Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: No Jews No News

Showing posts with label No Jews No News. Show all posts

Monday, September 19, 2022

A Palestinian's home will be demolished - but no human rights groups will care this time

Tamer Abu Bakra received a demolition notice for half of his already tiny 60-square-meter home.

But you won't hear a word about this from B'Tselem or ICAHD or HRW or Amnesty, who love to publicize when Palestinian homes are to be demolished.

Because this demolition notice came from Hamas.

Bakra put out an appeal on social media, saying the Khan Younis house "has been lived in by my father and my family since the Nakba, and it has been inherited from them to this day."

It had been burned down in 2020 and he has been rebuilding it himself.

Bakra said it is already too small to be called a "home."

Too bad he had the misfortune of building his house where no one would care if his home gets taken down.

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Protestors shut down Gaza UNRWA headquarters

This morning, angry protesters burned tires at the entrance of UNRWA headquarters in Gaza City, upset at the lack of compensation for the 2014 Gaza war.

As of this writing, no Western media has even mentioned this. The main UN agency that provides aid to Palestinians is shut down by Palestinians themselves, potentially affecting tens of thousands, but it doesn't fit the narrative so it doesn't get covered.

The last such protest in Gaza was in April. But other protests against UNRWA happen often, especially in Lebanon. And they are equally underrerported.

Notice the amount of security that UNRWA uses in Gaza. Heavy metal gates, with spikes on top, and barbed wire atop that.

This is to protect UNRWA from the people it serves!

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American Muslims rate the Palestinian issue as higher importance than genocides in China, Myanmar

CAIR, the Council of American Islamic Relations, released a poll of American Muslims ahead of the midterm elections.

The poll asked them, "What are the most important, Muslim-related, foreign policy issues to you in this election year?" They could choose as many topics as they wanted.

Here were the results:

Israeli occupation of Palestine 90.5%

Chinese Genocide of Uyghur Muslims 87.4%

Oppression of Muslims in India 80.8%

Burma Genocide of Rohingya Muslims 75.8%

Starvation in Afghanistan 67.4%

Discrimination against Muslims in France 61.9%

Conflict in Yemen 59.6%

Conflict in Syria 54.5%

Indian occupation of Jammu and Kashmir 37.5%

Civil war in Libya 31.6%

Security in Somalia 29.1%

Presidential Coup in Tunisia 24.2%

Tens of thousands of Muslims have been killed in Myanmar (Burma), Libya, and Yemen, and hundreds of thousands in Syria. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been ethnically cleansed from Myanmar. A million Muslims are incarcerated in China. A million Muslims are on the verge of starvation in Afghanistan. Yet when American Muslims only have to check a box to say they are concerned about these issues, they claim that the Palestinian issue is more important to them than direct physical threats to the lives of millions of Muslims.

Moreover, look at the questions they didn't ask: Palestinians are discriminated against in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. Tens of thousands of Palestinians are still refugees from Syria, living in camps in Lebanon and Jordan. But these issues are so unimportant to CAIR that they are not even asked about!

The American Muslims polled don't care about Palestinians - unless their oppression can be blamed on Jews.

These priorities cannot be explained by concern about Muslim lives, or by concern about Palestinian lives.

The only explanation for this twisted set of priorities is Muslim American antisemitism.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

A brief Twitter thread on anti-Zionism and antisemitism

A follower of mine from Brazil asked me a question on Twitter:

Good morning, Sr. Elder of Ziyon. I'm from Brazil and could you tell why does Palestine hate Israel? In Brazil, all history teachers love Palestine and hate Israel. Why??

My brief response, expanded here:

Anti-Zionism is the modern (and socially acceptable) version of antisemitism. My book describes it in great detail. The unhinged loathing you see for Israel and Zionists have few parallels beyond historic hate of Jews. (And Palestinians admit they hate Jews in Arabic.)

Anti-Zionists will claim that they are only supporting human rights, or opposing Israeli policies. But there is an entire NGO industry dedicated to making up or exaggerating Israeli crimes without context and without comparison to others. See my recent post on how Ben and Jerry's ignore human rights abuses in many countries they sell ice cream to.

In order to accuse Israel of "apartheid," for example, Amnesty and HRW had to create an entirely new definition of apartheid that only applies to Israel. Now haters can point to that and claim Israel is worse than anyone - which is objectively absurd.

The haters also go on to redefine Zionism itself. Zionism is a movement supporting self determination for the Jewish people. Anti-Zionists make up new definitions to justify their hate.

Another way to prove this is that virtually all of these people who pretend to care about Palestinian rights have little to say about discrimination against Palestinians in Arab countries. They are only upset when they can blame...Jews.

By any normal yardstick, Israel cares more about human rights than most countries. It is more progressive. It is far more tolerant of Muslims than much of Europe. It has worked harder than almost every other country to avoid civilian casualties in war.

Haters deflect and ignore the facts. The only reason for their obsession is because Israel is a Jewish state.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

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In a Palestinian society where guns are cheap and violence is admired, people murder each other

In Hebron yesterday, three people were executed while driving in a car - by other Palestinians.

Fighting broke out in Yatta as the news spread.

This happens often. Sometimes the murders are from family feuds, sometimes from honor killings.

The Palestinian Independent Center for Human Rights finds a correlation between Palestinians attacking Jews and Palestinians attacking Palestinians.

The same report notes that the Palestinian Authority is not keen on prosecuting those who misuse weapons - because a lot of them are members of Fatah.

But it happens in Gaza, too. And in the Palestinian camps in Syria and Lebanon. When you have a society where the most admired people are terrorists, and where guns are easily available, where honor is the motivating factor in nearly every decision - this is what is going to happen.

Not that there are any academic papers on the phenomenon. I couldn't find any from the past 20 years that mentioned "security chaos" or "clan clashes" or "family feuds" in Palestinian territories. There are plenty of articles in Arabic about the phenomenon, but in the overwhelmingly liberal halls of academia, this is not a topic for analysis. Palestinians are killed by Jews, not by other Palestinians.

And among the "progressive" crowd, one never hears calls for effective gun control in the Palestinian territories. But in that case, the reason is because they support Palestinians attacking Jews, and they need weapons to do that. A little collateral damage of scores of Palestinians killed as a result? To these faux liberals, it is a small price to pay.

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Abbas releasing accused killers of Nizar Banat on "bail": report

Remember Nizar Banat?

He's the critic who publicly called the Palestinian Authority corrupt and organized protests against Mahmoud Abbas.

Last June 24, at 3:30 AM, he was arrested by PA security services. By 6:30 AM, he was dead.

The PA pretended to be shocked at his death and arrested a bunch of people after the international community expressed displeasure at an obvious assassination.

And now, according to reports, the supposed murderers will be set free on bail.

Felesteen reports that according to sources, the military court of the PA in Ramallah decided to release on bail 14 defendants in the case of the assassination of Nizar Banat.

The sources stated that the decision to release the accused was based on the decision of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

The defendants are being released on condition that their movement be restricted. And if they happen to disappear towards Jordan, well, these things happen.

Especially when you work in a government as corrupt as the PA is, under the dictatorship of Mahmoud Abbas.

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Hamas and the PA accuse each other of torturing prisoners. (They're both right.)

A family in Gaza has accused Hamas of torturing their son to death in prison.

The Al-Hasanat family wrote a letter to various authorities claiming that Nawaf Al-Hasanat, who had a wife and six children, was arrested in November over a land dispute and was in Hamas prison until he died last week.

Meanwhile, the PA was accused of torturing Hamas members in a Jericho prison. The "Lawyers for Justice" NGO says that 15 Hamas members who were recently arrested by the Palestinian security services in Ramallah "are subjected to very, very severe torture."

One prisoner, Ahmed Al-Khasib, appeared in court yesterday, unable to speak due to the severity of torture. Another detainee, Ahmed Harish, could not control himself in front of the Jericho Court today and started crying during his court appearance.

As usual, when Israel cannot be blamed, people show no interest in the fate of Palestinian prisoners.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

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Gunfire from Hamas to evict Gazans from their homes. Did you read about this anywhere?

Palestinian site Amad reports:

Local sources reported on Thursday afternoon that there was an exchange of fire between Hamas security forces and residents of the Bedouin village area [in Northern Gaza], and that there were a number of casualties.

The sources indicated that the Hamas Land Authority demolished homes in the Bedouin village in the northern Gaza Strip.

Shooting took place in the Bedouin village at Hamas policemen while they were demolishing a house in the Bedouin village belonging to Tawfiq Abu Hashish.

According to the sources, there was intense shooting and a number of injuries, one of them seriously, they were transferred to the Indonesian Hospital.

Evicting people from their homes? Demolishing houses? Using gunfire against a violent riot?

When Israel is blamed for these things, they are considered the worst human rights abuses in the Middle East.

When Hamas does them - there is next to no coverage in Western media. The only reason any Israeli media covered it at all was because some gunfire reached an Israeli community, causing slight damage and a light injury - to an Arab worker.

When Palestinians do to Palestinians what Israel is accused of doing to Palestinians, no one cares. Not even the people who claim to be "pro-Palestinian."

Which proves, yet again, that practically nobody is really pro-Palestinian. They are anti-Israel. And since they only care what happens to Palestinians when they can blame Jews, they are antisemitic, by definition.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

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Lebanon's Naharnet reports:

The level of torture and sexual violence used by combatants against women and girls during the 15-year civil war in Lebanon shocked investigators, British newspaper The Guardian said.

A report by the human rights organization Legal Action Worldwide (LAW) gathered testimonies that detailed horrific experiences of violence, including gang-rape, electrocution and forced nudity used to persecute women and girls – some as young as nine – from opposing communities.

An amnesty law passed in Lebanon in 1991 granted immunity for crimes committed against civilians during the war, which has allowed a culture of impunity and lack of accountability to develop, the report noted.

The report itself, issued by LAW and UN Women, is horrific to read, with victim and eyewitness accounts of the most disgusting war crimes.

Yet the report doesn't say who performed these rapes and murders of women and girls. All it says are "state and non-state actors."

One has to read between the lines to understand that only Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian armed forces, Christian and Muslim militias were responsible for these rapes, not the IDF in its forays into Lebanon during the civil war. The report mentions the 1991 amnesty law, and subsequent Lebanese amnesty laws, as the major reason that there has been no investigation or prosecution, and why the victims have had no recourse. Yet the amnesty law would not cover any crimes by Israeli troops.

There's one other way to be certain that Israelis weren't involved. Because if they were, this report would be worldwide news. Besides the Guardian article, this report is not mentioned in mainstream media at all.

Obviously, saying that Jewish soldiers don't wantonly rape women and children is not a high moral or legal bar. Yet the disinterest in this systematic sexual abuse over 15 years in Lebanon only makes sense when you understand that the world expects Muslims and Christians, Lebanese and Palestinians to act like subhumans in war - it is the proverbial dog bites man story.

Israel is routinely accused of being a human rights monster. It is the only state currently accused of apartheid by the international humanitarian community. NGOs issue report after report, vying with each other to find novel angles to accuse Israel of yet more violations of human rights. Yet when it comes to the most horrific war crimes done by Arabs - virtually nothing.

Of course this is antisemitism. The goal of story after story on Israeli human rights abuses, most of them fictional or exaggerated, is to demonize Israel to the average news consumer - and one reason why stories about Arab human rights abuses don't get coverage is because that detracts from and waters down the narrative from the obsessive anti-Israel coverage.

Watch this story over the next week. See if CNN or the New York Times cover it at all - so far they haven't even though the Guardian story was published Thursday. If they do, see how many minutes CNN chooses to use for the story, see how many column inches it gets in the New York Times and on which page.

And if you think that a story from decades ago doesn't deserve major media coverage, compare this week's reporting or lack of reporting of the rape of hundreds of women with last month's coverage of a movie about an alleged Israeli war crime in 1948, against soldiers, based on a poorly written academic research paper that has been retracted.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

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Read all about it here!

The other Turkish occupation

Everyone knows about Turkeys' occupation of Northern Cyprus.

But Turkey also occupied large swaths of territory in northern Syria, and the people who scream about the evil of Israeli "occupation" are silent.

Not only that, but Turkey is threatening to invade Syria, and - again - the people who are upset about countries like Russia invading their neighbors seem to not have much of a problem with this.

From AP:

Turkey's president told journalists that Ankara remains committed to rooting out a Syrian Kurdish militia from northern Syria.

"Like I always say, we'll come down on them suddenly one night. And we must," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on his plane following his Saturday visit to Azerbaijan, according to daily Hurriyet newspaper and other media.

Without giving a specific timeline, Erdogan said that Turkey would launch a cross-border operation against the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units, or YPG, which it considers a terrorist group linked to an outlawed Kurdish group that has led an insurgency against Turkey since 1984. That conflict with the Kurdistan Workers' Party, PKK, has killed tens of thousands of people.

However, the YPG forms the backbone of U.S.-led forces in the fight against the Islamic State group. American support for the group has infuriated Ankara and remains a major issue in their relations.

Ankara has launched four cross-border operations into Syria since 2016 and controls some territories in the north with the goal of pushing away the YPG and establishing a 30-kilometer (19-mile) deep safe zone where Erdogan hopes to "voluntarily" return Syrian refugees.

In 2019, an incursion into northeast Syria against the YPG drew widespread international condemnation, prompting Finland, Sweden and others to restrict arms sales to Turkey. Now Turkey is blocking the two Nordic countries' historic bid to join NATO because of the weapons ban and their alleged support for the Kurdish groups.

Oh, and Turkey is building settlements, too, to move Syrian refugees to areas under its control

The media seems strangely uninterested.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Palestinians in Syria in danger of being forced to become Syrian soldiers

From The Action Group for Palestinians in Syria, June 25:

Syrian security forces have tightened military grip around Deraa and its outskirts, south of Syria.

Local sources told AGPS that all access roads to the city centre have been blocked except for the Sajneh road, where three military checkpoints have been pitched.

Palestinian refugees have expressed concerns over a new wave of forced military conscription and arbitrary manhunts in the area.

This comes only a weeks after Palestinians who had been forced out of the Deraa area were allowed to return after three years - under Russian mediation:

A former commander of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in the al-Lajat area told Enab Baladi that Russia’s mediation through its affiliate 8th Brigade had allowed the return of displaced families from the villages of al-Shayyah, al-Shomara, al-Modawara, and Alali to their homes.

He added that the residents of those areas had been displaced since 2018 in the villages of Hauran, and their areas were controlled by the 9th Division and Hezbollah-affiliated forces.

He pointed out that residents took the return decision after Russia guaranteed them that the Syrian regime’s security apparatus would not arrest them.

The Palestinians in Syria have every reason to be concerned.

However, "pro-Palestinian" activists - and even Palestinian media - have been silent about these latest moves by Syria.

Just more evidence that unless Israel is involved, no one cares about Palestinians.

Lebanese foreign minister tweets against Palestinians, but no one seems to care much

Last month, Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil tweeted that he supports the right of Lebanese women to pass citizenship to their husbands and children, except if they are married to a Palestinian or Syrian men.

It caused a bit of a ruckus in Lebanon but his explicit bigotry didn't make a ripple in the international media..

Earlier this month, he again went to Twitter to say, “It is normal to defend the Lebanese labour force against any other foreign labour, whether it be Syrian, Palestinian, French, Saudi, Iranian or American, the Lebanese come first!”

The Syrians and Arabs of Palestinian descent who are in Lebanon generally have nowhere else to go, so of course they need jobs. Yet he lumps them in with other foreign workers, who are also an important part of the workforce as they are throughout the Middle East.

Again, there was some regional controversy over his comments, and the rest of the world yawned. I didn't see any "pro-Palestinian" groups issue statements of condemnation.

Anti-Palestinian bigotry in the Middle East is simply not a story unless it can be ascribed to Lebanon's southern neighbor.

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Hypocrites decry Israel detaining "child" Ahed Tamimi - but she's a legal adult in "Palestine"

I just received another faux-outrage fundraising email from the "US Campaign for Palestinian Rights" that claims to care about Ahed Tamimi:

Ahed Tamimi, the brave Palestinian teenage activist who has experienced untold violence at the hands of the Israeli occupation in her short lifetime, spent her News Year’s Eve in an Israeli prison cell. Ahed will be punished severely for the most basic act of resisting a military occupation that has stolen her land, her freedom to live a peaceful childhood, and even the lives of her uncle and cousin. She faces 12 charges in a separate-and-unequal military court system with a 99.74% conviction rate. Read more about the connections between Ahed’s case and the landmark legislation I’m asking you to support.
Israel wants to make an example of Ahed and crush the will to resist. The Israeli government and its supporters are unapologetically brutal in the process; a minister called for life imprisonment and a prominent Israeli journalist implied that 16-year old Ahed should be raped. It is high time that we build our political power to end US complicity in Israel’s abuse of Palestinian children. 2018 will be the year – I can feel it. Take action today.

The 99.74% statistic is from 2010. No one seems to want to look at what the actual rate today is, because the 2010 number is too good.

No one suggested that Ahed be raped.

But the most interesting part is that the Israel haters are trying to get some interest in a bill before Congress called H.R.4391 - Promoting Human Rights by Ending Israeli Military Detention of Palestinian Children Act.

Under Palestinian law, Ahed Tamimi is an adult. And Israeli military law in the territories also considers 16 year olds to be adults.

But when Israel says it, it is a violation of human rights for children. When Palestinians say it....it is not even worth mentioning.

How many Arabs are in Palestinian jails between 16-18? No one knows....because no one cares.

Hundreds of Arabs report being abused and tortured in Palestinian jails every year. The "pro-Palestinian" activists are silent.

Palestinian Arabs aren't considered worthy of human rights protections, unless the abuse can be blamed on Jews. Facts don't matter.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

PA continues its siege of Gaza - more crucial medicines are running out. But human rights NGOs don't care.

We are now more than two months into the "reconciliation" between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, much of which only occurred because the PA imposed a crippling siege on Gaza of electricity, fuel and medicines that was ignored by the world.

And yet the siege continues.

Israel does not limit medicines or medical equipment into Gaza (with the exception of a tiny number of devices that need to be approved individually because they contain radioactive material or the like.)

But the Palestinian Authority does limit them. And the world, obsessed with Israel's blockade, ignores the things that Mahmoud Abbas does to his own people, not unlike Syria's Assad.

Gaza health officials are alarmed as the shortage of medicines and other medical needs have reached a critical point.

There is now a shortage of materials needed for blood tests, such as tests for hepatitis C and B tests and HIV tests. There is also a shortage of PKU tests for newborns, and for thyroid diseases.

Also, anti-rejection drugs for people who have received organ transplants.

Out of 657 laboratory items needed, 383 of them are down to zero and 274 will run out within three months.

Israel's restriction of materials to Gaza did not kill anyone (I did not see any such claims in Arab media) but these shortages, mandated by Mahmoud Abbas on his own people for some seven months already, are resulting in deaths.

So, where are the "human rights" NGOs complaining about the humanitarian crisis? Where is the media?

They are discussing how a 18 year old "child" was arrested for assaulting a soldier on video.

Gaza? Who cares? Certainly not the media and the NGOs when Israel cannot be blamed.

(Also in Gaza, the companies that clean hospitals are on strike, due to not getting paid. Surgeries are being cancelled. I don't know who is responsible for their salaries, but once again Gaza woes only make news when they can be blamed on Jews. Certainly the "pro-Palestinian" crowd doesn't care about their precious pets.)

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The past 8 months prove (again) that "pro-Palestinian" really means "anti-Israel"

The Palestinian Authority knowingly put thousands of Gazans' lives at risk starting in March of this year - and the world didn't care.

Even the UN knows, and buries, the truth.

From the latest OCHA (UN) Gaza Crisis paper:

A series of measures implemented by the Palestinian Authority since March 2017, following an escalation in the internal Palestinian divide, have led to a deterioration in the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip. ....These measures have exacerbated Gaza’s energy crisis, resulting in increasing outages from 12-16 to 18-20 hours a day, worsened the salary crisis in the public sector, increased the shortage of essential drugs from around 33% in March to 45% in October and delayed the referral of patients for medical treatment outside Gaza. These developments have impacted the availability of essential services and the livelihoods of Gaza’s two million residents. The following indicators were identified by the Humanitarian Country Team (HCT) to monitor the evolution of the crisis, trigger humanitarian action and prevent further deterioration. Despite an agreement signed in October 2017 between Fatah and Hamas, most of the measures that triggered the recent deterioration have not been reversed.

The graphs that UN-OCHA provides show a sharp deterioration of the quality of life in Gaza starting in March when the PA started cutting off electricity and medicine:

In black and white, one can see the stark results of the PA's cutting off essential services to Gaza. And these statistics were known for 8 months.

Where were the protests in the streets of London? Where were the peace activists? Where were the "human rights" NGOs? This year, Gaza plunged from a bad place to live into an impossible place to live, and it is all because of decisions made by Gaza's own fellow Palestinian Arab leaders.

The lack of media attention to this is, frankly, criminal. The only protests about Gaza are aimed at Israel. No one blames Hamas for violently splitting with the PA; no one blames the PA for collective punishment of two million people. The things that Israel is routinely blamed for are totally ignored when Arabs do much worse.

These past eight months are all the proof you need that all those protesters, all those NGOs and all those politicians who pretend to care about Gazans are full of crap.

Just like they don't care about thousands of Palestinians killed in Syria, and hundreds of thousands who became refugees. Just like they don't care about explicit discrimination against Palestinians in Lebanon and Jordan and Egypt. Just like they don't care about legal disenfranchisement of Palestinians in every single Arab country.

If Israel isn't involved, the world's concern for Palestinians is virtually zero.

When Israel can be blamed, rightly or wrongly, the world's concern for Palestinians far outstrips its concern for every other group whose suffering is far worse.

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Report: Palestinian Authority stops delivering medicines to Gaza. NGOs, media silent.

Palestine Today quotes Dr. Munir Bursh, the pharmacy director at the Ministry of Health in Gaza, saying that the Palestinian Authority has stopped supplying medicines and baby formula to Gaza altogether.

"90% of the treatment of cancer patients in the Gaza Strip has stopped due to the lack of the supply of drugs," he said.

Bursh added, "This is reprehensible and very strange, threatening a major health disaster up to the collapse of the health situation in Gaza, because the Ramallah government has been responsible for supplying medicine to Gaza, despite the deficit in the previous years."

"Whoever made this decision is killing the entire people, and punishing the entire people."

He said that the PA supplies the Gaza Strip with medicines every two months, but it did not send any medicines for three months now.

Hospitals in Gaza are also worried about the closure of the Gaza power plant due to the spat between Hamas and Fatah, saying that they cannot desalinate the water needed for every day purposes.

The PA denies the story of stopping medicines to Gaza, although it has publicly threatened to stop pretty much everything they pay for that goes to Gaza in recent weeks in an attempt to get angry Gazans to rise up against Hamas.

Of course, the Western media is all over this story, because the lives and well-being of Gazans are so important to them and the people being blamed for their predicament is not at all a factor in how the story of Gaza suffering gets reported to the world.

Oh, sorry, I was delirious for a minute there. The stories of both how Israel has refused to stop electricity to Gaza despite the PA's refusal to pay, and this story, have been completely ignored by Western media, NGOs and so-called "pro-Palestinian" activists, because if Israel cannot be blamed, the suffering of Gazans is simply not newsworthy.

Which proves yet again that the reporting and NGO reports from Gaza are not motivated by human rights or morality, but a desire by NGOs and reporters to bash Israel.

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Islamic State declares control of Yarmouk camp, "pro-Palestinians" silent

Yesterday, the Islamic State declared that it had seized control of the Palestinian Arab "refugee" camp in Yarmouk, Syria.

While you will sometimes see the "pro-Palestinian" crowd say how terrible things are in Yarmouk, the amount of attention given to it by them - and as a result, by the media - is tiny compared to how they report anything Israel does.

The Action Group for Palestinians in Syria reports that five people of Palestinian origin have been killed in Yarmouk this month, and 1,247 have been killed in the camp alone so far during Syria's civil war.

Yarmouk is yet more proof that most groups that claim to be "pro-Palestinian" are simply anti-Israel - and don't give a damn about Palestinians who are truly suffering anywhere else.

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Why Hamas' beating of protesters is a big story

This story encapsulates how much the media ignores stories from the territories that don't involve Israel.

Last night, many members of the Eshtewi family held a protest outside the home of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza. One of their sons, Mahmoud (in some reports Abul Magd) has been in Hamas prisons for months without charge. The family demanded that Haniyeh come out to talk to them, and they chanted slogans and held up banners.

Hamas police came and started beating them, injuring a number of family members including a female journalist Buthaina Eshtewi, and two brothers were arrested and taken away to an unknown destination.

In one story we have:

Detention without charge
Peaceful protesters being beaten
Peaceful protesters being arrested

In the grand scheme of things, this is not that big a deal. But the complete absence of any western media ever reporting stories like this while eagerly reporting on similar stories that can be blamed on Israel reveals a much bigger issue here.

Even if the media does not consider this newsworthy, "pro-Palestinian" NGOs would be expected to be compiling statistics of these sorts of events, and issuing annual reports counting the number of arrests, beatings, imprisonment without trial, cases of torture, people killed by police - all the statistics that are being zealously kept and often inflated by these same NGOs against Israel, even though they often claim that they are non-partisan.

Journalists, NGOs and diplomats have an unwritten agreement to ignore these sorts of stories to ensure that the news that filters out to the world is one-sided against Israel. The tiniest anti-Israel stories in the Hebrew press get translated and quoted prominently while Arabic stories like these get ignored. The decision as to which stories get coverage is not newsworthiness or the level of human rights being violated. No, the major decision-making is based on a single factor: whether the Jewish state can be properly blamed.

This ensures that generations of young people are brought up on biased, one-sided news stories based on simplistic memes of Jewish oppression and Arab victimhood.. It takes real effort to find out the truth and practically no one will spend the time, since there is an assumption that the news media will do their jobs. And the very people who should investigate this bias are the people who practice it.

This particular case is not a big story. But the situation that causes stories like this to be ignored day in and day out is indeed a very big deal.

For some reason, Gaza's many NGOs don't care about Hamas prisons

Palestine Press Agency (Fatah-leaning) has an article about the inhumane conditions in Hamas prisons and detention centers in Gaza.

According to the article, Hamas prison cells meant for 20 people routinely have as many as 80.

In the summer, temperatures can go past 40 degrees C (104F) with no ventilation.

Prisoners with deadly contagious diseases are herded next to others. There are no doctors available, ever.

Prisons are also filled with bugs because of how filthy they are.

And, of course, some prisoners are tortured and killed. The Independent Commission for Human Rights documented 21 cases of Hamas prisoners who died last year, most of them executed. They also received 996 complaints about torture in 2014.

Too bad Gaza doesn't have any internationally funded "pro-Palestinian" NGOs around who are interested in documenting these issues and publicizing them. It would be nice if Amnesty, HRW and Oxfam showed interest in the issue of prison conditions in Gaza. (HRW did once issue a report on Hamas torture, in 2012.)

Everyone hates Palestinian Arabs when there are no Jews around

An eye-opening report from the UN's IRIN news site, May 25:

Until November, it is alleged that Jordan routinely deported Syrian refugees who had broken the law back to Syria... Most Syrians are now sent to the Azraq refugee camp in Jordan instead. However, this is not the case for Palestinians, whose deportations do not appear to have been halted.

Jordan has denied entrance to Palestinian refugees living in Syria since January 2013, although this had already been the unofficial policy for months prior to the official announcement.

“They should stay in Syria until the end of the crisis,” Jordan’s Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour said in an interview at the time with the pan-Arab daily newspaper al-Hayat.

Many people fleeing Syria’s civil war have, however, been smuggled across the border, and Palestinians found to have entered the country illegally have been detained and are often deported back to Syria.

At least 42 Palestinians from Syria have been forcibly deported this year, in addition to 117 in 2014, according to sources familiar with the cases. Rights groups say those deported are at high risk of being arrested and tortured.

Here is the full quote from Jordan's Prime Minister:

Al-Hayat: But why are you preventing the Palestinian refugees fleeing from Syria from entering the kingdom, while knowing that they have Syrian travel documents?

Ensour: There are those who want to exempt Israel from the repercussions of displacing the Palestinians from their homes. Jordan is not a place to solve Israel’s problems. Jordan has made a clear and explicit sovereign decision to not allow the crossing to Jordan by our Palestinian brothers who hold Syrian documents. Receiving those brothers is a red line because that would be a prelude to another wave of displacement, which is what the Israeli government wants. Our Palestinian brothers in Syria have the right to go back to their country of origin. They should stay in Syria until the end of the crisis.

If we save their lives, we'd be doing what Israel wants us to do! Better to let them rot!

This is reminiscent of Mahmoud Abbas' own words saying that it is better for Palestinians to die in Syria rather than give up the mythical "right to return" to Israel.

The IRIN article shows that it is not only Jordan that turns its back on Syrian residents with Palestinian ancestry:

Palestinians from Syria are not allowed to register with the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, to receive aid, and many say they cannot contact other NGOs for fear of being discovered and stripped of their citizenship and deported. Many aid agencies will not work with them or represent them, making them particularly vulnerable to exploitation in the informal labour market.

Other Middle Eastern countries, including Lebanon, have also effectively banned Palestinians from Syria from entering.

There are literally hundred of NGOs operating in Israel and the territories, mostly funded by Europe, that are "pro-Palestinian." Yet almost none of these supposedly "pro-Palestinian" agencies take the slightest interest in the plight of Palestinians whose suffering cannot be blamed on Jews.

Now, why would that be?

(h/t Irene)