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Saturday, February 22, 2020

02/22 Links: Antisemitic Propaganda Channel ‘TruNews’ Gets Booted by YouTube; UK to review funds for Palestinian schools using textbooks encouraging violence

From Ian:
Lurid Antisemitic Propaganda Channel ‘TruNews’ Gets Booted by YouTube
A far-right, viciously antisemitic website that made headlines last November when it was revealed to have received media accreditation from the White House has been kicked off the YouTube platform.

TruNews, founded by Pastor Rick Wiles, was permanently banned from YouTube on Thursday, after repeatedly violating the website’s rules regarding hate speech.

US Jewish leaders welcomed the ban on the outlet, which actively promotes a diet of Holocaust denial and antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Jonathan Greenblatt — CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — said on Twitter that he hoped other social media platforms would follow YouTube’s example by removing TruNews-related accounts.

Wiles infamously let rip against what he called a “Jew coup” on his talk show last November, as impeachment proceedings against US President Donald Trump were launched in Congress.

Wiles raved: “That’s the way the Jews work, they are deceivers, they plot, they lie, they do whatever they have to do to accomplish their political agenda.”

He continued: “People are going to be forced, possibly by this Christmas, to take a stand because of this Jew coup in the United States. There will be a purge. That’s the next thing that happens when Jews take over a country, they kill millions of Christians.”

The White House has consistently denied that it had provided TruNews with press credentials.
UK to review funds for Palestinian schools using textbooks encouraging violence
British officials have pledged to urgently review the tens of millions of dollars in aid the UK provides to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, after an investigative report found that a majority of the funds have been going to schools in the West Bank and Gaza Strip which use textbooks that incite violence against Israelis.

According to a Friday report in the UK-based Daily Mail, the Department for International Development and its secretary, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, vowed to raise the issue with the Palestinian Authority, adding that London was working to carry out an independent review of the Palestinian textbooks.

“The UK Government has a zero tolerance approach toward incitement to violence,” a spokesman for the department told the Daily Mail.

The Daily Mail report included several examples of alleged incitement uncovered in textbooks used at schools funded by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). In one math textbook for nine-year-olds, students are asked to add up the number of martyrs from Palestinian uprisings, accompanied with images of their funerals. In another, 11-year-olds are taught Newton’s Second Law of Physics with a depiction of a boy pointing a slingshot at Israeli soldiers.

Other photos showed Palestinians using slingshots against Israeli forces and quizzed students on their potential use and effectiveness, as well as precautions to employ while using them.

Textbooks were found to praise Palestinian “martyrs,” including Dalal al-Mughrabi, who led the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre during which Palestinian terrorists hijacked a bus and murdered 38 Israelis.

The materials revealed by the Daily Mail appeared to have been provided to the paper by the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based right-wing think tank that was quoted in the article and which has released a report of its own calling for funding to UNRWA to be reconsidered.

The UK has given some $427 million in aid to UNRWA over the past five years with another $84 million pledged for the coming year. Roughly 62 percent of that funding goes to schools in the Palestinian territories, which could be using such textbooks.

Kuwait Airways under scrutiny after refusal to fly Israeli from London Heathrow
The Lawfare Project has filed a new complaint again Kuwait Airways for continued discrimination after Orna Schneider, an Israeli woman, was barred from traveling from London Heathrow to Bangkok after she presented her Israeli passport to airline staff.

Kuwait is one of many countries that either do not recognize Israeli passports, passports with Israeli visas or do not allow Israelis to visit there. The countries include Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, among others.

Though Kuwait Airways, which is the national airline carrier of the Gulf state, is outside of the their country's jurisdiction at London Heathrow traveling to Bangkok, the airline extended their authority and carried out the government's wishes by turning Schneider away from her flight.

"At this point, it is clear that Kuwait Airways’ hate for Israelis supersedes their desire to stay in business. If they simply end their illegal boycott of Israeli passengers, they’d be free to fly their planes wherever they want. [This will continue] as long as Kuwait enforces this discriminatory policy, in clear violation of national and international anti-discrimination laws," said Executive Director of the Lawfare Project Brooke Goldstein.

The Lawfare Project has been working since 2017 to hold Kuwait Airways accountable for breaching United States and international anti-discrimination laws. Due to this action, Kuwait Airways no longer runs inter-European flights or routes to JFK, according to the Lawfare Project.

“This is about an institutional policy of discrimination against a protected group under the provisions of the Equality Act 2010. If a carrier refused to carry any other minority group in the UK they would be closed down without hesitation. It is wholly unacceptable that the prejudices and discriminatory practices from a foreign country should be imported into the UK," said Robert Festenstein, Principal at RHF Solicitors and legal counsel on the case.



9 standouts as US Holocaust Museum shares New Yorkers’ artifacts from WWII
A hand-drawn portrait of a young man in a French internment camp. A photo of a Jewish girl who survived the Holocaust by hiding in a monastery. A letter detailing efforts to improve life for Jews in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp.

These are just a few of the 250 artifacts that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has collected recently through a drive launched last month — around the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz — to collect Holocaust-era artifacts from New Yorkers.

Most of the objects, including photographs, letters, documents, drawings and books, were donated by families of Holocaust survivors.

Fred Wasserman, the acquisitions curator for the museum’s New York office, described collecting the materials as “a race against time,” since the population of Holocaust survivors is aging and many have already died.

“It really is a matter of rescuing the evidence while we still can so that we can preserve this for future generations,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The Washington, DC-based museum decided to focus on New York because the city and surrounding area is home to a large population of Holocaust survivors and their descendants. The artifacts will join the museum’s vast collection and many will be digitized.

Here are nine standout artifacts collected through the project:

Little known Philippines’ WWII rescue of Jews was capped by US interference
In the late 1930s, Philippines president Manuel Quezon welcomed over 1,200 Jews from Germany and Austria into an unlikely haven in the Pacific archipelago. With his Open Doors policy, even as most nations closed their doors to Jewish refugees, these Jews — who came to be known as “Manilaners” — escaped Hitler’s growing menace and reached the Philippine capital.

Were it not for interference by the United States government, however, there could have been thousands more rescued Jews.

Philippine ambassador to Israel Neal Imperial told The Times of Israel via telephone that while Quezon had wanted to bring tens of thousands of Jews to the Philippines and permanently settle them on the island of Mindanao, his efforts were stymied by the US government, who limited him to accept 1,000 Jews a year, over a 10 year period.

The little-known rescue was commemorated on January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, at the United Nations in New York, as well as at the Philippine embassy’s recently inaugurated cultural center in Tel Aviv, the Balai Quezon. The organizers of both events included Philippine diplomatic missions and B’nai B’rith.

Jews rescued by Quezon contributed their perspectives — among them, Max Weissler in Israel and Ralph Preiss in New York. Weissler recently celebrated his 90th birthday; Preiss will turn 90 later this year.

In a phone conversation with The Times of Israel, Weissler called the Open Doors narrative “something that must be remembered.”

A new feature film, “Quezon’s Game,” may help cement the initiative’s place in history. Tel Aviv attendees got a sneak-peek at clips from the film, which is directed by Philippine-based Jewish filmmaker Matthew Rosen, who was on hand for the showing. They also saw the 2020 documentary, “The Last Manilaners,” directed by Nico Hernandez. Guests at the UN watched clips from a 2012 documentary by Filipino filmmaker Noel Izon, “An Open Door: Jewish Rescue in the Philippines.”

The films build upon past remembrance efforts, such as Manilaner Frank Ephraim’s book, “Escape to Manila.”
A Man in Full
Two years before he was elected president, Senator John F. Kennedy gave a speech at Loyola College in Maryland that concluded with the soaring rhetoric of a bygone era: “Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer.” Though Kennedy’s remarks may seem hopelessly naive to a generation that treats politics as a blood sport, my good friend and mentor Morris Abram, who hailed from the small Georgia town of Fitzgerald, actually lived much of his life in the public eye adhering to Kennedy’s exhortation.

In this splendid new biography, David Lowe (who retired as vice president for government relations and public affairs for the National Endowment for Democracy) tells the life story of a now-forgotten man who served as an adviser to Democratic and Republican presidents and led several major Jewish organizations. Though he began his political life on the left and concluded it on the right, Morris Abram was singularly guided by a passion to advance civil rights at home and human rights abroad. And in his pursuit of those ideals, he aligned himself with whatever political party lived up to his principles.

Though he later became an active supporter of the State of Israel, in his youth he was anti-Zionist. He also had no interest in joining a Jewish fraternity when he entered the University of Georgia in 1934 and recalled in later years that he was “far too proud to assimilate with Gentiles” and “‘too anti-Semitic’ to associate with exclusionary Jews.” Lowe reveals that when Abram was invited to join a Jewish fraternity, he responded that “he was personally opposed to groups that were segregated by race or religion.” That sentiment, vehemently anti-exclusionary and color-blind, became familiar to me in the course of the countless conversations I had with Morris about race relations. And he regularly invoked Martin Luther King Jr.’s encomium that we should not judge people “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

After attending law school at the University of Chicago and serving in the Air Force, Abram moved to England for two years of study at Oxford. Then, during the summer of 1948, he served on the staff of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor of Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg. This experience seared in him the desire to devote his life to fighting for civil rights at home and human rights across the globe. And that is what he did. Beginning in 1949, he commenced what would turn out to be a 14-year battle to overturn a Georgia electoral rule called the county unit system, which gave disproportionate weight to the votes of small rural counties instead of the far more populous urban areas in the state. This legal battle climaxed in an argument before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1963 in which Abram, joined by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, persuaded the Court to strike down the Georgia system of voting. As Justice William Douglas wrote in his opinion for the Court, “the concept of political equality…can mean only one thing—one person, one vote.”

Abram was also at the vanguard of human-rights activism. In the early 1960s, while serving on a UN subcommittee on human-rights issues, Abram was the lead drafter of an international convention that called for the elimination of all forms of racial and religious discrimination. Though he fought valiantly to include anti-Semitism in the anti-racism law, he was stymied by the Soviets, a prelude to his later work on behalf of Soviet Jewry. Then in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Abram U.S. representative to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva. In that role, he took the lead in advocating for the appointment of a UN high commissioner on human rights, a campaign he finally won nearly 30 years later, in 1993. Upon his retirement from government service in 1993, Abram founded a Geneva-based nongovernmental organization called UN Watch that to this day adheres to his founding vision of “monitoring the performance of the United Nations by the yardstick of its own charter.”
Poland’s forgotten civil strife and the struggle for Jewish statehood
Yad Vashem apologized for showing a video to world leaders at the Fifth World Holocaust Forum that neglected to mention the Soviet Union’s occupation of Polish territory in 1939

Interwar Polish governments indeed had no love lost for Jews, of whom they considered that Poland had too many. They were pressed to leave with a range of discriminatory measures, which propelled the Fourth Aliyah to Mandatory Palestine in the mid-1920s. When the Nazis expelled Jews with Polish citizenship from Germany, Poland refused to take them in and they were stranded at the border.

In its prewar effort to get rid of Jews, Poland found common cause with Zionist movements, especially the Revisionist youth movement Betar and paramilitary organization, the Irgun.

Their emissary, Avraham “Yair” Stern, found willing support in Warsaw for a plan to recruit a Jewish army to capture Palestine from the British; the Polish Army provided officer-instructors for training camps and sold an arsenal of weapons, which was stranded in port by the outbreak of war in September 1939.

In August, Joseph Stalin – whom Putin admires and seeks to emulate – had concluded the non-aggression treaty with Adolf Hitler dividing Poland and other eastern European countries between them. Two weeks later, Germany implemented it by invading Poland, which drew the latter’s allies, Britain and France, into the war. Stalin followed suit. A secure eastern front facilitated Hitler’s Blitzkrieg across western Europe. Unlike the other nations he subjugated, in Poland, no pretense was made of installing a puppet regime and it was ruled directly by a German General government.

Stalin likewise disavowed recognition of a Polish state, including the London-based government-in-exile. He annexed the Soviet-occupied eastern part of Poland and proceeded to deport hundreds of thousands into the Soviet interior, in addition to the Polish soldiers taken as prisoners of war. One of the latter was Gen. Wladyslaw Anders, who has been lionized as a national hero in present-day Poland where his American daughter, an honorary senator, is leading the international promotion of its own war narrative. (How the communists tried to poison Polish-Jewish relations in March 1968)




Daniel Pipes: Tel Aviv's mayor vs. the Middle East Forum
For three years, the Middle East Forum has been engaged in a campaign to wean Americans and Israelis off the deceptive charms of the "peace process" which has, in fact, produced overwhelmingly malign results. Instead, we argue for an Israeli victory and a commensurate Palestinian defeat.

We constantly seek out new ways to bring this argument to the public's notice, especially in Israel. Although the topic is deadly serious, we've had some fun in the process. Israel Victory Project attention-getting tactics have included posters of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in a swimsuit thanking Israel for all the money it sends his organization; a 10-meter tall rubber chicken posed in front of the Israeli parliament and the Ministry of Defense; and switching street signs in Tel Aviv (e.g., from Ben-Gurion Street to Yasser Arafat Boulevard).

In this spirit, as the election season heats up ahead of the national vote on March 2, we again sought a creative way to stimulate interest in Israel Victory. We came up with a provocative graphic showing blindfolded Palestinian Authority and Hamas leaders, Mahmoud Abbas and Haniyeh, photo-shopped against a battlefield scene. Abbas' hands are raised high while Haniyeh's hold a white flag. The graphic carries a pungent slogan in Hebrew, "Peace can ONLY be made with defeated enemies."

To stimulate curiosity, we did not put our name on the posters. The goal, as explained by Nave Dromi, head of the Middle East Forum-Israel office, was to "to spark public discussion about the crying need to change the thinking that characterizes the 'peace camp'."

This graphic went up on billboards at five prominent spots in Tel Aviv on Feb. 13.

On Feb. 14, the mayor of Tel Aviv, Ron Huldai, responded by denouncing the signs as Nazi-like incitements to murder. A municipality flack, Eytan Schwartz, actually compared the two depicted monsters to Jewish children in the Holocaust. Well no, the billboards were incitements to victory, not to murder; surrendering prisoners being blindfolded is common the world around. Both Israelis (in Syria) and Americans (in Iran) have experienced this sort of treatment.
Rubin Report: US Ambassador: Proof That Trump’s Style Is Working (Pt.3)| Richard Grenell
Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report talks to Richard Grenell (US Ambassador to Germany) about what it’s like to be the US Ambassador to Germany under President Trump. Richard details what he calls the Trump doctrine to foreign policy and whether or not it’s effective. He gives numerous examples of international policies that Barack Obama could not get accomplished that Trump and his negotiation skills have successfully gotten done. Richard also describes how an America first policy benefits us, but other nations as well. All this and more.


France and Germany condemn Israeli building plans
France and Germany both condemned Israel on Friday following Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s announcement of new construction in Jerusalem.

“We are deeply concerned about the Israeli announcement to build 5,000 housing units in Israeli settlements in occupied East Jerusalem. This would further separate occupied East Jerusalem from the West Bank and undermine possibility of a Palestinian state,” the German Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

“We are once again calling on the Israeli government to abandon plans to build residential units in Har Homa and Givat Hamatos in occupied East Jerusalem and to stop the construction of settlements in the occupied territories that violate international law,” it added.

The French Foreign Ministry issued a similar statement, writing, “France condemns the announcements regarding the construction of several thousand housing units in the settlements of Har Homa and Givat Hamatos, in East Jerusalem. The expansion of these two settlements directly undermines the viability of a future Palestinian state, as the European Union has reiterated on several occasions.”

“All forms of settlement activity are illegal under international law and challenge the two-state solution on the ground. France urges the Israeli authorities to reconsider these decisions and to refrain from any unilateral measures,” it said.

“It reaffirms that the two-state solution, with both states living in peace and security within secure, recognized borders and with Jerusalem as the capital of both states, is the only way to achieve a just and lasting peace in the region. It stands ready to support any effort in this direction based on agreed international parameters and coming about through negotiations between the parties,” concluded the statement.

Netanyahu made the announcement on Thursday together with Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion. The construction approved includes 3,000 housing units in Jerusalem's Givat Hamatos and 2,200 housing units in the city's Har Homa neighborhood.


Palestinian tries to stab cops in Jerusalem Old City terror attack, is shot dead
A Palestinian man in Jerusalem’s Old City tried to stab policemen on Saturday in an attempted terror attack before he was shot dead by officers.

Police said the assailant was spotted with a knife in his hand by Border Police officers at the Lion’s Gate as he ran to carry out an attack.

“[The officers] called on him to stop and he turned around toward them with the aim of harming them. The police responded quickly while firing toward him, neutralizing him and preventing harm,” a statement from police said. He died soon after, TV reports said.

The suspect was named by Channel 13 news as 33-year-old Maher Ibrahim Za’atara of East Jerusalem’s Jabel Mukaber neighborhood.

Video reportedly from the scene showed the assailant running with the knife before the attack, and, in a separate clip, lying on the ground as police secured the area around the Lion’s Gate.

Police said a female passerby was lightly hurt in the leg during the attack and taken to the hospital by the Magen David Adom ambulance service.

She was wounded in the leg by ricochet from a bulled fired by one of the police officers, the Kan public broadcaster reported.
Seth Frantzman: Absolute boredom in Iran on Election Day
Iran kept its voting booths open late on election day Friday. Officials claimed it was so more people could vote, claiming there were long lines. But videos showed few people voting. It appears that turnout was low and the government kept the polls open late to beg people to come. ISNA media in Iran noted that turnout looked to be only 20% or 12 million of the 60 million who could have voted. If that number ends up as the official tally, it will have been a disaster for the regime.

Even the few who did seem to vote looked like it was the most boring election they had ever taken part in. Media reports outside Iran claim that “hardliners,” the far-right conservatives, will perform well. Iran’s regime claims the interior ministry is safely guarding the votes that came in. Some Iranians mocked the election with posters of characters from Game of Thrones and even Snoop Dogg, illustrating the lack of choice they had to vote for.

Some people on social media claimed they had voted and were excited. But it was hard to confirm if they were real people or regime elements putting up English-language tweets to make the country seem like it had a major election. “The Iranian people really take the political system seriously and are eager to participate,” one woman tweeted. But in Shiraz, video showed no one voting at one polling station. Another person put up a video of a long line, saying it was people gathering to get clothes, while at the end of the video a deserted voting booth is shown. The people were apparently not there to vote.

While some called the elections “staged” or a “joke,” the Supreme Leader did set an example and voted early. Meanwhile in the Netherlands, Iranians protested outside the Iranian embassy. There have been calls to boycott from across Iranian exile communities in Europe. In Ahvaz and other areas the boycott seemed to work. In Yazd the officials kept the voting open until nine in the evening, hoping that a few people would turn up. “Empty voting booths,” “empty," were the tweets about voting that were placed online by those who oppose the regime. A video from the Kurdish region of Iran showed a courtyard outside of a government voting station with not one person voting.
Murder or mitzvah? ‘Hunters’ grapples with the morality of Jews killing Nazis
The show imagines an alternate history in which some of the thousands of Nazis and Nazi collaborators who made their way to the US after World War II maintained their Nazi identities rather than hiding them. (It’s Amazon’s second alternate Nazi history drama following “The Man in the High Castle.”) Simon Wiesenthal’s famous Nazi-hunting organization also was established in 1977, the year the show takes place.

But the series also draws from the graphic violent style of Quentin Tarantino — his 2009 film “Inglourious Basterds” is arguably the most famous in the Jews-killing-Nazis genre — as well as comic book culture. There are numerous comic book character jokes and references: At one point Lonny Flash, a member of the gang played by Josh Radnor, calls Jonah, who in fact works at a comic book store, a “real life f***ing Jew-perhero.”

Creator David Weil said that his first and main inspiration was his grandmother, who survived imprisonment in the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, and whom Weil said he used to see as a superhero while growing up in a Conservative Jewish family on Long Island.

“It is a love letter to my grandmother, it is a way to honor my birthright and my heritage and my Judaism, and it’s a way to shed light on hidden crimes and secrets,” Weil tells the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” an epic drama about Mossad agents who seek to retaliate against the Palestinians responsible for the “Munich Massacre” at the 1972 Olympics, was another influence looming large in Weil’s mind.

The show offers two arguments for the need for violent Jewish revenge — one is the biblical eye-for-an-eye means of paying back the Nazis for the suffering they caused. The show is full of flashbacks to scenes of chilling Nazi atrocities, such as a chess match that SS officers play involving real prisoners, who are forced to kill each other as the game progresses.
The real stories behind ‘Hunters,’ Al Pacino’s new Nazi-hunting Amazon series
Did Nazi hunters exist in 1970s America?

The answer to that is a little complicated — yes, in the decades after the Holocaust, Jewish and non-Jewish scholars and survivors worked to bring Nazis to justice. Some were American and some were European.

But “Hunters” exaggerates the drama of the hunt, so to speak.

The show’s Nazi-hunting squad is a decked up, action-ready group composed of an Army veteran (played by Louis Ozawa Changchien), movie star Lonny Flash (Josh Radnor), two weapons experts (Saul Rubinek and Carol Kane), a lockpicker (Tifanny Boone) and a British nun (Kate Mulvany).

Needless to say, the actual hunters they were based on were a less eclectic and glamorous group.

The real-life Nazi hunters also did not enjoy the Bruce Wayne-like obscurity that Pacino’s Offerman and his group of hunters did. Nor did they go around clandestinely torturing Nazis with horse dung (yes, this happens in the show) and murdering them, to the best of our knowledge.

But they did manage to uncover and bring to justice some Nazi war criminals.
Has J Street become US Jewry’s Democratic kingmaker on Israel?
By Jeremy Ben-Ami’s own admission, J Street was widely viewed as radical 10 years ago. Now, the Mideast advocacy group is one of the American left’s most influential organizations — if not the most influential — when it comes to Israel.

Case in point: Five of the Democrats running for president attended its annual conference last year, including former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who finished in the top two slots in the fraught and technologically challenged February 3 Iowa caucus and February 11 New Hampshire primary.

Other leading candidates, such as former vice president Joe Biden and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, addressed the confab via video.

None of these candidates attended the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) 2019 conference. It’s not clear how many will attend this year’s; a source with the pro-Israel lobby said it was still “finalizing” its speakers for the confab and would be announcing them over the few days.

Still, no other Israel-related gathering over the last year and a half has garnered as much attention from the 2020 Democrats. J Street, it appears, is playing an outsized role in setting the agenda on Middle East policy in this year’s Democratic primary.

As Ben-Ami explained in a recent interview with The Times of Israel, “We hold our conferences as a way to project political power.”




Auschwitz museum demands Amazon drop ‘Nazi propaganda’ books
The Auschwitz museum called Friday on Amazon owner Jeff Bezos to remove Nazi-era anti-Semitic children’s books from the online marketplace.

“Hateful, virulently antisemitic Nazi propaganda is available for sale not only on @AmazonUK,” the Auschwitz Memorial tweeted Friday on its official account.

“Books by authors like Julius Streicher can be found also on @amazon & @AmazonDE. Such books should be removed immediately,” it said in a post that also featured screen-grabs of the books for sale on the platform and tagged Bezos’s Twitter account.

Among them is an anti-Semitic children’s book titled “The Poisonous Mushroom” authored by Nazi party member Julius Streicher and originally published in 1938.

The book is offered on Amazon for sale in its original German under the title Der Giftpilz, as well as in English, French and Spanish.


The UK’s Holocaust Education Trust also called out Amazon for selling the Nazi books, writing on Twitter that “Nazi propaganda has no place on the electronic bookshelves of our country. We call on @AmazonUK to remove the Nazi propaganda it has on sale.”
German soccer teams to wear jerseys against hate, racism
The soccer teams in Germany’s third-division will wear special jerseys against hate, racism and discrimination this weekend following the racially motivated gun attack in Hanau and the racist abuse in the league a week before.

The German soccer federation said Friday that nearly all the division’s teams, the referees and children accompanying the players onto the field would wear shirts with the motto “red card for racism.”

There will also be a minute’s silence and flowers laid for the victims and families affected by the attack in Hanau, where nine people of foreign background were killed in a rampage by a German gunman.

“We stand together against anyone who attacks our values,” federation president Fritz Keller said, referring to the fan reaction when one Preußen Münster supporter directed monkey chants at Würzburger Kickers defender Leroy Kwadwo last Friday.

Münster fans shouted “Nazis out! Nazis out!” and forced the perpetrator to leave.
Israeli mobility app Moovit expands to 100 countries worldwide
Ness Ziona-made transportation app Moovit is continuing its global expansion and now provides its urban mobility service in a total of 100 countries, the company has announced.

Launched in 2011, the Moovit app and website assist individuals plan and navigate their way around urban areas, using all modes of available transport. The company says it has served over 720 million users in over 3,100 cities, spanning six continents, to date.

Moovit uses up to six billion anonymous data points daily, the company says, “to add to the world’s largest repository of transit and urban mobility data.”

In addition to its popular app, the company also provides analytics platforms to cities, transit authorities and businesses, enabling optimized planning and operations for residents and employees.

“Urban mobility is the lifeline to jobs, healthcare, and education, so we are so proud that in just a few years Moovit is now providing service to millions of users in 100 countries, helping them get from A to B with confidence and convenience,” said Moovit co-founder and CEO Nir Erez.
Tarantino reveals newest project: A Half-Israeli son
Quentin Tarantino, 56, and his wife, Israeli actress/model Daniella Pick, 36, officially became the proud parents of a baby boy on Saturday afternoon. This is after Pick gave birth in Ichilov hospital in Tel Aviv, according to a report from Pnai Plus magazine.

The couple announced the pregnancy last August, only nine months after the two were wed in a lavish Los Angeles wedding in November of 2018.
Last November it was revealed that the couple had begun renting an apartment an a lavish northern Tel Aviv neighborhood, fueling rumors of a possible permanent move by the couple from their current Beverly Hills residence.

“I have some short trips [back to the US] planned for the [Oscar] awards ceremony. And of course, we’ll be here for the birth and after.”

Tarantino discussed life in Israel in detail in an interview with Yediot Aharonot, last month, saying that “I love the country and the people are really nice, very nice to me and they seem excited that I’m here.”

After winning a Golden Globe for Best Screenplay last month, he thanked Pick in Hebrew, saying “I can’t have a conversation now, but I know many words in Hebrew.”

Tarantino said he birth of his baby will inspire him to learn more, saying “obviously, I’m going to learn. I don’t want my boy or girl to speak a language I can’t understand.”
Israel’s Netanyahu promises direct flights from Tel Aviv to Makkah
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to arrange direct flights between Tel Aviv and Makkah in Saudi Arabia to allow Muslim Palestinians living in Israel to perform Hajj and Umrah easily.

“We are working to introduce direct flights from Tel Aviv to Makkah for the benefit of Muslim pilgrims who intend to perform the Hajj,” Netanyahu said in a Facebook post which was later deleted.

The introduction of a direct link between Tel Aviv and Makkah has raised questions about the political and economic implications on Jordan.

For years, Palestinians living in Israel have travelled to Saudi Arabia via Jordan using temporary passports issued by Jordan specifically for this purpose, as Israeli passport holders are not allowed entry to Saudi Arabia.
In first, Israeli cycling team to compete in UAE race on Sunday
Israel’s national cycling team will for the first time compete in the 2020 UAE Tour, which begins on Sunday.

The squad named “Israel Start Up Nation” will join others around the world at the Middle East’s largest cycling event where competitors will ride 148 kilometers through all seven United Arab Emirates, from Dubai to Abu Dhabi.

“Competing in the UAE in the team uniform is an inspiring moment,” said Israeli cyclist Omer Goldstein in a statement. “Until recently, it would have seemed like an unrealistic dream.”

Goldstein added that he was pleasantly surprised by the warm reception his team was receiving in the UAE, saying that locals had asked the team decked in Blue and White to take selfies with them.

The effort to bring the Israeli team to the UAE was spearheaded by billionaire Sylvan Adams, who joined the team as co-owner in 2017 and was influential in bringing the Grand Tour Giro d’Italia race to the Jewish state last year.

“The participation in this race by our Israeli team in a Middle Eastern nation is emblematic of how cycling can be a force for diplomatic openness and progress,” Adams said in a statement. “It is not an exaggeration to suggest that sport can be a force for peace.”


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