Jordanian lawmakers call Jews "monkeys and pigs" (and women!) as anti-Israel analysts try to explain why there's no rioting

From i24News:

A member of Jordan's parliament on Wednesday said that Jordanians would become "suicide bombers" for the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem in response to the previous day's visit to the Temple Mount by Israel's National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Using an antisemitic reference to Jews as "the sons of monkeys and pigs," Yanal Abd al-Salam Nour al-Din al-Fraihat said in a speech at Jordan's national assembly in the capital Amman that "the response of the Palestinian and Jordanian people at the moment is only talk, but this is a volcano and soon the response will be with lead bullets."

Here's the video with Hebrew subtitles.

 

He wasn't the only Jordanian lawmaker who used the "monkeys and pigs" phrase. 

MP Khalil Attia condemned the "stinky-yahu" government (apparently an Arabic pun on Netanyahu) for Itamar Ben-Gvir's peaceful walk on the Temple Mount, also referring to him as the "grandson of monkeys and pigs" who "infiltrated Al Aqsa like women."

He said this while a woman MP was sitting right in front of him.

Have you noticed that ordinary Palestinians are not rioting over this? All of the inflammatory rhetoric is coming from politicians and pundits who keep predicting an earthquake. And they seem a bit disappointed that it hasn't happened. It's been two days and their confident predictions are looking rather foolish.

The always moronic Jonathan Cook, writing in Middle East Eye, regretfully notes that "Ben-Gvir’s visit has passed, at least so far, without a significant Palestinian backlash" but claims that this only means that Ben Gvir is about to launch a "holy war" against Palestinians. He then gives this priceless piece of "analysis:"

The precedent he was drawing on was the visit to Al-Aqsa in September 2000 of then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon backed by 1,000 members of Israel’s security forces, over the opposition of the Jerusalem police.

That incursion triggered a Palestinian uprising, the Second Intifada, justifying years of crushing Israeli military repression.... Ben-Gvir might be angling to provoke a similar confrontation to provide a pretext for finishing off what’s left of the PA. 

Cook thinks that Israel wanted and even planned the second intifada, sacrificing a thousand citizens just to weaken the PA. That is classic projection - the Palestinians may act that way, but Israel actually cares about the lives of its citizens.

Haaretz' Jack Khoury has a different theory. He writes, "The lack of Palestinian response in Jerusalem can perhaps be explained by the fact that it doesn’t depend on those leaders. Neither the Palestinian Authority nor Hamas have an organizational infrastructure in Jerusalem that can dictate the public agenda and bring masses out to the streets."

Which means he is admitting that those "spontaneous protests" are really scripted out by Hamas and the PA, and do not reflect the actual feelings of the people, who care as little about another Jew walking on the Temple Mount as they did about Trump's Jerusalem embassy move. 

But don't worry, Khoury says: "What passed quietly on Tuesday is no guarantee for what may develop tomorrow or in the near future."

The third intifada has always had a large cheering section, trying to goad the people who would suffer from its effects into violence.

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Today's hypocrisy by Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook, the Nazareth-based writer who finds every excuse he can to lie about and bash the nation that allows him to write freely, has another perfect example of hypocrisy in his latest piece published by Ma'an.

You see, New York Times reporter Ethan Bronner recently revealed that his son was in the IDF.
Cook uses this as a springboard to accuse all Western journalists in Israel (outside of himself, of course) of having pro-Israel biases. He also manages to whine that they have better sources than he does.

There is another journalist who has written dozens of arrticles for Ma'an, as well as for many other Arab and far-left sites. His name is Ramzy Baroud, and his hatred of Israel is palpable. He doesn't even pretend to be objective any more.

He just wrote a book called "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter." Although he says this is a history book, his father was actually a member of the Palestine Liberation Army in the 1960s.

Will Jonathan Cook, or any other Ma'an writer, decry Ramzy Baroud for his obvious conflict of interest?

Given that Bronner clearly tries to be fair in his writing, and Baroud clearly does not, wouldn't it make more sense to go after Baroud?

Fat chance.

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Ma'an calls Jews in Jaffa "settlers"

Ma'an published an article by Jonathan Cook about the yeshiva that was built in Jaffa, referring to Jews who live well within the Green Line as "settlers" because Jews have the audacity to legally buy and build in a mixed Jewish-Arab city.

Jonathan Cook is an extremist writer who has praised Hamas and has a history of writing lies and fantasies (the latter his prediction in 2007 that Israeli teams will start killing Iranian Jews to get them to leave Iran.)

In this article, originally published in The National (UAE,) Cook is trying to make the yeshiva look as extremist as possible. Apparently, people wearing kippot on their heads are automatically considered "settlers" to bigots like Cook, and he tries mightily to make it look like the yeshiva is causing severe problems in Jaffa. The head of the yeshiva disagrees, but of course Cook isn't interested in writing about both sides of the story.

While Cook talks about the Jaffa Arabs who left in 1948, it is interesting to note that in August, 1947, some 18 Jewish families were forced out of Jaffa by Arab violence - arguably the first refugees of the war. (My original posting lost the newspaper images, sorry.) Muslims went on a killing spree, both against the Jews of Jaffa as well as shooting at Tel Aviv. Later in the year some 5000 more Jews, mostly Yemenites, were forced out of Jaffa as well.

But lying journalists like Jonathan Cook can never be expected to mention such facts in his biased articles that are meant more to incite than inform.

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Jonathan Cook continues his lies

I have discussed Jonathan Cook before, and normally I would just leave it at that and chalk him up as yet another Israel-basher who gets his jollies by publishing his lies on far-left websites like Counterpunch. However, he also prints articles in The Guardian and as such, his lies need to be exposed.

His latest in The Guardian discusses a couple of the criticisms that pro-Israel advocates had of his earlier column on how Israel will start bombing Iranian Jews to get them to leave. Of course, he doesn't discuss the explicit lies and implicit bigotry I pointed out in that column - because it is easier to defend against cherry-picked weak arguments than strong ones.

The funny thing is that he tries to be careful to keep the worst lies out of his Guardian columns, but his lies and his intellectual dishonesty when making his tendentious anti-Israel arguments in his other articles makes all of his writings more than suspect.

For example, his latest screed about the Lebanon War includes this paragraph:

Recent reports have revealed that one of the main justifications for Hizbullah's continuing resistance -- that Israel failed to withdraw fully from Lebanese territory in 2000 -- is now supported by the UN. Last month its cartographers quietly admitted that Lebanon is right in claiming sovereignty over a small fertile area known as the Shebaa Farms, still occupied by Israel. Israel argues that the territory is Syrian and will be returned in future peace talks with Damascus, even though Syria backs Lebanon's position. The UN's admission has been mostly ignored by the international media.

The facts: An unnamed Israeli official said that the UN cartographer decided that Shebaa Farms was Lebanese territory. The UN denied that it made that determination and indicated that determining sovereignty was not the cartographer's job. In other words, Cook's claim that the UN "admitted" that Shebaa Farms is Lebanese is simply a lie.

Another claim, one that Israel hoped might justify the large number of Lebanese civilians it killed during the war, was that Hizbullah fighters had been regularly hiding and firing rockets from among south Lebanon's civilian population. Human rights groups found scant evidence of this, but a senior UN official, Jan Egeland, offered succour by accusing Hizbullah of "cowardly blending".

Besides the fact that there are videos showing the rockets coming from houses, Human Rights watch admitted that "of course Hizbullah did sometimes hide among civilians, breaching its duty to do everything feasible to protect civilians and possibly committing the war crime of deliberate shielding..." even as it condemned Israel for hitting civilians. Cook could have phrased his argument that Israel's reactions were disproportionate but instead he again crosses the line from fact to fantasy.

The war began on 12 July, when Israel launched waves of air strikes on Lebanon after Hizbullah killed three soldiers and captured two more on the northern border. (A further five troops were killed by a land mine when their tank crossed into Lebanon in hot pursuit.) Hizbullah had long been warning that it would seize soldiers if it had the chance, in an effort to push Israel into a prisoner exchange. Israel has been holding a handful of Lebanese prisoners since it withdrew from its two-decade occupation of south Lebanon in 2000.

Notice his wording - Israel started the war when it retaliated for offensive Hezbollah actions. Since Hezbollah always said it wanted to kidnap (and kill) Israelis, they are off the hook in Cook's twisted mind as far as any responsibility for starting the conflict. He also implies that the Lebanese in Israeli jails are just hostages, not criminals nor terrorists. No doubt he supports the release of Samir Kuntar, just like his Hezbollah heroes.

This is not journalism, and these are not facts. Ironically, Jonathan Cook rails against people advocating for Israel while he, weekly, advocates for Hezbollah. If he wants to write opinion columns for the Guardian, he is free to do so, but the readers should know how dishonest he has been in his other writings.

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Jonathan Cook's lies and bigotry

We've discussed Jonathan Cook before. This British journalist, based out of Nazareth and enjoying freedom of the press that just doesn't exist in the Arab nations he loves, consistently writes well-written and absurdly biased articles blaming Israel for all Middle East problems and praising Hamas.

His latest article, for Al-Ahram, is a thinly-veiled slander saying not only will Israel attack Jews in Iran to get them to leave, but that Arab bigotry against Jews is justified:

What is the basis for Israel's dire forecasts -- the ideological scaffolding being erected, presumably, to justify an attack on Iran? Helpfully, as George W Bush defended his Iraq policies last month, he reminded us yet again of the menace Iran supposedly poses: it is "threatening to wipe Israel off the map".

This myth has been endlessly recycled since a translation error was made of a speech Ahmadinejad delivered nearly two years ago. Farsi experts have verified that the Iranian president, far from threatening to destroy Israel, was quoting from an earlier speech by the late Ayatollah Khomeini in which he reassured supporters of the Palestinians that "the Zionist regime in Jerusalem" would "vanish from the page of time".

Ahmadinejad was not threatening to exterminate Jews or even Israel. He was comparing Israel's occupation of the Palestinians with other illegitimate systems of rule whose time had passed, including the shahs who once ruled Iran, apartheid South Africa and the Soviet empire. Nonetheless, this erroneous translation has survived and prospered because Israel and her supporters have exploited it for their own crude propaganda purposes.

This is an often heard leftist lie. While the literal translation may indeed have meant "vanish from the page of time," the official Iranian translation was "wipe off the face of the Earth." Even more dishonest is Cook's ignoring of Ahmadinejad's many, many other statements threatening Israel and declaring Islamist supremacy. He undoubtedly knows better and chooses to ignore anything that contradicts his tendentious arguments.

In the meantime, the 25,000-strong Iranian Jewish community is the largest in the Middle East outside Israel and traces its roots back 3,000 years. As one of several non-Muslim minorities in Iran, Jews there suffer discrimination, but they are certainly no worse off than the one million Palestinian citizens of Israel -- and far better off than Palestinians under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.

When there is a Jewish consul representing Iran in other countries, or a temporary Jewish president of Iran, or a Jewish supreme court judge in Iran, perhaps Cook would have a point. As it is, he is stating his own unsupported opinion as fact.

To step up these efforts -- and presumably to avoid the embarrassing incongruence of claiming Iran's genocidal intent while thousands of Jews live happily in Tehran -- Israel is now backing a move by Jewish donors to guarantee every Iranian Jewish family $60,000 to settle in Israel, in addition to a host of existing financial incentives that are offered to Jewish immigrants, including loans and cheap mortgages. The announcement was met with scorn by the Society of Iranian Jews, which issued a statement that their national identity was not for sale. "The identity of Iranian Jews is not tradeable for any amount of money. Iranian Jews are among the most ancient Iranians. Iran's Jews love their Iranian identity and their culture, so threats and this immature political enticement will not achieve their aim of wiping out the identity of Iranian Jews."

Somehow, Cook fails to mention that fully three quarters of Iranian Jewry emigrated after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Somehow, he fails to mention the 13 Jews arrested as spies in 1999 - including a rabbi - on trumped up charges of spying for Israel.

Somehow he fails to mention the 13 Jews executed since the Iranian revolution.

He also displays a remarkable lack of skepticism about what a Iranian Jewish group might want to say publicly in the land of the mullahs where Jews can be arrested arbitrarily or executed. I guess that journalists are not trained to be skeptical when the absurd statements they can quote fit their agendas.

However, this unwelcome financial gesture may not be as innocuous as it seems. Israel introduced a similar scheme a few years ago, when Argentina's economy plunged into deep recession, broadcasting an offer of $20,000 to every Argentinean Jew who settled in Israel. Months later the Israeli media reported a rise in anti- Semitic attacks in Argentina, only adding to the pressure on Jews there to leave. Of course, there was no mention of a possible causal connection between the attacks and Israel's generous offer to Jews to abandon their homeland as other Argentineans sank into poverty.

Can you spot the bigotry? Cook is justifying Argentine anti-semitism on the grounds that since the Jews were offered money they would of course become targets on basis of their religion!

But if financial enticements fail to move Iranian Jews, there is every reason to fear that Israel may resort to other, more dubious ways of encouraging them to emigrate. That is certainly a path Israel has chosen before with other communities of Arab Jews, whom it has regarded either as a pool of potential spies and agents provocateurs to be used when needed, or as "human dust", in the words of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, to be recruited to Israel's "demographic battle" against the Palestinians.

In "Operation Susannah" of 1954, for example, Israel recklessly recruited a group of Egyptian Jews to stage a series of explosions in Egypt in a bid to discourage Britain from withdrawing from the Suez Canal zone. When the plot came to light, it naturally cast suspicion of disloyalty over Egypt's wider Jewish community. Following Israel's invasion and occupation of Sinai two years later, the government of President Gamal Abdel-Nasser expelled some 25,000 Egyptian Jews and, after others were imprisoned on suspicion of spying, the rest soon left.

Can you spot the bigotry? While the Lavon affair was not a great chapter of Israeli history, Cook uses it to justify Egyptian anti-semitism. Would he argue that Americans and Europeans can justifiably hate Arabs because of the much deadlier and rampant terrorism done by Arabs in their countries?

Even more notoriously, Israel went to greater lengths to ensure the exit of the Arab world's largest Jewish population, in Iraq. In 1950 a series of bombs targeting Jews in Baghdad forced a rapid exodus of some 130,000 to Israel, convinced that Arab extremists were behind the attacks. Only later did it emerge that the bombs had been planted by members of the Zionist underground, supported by the Israeli government.

Sorry, Jonathan, but this just ain't true either. The major deadly synagogue bomb was thrown by Islamists, and the others were done by a Jew to prove that the Jew falsely arrested for the other bomb couldn't have done it. The idea that Zionists launched that campaign was a lie based on a British embassy assessment at the time that had no basis in reality. This was discovered by Tom Segev, a "new historian" who would not whitewash Israeli acts under any circumstances.

Now, Iran's Jews may find themselves treated in much the same manner -- simply as human fodder. Stories are growing of Israel exploiting the free movement between Iran and Israel enjoyed by Iranian Jews and their Israeli relatives to carry out spying operations on Iran's nuclear programme. Such reports have come from reliable sources such as the American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, citing US government officials.

The fallout from such actions is not difficult to predict. Besieged by the US and the international community, Tehran is cracking down on dissent and minority groups, fearful that its own grip on power is shaky and that the well-publicised subversion being carried out by US and Israeli agents is likely only to be stepped up. So far most officials in Tehran have been careful to avoid suggesting that Iran's Jews have dual loyalties, as has the local Jewish community itself, both of them aware of Israel's interests in provoking such a confrontation. But as the strains increase, and Israel's need to prove Tehran's genocidal intent grows ever stronger, that policy may end up being forfeited, and with it the future of Iran's Jews.

More important than the welfare of Iranian Jewish families, it seems, is the value of Iranian Jews as a propaganda tool in Israel's battle to persuade the world that coexistence with the Muslim world is impossible. For those who want to engineer a clash of civilisations, the 3,000- year-old Jewish legacy in Iran is not something to be treasured, but is merely an obstacle to war.

As usual, Cook bases his predictions on nothing but lies and his own fantasies, all coming to the conclusion that Israel is inherently evil and hates the Iranian Jews who it is trying to get out of Iran. And he neatly avoids blaming Iran for any future mistreatment of Jews - in classic Israel-bashing manner, the only one respinsible for anyone else's actions is Israel.

Way to go, Jonathan! Your quasi-historic writings may play well in Egypt and in the usual leftist rags that publish you, but it exposes you to being a hack when put up against any real analysis.

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Guess who's stealing land?

Palestinian Arabs have so far been guilty, as far as I can tell, of 100% of the crimes that they routinely falsely accuse Jews of committing. This is what is known as "projection" and it happens a lot.

The latest example is that the Palestinian Muslims are stealing Palestinian Christians' land. (Sorry, Jonathan Cook, you have been proven a moron yet again.)

A number of Christian families have finally decided to break their silence and talk openly about what they describe as Muslim persecution of the Christian minority in this city.

The move comes as a result of increased attacks on Christians by Muslims over the past few months. The families said they wrote letters to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, the Vatican, Church leaders and European governments complaining about the attacks, but their appeals have fallen on deaf ears.

According to the families, many Christians have long been afraid to complain in public about the campaign of "intimidation" for fear of retaliation by their Muslim neighbors and being branded "collaborators" with Israel.

But following an increase in attacks on Christian-owned property in the city over the past few months, some Christians are no longer afraid to talk about the ultra-sensitive issue. And they are talking openly about leaving the city.

"The situation is very dangerous," said Samir Qumsiyeh, owner of the Beit Sahur-based private Al-Mahd (Nativity) TV station. "I believe that 15 years from now there will be no Christians left in Bethlehem. Then you will need a torch to find a Christian here. This is a very sad situation."

Qumsiyeh, one of the few Christians willing to speak about the harsh conditions of their community, has been the subject of numerous death threats. His house was recently attacked with fire-bombs, but no one was hurt.

Qumsiyeh said he has documented more than 160 incidents of attacks on Christians in the area in recent years.

He said a monk was recently roughed up for trying to prevent a group of Muslim men from seizing lands owned by Christians in Beit Sahur. Thieves have targeted the homes of many Christian families and a "land mafia" has succeeded in laying its hands on vast areas of land belonging to Christians, he added.

Fuad and Georgette Lama woke up one morning last September to discover that Muslims from a nearby village had fenced off their family's six-dunam plot in the Karkafa suburb south of Bethlehem. "A lawyer and an official with the Palestinian Authority just came and took our land," said 69-year-old Georgette Lama.

The couple was later approached by senior PA security officers who offered to help them kick out the intruders from the land. "We paid them $1,000 so they could help us regain our land," she said, almost in tears. "Instead of giving us back our land, they simply decided to keep it for themselves. They even destroyed all the olive trees and divided the land into small plots, apparently so that they could offer each for sale." When her 72-year-old husband, Fuad, went to the land to ask the intruders to leave, he was severely beaten and threatened with guns.

"My husband is after heart surgery and they still beat him," Georgette Lama said. "These people have no heart. We're afraid to go to our land because they will shoot at us. Ever since the beating, my husband is in a state of trauma and has difficulties talking."

The Lamas have since knocked on the doors of scores of PA officials in Bethlehem seeking their intervention, but to no avail. At one stage, they sent a letter to Abbas, who promised to launch an investigation.

"We heard that President Mahmoud Abbas is taking our case very seriously," said Georgette Lama. "But until now he hasn't done anything to help us get our land back. We are very concerned because we're not the only ones suffering from this phenomenon. Most Christians are afraid to speak, but I don't care because we have nothing more to lose."

A Christian businessman who asked not to be identified said the conditions of Christians in Bethlehem and its surroundings had deteriorated ever since the area was handed over to the PA in 1995.

"Every day we hear of another Christian family that has immigrated to the US, Canada or Latin America," he said.

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