Palestinian zero sum game: "Israeli embassy in Manama is an attack on Palestinians"

One of the consequences of the Arab honor/shame culture is the zero-sum mentality. If one party is honored, then their rival is considered shamed, even if there is nothing in reality  that shames the other party.

This is illustrated by the statement issued today by the PFLP terror group. 

The PFLP announced that "the opening of a headquarters for the Zionist embassy in the Bahraini capital, Manama, represents a state of increasing decline of the Bahraini regime" and hat continued normalization between Israel and Bahrain is "an integral part of the aggression against our people."

Has Bahrain turned anti-Palestinian? I don't see any evidence of it. But to Palestinians, if Israel gains something, then they lose - by definition. 

It is a very childish way of looking at the world but it is accepted as normal, at least for Palestinians and most Arabs. 

A great part of the profound changes happening in the Gulf, and the reason that the Abraham Accords are so important, is that they represent a sea change in the old zero-sum mentality, and towards a win/win culture in the UAE and Bahrain. There is no contradiction between having relations with Israel and supporting Palestinian nationalism, unless you look at everything as zero-sum - or if you view a Palestinian state not as a goal but as a means to destroy Israel. 

The PFLP goes on "warn of the dangers of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia embarking on normalization with the Zionist entity, especially since there are channels that have been opened in the sports and media fields, in addition to opening Saudi airspace for the passage of Zionist planes, which paves the way for the possibility of announcing full normalization with this entity. This would represent a major stab wound to the Palestinian cause."

If Israel wins, Palestinians lose - and vice versa. Which partially explains the celebrations and glee that accompany terror attacks that kill Jews. To Palestinians, any dead Jew is a loss for Israel and therefore a gain for Palestinians.

It is a sick mindset. And not enough people are fighting against it. Which is another reason why the Abraham Accords is so important - it introduces a different way of thinking into the Arab world, one that is attractive both because it is more optimistic but also because it is true. 

It is worth mentioning that while the West generally adheres to a win/win mentality, socialists like the PFLP and those in the "progressive" Left indeed do believe in a zero-sum game - that the world has a fixed amount of resources and if the rich gain, the rest of the world inevitably loses. Simplistic and ultimately wrong zero-sum thinking is something that the far Right and far Left have in common.

It cannot be a coincidence that the main fans of zero sum thinking also happen to hate Jews. I don't know whether that is a cause or an effect, probably both, but eradicating the zero sum mentality is perhaps the best  and most comprehensive way to combat antisemitism. 

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Harvard partners with Palestinian university that rewards and supports terrorism

From Harvard University's FXB Center:

The Institute of Community and Public Health (ICPH) at Birzeit University, the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights, and the World Health Organization in the occupied Palestinian territory have launched the Palestine Social Medicine course. This intensive course is part of the activities of the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights, a partnership between ICPH at Birzeit University and the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, United States. The course is supported through Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation funding to WHO occupied Palestinian territory Right to Health programme.

Birzeit University is a center of antisemitic, pro-Jihadist terror.

Last December, it hosted a PFLP march where they exhorted students to "blow up the settler's head!"

Also last year, Birzeit's Hamas group hosted a reception for new students where they celebrated a famous Hamas bombmaker, Yahya Ayyash, who was a graduate of Birzeit U:

This display of Nazi-style salutes, a model of a rocket and of a suicide belt was not in Gaza, but in Birzeit University:

Does it sound like Birzeit is a center of "health and human rights?" Is it appropriate for Harvard to partner with a university that is a center for incitement of violence against Jews?

Actually, maybe it is. Because Harvard's own recent record is one of sacrificing academic integrity for "social justice" causes such as hating Israel.

The entire Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights appears to be far more concerned with bashing Israel than in actually helping promote Palestinian health.

The FXB Center's Health and Human Rights Journal recently dedicated an issue to Palestinian health. The entire thrust of the journal was to call Israel "racist" and "apartheid" and "settler colonialist":

Its studies pre-suppose that Israeli policies are fatally hurting Palestinian health and work. And when biased people look for evidence of their thesis, they can invariably find it - as long as they ignore any counter-evidence.

Similarly, Harvard's School of Public Health offers a course that looks at Palestinian health through the lens of Israeli "settler colonialism" making the initial assumption that health services are drastically impacted by Israeli policies.

Yes, a Harvard University course actually highlights "The Map that Lies" that has been thoroughly debunked and retracted by numerous organizations. 

Yet in real life, Palestinian healthcare - and indeed, Palestinians' general quality of life - is better than that of neighboring Jordan which does not suffer from "settler colonialism" or "Israeli apartheid:"

In fact, it is difficult to find studies that look at and evaluate Palestinian healthcare on its own merits, or that compares it with the rest of the Arab Middle East - something that is basic in studying the healthcare of every nation on the planet.  One rare example that does is this obscure paper, "Experiences of Palestinian patients with hospital services: a mixed-methods study" which employs a standardized survey used throughout the world to evaluate patient experiences in Palestinian hospitals. They aren't great, they aren't terrible, and the study makes recommendations on how to improve them. 

Palestinians themselves blame their governments, not Israel, for healthcare shortfalls. A recent survey says that one third of Palestinians say they do not have enough hospitals, 24% complained of scarcity of supplies, 20% said the lack of skilled medical professionals was the biggest problem, and 10% said it

was the high costs of care or the lack of medical insurance. 

But looking at the real issues is not how Palestinian health is studied in the West. Instead of caring about how to improve Palestinian healthcare, these seminars and courses and studies are all designed to sacrifice Palestinian healthcare on the much more important altar of using every possible social means to demonize Israel. By viewing everything Palestinian through a "settler colonialist apartheid structural racist" lens, actual daily Palestinian healthcare is neglected and ignored. 

Demonizing Israel is a higher "human rights" imperative than improving the lives of Palestinians. 

So perhaps it is appropriate that Harvard, which has already hijacked Palestinian healthcare as  ammunition to be used against Israel, partners with Birzeit University, which glorifies those who use actual ammunition against Israel. 

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Amnesty campaigning on behalf of a despicable terrorist (update)

From Amnesty International:

The Israeli authorities should release Walid Daqqah, a terminally ill Palestinian prisoner, so he can access specialist medical care and spend his remaining time with his family, Amnesty International said today. Walid Daqqah, 62, suffers from chronic lung disease and bone marrow cancer, and the clinic at Israel’s Ayalon Prison is ill-equipped to deal with his conditions. Following his cancer diagnosis last year, the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) denied Walid Daqqah access to a potentially life-saving bone marrow transplant by refusing to transfer him to a civilian hospital.   

Amnesty doesn't even hint at his crime until paragraph 13, and even then downplays it:

Walid Daqqah, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, was arrested in March 1986. A year later, a military court convicted him of commanding a group affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which had abducted and killed Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam in 1984. He was not convicted of carrying out the murder himself, but of ordering other members of the group to kill Moshe Tamam. 

Amnesty doesn't mention that Tamam was brutally tortured, disfigured, and sexually mutilated  by the terror cell led by Daqqa. 

Why should their readers know about that? The only torture they mention are Daqqa's own false allegations of being tortured by Israel.

When Daqqa was up for parole, the special committee ruled that his medical condition was not reason enough to violate Israeli anti-terror legislation that forbids early release for prisoners convicted of terrorist acts.

Amnesty didn't mention that either.

It does everything it can to humanize a disgusting murderer while demonizing the country that is attempting to carry out justice for his victim. Any information that shows what a monster Daqqa is, or why his parole was denied, is simply not to be reported.

Not coincidentally, as Daqqa is a member of the PFLP,  the PFLP and its associated NGOs have been heavily campaigning to free Daqqa, and Amnesty is quite friendly with many PFLP officials in other "human rights" NGOs. 

There is one delicious irony here, though. Daqqa was supposed to be released earlier this year, but two years were added onto his sentence because he smuggled cell phones into prison. 

Which means that the likelihood of his dying in prison is his own damn fault. 

UPDATE (4/9/24): The mutilation accusation seems to be a rumor.

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Terrorist reactions to house demolitions indicate that the policy might be effective in discouraging attacks

This morning, the IDF demolished the home of the Hamas terrorist who killed  brothers Hallel Yaniv, 21, and Yagel Yaniv, 19, as they drove through Huwara in February.

I always wondered whether this policy actually deterred some terror attacks. Reading between the lines of the angry reactions from major terror groups, it appears that they may indeed act as a deterrent for at least some attacks.

Islamic Jihad issued a statement saying  "the demolition of the house of the martyr Abd al-Fattah Kharousha in Nablus will not weaken the resolve of the resistance fighters, but rather they will increase their determination and adherence to resistance and jihad....the crime of demolishing houses will not achieve the deterrence goals that the enemy army is looking for."

That is a lot of words to protest a policy that they claim is ineffective.

Similarly, the PFLP said, "The policy of demolishing the homes of the martyrs will only increase our people's determination to continue the path of freedom and dignity that was paved with the blood of our martyrs, the sacrifices of our families, and the struggles of our people with all its components."

Hamas said, "Our people and their factions will remain a support for our steadfast people who are targeted by the enemy by demolishing their homes and property. This struggling people will continue to unite with the heart of one man in the face of the occupier, until our rights are fully recovered, no matter how long it takes and no matter how much they sacrifice." It also said that this was "a Zionist policy of impotence, which proved its failure to quell the resistance and affect the morale of the fighters."

If the home demolition policy only encourages more terror, and these groups want to recruit more members, then why are they so insistent on how the policy is ineffective? These statements appear to be more a message to Israel to stop the demolitions and to their own people not to be deterred from attacking Jews because of the knowledge that their families will lose their homes.

Israeli authorities know far more. They interview the actual terrorists and know whether some of them say that the demolition policy affects their fellow terror group members. Almost certainly these interviews are what prompts Israel's High Court to continue to allow that policy, as the objective of discouraging terror attacks is a higher priority than the issue of collective punishment that is the usual argument by NGOs against the policy. 

This is indirect proof, of course, but the strident reactions to the destruction of Abd al-Fattah Kharousha's home in Nablus seem to indicate that the policy does indeed cause some militants to think twice before attacking, and the leaders of the terror groups are trying to quash that reluctance.

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From the Left to the Right, Palestinian groups unanimously support murdering Jews

Last Sunday, Palestinian groups met in Cairo in yet another quixotic attempt at unification.

There were no agreements, but the groups announced that they will form a committee to further look at the matter.

Now, one of the attendees, Omar Murad of the PFLP, was interviewed by Ultrapal, where he criticized Mahmoud Abbas for insisting that he does not support "armed resistance" and that the Palestinians must adhere to international law, only supporting non-violent resistance.

Murad then said that the PFLP  met with the Hamas movement and all the other factions attending the meeting, including Abbas;' own Fatah movement, and that all those groups agreed on 90% of their positions, meaning support for terrorism. 

Only Abbas himself is against an official return to terror. 

The PFLP official complained,  "The president, with this age and this experience, believes that he is more knowledgeable than us, and is more zealous for the Palestinian interest than we are. We respect his age, but we have our positions and decisions."

That assertion of 90% agreement is remarkable. The PFLP is a Marxist-Leninist group that has little in common politically with the Islamist Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups that attended. They have completely different concepts of what a Palestinian state would look like. The only thing they have in common is the desire to destroy the Jewish state. 

Yet that hate is enough for them to collude and cooperate in their terror activities. 

As we see partisanship tear apart nations around the world, and those on the political Left and Right hardening their positions to the detriment of their own countries, the Palestinian factions have struck upon a formula to ensure virtual consensus across all political philosophies: the burning desire to murder Jews. 

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Palestinian leaders *want* Gaza to be an open-air prison

JNS reports:

Residents of the Gaza Strip may soon be able to fly to Turkey via Israel’s Ramon Airport near Eilat.

The pilot program could start as early as July when two flights are anticipated, Channel 12 reported. The final decision is subject to approval by the security and political echelons.

Gaza sources say the flights will be available to residents ages 35 and older. They will be shuttled to the airport from the Erez crossing to the northern Gaza Strip.

At present, Gazans travel via the Erez crossing by land to Jordan and fly abroad from there.

The announcement follows a similar one from the Israel Airports Authority in August 2022 that Palestinians from Judea and Samaria would be able to take charter flights from Ramon Airport to Turkey.

The first flight from the airport with Palestinian Arabs on board departed on August 22. Its destination was not Turkey but rather Cyprus.

While the announcement is not official, Palestinian travel agencies are already advertising the trips.

Right now, for Gazans to travel anywhere, they need to get permission to enter Egypt, which is difficult to get to begin with, and then travel by bus directly to Cairo's airport - a six hour trip - and then wait hours more for their flights.

The trip from the Gaza crossings to Ramon is about three hours.

The Palestinian Authority announced that it opposes this and will do whatever it can to block Palestinians from traveling to Ramon Airport, saying that this will hurt relations with Jordan and Egypt, which would lose out on revenues from Palestinians traveling through those countries to get to Amman and Cairo, respectively. 

The leftist terror groups Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which are closely linked with many "human rights" NGOs, issued  condemnations for allowing Gazans to fly to Turkey through Ramon Airport. 

Their reasons are a perfect example of the blind hatred that Palestinian leaders have for Israel - so much so that they are eager to make their own people miserable for nebulous political gain.

They called on Palestinians to boycott Ramon airport, saying that Israel is using this as a means to reduce terror from Gaza.

PFLP political analyst Zulfiqar Swergo said in an interview with Al-Hadaf News Portal, "This step is meant to 'neutralize' the Gaza Strip through offering political bribes to [Hamas]  in order to ensure calm and not create a state of inconvenience to the occupying state."

He continued, "The Gaza government must carefully consider the strategic interests of the Palestinian people, and not forget that it is a government of resistance, and that this step will harm the idea of ​​resistance that our people are now strongly adopting in the West Bank, and it must be aware that the 'neutralization' of the Gaza Strip It is a major blow to the escalation of resistance in the West Bank."

That's the logic.  Terror is the top priority of the Palestinian people, and anything that makes their lives easier and reduces their continuous anger towards Jews is something that must be fought.

To the PFLP, it is better for Gaza to be what their NGO partners call an "open air prison" than to give travel options for residents of Gaza.

The DFLP had a different objection: using the Ramon Airport helps Israel economically, so therefore it must be boycotted, even if it costs Palestinians far more time and money. 

DFLP political analyst Mahmoud Mardawi complained that “there is an economic goal for the occupation behind this matter, especially since none of the Zionists went to use Ramon Airport when it opened."

He warned about "the political motives and the affirmation of the apartheid policy that the occupation practices day and night against our people" and called for all Palestinian institutions to "thwart this racist project."

So Israel helping Palestinians travel is an apartheid, racist project. 

Cutting through the doubletalk, it is clear that the Palestinian leaders want Palestinians to suffer for their own political gain - they cannot recruit more terrorists from people who aren't angry. 

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Arabic language media deliberately hiding the truth of the PFLP-GC "work accident" that killed 5

This morning, there was a large explosion in a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command location in the Bekaa region in southern Lebanon, near the Syrian border.

The PFLP-GC immediately issued a press release saying that this was an IDF airstrike.

Arabic-language media spread the word about the Israeli aggreesion.

Since then, two things happened:

- The IDF denied doing any activity in Lebanon at all.

- Multiple Lebanese security sources reported what did happen:

Five fighters from a pro-Syrian Palestinian militant group were killed in an accidental explosion at a base in eastern Lebanon, a Lebanese security source said Wednesday.

"An old rocket exploded in an arms depot on the base and five fighters were killed," the security source said, requesting anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the media.

In Beirut, a Lebanese military official said the explosion was the result of a blast within the base, adding that there was no airstrike. An official with a regional group allied with the Syrian government, said the explosion was the result of a “human error” that occurred when militants were handling ammunition. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity.

Yet looking at the last several hours of Arabic media reporting on the explosion and its aftermath, the Israeli denial is barely mentioned on a couple of Western-oriented Arabic sites, and the report about an old missile explosion has been ignored completely.

This is even after wire services like AFP reported on the rocket explosion. 

This is not government-level censorship. This is an unofficial policy for Arabic media to censor facts that do not fit the narrative or that can cause unease among some of their readership. 

If they even published it as a competing set of claims, as The National (UAE) did in English, any thinking person would see that the PFLP-GC is lying and Israel's denial is truthful - and that means that Arabs are less trustworthy than Jews, which contradicts the mega-narrative of Jews being dishonest and Arabs being honorable and trustworthy. 

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Palestinian NGOs cynically use World Press Freedom Day to falsely accuse Israel of jailing journalists

Palestinian prisoner rights NGOs are using today's World Press Freedom Day to call for Israel to release 16 "journalists' who are in prison. They claim that these journalists were arrested to curtail freedom of speech:  "The occupation authorities are pursuing a number of policies to restrict freedom of opinion and expression and impose more censorship and control on the Palestinians, as part of the tools of the apartheid regime, most notably the policy of arrest, threats, house arrest, and repeated assaults in the field of work; This is in a continuous attempt to undermine their societal, cultural, and political role, and to prevent them from exposing the ongoing crimes against the Palestinians."

They pointedly don't mention that these "journalists" were arrested because they engaged in terror. And many were never journalists to begin with.

People like Ahmed Adeeb Ahmed Al-Saifi, a member of Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades sentenced to 17 years in 2011 for his involvement in a shooting attack. He became a "journalist" during his time in prison.

Or Bassem Khandakji, a PFLP member who drove a 16 year old to blow himself up at the Carmel Market in 2004, killing 3 civilians. He also started writing after he was in prison.

Or Mahmoud Musa Issa (right), a Hamas Al Qassam member who kidnapped and killed an Israeli soldier in 1992. H is another "journalist" who started writing while in prison. 

Or Islamic Jihad's Haitham Jamal Ali Jaber, sentenced to 28 years in 2002 for terror attacks, who completed his degrees while in prison and also only became a writer afterwards. 

Of course, people who do have press credentials and use them to help terrorism are even more reprehensible and should not be held up as 

One photojournalist, Yazan Abu Salah, is a PFLP member who was sentenced to four years for his involvement in setting up terror cells an Iranian-funded plot to kidnap soldiers.

This is just more cynicism from Palestinian NGOs who know that most people will not bother to check their claims. Their track record of telling the truth is exceedingly poor, but they keep getting funded and respected. They know that years of lying propaganda pay off over time.

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Palestinian Arab angry reactions to Mansour Abbas' words of sanity show why they can never be peace partners

i24news reported Sunday:

Violence should be discarded and condemned “in all its manifestations” for Jews and Arabs to have a common future as neighbors, Mansour Abbas, arguably the most prominent Arab Israeli lawmaker of the day, told i24NEWS in an exclusive interview.

“We think that this demand is a compulsory for all of us, and we should push the violence in all of its manifestations aside, and we should engage in peace and in construction. We need to treat the wounds of both sides, to translate into the reality the goals of both sides, in order for us to reach a solution that would be acceptable for both sides,” Abbas, chair of the United Arab List faction, said.

Abbas stressed that he regards himself and fellow Arab citizens of Israel as Israelis, and rejected attempts by Palestinian leadership including the Hamas terrorist group to enlist Arab Israelis against Israel on the side of the Palestinians.

This is in response to Hamas trying to drag Israeli Arabs into becoming terrorists as a fifth column. 

I agree with very little that Mansour says, but this is a sane statement that reflects reality and not the fantasy of wanting nothing less than the destruction of Israel.

Naturally, major Palestinian factions condemned his words.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - which has extensive ties with "human rights" NGOs -  strongly condemned Abbas’s statements, and said they are "treacherous and do not represent our people from near or far, and reveal the suspicious role assigned to him as an obedient tool in the hands of the occupation...he is a traitor to the interests of our people and their national rights.” 

Mahmoud Abbas' "moderate" Fatah said his words “essentially affect the historical national rights of our Palestinian people in Palestine,” and described them as “a cheap fit with the Zionist narrative that falsely monopolizes the history of Palestine.... Mansour Abbas crossed the red lines with his positions.”

As of this writing, I have not yet seen any reaction from Hamas or Islamic Jihad, but since Abbas' comments were aimed squarely at them, one can assume that they would be at least as angry as their rival  Fatah is. 

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Palestinian media refuses to mention that today's terrorist murdered a six year old. Because that isn't "heroic."

From Times of Israel:

A six-year-old boy and a 20-year-old man were killed and at least five others were wounded in a car-ramming terror attack near East Jerusalem’s Ramot neighborhood, police and medics said Friday. One of those wounded was a child in critical condition.

Graphic footage from the scene showed several people strewn on the ground after a blue Mazda vehicle crashed into a bus stop near the Nebi Samuel site, between Jerusalem and the Palestinian city of Ramallah.

The attacker was identified as Hussein Qaraqa, an Israeli citizen and resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya.

The six year old victim was named as Yaakov Yisrael Fali.

The second victim was identified as Alter Shlomo Lederman, a 20-year-old yeshiva student who had gotten married two months ago. He and his wife had been on their way to his parents’ home for Shabbat. Lederman was rushed to Shaare Zedek Medical Center in critical condition, where he succumbed to his wounds.

I went through every Palestinian media outlet that I could think of, and not a single one mentioned that the victim was a six year old child. They all just said that he was a "settler."

Because heroes don't kill children, and the murderer was a hero, therefore they cannot report that he murdered a child. The narrative is the important thing. 

And, yes, the attack is described as a "heroic operation" in much of Palestinian media. 

While they dehumanize Jews, they humanize murderers of Jews. The terrorist is described as a loving father of three, the oldest being 5 years old.  Yes, children he chose to leave fatherless are more important than the ones he rammed his car into.

I am willing to bet that if anyone looks into his background, they will find that he had incentive to commit suicide and receive the guaranteed lifetime salary for his family paid for by the PLO. But no reporter will bother asking those questions. The narrative of a desperate Palestinian who has "no choice" but to murder Jews is too important.

The murderer was not an Islamic extremist. He was a leftist, and a fan (at least) of the PFLP group that is linked to so many Palestinian "human rights" organizations.

I have not seen a condemnation of the PFLP as a terrorist organization from any human rights group since the early 2000s.

After the last terror attack in Jerusalem, Human Rights Watch didn't write a word of condemnation until they could first blame Israel for sealing the house of the murderer's family. "Collective punishment" was the theme of their story that mentioned the attack. 

Since they prioritize collective punishment as a worse crime than mass murder, I wonder if they would consider a Palestinian ramming his car into random Jews, ostensibly because of Israeli policies, as a case of collective punishment? 

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"Human rights expert" from EU-funded Al Haq supports and praises murdering Jews

In late 2021, when Israel declared Al Haq and several other Palestinian NGOs to be illegal, the reaction from "human rights" groups was immediate and fierce. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch called the move "a brazen attack on human rights" and referred to their members as "human rights defenders." The New York Times called them "human rights groups," as did AP.   The UN issued a statement from 17 "experts" calling it "a frontal attack on the Palestinian human rights movement, and on human rights everywhere."

As usual, Israel is right and the "experts" are wrong.

Meet Isam Abdeen, "human rights defender." Although it is unclear whether he stills works there, he was the head of the Local and Regional Advocacy Department at Al Haq when Israel labeled it a terror group and his papers are still on its site. As of last summer he was described as a legal advisor for the Al Haq Foundation.

Abdeen, considered one of the more prominent Palestinian human rights activists, fully defended the murder of seven Jews outside the synagogue in Neve Yaacov on Friday night.

His immediate reaction on his Facebook page was to say, "The shooting by the son of the capital alone in occupied Jerusalem is legitimate in international law, and no justification is needed."

Abdeen expanded on that in a full article where he wrote, "What happened in the occupied Jerusalem, that a holy young man of the capital, alone, committed a resistance act on Palestinian land (occupied Jerusalem) the land of his parents and ancestors, a legitimate act under international humanitarian law, human rights law and dozens of United Nations resolutions that all pour into the pot of the original right of peoples in destiny determination; And he is a legal argument on the world."

Murdering civilians is illegal under international law under all circumstances. The entire Fourth Geneva Convention is meant to protect civilians in a time of war. In 2004, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan directly dismissed the argument of terrorists and their supporters: "There is nothing in the fact of occupation that justifies the targeting and killing of civilians."

This Al Haq "human rights defender" is directly supporting, advocating and praising murdering Jews.

And this supporter of murdering Jews also trains other human rights professionals! 

There cannot be a more grotesque perversion of human rights than having a "human rights lawyer" train others that murdering humans is not only allowed but praiseworthy. 

And this is who  Amnesty and Human Rights Watch and the UN support.

Al Haq is funded by the European Union, Norway, Ireland, Italy, France, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Spain.. It has never condemned any terror attack against Jews, to my knowledge. it has ties to the PFLP terror group which recruits and brainwashes child soldiers - another human rights violation the group has never condemned. 

And now one of its prominent members directly praises the murder of innocent civilians.

The only way this can be considered a human rights organization is if it considers Jews to be subhuman. 

Exposing this hypocrisy is the single most important thing that can be done to combat terror. In this sense, the media has failed in its most basic responsibility. 

(h/t NGO Monitor)

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"He's a victim!" "He's a heroic martyr!" "He's both!"

In what has become a daily occurrence, a Palestinian man was shot and killed as he tried to stab Israelis.

Aref Abdel Nasser Aref Lahlouh attempted the attack at a checkpoint near Kedumim.

Palestinian media went through their usual ritual. At first, they claimed that he was shot for no reason.

Then they say that he was "allegedly" trying to stab a soldier but the Israelis killed him in cold blood. And that the heartless Israelis killed him in front of his mother and brother.

And then, when it becomes clear that he actually did try to stab people, they turn him from an innocent victim into a heroic martyr.

Here's video of the incident that appears to show that Lahlouh tried to go around the soldier to attack civilians at the checkpoint, who ran away as the soldier shot him.

Originally, the "Resistance News Network" tweeted, "In yet another cowardly act of cold-blooded execution, zionist forces shot the martyr Aref Abdelnasser Lahlouh (21)  from Jenin the settlement of Kedumim, east of #Qalqilya after being forcibly removed from his car. Aref was shot in front of his mother and epileptic brother."

After the video evidence, there was a complete about face. They proudly show the video, saying "Martyr Aref Lahlouh attempted to carry out a stabbing operation on IOF soldiers in #Qalqilya before his ascendance to martyrdom."

Hamas also tries to have it both ways, but they choose to give one message in English to the West and another in Arabic.

In English:

 The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas mourns Palestinian citizen Aref Lahlouh, 20, who was extrajudicially killed by the Israeli occupation forces in the occupied West Bank city of Qalqilia.  

In Arabic:

 The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) mourns to the masses of our stationed Palestinian people, its  fighter martyr: Aref Abdel Nasser Aref Lahlouh (20 years), from the Jenin refugee camp, who rose to fame while carrying out a heroic stabbing operation against the occupation forces near Qalqilya, this afternoon, Wednesday.

The choice of our people is to escalate the confrontation by igniting the land under the feet of the occupation and its settlers, and that the resistance will confront the crimes of the occupation and its aggression against the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque with sacrifices, lives, and all available means so that it remains purely Islamic, and a title for our people and our Arab and Islamic nation.

But the most unusual take comes from the socialist PFLP. The PFLP requires both narratives - from the socialist viewpoint, Palestinians are always victims and therefore always right, while from a Palestinian perspective, they love brave heroic "martyrs." Plus they need to add some antisemitism as well. So their statement includes all three:

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine mourned the death of Aref Abdel Nasser Aref Lahlouh (22 years old), who was shot dead by the occupation army near Qalqilya while trying to carry out a stabbing attack.

The PFLP considered that the Zionist enemy's continued commission of murders against Palestinian youth at checkpoints is at the heart of the killing doctrine rooted in the official Zionist institution, which is dominated by a fascist and bloody military character based on criminal Talmudic religious fatwas.

Interestingly, Ma'an has an analysis that says that Hamas is encouraging these "lone wolf" attacks in order to take IDF attention away from Gaza, and that many Palestinians are critical of these "martyrdom operations" because they often have to pay the price in being unable to go to their jobs in Israel. 

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Donations to groups that encourage Palestinians murdering Jews are tax deductible in the US

Last year, a group of anti-Israel groups co-sponsored rallies  in New York City titled  "By Any Means Necessary."

The phrase isn't even a dog whistle, It literally is a call to murder Jews in Israel. it says that bus bombs, suicide bombings of pizza shops and Passover seders and murdering children via sniper are all legitimate "resistance." And if they thought that murdering Jews around the world would help their cause, then that is included in "any means necessary."

One would think that groups that literally call for murdering Jews would be banned. But not only are they legal - incitement to murder Jews is apparently free speech - but donations to these groups are tax deductible.

The Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network was founded and is led by members of the PFLP terror group.  It proudly promotes the PFLP which recruits children to attack Jews. Yet donors to Samidoun get a tax deduction, as it launders the donations through the Alliance for Global Justice, which claims to support "peace, anti-war and liberation." But AGJ happily partners with a group that openly advocates terror.

"Within Our Lifetime" apparently coined the phrase "Globalize the Intifada," which they explicitly say means "to win liberation by any means necessary." 

In this case, it sounds even more like a threat to Jews worldwide, not just in Israel.

Yet donations to Within Our Lifetime are also tax deductible, laundered through Wespac, which describes itself as wanting a more "just and peaceful world" - which apparently includes blowing up Jews. 

The Palestinian Youth Movement, another co-sponsor of "By Any Means Necessary," also launders its donations through Wespac.

It seems to me that IRS rules against terrorist organizations are general enough to include any of these groups that say they support violence against civilians as a legitimate means of "resistance." The organizations that launder the money, Wespac and the Alliance for Global Justice, should be examined and put on notice - the contents of these groups' websites should be enough to make an initial determination that they support terror.

This is way overdue. 

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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!

 

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Israel admits it mistakenly killed one Palestinian - the exception that proves the rule

Last week, at an impromptu checkpoint, IDF soldiers pulled a young man out of his car. His father, Ahmed Kahla, leaped out of the car (Haaretz' words) towards the soldiers. Fearful that they were being attacked, the soldiers shot the father, killing him.

The IDF investigated and determined that lethal force was not necessary, and that the soldiers' stories about what happened - that Kahla tried to grab one of their guns, or tried to stab them - were not accurate.

So far this year, there have been 18 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank. In nearly all of the cases, the person killed was actively involved in hostilities when killed and/or was a member of a terror group.  (Given that there are millions of Palestinians and, at most, only several thousand members of terror groups in the West Bank, the chances that terror group members were not involved in hostilities and were coincidentally killed is quite small.)

Here is what most of those killed looked like: 

Adin Haykin has been keeping track of the deaths and the circumstances/affiliations.

Notice that two of those pictured here are children (#1 and #8.)  There have been four child terrorists killed this year, three of them PFLP and one Fatah Al Aqsa Brigades. That story, that terror groups are actively recruiting and training children, is simply not reported anywhere. 

The case of Ahmed Kahla is the exception that proves the rule - the IDF tries as much as possible to only kill those who are directly attacking at the time, which is the vast majority of those killed. Moreover, the deaths are investigated, the investigations are done by high level authorities and the IDF will admit when their soldiers violate policies and kill without enough justification. (The last time the IDF admitted to have made a mistake was in December.)

Soldiers are under intense pressure, knowing that they are targets 24/7. They often have to make split second decisions as to whether they are being attacked and from where. And, crucially, they know that if they make a wrong decision, not only could they be responsible for the death of an innocent person, but they may face investigations.

The media typically does not report on most of these cases of actual gunmen attacking soldiers; far more often they will just report a tally of those killed and imply that most of them were uninvolved civilians.  

But as we have seen, well over 90% of those killed are very involved and active in hostilities when killed. And in Arabic, their "heroism" is celebrated.

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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!

 

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01/18 Links Pt2: Moshe Dayan’s Tragic Blunder; Mahmoud Abbas’ Dissertation; Why Israel’s enemies will hate the Louvre; No room for anti-Israel bias at Kennedy School

From Ian:

Meir Y. Soloveichik: Moshe Dayan’s Tragic Blunder

There is an argument to be made for permitting wider access and the right to pray for Jews at the site of the biblical Temples. In part, this argument charges that defense minister Moshe Dayan, in electing not to fully realize Israel’s sovereignty over the Mount immediately after its breathtaking capture in the 1967 war, helped facilitate the resonant Palestinian lie that the Jews have no connection to our ancient homeland—for surely, if the Temple Mount was historically ours, religiously ours, we would not have handed it back to them.

Dayan self-evidently thought otherwise. Anxious to avoid a full-on confrontation with the entire Muslim world, and utilizing the halachic argument that Jews should not set foot on the Mount for fear of defiling the sacred ground where the Temple and its Holy of Holies once stood, he allowed Jordan’s Muslim Waqf to continue to administer the compound’s holy places.

Netanyahu, Horovitz continued, had “wisely” adopted Dayan’s approach previously, but now the prime minister had “sanctioned” an act of “potential pyromania.” Horovitz’s account leaves out the fact that the decision of the ardently secular Dayan was founded on total disregard for what the Temple Mount meant to religious Jews.

After his paratroopers broke through Jordanian lines in 1967 and reached the site, Mordechai Gur exultantly exclaimed that “the Temple Mount is in our hands.” Dayan, in contrast, infamously reflected, “What do I need this Vatican for?” As the Israeli journalist Nadav Sharagai has documented, Dayan’s actions were based in the presumption that the Temple Mount is not of any religious significance to Jews at all:
Dayan thought at the time, and years later committed his thoughts to writing, that since the Mount was a “Muslim prayer mosque,” while for Jews it was no more than “a historical site of commemoration of the past…one should not hinder the Arabs behaving there as they do now and one should recognize their right as Muslims to control the site.”

But of course the Temple Mount is more, for Jews, than a commemorative locale of the past: It is the holiest site in Judaism, the one toward which Jews pray all over the world, because they believe that God dwells there in a special way. Dayan’s decision did indeed facilitate Palestinian claims, rampant today, that no Temple ever stood in Jerusalem and that the entire Jewish connection to Jerusalem is a fabrication. This is why more and more religious Jews are realizing that visiting the site is essential. It is not only far-right figures who are visiting the Mount. Entering certain sections of the Mount in a manner sanctioned by Jewish law is becoming more and more mainstream among Orthodox Jews. And that is why opposition to Jewish access to the Mount is growing more and more frantic by the day.

All this points to a profound irony. The return of Netanyahu has been met with the journalistic gnashing of teeth and the rhetorical rending of garments by writers and public figures about the danger that the (democratically elected) government of Israel poses to democracy. And yet it is these very critics who are often so dismissive of the most elemental of democratic injustices: denying Jews in Israel the right to visit, and to pray at, Judaism’s holiest place. Perhaps, when it comes to the history of the democratic liberties of mankind in the eyes of those who piously intone on the subject, it is only the rights of religious Jews that do not matter.

Mahmoud Abbas’ Dissertation

On Feb. 1, 1972, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union issued a directive “On further measures to fight anti-Soviet and anti-communist activities of international Zionism.” The social sciences section of the Soviet Academy of Sciences soon established a permanent commission for the coordination of scientific criticism of Zionism, to be housed at the academy’s prestigious Institute of Oriental Studies. Over the next 15 years, the IOS would serve as an important partner in the state’s fight against the imaginary global Zionist conspiracy that Soviet security services believed was sabotaging the USSR in the international arena and at home. In 1982, the IOS would grant the doctoral status to one Mahmoud Abbas, upon the defense of his thesis The Relationship Between Zionists and Nazis, 1933-1945.

Abbas’ dissertation has been a subject of considerable interest over the years. The thesis isn’t publicly available: By all accounts, it is kept in an IOS special storage facility requiring special authorization to access. But if one visits the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, one can easily get the Palestinian leader’s so-called avtoreferat—an extended dissertation abstract. Written to the standards of the Soviet State Commission for Academic Degrees and Titles and authored by the candidate, the 19-page document outlines the dissertation’s relevance, methodology, main arguments and unique contribution to the field. It also provides a literature review and lists the individuals and institutions that were involved in shepherding the work through to completion. It therefore offers a peek not only into Mahmoud Abbas’ academic accomplishment, but also into the system that produced it.

Using the social sciences to support political and ideological agendas set by the Communist Party was a matter of course in the USSR. Entire academic disciplines had been established to grant scholarly legitimacy to the state’s guiding ideology. “Scientific atheism,” for an example, was tasked with proving scientifically that God did not exist and that religion was the opiate of the masses. “Scientific communism” was supposed to supply scientific proof that communism was the superior stage of social and economic development and would supersede both Soviet socialism and global capitalism. When, instead, capitalism superseded Soviet socialism and the cushy budgets that sustained these disciplines vanished, they, too, quietly dissolved.

As a field, “scientific anti-Zionism” never took root in the Soviet academy as broadly as the other two subjects. Like them, it died as soon as its primary client—the Soviet state—disappeared. Soon a million Soviet Jews resettled in Israel and the newly independent former Soviet states restored diplomatic relations with the country.

I grew up in Akademgorodok—a suburb of the Siberian city of Novosibirsk that was home to the Siberian Division of the Academy of Sciences. Adults around me lived and breathed science—real science, like physics and biology. It was well-known that portions of the academy were corrupted by ideological agendas. The antisemitism in its math division and elsewhere was a fact of life. Humanities and social sciences in particular were ruled by ideological priorities. But seeing the intellectual corruption that is evident in the story of Abbas’ dissertation is disturbing nonetheless.

Why Israel’s enemies will hate the Louvre

The Palestinian Authority and its supporters have a new enemy: the Louvre.

The world’s most-visited museum, the famous French institution that holds some of the greatest works of art and antiquities, is likely to find itself on anti-Israel boycott lists around the world.

This is because among the Louvre’s storied collections is a slab of stone with an inscription that affirms the ancient connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.

The stone, known as the Mesha Stele, was first discovered in 1868 near the Dead Sea, but its inscription, written in the language of the ancient Moabites, was only partially understandable due to centuries of wear and damage. The inscription recounts a war between King Mesha of Moab and the Jews—the same conflict described in the third chapter of the Book of Kings. In addition, the words “House of David” appeared to be included in the inscription, but damage to the artifact meant this could not be proved conclusively.

Linguists and historians associated with a University of Southern California research project recently analyzed the artifact with a new technology called Reflectance Transformation Imaging that “takes digital images of an artifact from different angles and then combined to create a precise, three-dimensional digital rendering of the piece,” according to an article by two of the researchers, André Lemaire and Jean-Philippe Delorme, in the latest issue of Biblical Archeology Review.

This allowed the damaged section of the stele to be read. As was long suspected, it indeed referred to the “House of David.” So, once again, archaeological discoveries have affirmed what was already written long ago in the Hebrew Bible.

Do you know what is not mentioned in the inscription? “Palestine” or “Palestinians.”

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