Monday, January 19, 2015
Elder of Ziyon
Poster
Sunday, January 18, 2015Elder of Ziyon
Miss Lebanon Saly Greige defended herself against accusations that she posed for a selfie with Miss Israel during the Miss Universe contest currently being held in Miami, saying Miss Israel Doron Matalon photobombed the picture.Can you imagine! Miss Israel wanting to have her photo taken with he neighbor Miss Lebanon! Poor Saly, being forced to guard against that nasty Israeli contestant chasing her all around Miami! She really should have put out a restraining order. How low will these Israelis go, anyway?
Photos circulated on social media in Lebanon showing Greige surrounded by the beauty queens of Israel, Slovenia and Japan caused uproar in Lebanon. Lebanon and Israel are enemy states and any contact with the Jewish state is illegal in Lebanon.
According to El-Nashra fan entertainment website, Greige defended herself on social media saying Matalon photobombed a picture she was taking with Miss Slovenia and Miss Japan and later on posted it on social media.
“From the first day I arrived at the Miss Universe pageant I was very careful not to take any pictures with Miss Israel, who tried repeatedly to take pictures with me,” Greige wrote. “While I was preparing with Miss Slovania and Miss Japan to get our photograph taken, Miss Israel jumped in and took a selfie with her phone and posted it on social media.
“This is what happened,” she added. “I hope you continue supporting me.”
Greige, a brunette with green eyes, was crowned Miss Lebanon during a ceremony in October. After the selfie with Miss Israel was circulated some Lebanese asked that Greige be stripped from her title for mingling with the citizen of an enemy state.
Matalon was also photographed with Miss Egypt, but it was apparently a one-time event. Egypt's representative, Lara Debanna, was reportedly instructed by "higher up" to keep her distance from Matalon, and to avoid being photographed with her under any circumstances.
"We took a group picture with Miss Slovenia, Miss Japan, and Miss Lebanon," said Matalon. "She must have received criticism from fans in Lebanon after I uploaded it, and now she will not stand next to me in any situation, and now Miss Egypt is behaving the same way."
"It's a shame that we can't set all the hostility aside just for the period of the competition," Matalon said, adding that she was not surprised by the development. "We really have a rare chance to meet girls from all over the world and hear about their different cultures."
Sunday, January 18, 2015Elder of Ziyon
Hezbollah is prepared for military intervention in Israel's Galilee and beyond, deeper into Israeli territory, the group's leader Hassan Nasrallah said in an interview with Lebanon's Al-Mayadeen TV to be aired Thursday evening.Even though he heads an Iranian proxy militia and a master terrorist, Nasrallah usually doesn't lie.
"We have made all necessary preparations for a future war with Israel," Nasrallah said.
He vowed that the group would not stay quiet in the face of attacks attributed to Israel in Syria. "We will provide an answer for every attack against Syria," he said.
"We have military abilities that will deliver us the victory against Israel," Nasrallah threatened. "The military capability of the resistance has not been damaged, and if Israel thinks differently, it is wrong."
In excerpts of the interview that were previously released on Wednesday, Nasrallah said that Hezbollah has more types of weapons than Israel can imagine.
Several Hizbullah fighters were killed Sunday in an Israeli airstrike on the Quneitra region in the Syrian sector of the Golan Heights.
“The Israeli enemy's helicopters fired missiles at a group of Hizbullah's fighters who were inspecting the town of Mazraat al-Amal in the Syrian Quneitra region,” Hizbullah's media department announced in a statement.
The strike “resulted in the martyrdom of a number of jihadist brothers, whose names will be announced later, after informing their honorable families,” the party added.
A source close to Hizbullah told Agence France-Presse that the strike killed a military commander of the Lebanese group and five fighters.
The dead included Mohammed Issa, a Hizbullah commander responsible for its Syrian and Iraqi operations, as well as Jihad Mughniyeh, the son of Imad Mughniyeh, a top Hizbullah operative killed in a 2008 car bombing in Syria which was blamed on Israel, the source told AFP.
Lebanese and Arab media outlets identified the other four Hizbullah members killed in the raid as Mahdi al-Moussawi, Ali Fouad, Hussein Hassan and Abbas Hijazi.
Al-Arabiya TV meanwhile said that “a prominent Hizbullah leader and 6 Iranians were killed in the Israeli airstrike on Golan.”
Al-Jadeed television for its part said "Iranian commander Abu Ali al-Tabtabani was among the martyrs of the Israeli raid on Golan."
Earlier on Sunday, an Israeli security source said an Israeli helicopter carried out a strike against "terrorists" in the Syrian sector of the Golan Heights.
The source told AFP that the militants were preparing an attack on Israel and that the airstrike took place near Quneitra, close to the ceasefire line separating the Syrian part of the Golan Heights from the Israeli-occupied sector, confirming a report by Hizbullah's al-Manar television.
Quneitra is right on the border with the Israeli Golan Heights. The senior Hezbollah commanders were not there for sightseeing.Information obtained by MTV: Nasrallah will tonight deliver a speech in which he will announce that Hizbullah will retaliate against Israel with a painful strike.Hezbollah rockets are said to be able to reach all of Israel now.
Hezbollah most closely resembles an army, and its arsenal totals some 150,000 missiles and rockets, several thousand of which can target any area in Israel.In what may or may not be a coincidence, Iran's Supreme Leader threatened the West today as well on Twitter - about low oil prices:
“This rare and substantial firepower apparently even exceeded the firepower possessed by most of the European states combined,” Amidror said in the report.
Additionally, Hezbollah is armed with surface-to-sea missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, drones and modern anti-tank missiles.
Who are Hezbollah?Nothing about its raison d'etre of destroying Israel, nothing about its history of attacks against not only Israel but also US troops, nothing about it being considered a terror group. It's just a political group that happens to exist, somehow, in a country that doesn't want it.
• Name means "Party of God"
• Political and military organisation made up mainly of Shia Muslims
• One of the biggest blocs in Lebanon's governing coalition
• Strongly backed by Iran, a close ally of Syrian President Assad
• Mr Assad's minority Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shia Islam
In 2007, as part of this playbook, the OIC launched the Islamophobia Observatory, a watchdog group based in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, with the goal of documenting slights against the faith. Its first report, released the following year, complained that the artists and publishers of controversial Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad were defiling “sacred symbols of Islam . . . in an insulting, offensive and contemptuous manner.” The honor brigade began calling out academics, writers and others, including former New York police commissioner Ray Kelly and administrators at a Catholic school in Britain that turned away a mother who wouldn’t remove her face veil.Douglas Murray: 'Religion of peace' is not a harmless platitude
“The OIC invented the anti-‘Islamophobia’ movement,” says Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and a frequent target of the honor brigade. “These countries . . . think they own the Muslim community and all interpretations of Islam.”
Alongside the honor brigade’s official channel, a community of self-styled blasphemy police — from anonymous blogs such as LoonWatch.com and Ikhras.com to a large and disparate cast of social-media activists — arose and began trying to control the debate on Islam. This wider corps throws the label of “Islamophobe” on pundits, journalists and others who dare to talk about extremist ideology in the religion. Their targets are as large as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and as small as me.
The official and unofficial channels work in tandem, harassing, threatening and battling introspective Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere. They bank on an important truth: Islam, as practiced from Malaysia to Morocco, is a shame-based, patriarchal culture that values honor and face-saving from the family to the public square. Which is why the bullying often works to silence critics of Islamic extremism.
“Honor brigades are wound collectors. They are couch jihadis,” Joe Navarro, a former supervisory special agent in the FBI’s behavioral analysis unit, tells me. “They sit around and collect the wounds and injustices inflicted against them to justify what they are doing. Tragedy unites for the moment, but hatred unites for longer.”
This is a problem with Islam — one that Muslims are going to have to work through. They could do so by a process which forces them to take their foundational texts less literally, or by an intellectually acceptable process of cherry-picking verses. Or prominent clerics could unite to declare the extremists non-Muslim. But there isn’t much hope of this happening. Last month, al-Azhar University in Cairo declared that although Isis members are terrorists they cannot be described as heretics.Abbas’ terror-hypocrisy continues - Fatah praises killers of 8
We have spent 15 years pretending things about Islam, a complex religion with competing interpretations. It is true that most Muslims live their lives peacefully. But a sizeable portion (around 15 per cent and more in most surveys) follow a far more radical version. The remainder are sitting on a religion which is, in many of its current forms, a deeply unstable component. That has always been a problem for reformist Muslims. But the results of ongoing mass immigration to the West at the same time as a worldwide return to Islamic literalism means that this is now a problem for all of us. To stand even a chance of dealing with it, we are going to have to wake up to it and acknowledge it for what it is.
Palestinian Authority Chairman Abbas’ Fatah movement continues to glorify killers of Israelis as “heroes” and “Martyrs.”
On Jan. 17, 2002, terrorist Abd Al-Salam Hassouna shot and killed 6 and wounded dozens at a bat-mitzvah celebration in Hadera. Anticipating the anniversary of this “heroic operation” and the killer’s “Martyrdom-death,” Fatah posted a photo of the murderer holding a rifle and praised him and other “Martyrs” as “torches on the path to victory and freedom”:
“With an M16 he opened fire on many Zionists, killed 9 and injured dozens, until his rifle jammed. Our Martyrs are torches on the path to victory and freedom.”
[Facebook, “Fatah - the Main Page,” Jan. 15, 2015]
Sunday, January 18, 2015Elder of Ziyonlumish
One of the blogs that I used to follow was known as Fresno Zionism, but the Fresno Zionist made aliyah and is now writing some place within Israel under the blog title Abu Yehuda.Every once in awhile I like to point to a fellow blogger that I do not think is getting sufficient attention and Abu Yehuda is definitely among them.
This is another chapter in the long and not-so-happy relationship between France and its Jews. When Napoleon offered the Jews emancipation at the beginning of the 19th century, he made demands as well. He decreed that they could live outside of ghettos, removed other restrictions and even made Judaism one of the official religions of France (the others were Catholicism and several forms of Protestantism). In return, he expected that Jews living in France would no longer consider themselves a distinct people. They would be French in every way, Frenchmen and women who practiced Judaism.
But France didn’t live up to Napoleon’s bargain. Anti-Jewish attitudes remained, and when Alfred Dreyfus — an army officer, a French patriot who happened to be Jewish — was falsely accused of treason in 1894, most of the establishment went along with the coverup of the evidence against the real traitor, Ferdinand Esterhazy, and the trumped-up charges and draconian punishment of Dreyfus. The French ‘street’ seethed with anti-Jewish agitation as well. Indeed, the Dreyfus affair was a major motivation for Theodor Herzl’s position that Europe’s Jewish problem would not be solved within its borders.
The recent anti-Jewish violence — the kidnapping, torture and murder of Ilan Halimi, the mob attacks on synagogues, the rape of a woman in her home who was told it was because she was Jewish, the murders at the Jewish school in Toulouse, yesterday’s killing of four Jews at a kosher market, and perhaps most of all, the daily degradation of Jews who are afraid to wear kippot or walk to synagogues, who are cursed, struck and spat on in the streets — has convinced French Jews that the Republic can not or will not protect them.We have just witnessed one of the most ridiculous farces in contemporary European history.
Hollande apparently is insulted by the fact that they don’t trust the state and him personally, so much so that they appeal to the leader of the Jewish state (Netanyahu was met with cheers (video) when he entered the synagogue) for help and perhaps to provide them with a place of refuge. In addition, he is probably worried about France losing its Jews and the intellectual and financial capital that they represent.
Sunday, January 18, 2015Elder of Ziyon
I also encourage the Egyptian authorities to re-open the Rafah crossing while taking into account Egypt’s legitimate security concerns. Humanitarian concerns are growing with around 17,000 registered people, including patients, waiting to exit Gaza, in addition to 37,000 others who wish to exit Gaza.I knew that a couple of thousand people would normally gather at the Rafah crossing on the rare days it was open.I had no idea that some 54,000 Gazans were actively trying to cross into Egypt.
Sunday, January 18, 2015Elder of Ziyon
Saturday, January 17, 2015Elder of Ziyon
Protest graffiti was sprayed outside the French cultural centre in Gaza before dawn Saturday following the publication of a new cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed by satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.But the Arabic AFP article includes one more graffitum that did not make it into the English version.
“You will go to hell, French journalists,” read one of the slogans daubed on the walls of the cultural centre compound, which has been closed since it was damaged in a fire last October.
“Anything but the prophet,” read another.
Saturday, January 17, 2015Elder of Ziyon
Deep down, even The Guardian knows that Israel is home for all Jews - otherwise why use the word "returning"? pic.twitter.com/jwWUvckopD
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) January 16, 2015
@guardian "Returning" …something wrong with that headline…..just like 90% "returned" from E Europe, US and SA?
— H Gethings (@GethingsH) January 16, 2015@guardian They're done destroying France?
— Patrick (@paddylongshanks) January 16, 2015
Any debate on Islam in Muslim countries and among Muslim communities in the West is like stepping into a minefield. When it comes to the media outlets and academe, for the most part, the subject of Islam sparks a convoluted and apologetic discourse; on the social networks, on the other hand, the discourse it prompts is a racist one.The anti-Semitic derangement
The thing is there's a problem. It's hissing and bubbling. Many Muslims realize there's a problem. The Egyptian president spoke recently of "a need to effect a substantial change in Islam." And in 2004, Abdulrahman al-Rashed, the former general manager of the al-Arabiya television news channel, said: "It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims."
The problem is not a handful of Jihadists involved in terrorism. The problem is that the Muslim world in recent years has produced most of the high-casualty conflicts across the globe. The Muslim world struggles to embrace universal values, such as the status of women. And the problem extends to the free world. Entire neighborhoods in Europe are becoming "no-go zones" for veteran residents, and the police too in some cases.
Rotterdam Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb stated that the major problem was resistance to integration. The percentage of social misfits and individuals opposed to integration is higher among the Muslim communities than among the other minorities. In addition, many of the world's Muslims, even those who live in the West, want to see Sharia law in effect, not only for themselves, but also forcibly for others. They are basically saying in the clearest of terms: We have come here to impose our values on you.
Anti-Semitism is commonly regarded as a variety of racism, but the prolific English historian Paul Johnson suggests that it should be seen as a kind of intellectual disease, fundamentally irrational and highly infectious. It exerts great self-destructive force, Johnson wrote in a notable 2005 essay, severely harming countries and societies that engage in it. In a pattern that has recurred so predictably that he dubbed it a “historical law,” nations that make Jewish life untenable condemn themselves to decline and weakness.
For example, Spain’s expulsion of the Jews in the 1490s, and its subsequent witchhunt of the converted “New Christians” who remained behind, meant a loss of Spanish financial and managerial talent at the very moment the New World was being opened up to lucrative colonization. That had “a profoundly deleterious impact,” Johnson argued, “plunging the hitherto vigorous Spanish economy into inflation and long-term decline, and the government into repeated bankruptcy.” More than 500 years later, Spain — where, incidentally, Valls was born and lived until his teens — still regrets that self-inflicted wound, and has looked for ways to rectify it.
Johnson pointed out other prominent examples of the phenomenon. Czarist Russia’s persecution of Jews, reinforced by the encouragement of brutal pogroms, fueled a massive migration of Jews to the West, especially to Britain and the United States; those countries’ cultural and entrepreneurial gain was Russia’s debilitating loss. Germany’s descent into demonic Jew-hatred under the Nazis ended in devastating military defeat, followed by a decades-long Cold War rupture and the end of German renown as Europe’s intellectual center. The Arab world, steeped in anti-Semitism and obsessed with the Jewish state, squandered vast oil riches “on weapons of war and propaganda,” wrote Johnson. “In their flight from reason, they have failed to modernize or civilize their societies, to introduce democracy, or to consolidate the rule of law.” Arab culture once led the world in learning, innovation, and pluralism. Today it is a world leader in almost nothing, save fratricidal violence and Islamist fanaticism.
France’s Jews are leaving, and that bodes ill for the society making them unwelcome. The prime minister put his finger on it: If there is no Jewish future in France, if the anti-Semitic cancer has metastasized so alarmingly that tens of thousands of French Jews are ready to flee, then France will indeed no longer be France. It will be something darker and more deformed, wrecked by an injury it inflicted on itself.
The ICC’s Prosecutor announced today the opening of a “preliminary examination” into “the Situation in Palestine.” This means she will consider, on jurisdictional, evidentiary and policy grounds whether to open an investigation into crimes that may have been committed during this summer’s Gaza conflict. Opening such an investigation is a fairly standard step after receiving a declaration of acceptance of jurisdiction under Article 12(3) of the Rome Statute, and would not normally warrant much notice (other preliminary investigations also involve alleged crimes by the U.S. in Afghanistan and the U.K. in Iraq, though precious few Americans or British are aware of this).ICC prosecutor opens probe into alleged Israeli war crimes
But this decision of the prosecutor is quite different, and extremely significant. The decision to open the inquiry involved the prosecutor determining that the Palestinian Authority is in fact a “state,” a necessary precondition to jurisdiction under the Rome Statute, the Court’s constitutive treaty.
The ICC has never accepted jurisdiction over what is clearly at most a “marginal” state – one that is not a U.N. member, that has not ever claimed to govern any territory, and whose recognition by other states is limited (for example, the U.S., Canada and most Western European states do not recognize the existence of a Palestinian state). This is clearly dramatically different from anything the Court has done before.
But the prosecutor did not actually determine the Palestine qualifies as a “state” under the well-established legal definitions of the term. Rather, she said that the U.N. General Assembly’s vote in 2012 to call Palestine a “non-member state” is dispositive of the question. In short, she substituted the determination of the General Assembly for her own. The GA is not a judicial body, but a political one. Its determinations are political, not legal. (It also has no power under the U.N. Charter, to create or recognize states.)
The International Criminal Court’s prosecutor on Friday opened an initial probe to see if war crimes have been committed against Palestinians, including during last year’s Gaza conflict.FM calls to dismantle ICC after launch of ‘war crimes’ probe
“Today the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Fatou Bensouda opened a preliminary examination into the situation in Palestine,” her office said in a statement, adding it may lead to a full-blown investigation.
Her decision comes after the Palestinians formally joined the ICC earlier this month allowing it to lodge war crimes and crimes against humanity complaints against Israel as of April 2014.
At the same time, the Palestinians also recognized the ICC’s jurisdiction retroactively, to cover the period during last summer’s war in Gaza that killed nearly 2,200 Palestinians and 72 Israelis.
“A preliminary examination is not an investigation but a process of examining the information available in order to reach a fully informed determination on whether there is a reasonable basis to proceed with a (full) investigation,” Bensouda said.
Liberman charged it was a “scandalous decision whose only goal is to try and harm Israel’s right to defend itself against terror.”
He said the decision was “solely motivated by political anti-Israel considerations,” and that Israel would not tolerate it, adding that he would recommend against cooperating with the probe.
“Israel will act in the international sphere to bring about the dismantling of this court which represents hypocrisy and gives impetus to terror,” Liberman continued in a statement released to the press.
Netanyahu also blasted the decision, accusing the ICC of being “part of the problem.”
“It’s scandalous that mere days after terrorists massacred Jews in France, the ICC prosecutor opens a probe against the Jewish state. And this is because we defend our citizens from Hamas, a terror group that signed a unity pact with the Palestinian Authority and war criminals who fired thousands of rockets at Israeli citizens,” charged the prime minister.
“Unfortunately, this makes the court part of the problem and not part of the solution,” he continued.
Friday, January 16, 2015Elder of Ziyon |
| Filipinos burn fake Charlie Hebdo poster saying it is a Zionist conspiracy |
Muslims marched in Middle East cities Friday to protest the publication of a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed by French magazine Charlie Hebdo, as Qatar warned the image would "fuel hatred".Qatar condemned the publication:
The largest rally was in Jordan, where around 2,500 protesters took to the streets of the capital Amman amid tightened security, while demonstrations also took place in east Jerusalem and Khartoum.
The crowd, including members of the Muslim Brotherhood and youth groups, set off from the Al-Husseini mosque in central Amman holding banners that read "insulting the prophet is global terrorism".
Jordan's opposition Islamic Action Front party, the political wing of the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, has branded the publication of the cartoon as "an attack on Muslims across the world".
King Abdullah II, who last weekend joined world leaders on an anti-terror solidarity march in Paris, on Thursday said the latest issue of Charlie Hebdo was "irresponsible and reckless".
A protest against the cartoon in Tehran was canceled, with no official reason given, as senior Iranian cleric Ayatollah Ali Movahedi Kermani told worshipers its publication amounted to "savagery".
In Tunis, worshipers at El-Fath mosque interrupted prayer leader Noureddine Khadmi as he delivered a sermon saying: "We are all against insults made against our prophet but it is not a reason to kill".
Charlie Hebdo journalists "deserved to be killed because they insulted our prophet many times," the worshipers cried out.
Saudi Arabia's top religious body, the Council of Senior Ulema, also criticized the publication of Mohammed cartoons that it said "have nothing to do with the freedom of creativity or thought".
Its secretary general Fahd al-Majid warned that publishing such images would only "serve extremists who are in search of excuses for killing and terrorism".
Qatar warned Friday that publishing cartoons of Prophet Mohammed would "fuel hatred and anger", as a leading Muslim body called for peaceful protests against French weekly Charlie Hebdo.
Qatar "condemned the reprinting by French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and other European press of pictures offensive to Prophet Mohammed," the foreign ministry said in a statement.
"Freedom of speech does not mean insulting others, hurting their feelings, and mocking their religious beliefs and idols," said the statement published by the official QNA news agency.
"These disgraceful actions are in the interest of nobody and will only fuel hatred and anger," it warned, describing them as a "violation of human values of peaceful coexistence, tolerance, justice, and respect among people."
RT adds:
Pakistani police fired tear gas and used water cannons on protesters in Karachi, with AFP photo journalist injured in the protests.
Earlier on, dozens of Pakistani lawmakers marched near the country’s parliament in Islamabad, calling for "death to blasphemers."
"All political parties are with us… All Muslim countries should condemn these blasphemous cartoons," Pakistani Religious Affairs Minister Sardar Yousaf said, NBC reported.
Egypt’s top religious institution, the Al Azhar mosque, has expressed its outrage at the magazine’s new cartoon, describing it as a “blatant challenge to the feelings of Muslims who had sympathized with this newspaper,” AP reported.
Muslims in Aleppo on Thursday marched through the southwestern Syrian city, burning a “Je suis Charlie” poster.
Protesters in the Philippines marched in the southern town of Marawi, burning images of the magazine’s new cover.
Friday, January 16, 2015Elder of ZiyonElder gets results |
| "It's been a great (hic) run." |
CNN confirms longtime correspondent Jim Clancy has left the network after nearly 34 years. Clancy made the announcement to colleagues in an email obtained by TVNewser, calling CNN “one of the greatest news organizations in the world” and “a family to my own family.”To be honest, I'd have preferred a real apology that indicated that he understood what he was saying and regretted it. And CNN should have issued a statement on how they will ensure that people with such obvious bias are not hired in the future to as journalists.
The timing of Clancy’s announcement comes just days after the veteran journalist had an extended debate via Twitter over the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.
In a statement to TVNewser, a CNN spokesperson “Jim Clancy is no longer with CNN. We thank him for more than three decades of distinguished service, and wish him nothing but the best.”
There are three lessons from the explosion of European anti-Semitism.Caroline Glick: The answer to French anti-Semitism
First, hatred of Israel can no longer be separated from loathing of Jews. Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are one and the same. The hard-core anti-Israel protests that engulfed Europe showed that the demonstrators aimed to dismantle the Jewish state because of its Jewishness. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called contemporary anti-Semitism "pretend criticism of Israel," an "expression of Jew-hatred at pro-Palestinian demonstrations."
The second lesson is that mere opprobrium from European leaders is insufficient. To their credit, the foreign ministers of France, Germany, and Italy last summer condemned "the anti-Semitic rhetoric and hostility toward Jews [and] attacks on people of the Jewish faith and synagogues." But rhetoric is not enough.
So the third lesson is the need for a zero-tolerance policy toward violent anti-Semitic rallies. And Europe should immediately adopt the U.S. State Department's definition of modern anti-Semitism, which includes anti-Zionism/Israelism. Finally, terrorist entities like Hezbollah and other jihadi networks should be banned. In sharp contrast to the United States, Europe allows Hezbollah's so-called political wing to operate and recruit within the 28-member European Union. Worse, with Europe striking Hamas from its terrorist list, there has been an active attempt to legitimize Islamist groups.
Change must ultimately start at the grassroots, turning anti-Semites and their political and religious movements into pariahs.
Absent this change, the safety of Jews, as well as European democracy, will continue to be jeopardized.
January 16 is the nine-year anniversary of the beginning of the Ilan Halimi disaster.Sarah Honig: 'Charlie' makes them laugh
On January 16, 2006, Sorour Arbabzadeh, the seductress from the Muslim anti-Jewish kidnapping gang led by Youssouf Fofana, entered the cellphone store where Halimi worked and set the honey trap.
Four days later, Halimi met Arbabzadeh for a drink at a working class bar and agreed to walk her home. She walked him straight into an ambush. Her comrades beat him, bound him and threw him into the trunk of their car.
They brought Halimi to a slum apartment and tortured him for 24 days and 24 nights before dumping him, handcuffed, naked, stabbed and suffering from third degree burns over two-thirds of his body, at a railway siding in Paris.
He died a few hours later in the hospital.
In an impassioned address to the French parliament on Tuesday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls gave a stirring denunciation of anti-Semitism, and demanded that his people stop treating it as someone else’s problem.
In his words, “Since Ilan Halimi in 2006... anti-Semitic acts in France have grown to an intolerable degree. The words, the insults, the gestures, the shameful attacks... did not produce the national outrage that our Jewish compatriots expected.”
Valls insisted that France needs to protect its Jewish community, lest France itself be destroyed.
Valls words were uplifting. But it is hard to see how they change the basic reality that the Jews of France face.
When all is said and done, it is their necks on the line while humanity’s conscience is merely troubled.
The inclination, subliminally or otherwise, to isolate Jews in a separate classification is pervasive.Ambassador Prosor in UNSC: The Situation in the Middle East
The assumption that the bad guys aren’t primarily after non-Jews even offers a sense of semi-safety to the presumably uninvolved onlookers.
The segregation of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel terror into a different category is abetted by the two-faced denunciation of the Paris bloodshed by Mahmoud Abbas and his on-and-off Hamas partners in Gaza. They enable terror on a grand scale, but then deny culpability.
They pro forma condemn carnage but endorse, glorify and bankroll the perpetrators.
Sanctimonious pen-warriors don’t take Abbas or Hamas to task for their wrongdoing and blatant deception. Europe’s media further adds insult to injury by helping disseminate the false analogy between the demonized and dehumanized Jews of Hitler’s Germany to Europe’s Muslims who claim to be equally as collectively demonized.
Disagreeable as it surely is to tar any group collectively, there’s too much cynical PR profit in drawing this parallel for it to be taken at face value. Comparing Holocaust- era Judeophobia to Islamophobia is not only spurious but colossally galling.
For one thing, Jews never engaged in terror against Germans.
If anything, they regarded themselves as German patriots.
Then comes the minor matter of Arabs having been among the most vociferous promoters of Judeophobia in Nazi times. They still are to this day.
But Europe’s self-acclaimed pen-warriors are loath to take note, expose the chutzpah and sincerely fight against mega-hypocrisy. With rare exceptions, they are nothing like the gallant guardians of their own conceited portrayals. Their syrupy catchphrases in the end give succor to the implacable enemies of us all. “Je suis Charlie” makes the jihadists laugh.
Buy EoZ's book, PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
