His one minute history of the region is pretty good - and infinitely better better than some I've seen.
If I get a chance before the holiday I'll add more clips as I find them.
UPDATE: All the clips seem to be here but I can't embed them (legally.)
The 1,800-page court decision written by Justice Moshe Drori elaborates on the details of the torture. The gruesome stories, it found, were confirmed by eyewitnesses, the scars on their bodies, and testimony from psychologists.I could not find a single story about torture in Palestinian Authority prisons for any reason on the Amnesty website although there are several that allege Israel tortures Palestinian prisoners.
The victims are being represented by the law office of Barak Kedem, Aryeh Arbus, Netanel Rom and David Zur. Kedem, in an interview with The Times of Israel, described some of the worst cases of torture he can remember from the trial.
For days on end, prisoners were hung upside down. After they lost consciousness, they would be put right side up until they regained consciousness. Then the process would be repeated, he said.
Another method of torture was transferring prisoners back and forth between hot and cold baths. Many had their teeth pulled out with pliers, while some had fingernails extracted. Many spent weeks at a time in a tiny metal closet in which they couldn’t move their bodies.
One man was placed inside a metal barrel and left for five hours in the hot August sun. When they took him out, his interrogators placed salt all over his blistering skin.
Walid himself said that the worst torture method was forcing prisoners to sit on the head of a broken bottle of glass, which tore up their insides.
Though the prisoners were placed in different jails throughout the West Bank, many described the same methods of torture.
Kedem said this showed that these methods “were ordered from up top and not at the discretion of individual interrogators.” In his decision, Justice Drori agreed with this assessment.
At no point while in PA custody were the prisoners brought before a judge.
A few alleged ex-Shin Bet agent prisoners were killed while in jail. (They were represented in the lawsuit by their parents.)
Walid said he witnessed more than one of the executions.
A new academic year has begun and, with it, we can expect new attempts to demonize Israel on our college campuses. As ever, the immoderation of those who support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement should help. The most recent visible move by prominent BDSers has been to try to align their colleagues—in however hedged a manner—with the politically toxic Antifa movement.
So yes, we are not dealing here with strategic masterminds. But, in academia, such people have an advantage, nonetheless. They are “scholar-activists,” distant cousins of the 1960s New Left, who view campuses, as their forebearers did, as grounds from which to assail the powers that be. That is to say, they are there primarily, not incidentally, to engage in political activism. They have an influence far out of proportion to their numbers because most academics are at colleges and universities to teach and engage in research. They don’t, as people say in the movies, want no trouble. So they are inclined to leave politics to the people who care about it, so long as they are allowed to do their work in peace.
It is in part for this reason that organizations like Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and the newer Academic Engagement Network exist (full disclosure: I have worked with both organizations). On the one hand, they enable scholars drawn reluctantly into a fight against BDS to learn from and support each other’s efforts. On the other hand, they try to spread the news that BDS is not only unjust to Israel—a fact that may worry those with no dog in the fight only a little—but also damaging to the academic enterprise, for which BDS seeks to substitute propagandizing.
At the beginning of the academic year, it is worth pausing to notice how many professors have been willing to put their reputations on the line to turn back BDS efforts and how often they have been successful. These include figures like Cary Nelson, Russell Berman, Rachel Harris, Sharon Musher, and Jeffrey Herf, to name just a few. These academicians have well-deserved reputations for waging long and successful campaigns for the integrity of their disciplines in the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association. But they also include physicist Azriel Genacka and biochemist Fred Naider, who, along with many of their colleagues at the City University of New York, stood up and opposed a pro-BDS resolution passed by a graduate student union there, and supported by some CUNY faculty.
Perhaps most impressively, they include scholars like the anthropologist Gila Silverman, who, despite working in a field that includes many BDS supporters and without the protection of tenure, was willing to fight publicly against a BDS resolution that very narrowly failed to win the support of the American Anthropological Association. Credit is due to the Academic Engagement Network for pulling together, as part of a new guide for faculty, these and other examples of faculty efforts to counter BDS.
Most of the participants in these efforts are left-liberals; in a profession in which conservatives have neither numbers nor much influence, that can hardly be surprising. But BDS has inadvertently brought together people on the left and right who have in common, at the very least, an interest in the health and integrity of their universities and professional associations.
For more than seven decades, the United Nations has been a leading international authority on world affairs. However, its credibility has been damaged by allegations of corruption, and political stalemates among leading powers undermine the U.N.'s core values and often produce more talk than change, critics say.
This week, world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly in New York are set to deliver major speeches addressing some of the most pressing issues facing the international community. President Donald Trump, a frequent critic of the U.N., is widely expected to take on rivals Iran and North Korea in his first appearance at the forum. While the gathering is likely to host some fiery rhetoric from all sides, critics such as U.N. Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer are more concerned with what's going on behind closed doors, something he says could compromise the integrity of the organization as a whole.
"People don't realize this, but most of what happens at the U.N. is vote-trading," Neuer told Newsweek.
"Sadly, too often European democracies do deals in the darkness; they do secret deals that end up being sort of a deal with the devil," he added.
U.N. Watch is a Geneva-based monitoring group founded in 1993 by lawyer and civil rights activist Morris Berthold Abram. Its stated goal is to hold the U.N. accountable when it fails to live up to its mission. While Neuer cites U.N. inaction on humanitarian crises in Syria and Venezuela as examples of times when states needed to step up and effect real change, he expressed particular indignation toward a recent U.N. scandal that highlighted the practice of nations offering votes for individual political gains, as opposed to dealing on ethical and moral grounds.
One hateful and dangerous Palestinian libel is that Israelis murder Palestinians in cold blood, and deliberately target Palestinian children.
This week, PA TV chose to rebroadcast a version of this lie that was first heard on PA TV as part of a religious lesson. PA TV's Islamic educator taught that former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would celebrate his birthday by asking Israelis to murder 10 Palestinian children, before "the end of the day." Imad Hamato, the preacher who taught in his weekly PA TV lesson on religion that the dead children would bring "joy" to Sharon, is not an insignificant figure: Hamato was appointed last year by Mahmoud Abbas to be dean of the Al-Azhar institutes, a system of schools that prepare students for studies at the Al-Azhar University in Gaza.
Imad Hamato: "Read the memoirs of [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon who died. When he wanted to celebrate his birthday, he used to say: 'On my birthday I want 10 candles to be blown out, 10 Palestinian children. I want to hear that at the end of the day, so that I can feel joy.'"
[Official PA TV, Sept. 15, 2017, Aug. 7, 2015]
Palestinian children are brought up to hate Israelis who they are told are seeking to murder them. During the Palestinian terror wave in 2015-2016 when young Palestinians attacked Israelis with knives, guns, and in car rammings, the host on PA TV's children's program The Best Home, claimed Israelis are "barbarians" and murderers, warning Palestinian children under 18 and 15 not to go out alone because Israelis were looking for children to kill:
"The occupation [Israel] targets children everywhere. In their schools, near their homes... We must be very careful now. We are confronting the occupiers who act in a very barbaric terrorist way. They are trying to kill people everywhere. These are barbarians, my young friends. They try to kill people for no reason, who are just walking on their land. They make various accusations against them. This is called barbarity, my friends. Be very careful all the time. All children under 18, and children under 15, when you go out, your mom or dad, should accompany you, I mean that an adult should accompany you." [Official PA TV, Nov. 13, 2015]
If you can forfeit citizenship for serving in a foreign government, you can certainly forfeit permanent residency. After all, Hamas officials surely don’t deserve more rights than Israeli ones. Yet that’s exactly what the court gave them: Hamas officials can now retain dual nationality even though their other nationality is Israel’s bitter enemy, while Israeli officials cannot, even when their other nationality is Israel’s close ally.The Myth of the Disappearing Two-State Solution
Moreover, it’s eminently reasonable to expect people who choose to serve in a foreign government to move to that government’s jurisdiction, unless some unusual obstacle prevents them. In this case, no such obstacle existed, as evidenced by the fact that two of them did relocate to Ramallah after losing their Israeli residency (the other two were arrested by Israel on unrelated grounds).
Even the majority justices appeared to realize how irrelevant their argument actually was. In a truly stunning statement, Justice Uzi Vogelman, who wrote the main opinion, said, “Our interpretative decision didn’t focus on the petitioners’ case specifically, but on an interpretive question of general applicability to residents of East Jerusalem.” Quite how any court can decide a case without focusing on that case specifically is beyond me.
Ostensibly, the case at least has limited application. After all, how many East Jerusalem Palestinians are going to become Hamas legislators of cabinet members? But in reality, the implications are broad, because if even swearing allegiance to a foreign government on behalf of a terrorist organization committed to Israel’s destruction isn’t enough to make a Palestinian lose his Israeli residency and its attendant benefits, what on earth would be? Nothing I can think of. Thus, Hamas supporters in Jerusalem will now be emboldened to step up all kinds of activity on the organization’s behalf, secure in the knowledge that they need not fear expulsion from the country as a consequence.
The court’s judicial activism impedes the government’s ability to set policy in almost every walk of life, as I detailed in Mosaic last year, and several rulings over the past few months rightly outraged many members of Israel’s ruling parties. But last week’s ruling may have been a tipping point: In response, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked and her Jewish Home party submitted legislation to curb the court’s excesses. Whether it will pass remains to be seen. But this outrageous ruling in defense of Hamas legislators amply shows why it should.
A frequent refrain among those who claim the need for an immediate peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians is that soon it will “too late” for compromise. According to this argument, the ongoing increase in the number of Jews living on the West Bank will soon lead to Palestinian and Israeli populations that are hopelessly entangled, rendering any division of territory impossible. But, writes Jackson Diehl, the facts tell a different story:
The annual UN General Assembly is under way this week in New York, so we can expect to hear, again, its most hackneyed rhetorical theme—the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.” Speaker after speaker will declaim the urgency of settling the conflict once and for all; many will assert that the time for doing so has all but expired. . . . It consequently seems worthwhile to offer a couple of reality checks: no, this is not the time to fashion a Mideast peace deal; and, no, the time for one has not run out.
Of the some 600,000 [Jewish] settlers who live outside Israel’s internationally recognized borders, just 94,000 are outside the border-like barrier that Israel built through the West Bank a decade ago. Just 20,000 of those moved in since 2009, when Benjamin Netanyahu returned to office; in a sea of 2.9 million Palestinians, they are hardly overwhelming. Last year, 43 percent of the settler population growth was in just two towns that sit astride the Israeli border—and that Mahmoud Abbas himself has proposed for Israeli annexation.
If the Palestinians were today to accept the deal they were offered nine years ago by then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a state on 94.2 percent of the West Bank, only 20 percent of current settlers would find themselves on the wrong side of the border. . . . It follows that a wise U.S. policy would aim at preserving that option until Israeli and Palestinian leaders emerge who can act on it.
Praise be unto the only God. In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. O ye Moslems. O ye beloved sons of the Maghreb. May the blessing of God be upon you.
This is a great day for you and us, for all the sons of Adam who love freedom. Our numbers are as the leaves on the forest tress and as the grains of sand in the sea.
Behold. We the American Holy Warriors have arrived. We have come here to fight the great Jihad of Freedom.
We have come to set you free. We have sailed across the great sea in many ships, on many beaches we are landing, and our fighters swarm across the sands and into the city streets, and into the wide country sides, and along the highways.
Light fires on the hilltops; shout from your housetops, and from the high places, and say the sound of the drum be heard in the land, and the ululation of the women, and the voices even of small children.
Assemble along the highways to welcome your brothers.
We have come to set you free.
Speak with our fighting men and you will find them pleasing to the eye and gladdening to the heart. We are not as some other Christians whom ye have known, and who trample you under foot. Our soldiers consider you as their brothers, for we have been reared in the way of free men. Our soldiers have been told about your country and about their Moslem brothers and they will treat you with respect and with a friendly spirit in the eyes of God.
Look in their eyes and smiling faces, for they are Holy Warriors happy in their holy work. Greet us therefore as brothers as we will greet you, and help us.
If we are thirsty, show us the way to water. If we lose our way, lead us back to our camping places. Show us the paths over the mountains if need be, and if you see our enemies, the Germans or Italians, making trouble for us, kill them with knives or with stones or with any other weapon that you may have set your hands upon.
Help us as we have come to help you, and rich will be the reward unto us all who love justice and righteousness and freedom.
Pray for our success in battle, and help us, and God will help us both.
Lo, the day of freedom hath come.
May God grant his blessing upon you and upon us.
--Roosevelt [emphasis added]
O Arabs, do you see that the time of the Dajjal has come? Do you recognize him, the fat, curly-haired Jew who deceives and rules the whole world and who steals the land of the Arabs?… O Arabs, do you know the servant of God? He [Hitler] has already appeared in the world and already turned his lance against the Dajjal and his allies…. He will kill the Dajjal, as it is written, destroy his places and cast his allies into hell.The effort was a failure. The Arabs ended up preferring to fight on the side of the British in North Africa and the Middle East.
...He reportedly described Islam as a more muscular belief system than Christianity and thus better suited for the Germany he wished to build.
According to Albert Speer, Hitler once offered a remarkable counterfactual history of Europe. He speculated about what might have been if the Muslim forces that invaded France during the eighth century had prevailed against their Frankish enemies at the Battle of Tours. “Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate” of Northern Europe. Therefore, “ultimately not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire.
[T]he Torah reading that we hear on the first day of Rosh Hashana provides us with some important lessons -- lessons that ought to resonate with us as we continue to advocate for diplomacy and the pursuit of peace.
In the reading from the Book of Bereshit, we learn of a water dispute between the patriarch Abraham and Abimelech, a local chieftain based in the land of the Philistines. Abraham has dug a well to provide for the needs of his sheep and cattle, but Abimelech’s men have been stealing the water. Abimelech comes to confront Abraham, bringing along with him the head of his military forces. The text describes their negotiations in some detail. Faced with a difficult and hostile opponent and a situation that could easily erupt into violence, Abraham instead chooses a path instead designed to safeguard his community and avoid war.
Abraham offers Abimelech compensation in the form of animals from his flock, in return for an admission that the well belongs to him. Abimelech agrees. The two leaders conclude a treaty and loss of life is avoided.
What lessons does this story have for us? First, that wise leaders resort to diplomacy to resolve their disputes, and see the use of force only as a last resort. According to the text, Abraham is clearly in the right, but also understands that what is most important is securing the long term interests and safety of his family and community. He negotiates a prudent compromise to do so -- and avoids an unnecessary war in which both sides would likely have suffered.
... The biblical text teaches us the crucial lesson that simply winning the dispute is not the highest goal. For Abraham, achieving a durable peace and protecting his tribe is far more important than proving that he is right, or suppressing the arguments and goals of his opponent.This is a completely backwards description of the story.
At that time Abimelech and Phicol, chief of his troops, said to Abraham, “God is with you in everything that you do. Therefore swear to me here by God that you will not deal falsely with me or with my kith and kin, but will deal with me and with the land in which you have sojourned as loyally as I have dealt with you.”
And Abraham said, “I swear it.”
Then Abraham reproached Abimelech for the well of water which the servants of Abimelech had seized.
But Abimelech said, “I do not know who did this; you did not tell me, nor have I heard of it until today.”
Abraham took sheep and oxen and gave them to Abimelech, and the two of them made a pact.
Abraham then set seven ewes of the flock by themselves, and Abimelech said to Abraham, “What mean these seven ewes which you have set apart?”
He replied, “You are to accept these seven ewes from me as proof that I dug this well.”
Hence that place was called Beer-sheba, for there the two of them swore an oath. When they had concluded the pact at Beer-sheba, Abimelech and Phicol, chief of his troops, departed and returned to the land of the Philistines.
[Abraham] planted a tamarisk at Beer-sheba, and invoked there the name of the LORD, the Everlasting God.Abimelech didn't come to "confront" Abraham over the well; he didn't know anything about it. He didn't come with any aggressive intent - on the contrary, he came with his general to pay tribute to Abraham! (See Rashi who lists the things that Abraham did that Abimelech was awed by - he had left Sodom safely, he had fought against the kings and won, and that his wife had been remembered in his old age and gave birth to Isaac.)
With violence breaking out between protesters and police in riot gear on the streets of a Missouri city, the Central Reform Congregation of St. Louis opened its doors on the Jewish Sabbath to provide sanctuary to those caught up in the confrontation.This story was picked up and repeated in other media as if there were hundreds of Nazi Tweeters all calling to gas the St. Louis synagogue.
As penned-in protesters piled in, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police reportedly surrounded the synagogue and prepared to fire tear gas at those who had taken refuge within. The night's goings-on being widely shared live on social media, a Twitter hashtag calling for the police to breach the Jewish house of worship began to trend: #GasTheSynagogue.
Overcompensating? |
Tuvia Tenenbom, that most acute and incendiary observer of what’s festering beneath the surface of polite society, has turned his attention to Germany’s “refugees”. To his surprise and no little dismay, what he has found out is not so much about these migrants but about Germany itself, and it isn’t pretty at all.NGO Monitor: EU Heads of Mission Condemnation of Israeli Policy in E. Jerusalem and NGO Campaigns
In his new book Hello Refugees, he adopts his now familiar but no less devastating tactic of trading on his blond hair, Falstaffian girth and indeterminate accent to conceal the fact that he was born and brought up in an ultra-orthodox family in Israel. He derives his unique insights from the fact that many of those to whom he addresses his faux-naïf but devastatingly direct questions assume he is an antisemite — just like them. And so they open up to him in a uniquely frank manner.
In Hello Refugees “Toby the German”, his previous persona, has become “Toby the Jordanian”. Posing as the son of Jordanian and European parentage, he uses his fluent Arabic to gain access to refugee camps in Germany where access is routinely denied to the media.
What he discovers shocks him deeply. He finds migrants effectively warehoused in wholly inadequate conditions, housed twelve to a “room” in what are no more than, and indeed described as, “containers”. Existing on disgusting food, jobless and with no apparent means of emerging from these holding pens, these migrants have in effect been abandoned by the German state.
Everywhere he goes, people tell him the same thing: that Chancellor Angela Merkel famously invited in more than one million migrants in order to erase the moral stain of Germany’s Nazi past. He concludes that this was not an act of conscience. How could it have been when these people have been left so abandoned? It was instead a move to show the world — and themselves — that this former Nazi state has become the world’s conscience. In other words, it was a cynical move that evacuates the word conscience of all meaning.
On August 11, 2017 the EU Heads of Missions (HoMs) in Jerusalem and Ramallah issued a statement condemning the “imminent threat of eviction” of Palestinian residents of an apartment in east Jerusalem. The occupants had lived in the apartment since the 1970s but had not paid rent to the Jewish owners who were driven out in the 1948 conflict.
Palestinian residents often refuse to pay rent on Jewish-owned homes for political purposes, and sometimes are encouraged to so by activists with little concern for the consequences to those who then go through lengthy legal proceeding and can be evicted.
The eviction order given to the Palestinian residents of the house is based on Israeli law and followed lengthy court sessions on the issue. The final verdict was delivered by the Israeli High Court of Justice (HCJ) in 2013. The HCJ also ruled that the family be given 18 months to leave prior to the eviction. Furthermore, the Jerusalem Municipality did not attempt to enforce the eviction for two and half further years. The eviction finally took place on September 5, 2017.
It appears that the condemnation by the EU HoMs is based at least in part on NGO allegations and publications. As shown in NGO Monitor reports, the EU has consistently relied on NGO reporting in accusations directed against Israel, and this appears to be another instance. European diplomats also made highly publicized visits to the site in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem.
The EU statement details a number of purported plans by Israeli authorities to evict Palestinians in “Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan, the Old City and Beit Safafa.” This appears to be based on Terrestrial Jerusalem and Peace Now, both of which have recently released statements on these plans. Substantial funding for these political advocacy NGOs is provided by the EU and a number of individual governments.
Finally we come to Europe.
The same Europe that perennially “advises” Israel on how to achieve peace and security, while frequently condemning Israel for not adopting policies similar to Europe’s own disastrous strategies.
Deputy Head of Mission from the UK to Israel Tony Kay exemplified the standard European talking points:
We are doing quite a lot on… safeguarding people from becoming terrorists, or supporting terrorism… [using] a combination of soft power with hard power. We are…engaging communities [and producing] lots of successes that the UK has made on countering terrorism recently.
There is a dark irony in Kay’s statement, which came just three days before a devastating terror attack hit London’s Parsons Green, injuring 29 victims this past Friday. While Kay undoubtedly meant well, his statement served as just one more example of deadly European self-assurance, at a time when Europe desperately needs a measure of humility.
In fact, Europe’s recent track record has been bloody:
Just this past week Europe saw three separate attacks in London and Paris, in addition to recent attacks in Nice, Brussels, Stockholm, Berlin, Manchester, Barcelona and others. In just two years (2015-16) Islamic terror killed 288 Europeans and injured 739. Contrast with Israel, where 50 were killed during the same period.
Buy EoZ's book, PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
If you want real peace, don't insist on a divided Jerusalem, @USAmbIsrael
The Apartheid charge, the Abraham Accords and the "right side of history"
With Palestinians, there is no need to exaggerate: they really support murdering random Jews
Great news for Yom HaShoah! There are no antisemites!