concerns over his “virulent anti-Semitism.”
CORBYN KNOWINGLY TRIED TO HIDE TERRORIST WREATH-LAYING TRIP
To the surprise of many, Corbyn remarkably escaped punishment for failing to declare his 2014 trip to Tunisia to lay a wreath for terrorists responsible for the Munich massacre after telling the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards that his trip had only cost £656 – £4 under the £660 threshold for declaring trips. Convenient…

After a much deeper investigation into the evidence Corbyn provided to the PCS, Guido can reveal that Corbyn himself was aware of the threshold (although he got the number wrong) and knowingly tried to avoid exceeding it. Corbyn sent an email, apparently to his office staff, raising his concerns that the organisers “keep it cheap” to avoid him having to declare it and refer to it in debates in Parliament:
CORBYN’S OWN EVIDENCE SHOWS HIM COOKING THE BOOKS OVER TERRORIST WREATH-LAYING TRIP
When challenged over the discrepancies by the investigators, Corbyn’s response was to suggest that the tickets might have been cheaper because they were return tickets or that the Tunisian Government might have got discounts. This is not a few quid we’re talking about, it’s over a £300 difference. Given his clear concern about keeping the trip below the limit these excuses look flimsy at best, cynical at worst…

Worse for Corbyn, it appears as if he misunderstood the donation limit, which for visits to non-UK destinations where even just some of the costs are covered by external organisations or individuals is just £300. Less than half the the £660 Corbyn thought was the limit…

As it appears that his trip was funded by the Council on for European Palestinian Relations, and the conference as a whole was funded by the Government of Tunisia, it seems all but certain that the £300 limit applies. Corbyn’s team seemingly went to huge lengths to avoid declarations but they did so for the wrong number!

Corbyn wasn’t the only UK politician on the trip, his regular travel buddy Tory Lord Sheikh also went along. Perhaps the Parliamentary authorities should see if Lord Sheikh has been more assiduous with his record keeping and can provide something a little bit more concrete to compare Corbyn’s numbers to?
Columbia U professor says Israel is almost identical to Islamic State
A Columbia University professor wrote on Facebook that the only difference between Israel and the Islamic State, is that Zionist columnists defend the Jewish state’s “terrorist cause.”

Hamid Dabashi, a professor in the university’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, wrote this last week, triggering an outcry by pro-Israel students.

The “murderous thugs” of the jihadist group “conquered parts of Syria and declared a ‘caliphate,’” Dabashi wrote. “Their ISRAELI counterparts meanwhile conquered parts of Syria and declared it part of their Zionist settler colony.”

He added: “The only difference: ISIS does not have a platoon of clean shaven and well coiffured [sic] columnists at the New York Times propagating the cause of the terrorist outfit as the Zionists columnists do on a regular basis.”
Israel Apartheid Week flyer at Columbia U. depicts IDF soldier with horns
Students Supporting Israel at Columbia University is calling on the public to reach out to the office of the president of Columbia University and take a stance against what the organization is calling “blatant antisemitism from the dark ages of Europe” on campus.

Earlier this week, Students for Justice in Palestine, Columbia University Apartheid Divest and Jewish Voice for Peace disseminated a flyer around campus depicting an Israeli soldier with horns on his head to help promote Israel Apartheid Week.

The same image is being used to promote the week on Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine’s Facebook event page.

SSI discovered the flyer and shared it on its Facebook page with the following message:

“While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a profoundly complex situation which can harbor intense emotions from the victims of both sides, such a disgusting and cheap act of portraying Jewish soldiers with physical deformities is downright abhorrent and antisemitic and must be condemned by Columbia University.”

In Latest Legal Blow to BDS, Spanish Judge Rules City’s Cancellation of Israeli Festival Violated Constitutional Rights
A Spanish court ruled that a city council that nixed an Israeli film festival due to its support of boycotts of the Jewish state had violated four fundamental rights enshrined in the Spanish constitution.

The judicial condemnation came after the City Council of Cadiz, a port town in southwestern Spain, unexpectedly canceled the Israeli Film Cycle in 2017, which was organized in collaboration with the Israeli Embassy in Madrid and set to take place in a municipal building. According to an email authored by the city’s councilor for culture, Eva Tubรญo, and cited in the ruling, the cancellation was linked to the city’s “Space Free of Israeli Apartheid” pledge — a measure adopted by the council’s Local Government Board in 2016 in support of the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.

The cancellation — executed under the authority of Jose Maria “Kichi” Gonzalez, the mayor of Cadiz and a member of the far-left Podemos party — was denounced as an “unequivocally antisemitic” demonstration by the Madrid-based rights group ACOM, which took legal action against the city council.

In a March 22 judgement, Judge Carmen Beardo of the No. 1 Administrative – Contentious Court of Cadiz found that the council behaved in a manner that infringed on “the free development of freedom of expression and teaching,” as well as “the right not to be discriminated against for their opinion,” El Mundo reported.
Cleveland Clinic Resident Fired for Online Antisemitism Rejected From Another Job
A former Cleveland Clinic medical resident fired for making antisemitic remarks online, such as tweeting in 2012 that “ill purposely give all the yahood the wrong meds,” had a residency offer recently revoked due to her antisemitic past.

On Monday, Kern Medical in California released a statement that as of March 15, they had notified Dr. Lara Kollab “that her position as a Post-Graduate-Year 1 resident in the Internal Medicine Residency Program has been withdrawn effective immediately.”

“Kern Medical has determined that Dr. Lara Kollab breached her Match Participant Agreement when she submitted information that was false, misleading, and incomplete to Kern Medical during the interview and match process,” they continued.

Kollab studied at Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in New York and was accepted at the Cleveland Clinic as a resident.

“After repeated failed diplomacy, our aim is to defeat the Zionist state through force,” Kollab tweeted in December 2012 in response to a tweet that said “Peace won’t come by killing every Zionist. There has to be diplomacy.”

“Khalid stop starting fala7i vs madani [peasant vs civilized] wars on twitter! roo7o [go] fight with yahood [Jews] instead. Yallah,” Kollab tweeted in March 2013.
Accountant fired after attacking an Orthodox Jew with MAGA hat
A California woman verbally abused an Orthodox Jew wearing a Make America Great Again hat in a Palo Alto Starbucks, later posting his picture and abrasive comments about him on social media. Her posts and the political furor which ensued went viral. Mansey lost her job as an accountant as a result and reportedly received death threats, according to the Palo Alto Weekly.

Palo Alto resident Rebecca Parker Mankey, spotted the 74-year-old man in Starbucks and immediately began screaming at him, calling him a "hater of brown people" and "Nazi scum" and tried to recruit other Starbucks customers and employees to berate him as well. No one joined her but no one defended him from Mankey's vitriol either.

Mankey even trailed after the man to the parking lot when he left the store, continuing to scream, curse and criticize him, telling him that she was going to publicize his personal information so other people could shame him as well.

Mankey went home and posted pictures of the man on social media, asking her Facebook and Twitter followers to help find him. “I am going to publicly shame him in town and try to get him fired and kicked out of every club he is in,” she wrote on Twitter. "I am going to go to his house, march up and down carrying a sign that says he hates black people. I am going to organize protests where he works to make him feel as unsafe as he made every brown person he met today." (h/t MtTB)




Breakfast Television Whitewashes Palestinian Terror
Give me a break, Breakfast Television.

Today, a Palestinian terrorist armed with a knife tried to stab an Israeli civilian who in self defense shot the terrorist dead, and yet, Breakfast Television’s reporting tacitly implied that the terrorist was the victim.

BT headlined the report: “One man shot and killed in the West Bank”.

BT’s anchor led her report by emphasizing and tacitly drawing viewer sympathy to how “A Palestinian has been killed and another seriously injured according to the Israeli military.” The anchor then went on to state that the Israel Defense Forces claim he tried to stab an Israeli resident, but this claim gets discounted and doubt is cast when the anchor claims that “Palestinian officials say they want to see surveillance footage to verify the claims”.
Oklahoma City vandal caught in the act
Police have a suspect in a spree of anti-Semitic and racist graffiti in Oklahoma City and the neighboring city of Norman.

A woman was caught on surveillance video painting white supremacist, racist and anti-Semitic graffiti on the Oklahoma Democratic Party headquarters in Oklahoma City. She is the main suspect in new vandalism in Norman.

Three locations in Norman, located about 20 miles from Oklahoma City, were vandalized with swastikas, ethnic slurs, and other racist graffiti on Tuesday night, according to local reports. The Firehouse Art Center, McKinley Elementary, and the Cleveland County Democratic Party Headquarters were all defaced, the Norman Transcript reported.

The epithets include “Gas the Jews,” the word “Jewess” painted in red on a statue that had swastikas painted over its eyes, and “hang n***er kids,” all decorated with swastikas. The graffiti also made violent threats against prominent Jewish Americans such as academic Barbara Spectre and political commentator Bill Kristol.

Last week graffiti was scrawled in Oklahoma City on a building that is also home to state agencies, non-profit groups and businesses. The phrases included “Welcome to Germany,” “Trump hates Israel,” ”Gas the Jews,” and “The Goyim know,” as well as the number sequence 1488, which is a reference to Adolf Hitler.
‘Jews worship the devil’ flyers found on cars in California
Antisemitic flyers were found in mailboxes and on the windshields of cars parked in a neighborhood near the University of California, Santa Barbara, according to a report by the Jewish Journal.

UCSB student senator Gabriella Shofet posted a picture of one of the flyers to her Facebook page on March 31, the day they were discovered, which reads: “Jews worship the Devil. Jews RAPE KIDS. The Holocaust is a LIE.”

She then posted her own comments: “This is what antisemitism looks like. In 2019. A block away from my apartment. My heart aches.”

Students Supporting Israel (SSI) at UCSB then shared Shofet’s post on its Facebook page, writing: “Posted on windshields across Del Playa in Isla Vista. It’s 2019 and anti-Semitism is alive, even in our communities.”
Beijing airport selects Israeli radar technology to protect runway
Beijing Capital International Airport, the second busiest airport in the world, has selected Rosh Ha’ayin-based Xsight Systems’ foreign object debris (FOD) detection solution to improve runway safety.

RunWize, which will be installed at the airport’s eastern runway, continuously monitors and detects any forms of debris or other hazards that could interfere with runway operations, increasing safety and boosting runway capacity by facilitating rapid detection and removal of debris.

Last year, more than 100 million passengers traveled through Beijing Capital International Airport, a number that was only surpassed by Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

Debris and other potential threats on runways, such as bird strikes, cost the global aviation industry an estimated $12 billion per year.

Boston Logan International Airport, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Ben-Gurion Airport and Bangkok Suvarnabhumi International Airport have all installed Xsight Systems’ technology. The Defense Ministry has also acquired the RunWize system to install at Israel Air Force bases.

“We are proud to bring our industry-leading technology to Beijing Capital International Airport,” said Xsight Systems CEO Alex Koren.

“This important achievement serves as a seal of approval of Xsight’s reputation worldwide. We are very pleased that China’s biggest airport has chosen to keep safety as a top priority.”
Israeli soccer star becomes world's oldest player, breaks Guinness record
Darting between the goal posts with his striking white hair, 73-year-old Israeli Isaak Hayik set a new world record on Friday as the oldest person to play in a professional soccer match.

Hayik, who celebrates his 74th birthday next week, broke the record after playing as a goalkeeper in an afternoon game with Israel's Ironi Or Yehuda soccer club.

The Iraqi-born keeper was officially recognized in an award ceremony attended by representatives from the Guinness World Record organization.

"I'm ready for another game," said Hayik, who made some good saves in the team's 5-1 defeat to Maccabi Ramat Gan.

"This is not only a source of pride for me but also to Israeli sports in general," added Hayik, who moved to Israel when he was four years old.

The previous record was held by Robert Carmona of Uruguay, who in 2015 played a professional match with Uruguay's Pan de Azucar at the age of 53, an official adjudicator for Guinness World Records said.
The Israeli Army Unit that Recruits Teens with Autism
For eight hours a day, E., 21, sits in front of multiple computer screens, scanning high-resolution satellite images for suspicious objects or movements. As a decoder of Israel’s complex and often heavily civilian battlegrounds, he’s been critical in preventing the loss of life of soldiers on the ground in several different situations, his officers say.

For many people, combing through each millimeter of the same location from various angles would be tedious work—but E., who is on the autism spectrum, describes the job as relaxing, “like a hobby.”

E. (he requested his full name be withheld to comply with army protocol) is a corporal in the Israel Defense Force’s “Visual Intelligence Division,” otherwise known as Unit 9900, which counts dozens of Israelis on the autism spectrum among its members.

The relationship is a mutually beneficial one. For these young people, the unit is an opportunity to participate in a part of Israeli life that might otherwise be closed to them. And for the military, it’s an opportunity to harness the unique skill sets that often come with autism: extraordinary capacities for visual thinking and attention to detail, both of which lend themselves well to the highly specialized task of aerial analysis.
With Beresheet, Israel becomes 7th country to achieve lunar orbit
Engineers confirmed early Friday morning that the Beresheet spacecraft was successfully captured by lunar gravity during a tricky maneuver the night before, making Israel the seventh country in the world to successfully send objects into orbit around the moon.

The United States, Russia (as the USSR), Japan, China, the European Space Agency and India have all made visits to the moon via probes, though only the US, Russia and China have successfully landed on the moon; other probes lost control and crashed into the surface.

If Israel successfully lands as planned on April 11, it will also be the first time that a privately financed venture has landed there.

Early on Friday morning, Beresheet sent back photos, one taken at a distance of just 470 kilometers (290 miles) above the moon’s surface.

The NIS 370-million ($100-million) spacecraft is a joint venture between the Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries, funded almost entirely by private donations from well-known Jewish philanthropists.

On Thursday, Beresheet’s engineers executed the most complicated maneuver yet, a perfectly choreographed space hop allowing the car-sized spacecraft to jump from an orbit around Earth to one around the moon.

How do you fly a spaceship on Shabbat?
It's Shabbat eve for the Beresheet lunar lander, Israel’s first spacecraft, which is on track to land on the moon on April 11. How will the first Jewish spacecraft be operated on Shabbat without violating Jewish law?

Arutz Sheva interviewed staff members of Beresheet who are involved in the research, consultation and technology needed to minimize the violation of Shabbat while simultaneously ensuring the continued safety of the spacecraft

According to Beresheet system engineer, Ariel Gomez, the staff consulted their advisor on Jewish law, Rabbi Shraga Dahan, on how to operate the Beresheet on Shabbat. Furthermore, all their Shabbat procedures to maintain Beresheet have been approved by the chief rabbi of Israel.

"The head of staff of Beresheet is a Chabad chassid and avoiding the violation of Shabbat is very important to him," Gomez said. "The launch of Beresheet itself was pushed back to Thursday so it wouldn't take place on Shabbat. In fact, in our contract with the American company, there's a clause that the launch won't take place on Shabbat."

"The chief of staff wants to connect all sectors of the Jewish people. We see Beresheet's mission as a mission of the entire Jewish people and therefore it's very important to us that there won't be any procedures on Shabbat there were not approved by the chief rabbi. We used technological innovations designed for us by Machon Lev (Jerusalem College of Technology) and approved by the chief rabbi. Machon Lev provided us with keyboards and mice which can be operated through a Grama (an indirect action which involves a less serious violation of Shabbat). Additionally, we instructed the staff to do only what is strictly necessary to ensure the safety of Beresheet on Shabbat and no more."


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