Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

We Were Just Looking for an Excuse to Kill an A-rab (Judean Rose)

On Monday there was a ramming attack near Tekoa, not far from where I live. The terrorist rammed his car into a group of soldiers, then jumped out of the car brandishing a knife, and attempted to stab as many soldiers as possible. One soldier was injured. The terrorist died, as he intended, while doing his evil deed.

These are the facts, cut and dried.

An hour later, I happened to be on Twitter and saw that the top trending hashtag was "Tekoa." Mildly curious, I clicked to see what people were saying. First there was the IDF Spokesperson's blog, which had everything anyone would want to know in a brief update, except for the missing bit about the injured soldier. We can assume and appreciate that this was not yet known at that point. Fine.

Moments ago, a Palestinian assailant attempted car ramming attack in Tekoa. Armed w/ a knife, assailant then attempted to stab IDF soldiers pic.twitter.com/x5yMxBAHiq
— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) July 10, 2017

The next tweet was the Jerusalem Post story on the attack.

BREAKING NEWS: One injured in car ramming attack in Tekoa https://t.co/BoS1Cs7RAz #BreakingNews pic.twitter.com/zVpNAlxJJd
— The Jerusalem Post (@Jerusalem_Post) July 10, 2017

The JPost lets you know there was an injury, but you don't know that the injured person was Jewish, a soldier, and the attacker, an Arab. To me, this is whitewashing the news piece, whether or not the information is contained in the body of the article. People are busy. Like me, they scan things quickly, register, and move on. How many people read past the headline?

The fact is, it was only going to be an Arab attacking Jews and it had to be said. Why are these details important? People need to know that there is no such thing as an Arab/Israeli conflict. There is only an Arab war against the Jews. Professor Ruth Wisse explains this as no one else can. Everyone should watch THIS VIDEO multiple times.

Be that as it may, the next tweet in the lineup shocked me so that I gasped. I had to read it a few more times to take in the utter duplicitousness of this man, Muntaser Alrefai, and his account of what had happened only an hour before, in my neighborhood.

The Israeli occupation forces shot killed a Palestinian youth at town of Tekoa south of Bethlehem on the pretext of an attempt to run over pic.twitter.com/ujAL01uoNK
— Muntaser Alrefai (@muntaser_buz) July 10, 2017

Imagine: Jewish soldiers looking for a reason to kill an Arab youth, and then saying, "Well, HE tried to run us over!"

Why would anyone believe this? It's ridiculous. Absolute rubbish. Just a LIE from start to finish.

A lie.

But I knew that most of the world would believe that lie, for the simple reason that people love to hate Jews and want to see Arabs as victims. The truth doesn't matter to them, no matter how many terrorists shoot people up in airports in Belgium, supermarkets in France, or run them over with trucks in Germany or England. When it happens in Israel, it's not terror, natch? It's FREEDOM FIGHTING.

It could make you tear your hair out, that people want to believe this stuff, as unbelievable as it is. It makes you despair.

More than that, it makes you realize that people like Alrefai are black hearted and truly evil. There is nothing there with which one can make peace. Not ever.

In fact, for safety's sake, it's best to stay away from them. Far away. An Alrefai (and there are multitudes of them) will wield his black magic, swaying the undecided to his side as well as the already convinced, by rushing them with a tsunami of distorted vocabulary: pretext, occupation forces, Palestinian youth.

Lies, lies, lies. And the sheeple are convinced. You can't change their minds by showing them facts. They'll tell you they have their own facts. And what are their facts? A body no less than UNESCO (!), for instance, says that the Jews have no right to Yerushalayim, and that Hevron, where Sarah, Rivka, Leah, Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov are buried, is an "endangered Palestinian site."

Their lies are mainstream.

And you know who helps them rile people up against the Jews? Do you know who helps rile up ARABS against Jews?

Haaretz.

At least one person was lightly wounded in a suspected car-ramming attack near the West Bank settlement of Tekoa https://t.co/hxFEbTgDzZ
— Haaretz.com (@haaretzcom) July 10, 2017

Yes, Haaretz, who called it a "suspected car-ramming attack" when no. There was no such suspicion. It WAS indeed, a ramming attack.

Not to mention that it was followed by a STABBING attack. And look how they order the words. "lightly wounded" is the first thing you see, so you'll say, "Oh, no big deal. Someone got a scratch."

*yawn*

And then, of course, it's his own fault, the guy who got injured, because he was in the WEST BANK, near a SETTLEMENT. As opposed to a town in Judea.

Judea. Funny, how that's the proper geographical name of the territory. And it's certainly the name you'd expect it to be called by a Jewish publication. But no. There's a reason they call Haaretz, "the only Arab newspaper that's printed in Hebrew."

"Settlement" is a word tossed about like an epithet. As if Judea and Samaria were not the indigenous territories of the Jewish people, won fair and square in a battle we were forced to fight. People who read Haaretz think Jews have no right to live in these places.

I, meanwhile, wonder why the people at Haaretz live in Israel, to begin with. If they really think the Arabs are living under occupation and that we should give them Jewish land, why don't they frickin' LEAVE?

The answer, of course, is subversion, which is why they continue to limp along, though sales are drastically down. They want to bring down the state.

It was a relief to see the next tweet. Ynet showed class in this instance. Without mentioning nationalities or religions, this publication made it clear: A terrorist attacked a soldier.

Vehicular attack in Tekoa wounds soldier; terrorist neutralized - https://t.co/XN85MqnuEO
— Ynetnews (@ynetnews) July 10, 2017

My blood pressure probably dropped 20 points reading that. But then I came to a tweet by Judah Ari Gross, the military correspondent for the Times of Israel.

#breaking IDF: reports of a suspected car ramming attack near the Tekoa settlement
— Judah Ari Gross (@JudahAriGross) July 10, 2017

There's that word again: "suspected." Add it to "settlement" and you've got the formula down. It means: anyone who gets hurt in Judea and Samaria damn well DESERVES IT.

Just as Haaretz has been dubbed the only Arab newspaper that appears in Hebrew, the Times of Israel is (not so fondly) called Haaretz 2 by those in the know.

These are the papers of record that the big news outlets turn to for their stories. Papers like the Washington Post and CNN. And it's like the game "telephone" we used to play at birthday parties, where a kid whispers a word into a kid's ear, and that kid whispers it into the next kid's ear, and so on and so forth and then the last kid in the circle calls out the word and everyone laughs, because the word is totally different from the one originally uttered.

Naturally, if you call any of these news outlets on their facts, they'll say, "But we read it in an Israeli publication!"

Uh huh.

By the way, the Washington Post, via the Associated Press, skews the order of its headline to make the killing of the terrorist the main event:

"Israel: Palestinian assailant killed after attacking soldier"

Note that the terrorist becomes an "assailant," and soldiers becomes "soldier." There's no mention of any injury caused by the attack. That would be deemed too sympathetic to Israel.

We should be grateful for small tidbits: the headline refers to Judea as "Israel."

Shhhhhhhhh.

Don't anyone tell them.

Poor, Uneducated, Underemployed Americans Somehow Not Resorting To Terrorism (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Gary, Indiana, July 12 - Terrorism experts confessed today they cannot explain why tens of millions of Americans under economic circumstances similar to those of Islamist terrorists have not embraced hijacking, suicide bombing, burning people in cages, mass execution, and other forms of violence.

Conceding that they lack important data, analysts of the phenomenon of religious violence by Islamist militants declared themselves today unable to explain why the poverty, political voicelessness, despair, social immobility, and feeling of being exploited by more powerful forces that serve to explain Islamic terrorism have not led American, or any Western, economic underclass to pursue similar violent strategies in response to those conditions.

"We just can't think of anything that might get to the root of the difference," lamented Forrest Furthtriis of the Davis-Utley-Howe (DUH) Research Institute, a think tank. "President Obama insisted for eight years that providing good jobs for people across the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia would alleviate the grievances those societies have that lead to terrorism. He didn't get that from thin air - it's a well-established line of analysis."

"But then we started to look at the numbers and conditions of the American poor, and discovered no such violent movements with mass support," he continued. "I mean, there are fringe groups, but you don't have them taking over whole regions and recruiting thousands of like-minded fighters from far away. It's bizarre."

"We're stumped," admitted Ben Rhodes, an adviser to Obama. "According to the logic we've applied for years and years to the development of Islamic terrorism, Americans significant numbers should be joining terrorist groups to fight the oppressirs, backed by an even larger number of sympathetic supporters. Maybe it's just a matter of time? In any case, I would suggest adopting the most patronizing attitude possible, both with the Islamic societies and the American poor. Obviously, neither one knows what's good for them, and they need the educated elites to make those determinations for them."

A second DUH researcher disputed Rhodes's reasoning. "All this requires is a change in nomenclature," insisted Linda Sarsour. "All those people who voted for Donald Trump should be described as committing an act of terrorism against tolerance, and against anything I can claim is congruent with my values. Once we've drawn the equivalence between murderous terrorism and a democratic act, we no longer need to worry about silly distinctions such as violence vs. non-violence. You just have to recast 'violent' to include other things and the whole problem goes away."

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07/12 Links Pt1: Jewish Cemetery Promised $100K by BDS Activist Sarsour hasn't seen a cent; UNESCO Supports Terrorism

From Ian:

Daniel Pipes: Israelis Want Victory — Not Just Peace

What does the Jewish Israeli public think about convincing the Palestinians that they’ve lost their century-long war with Zionism — that the gig is up? In other words, what do Israelis think about winning?
To find out, the Middle East Forum commissioned the Smith Institute to survey 700 adult Israeli Jews. Carried out on June 27-28, the poll has a margin of error of 3.7 percent.
It reveals a widespread Israeli belief that a Palestinian recognition of defeat will eventually lead to the acceptance of Israel as the Jewish state, thereby ending the conflict.
Palestinian defeat: “A peace agreement with the Palestinians will only be possible once the Palestinian leadership recognizes the fact that it has been defeated in its struggle against Israel.” Overall, 58 percent of respondents agreed, with opinion deeply polarized by political outlook: 69 percent on the Right concurred, but only 16 percent on the Left did so.
Israeli victory: “The reason that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict still continues is that none of the military operations or diplomatic engagements with the Palestinian leadership have led to Israeli victory.” This resembles the first statement, but reverses it; doing so increases the positive responses to 65 percent of the Israeli public. More surprising, the results show that — across the entire political spectrum from Right to Left — an awareness exists that Israel needs to win. The results also show that a majority of every subgroup of voter — male and female, young and old, adherents of every kind of Judaism, supporters of every Jewish political party represented in the parliament — concur with this sentiment.

'UNHRC focuses on Israel, ignores companies operating in other occupied areas'

Despite pushing efforts to boycott businesses active in Israeli settlements, the UN Human Rights Council is turning a blind eye to more than 40 European companies that operate in four other areas deemed occupied by the UN.
A report issued last month by two pro-Israel advocacy organizations – Kohelet Policy Forum and NGO Monitor – says that “some of the world’s largest industrial, financial services, and other major publicly traded companies,” are operating in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus, Armenian-occupied Nagorno-Karabakh and Russian-occupied portions of Ukraine.
The UNHRC has been pushing efforts to boycott businesses that are active in Jewish settlements since it adopted Resolution 31/36 on March 24, 2016. A new boycott list is due out by December.
The report, authored by Kohelet legal expert and Northwestern University Prof. Eugene Kontorovich, accuses the UNHRC of formulating a boycott list that “is far too narrow in its scope, and fails to capture the full context and magnitude of business activities that support settlement enterprises in occupied territories.”
Its singular focus “undermines both the legal and practical value of the resulting database, and is likely to produce consequences both unexpected and undesired,” wrote Kontorovich.
Further, the report says that “as a matter of human rights, the council’s focus on Israel is difficult to understand.

UNESCO Supports Terrorism

Denying Jews' rights in Jerusalem and Hebron has long been a major component of the Palestinians' anti-Israel narrative. In school textbooks and other publications, Jewish religious sites are featured as "Arab, Palestinian and Islamic" religious places. The Western Wall, for example, is only described as "Al-Buraq Wall," while the Tomb of the Patriarchs is referred to as the Ibrahimi Mosque.
Generation after generation, Palestinian children are taught that Jewish history is a figment of some twisted Jewish imagination. They are also being taught that only Palestinians and Muslims are entitled to the Holy Land. And they learn this lesson well: many Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims continue to deny Israel's right to exist because they have absorbed this message of hate. This message, moreover, is pervasive -- it is disseminated not only through school textbooks, but also through media outlets and the rhetoric of their leaders, especially mosque preachers and imams.
As of now, Palestinians also have an international agency (UNESCO) to support their anti-Israel narrative and rhetoric. The UNESCO resolutions are being interpreted by many Palestinians as proof that Israel has no right to exist. For many Palestinians, the resolutions are a green light to pursue their "armed struggle" to "liberate Palestine, from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river." Translation: UNESCO has given the Palestinians yet another incentive to take to the streets and kill the first Jew they meet.
The latest UNESCO resolutions are a catalyst for Palestinian terrorism against Israelis. Yet they are more than that: they also make the prospect of peace even more distant. UNESCO and other international agencies that deny Jewish history are sending a green light for violence and extremism to Palestinians and other Arabs and Muslims.
These resolutions are seen by Palestinians as supporting their false and invented narrative that they are the true owners of the land and that all the holy sites belong solely to Muslims.

Global Christian Group Says UNESCO Has Become Mouthpiece for Global Jew Hatred

The World Council of Independent Christian Churches (WCICC) is calling on member states of the United Nations to defund the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in the wake of the passage of a resolution to declare the Cave of the Patriarchs and the Old City of Hebron to be World Heritage Sites in Danger, and under the authority of the Palestinian Authority government.
“Instead of protecting our shared history and values, UNESCO has become the mouthpiece for global Jew Hatred,” the organization said in its release. “Their latest motion which suggests that Hebron and the Cave of the Patriarchs are Palestinian Heritage sites is both pathetic and offensive to history and the billions of Jews and Christians worldwide.
“There can be no place for such hatred within a world organization that exists to foster peace and understanding and protect history. It’s time to defund UNESCO once and for all.”
WCICC represents more than 45 million Evangelical Christians around the world, and is represented at the United Nations by special envoy Laurie Cardoza-Moore, president of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations (PJTN).
Cardoza-Moore said Monday in a statement of her own, “UNESCO has once again proven that they are not interested in protecting historic sites globally, but instead, blatantly disregarding over 3,500 years of documented history, they are more interested in their outrageous attempts at revisionist history.

An Israeli policeman wore a small Israeli flag on his shoulder yesterday, causing the Waqf on the Temple Mount to issue a condemnation.

(I cannot discount the possibility that this police officer confiscated the flag from a visitor.)

Here are some of the flags that have been proudly flown on the holiest spot in Judaism.

Palestinian

Algeria

Syria

Hamas

ISIS

They have their priorities.

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Wafa reports that 5 people were injured in Gaza from celebratory gunfire after students received their results from secondary school exams.

One victim was 53-year old Asaad al-Zatma who was shot in the head. He is in serious condition. Four of the other injured live in Beit Hanoun.

Keep in mind that this is being reported in pro-PA media to make Hamas look bad. Chances are there was also similar gunfire in the West Bank but the PA and Hamas only report the ugly news from the other side.

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From Times of Israel:

An ex-Palestinian Authority minister on Sunday slammed the government in Ramallah for corruption, and said dirty practices were what caused him to quit his post.

Shawqi al-Issa, who served as minister of agriculture and minister of social affairs in the Palestinian unity government sworn in in June 2014, resigned from his post in October 2015. At the time he did not reveal why he stepped down.

On Sunday, in post on Facebook, Issa said the reason he quit was the high level of corruption in the Palestinian government.

“It was not possible nor permitted to carry out any useful action to reduce corruption, or improve the services provided to our people” he wrote.

He added that “the well-qualified and non-corrupt officials continued to be removed, while those suspected of corruption had their positions strengthened.”

Finally! A moral Palestinian politician!

Except, in Pallyland, morality means something quite different than it means in the real world.

At the time Issa quit, a persistent wave of stabbing, ramming and shooting attacks by Palestinians against Israelis was at its early peak.

In his Facebook post, the ex-minister criticized the Palestinian government for not backing the wave of violence against Israel at the time, while instead chasing “opportunism.”

Ah. So this moral ex-minister doesn't think that the many examples of support of terror in the Palestinian media (and by Mahmoud Abbas himself) during the "knife intifada" was enough. he feels that the PA should have explicitly praised young murderers of Jews.

And this is one of the better Palestinian politicians. Someone who would without a doubt be described as "moderate" by Western media invested in the myth of a peaceful Palestinian leadership.

(h/t Josh K)

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07/11 Links Pt2: PalExpo: Outside and Inside; Isso Amro: A Pretext for NGO and UN Lawfare

From Ian:

PalExpo: Outside and Inside

First the good (and exclusive) news about PalExpo, the event at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in London which happened at the weekend. Mark Taylor, the CEO of the Conference Centre, was not in London at the weekend. Because he was on vacation. In Israel! #BDSFail.
The other good news was the resistance to the event, led by the StopPalExpo Coalition.
Sharon Klaff in particular worked really hard to ensure there was a pro-Israel anti-extremist presence outside the venue on both days. Well done Sharon and to all who came in support and helped in any way, especially the Zionist Federation.
Thanks also to the Met who ensured our safety, without in any way disrupting the sometimes very heated debates in the blazing sunshine outside the venue.
Now the not-so-good news. This event should never have been allowed to happen at a publicly-owned venue. Because it was organised by Friends of Al-Aqsa, which has been charged with expressing support for terrorists. And because it featured 25 speakers who have either supported terrorism, expressed antisemitism or defamed Israel – or its supporters – with lies (this booklet says 24, but Hatam Bazian was a late addition).
We have to conclude that after the election the government is too weak to act against this part-hatefest (there was also an unobjectionable cultural element). And too preoccupied with Brexit – and at DCLG (the Department responsible for the QEII Centre), too preoccupied with the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower inferno.
The organisers have defended one speaker, Shaykh Ebrahim Bham, who quoted Goebbels in a sermon (“People tell me that Jews are human beings. Yes, I know they are human beings. Just as fleas are also animals. Just as fleas are also animals, they are also part of human beings like that”).

How East Germany and the West German Left Waged War on Israel

The historian Jeffrey Herf, in Undeclared Wars with Israel, tells of East Germany’s vicious anti-Zionism, which went well beyond condemning Israel and expressing solidarity with those seeking its destruction: indeed, the German Democratic Republic provided funds and weapons to both Arab regimes and the PLO. For its part, Herf relates, the West German far left equated opposition to the government in Bonn with opposition to Israel, often crossing the line into anti-Semitism and, for the most committed, active participation in terrorist attacks against Jews. Allan Arkush writes in his review:
Unlike other Soviet-bloc nations, East Germany didn’t break relations with Israel after the Six-Day War—because it never had them in the first place. This was mostly due to its refusal to pay reparations for the crimes of the Nazis. But it did denounce Israel as the aggressor and likened it to the Nazi regime. . . . In the ensuing years, East Germany’s sales of armaments to the Arab world . . . ran in to the hundreds of millions of dollars. . . .
The West German far left, [meanwhile], emerged in a society that believed its own legitimacy to be bound up with a Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) that entailed not only repudiation of the Nazis but reparations to their Jewish victims. While East Germany was denying any responsibility for the Nazi regime and excoriating Israel, West Germany was transferring massive amount of money to it and offering the country its broad support. . . .
As the New Left turned against Israel after 1967, West German leftists followed suit and, in Herf’s words, “redefined the meaning of Vergangenheitsbewältigung” to justify the equation of the Jewish state’s alleged crimes with those of the Nazis. Leftists in the Federal Republic began speaking of the malign effects of Germany’s “Jewish complex” and condemning philo-Semitism.

NGO Monitor: Isso Amro: A Pretext for NGO and UN Lawfare

The trial of Isso Amro, which began on July 9 with charges of unlawful activity including violence, is deeply intertwined with the political complexities and narratives of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This issue has become an opportunity for advocacy NGOs and the UN officials closely linked to these organizations to falsely impugn the Israeli justice system and distort international law along the way. This campaign is a form of lawfare, exploiting the language of justice and aimed at demonizing and delegitimizing Israel.
Two UN officials, Michael Lynk and Michel Forst (Special Rapporteurs for Palestinian territories and human rights defenders, respectively), released an absurdly prejudicial statement (July 7, 2017) that “If the Israeli military court convicts Mr. Amro on any of the charges against him, the convictions will be stained by reasonable doubts about the system’s ability to ensure justice.” Likewise, Amnesty International prejudged the case before any evidence was presented and announced (November 22, 2016) “If he is convicted we will consider Issa Amro a prisoner of conscience.”
These statements do not point to the quality of the Israeli justice system, but rather to the possibility of an outcome that these ideological advocates do not like. The claims of the UN officials and Amnesty notwithstanding, the legitimacy of the verdict in this case will be established by the evidence presented by the prosecution and defense. Israel’s military courts employ the same evidentiary rules as civilian courts, and their standards are on par or exceed any system in the world. (Under international law, specifically the Geneva Conventions, Israel is required to try Palestinians domiciled in the West Bank and arrested on security offenses in military courts.)
In other words, either Amro violated the law, or he did not. Being automatically labeled a “human rights defender” does not generate immunity from prosecution.

A Palestinian human rights NGO has confirmed the story we mentioned recently that the Palestinian Authority has greatly reduced the number of permits allowed for Gazans requiring hospitalization to leave the enclave.

PCHR has the statistics:

Data collected by PCHR indicates there is a gradual decline in the number of medical referrals issued for the Gaza Strip patients, as the number reached 2,190 referrals in March, but declined to 1,756 in April at a rate of 19.8%. Moreover, the medical referrals decreased in May to 1,484 at a rate of 32.2%. The information collected by PCHR shows that the number of referrals in June did not exceed 500, which points out that they declined at a rate of over 75%. On the other hand, the External Medical Treatment Department adopted a new mechanism when dealing with serious cases, under which patients are referred upon the approval of the Department’s Director, as the “financial coverage is offered later and following the coordination needed”. On Thursday, 15 June 2017, this mechanism stopped upon the instructions given by Ramallah’s Ministry of Health to the External Medical Treatment Department in Gaza. The number of medical referrals approved by the Higher Medical Committee in the Gaza Strip since early June is over 2,500 referrals so far for patients suffering from serious diseases that have no treatment in Gaza. These patients are awaiting for the approval on the financial coverage for their treatment abroad. However, Ramallah’s External Medical Treatment Department issued only 400 referrals. This raises concerns on the delay of about a month and a half, in addition to the decline in the number of medical referrals despite the approval of the Higher Medical Committee in the Gaza Strip.

Not only that, but patients that do get permission to go to the West Bank for treatment are being rejected by the hospitals themselves!

PCHR is shocked as the West Bank hospitals has started rejecting hospital appointments for the Gaza Strip patients with medical referrals from the External Medical Treatment Department although these hospitals used to reserve a bed for the referred patient under the term “financial coverage offered later“. The new measure taken hinders the Gaza Strip patients’ access to those hospitals and aggravates the health situation.

The PA has shown time and time again that it doesn't care about its own people.

Why should the rest of the world prioritize helping those who actively and consciously allow their own people to die?

Is Abbas' decision to stop electricity, medicines, anesthetic, medical equipment and other life saving material from Gaza morally different from Bashar Assad's siege of Yarmouk? Yet Assad is considered a monster and Abbas a peacemaker.

It goes to show that facts have little to do with how (or even if) things are reported.

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The BDS movement recently celebrated their 12th anniversary with a list of 200 "victories."

They include:

June, 2010 – The Pixies cancel concert in wake of Mavi Marmara massacre

The Pixies are playing in Israel later this month.

June, 2011 – Basketball legend and actor Kareem Abdul-Jabbar cancels visit to Israel in response to “Nakba Day violence”

Basketball Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons were among the guests at an event at the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles marking the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

December, 2013 – American Studies Association endorses academic boycott of Israel by sweeping majority membership vote after national council passes unanimously

The ASA reversed itself almost completely a year later.

June, 2010 – Carlos Santana cancels concert in Tel Aviv following boycott calls

Santana played in Israel last summer.

January, 2014 – Hollywood Star Scarlett Johansson resigns as Oxfam International Global Ambassador due to deal with Sodastream

Um, doesn't that mean that she rejects BDS?

June 6, 2014 – Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation divests from G4S

This is one of several "victories" they claim for investors selling their stakes in, or not choosing to hire G4S, Veolia and others that had nothing at all to do with Israel.

These guys just can't stop lying.

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07/11 Links Pt1: Phillips: ISRAEL WON! NOW GET OVER IT; 120,000 Palestinian Children Attend Summer Terrorist Camps

From Ian:

New Knesset lobby unveils plan for peace: Total Palestinian surrender

Israel has already defeated the Palestinians. All that’s left is for them to surrender.
That, at least, was an argument being made in Jerusalem this week. Led by the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, pro-Israel leaders and analysts gathered here to highlight local support for their aim of reframing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict internationally.
“After more than a century, the conflict is really over,” Daniel Pipes, the forum’s president, told JTA. “As an American, I would like my government to say to the Israeli government, ‘Do what you need to do to convince the Palestinians they lost.’”
Pipes on Sunday night held an English-language event at the Begin Heritage Center to cheer Tuesday’s launch of a Knesset lobby committed to forcing the Palestinians to admit defeat. He said he hoped the Knesset Israel Victory Caucus — along with a public opinion poll he released Sunday to JTA — would help them convince US policymakers to “let Israel win.”
In an article in the December 2016 issue of Commentary, Pipes described the things Israel might do to “encourage Palestinians to accept Israel and discourage rejectionism.” They include charging the Palestinians Authority for material damage from terrorism; blocking Palestinian Authority officials from returning to the West Bank if their colleagues incite violence; quiet, anonymous burials for Palestinians killed attacking Israelis, and shutting off water and electricity supplies to punish violence by Palestinians.
“Inducing a change of heart is not a pretty or pleasant process,” wrote Pipes. However, he continued, “Wars usually end when failure causes one side to despair, when that side has abandoned its war aims and accepted defeat, and when that defeat has exhausted the will to fight.”

Melanie Phillips: ISRAEL WON! NOW GET OVER IT

The Middle East Forum held a meeting in Jerusalem last night to discuss Daniel Pipes’s “Victory Caucus“, his project for breaking the Arab-Israel impasse. He urges that the conflict should be reframed as a war which Israel has won and the Arabs have lost rather than a never-ending impasse with demands upon Israel for negotiations, peace processes and compromises. I spoke briefly at this meeting. You can watch my comments on this clip from the Facebook Live video below. You can also watch the video of the whole meeting here. A transcript of my remarks follows beneath the clip.

If the Palestinians Care about Peace, Why Do They Pay Salaries to Terrorists?

All over the world, people take the side of the Palestinians without knowing much about them and their collective beliefs and intentions. Palestinians who go abroad looking for praise and propaganda seem pleasant. They don’t find it hard to convince innocent Westerners that they have justice on their side.
But sometimes, even in the Middle East, a window opens and the truth peeks out. At the moment, the struggle over official payments to Palestinian terrorists provides an exceptionally useful vantage point.
For many years, the Palestinian Authority (PA) or one of its offshoots has been paying regular salaries to the families of dead or imprisoned terrorists. The 2016 PA budget says it now pays relatives of “martyrs” the equivalent of $183 million a year and families of imprisoned terrorists $135 million. According to the Times of Israel, the Palestinians have paid out $1.12 billion during the last four years to terrorists and their families. The money, all in U.S. dollars, comes from foreign aid grants.
The new administration in Washington has decided this practice should end. At his meeting in Bethlehem with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the PA, Donald Trump said: “Peace can never take root in an environment where violence is tolerated, funded or rewarded.”

How many UN agencies does it take to screw in a Palestinian light bulb?

Here is an almost complete list of UN agencies that work in the Palestinian territories.

Name	Full
FAO	Food and Agriculture Organization
ILO	International Labour Organization
ITC	International Trade Center
OHCHR	Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
UN Habitat	UN Habitat
UN Women	UN Women
UNCTAD	United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
UNDP	UN Development Program
UNDSS	United Nations Department of Safety & Security
UNEP	UN environment
UNESCO	United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
UNFPA	United Nations Population Fund
UNICEF	United Nations Children's Fund
UNIDO	United Nations Industrial Development Organization
UNMAS	United Nations Mine Action Service
UNODC	United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
UNOPS	United Nations Office for Project Services
UNRWA	United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees
WFP	World Food Programme
WHO	World Health Organization

There are so many UN agencies in the territories that another organization, UNDAF (United Nations Development Assistance Framework) is needed to coordinate the other 20-odd agencies.

As a result of this infantilizing of Palestinian Arabs, they have no idea how to do anything themselves.

Think about it. The PA has existed for over 20 years now. Yet basic services that one would expect a nascent nation to do are still not done, and Israel is blamed instead of them acting like adults.

A tiny example from a recent newsletter I saw from the "Directorate of Joint Service Council Ministry of Local Government Japan International Cooperation Agency" which helps the PA with waste management.

The newsletter says:

Open dumps (or so-called “random dumps”) have a negative impact on the environment and on the public health and safety. The impact of open dumping is potentially affects water resources, and some additional expenditure on waste management, which could provide clean water cheaply (ISWA, 2017). Now is the time to consider closing or upgrading open dumpsites and changing waste disposal practices. In West Bank - Palestine, non-negligible number of open dumps were in operation.

MoLG-JICA’s project supports the initiatives for Joint Service Councils (JSCs) to change the final disposal works from open dumps to designated landfills where the waste is better contained and covered, and where environmental impacts from waste disposal are progressively reduced. In order to promote the initiatives, the project has focused on five JSCs for their capacity development in waste management. Since January 2015, three out of the five JSCs, successfully closed 4 open dumps, but still 17 open dumps are in operation.

Why can the PA not close open waste dumps and create proper facilities after 20 years? If they asked for the money from the international community with a specific plan, they'd get it. But they wait for the Japanese to come in and tell them "Hey! You are dumping waste where it can hurt people!"

Why do the Palestinians need outside people to tell them how to keep their own areas clean?

This, and hundreds of other NGO projects, create a cycle where Palestinians depend on the rest of the world to do basic services for them and Palestinians themselves act like spoiled brats who cannot assume any responsibility for their own actions.

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Later this month, a romance novel called "The Last Kibbutz" by Sabrina Abreu will be published.

Set in an Israeli kibbutz, the story about a Brazilian woman named Sofia, who decides to work as a volunteer picking apples leaving behind her professional life in São Paulo in search of new loves, friends and experiences.

The author lived on a kibbutz for a year so she knows a bit about the subject.

But she received a letter from an editor at her publishing house, nVersos, demanding that she add criticism of Israel in her novel. The note said, "At first glance, the work is not meant to be political, and therefore does not defend Zionism or Israel. For those who follow the conflict, however, the absence of critical commentary on Israel's actions toward Palestine is obvious. While extolling a way of life that is disappearing - the collectivism of kibbutz - it ends up defending Israel."

Another editor's note suggested that she consult "an expert on the Middle East" to make her book more in line with the publishing house's idea of political correctness. Another note asked her explicitly if she would change the novel.

Abreu says, "They suggested that my approach would be naïve because it does not address the Palestinian issue, something that does not influence people's daily lives there."

The publishing house claims that she agreed to the changes to add an anti-Israel element to the book. However, she changed publishers, and the book is being released by Simonsen.

(h/t Golan Shahar)

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From B'nai Brith Canada:

B’nai Brith Canada is strongly condemning an anti-Israel art exhibit on display at Western University's McIntosh Gallery which received grants from a federal funding agency, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).The display, entitled "Choreographies of Resistance," glorifies the actions of Palestinian protesters, including stone-throwers who promote violence under the guise of resistance. In Israel, a reported fourteen civilians have been murdered by Palestinian stone-throwers, including infants such as Adele Biton and Yehuda Shoham, as well as three Israeli Arabs who were attacked because they were mistaken for Jews.The creator of the exhibit is Rehab Nazzal, the sister of Palestinian terrorist leader Khaled Nazzal. In 2014, Rehab drew condemnation for a similar display at Ottawa City Hall which glorified Khaled and other Palestinian terrorists. Rehab continues to justify terrorist attacks plotted by her brother, including the 1974 massacre of 22 Israeli schoolchildren, describing him as a "martyr" who fought for "justice."Despite Rehab's abuse of art to whitewash acts of terror, research by B'nai Brith shows that the SSHRC handed her $35,000 in 2015 in order to continue her work."It is irresponsible that taxpayer dollars are being used to finance this anti-Israel exhibit," said Michael Mostyn, Chief Executive Officer of B'nai Brith Canada."The false narrative of victimhood on display at this exhibit deliberately ignores Palestinian car rammings, suicide bombings, the recent knife intifada and lethal use of rocks targeting civilians due to a continual campaign of incitement. Rehab Nazzal's public support for her terrorist brother is deplorable."

The description of the exhibit (and the graphic that celebrates violence) is quite disgusting:

The exhibition, entitled Choreographies of Resistance, includes photographs, video, and sound works that focus on the Palestinian struggle against settler-colonialism in one of the world’s most volatile hotspots, Nazzal notes. It includes a video installation seen through the “eyes” of a gas-mask, and an installation in which photographic images are projected onto hundreds of handmade slingshots as it pays tribute to Palestinians who have lost their lives in what the artist notes is an "intifada, or uprising."
“This will be an immersive journey for visitors, as these works will transmit Palestinian civilians’ experiences from the streets of the occupied West Bank to the gallery space of London, Ontario,” she said.

Really? Palestinians wear gas masks all day because of random Israeli tear gas that happens to land where they live, nothing at all to do with the proud "resisters" hurling rocks and firebombs that she is celebrating?

It is sickening that this "artists' who glorifies the deaths of Jews is being funded by Canadian tax dollars in the name of "art."

Her previous exhibit was discussed here.

(h/t Josh K)

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Just some more BDS hypocrisy about Lincoln Center

A group of anti-Israel artists - including, of course, Roger Waters - signed a petition to force Lincoln Center not to show a play that was partially funded by the Israeli government. As the NYT reports:

More than 60 artists, including four Pulitzer Prize winners and other prominent writers, actors, directors and playwrights, have signed an open letter calling on Lincoln Center to cancel performances of a play co-produced by two Israeli theater companies and backed by the Israeli government.

The play, “To the End of the Land,” is produced by the Cameri Theater of Tel Aviv and Ha’Bima National Theater of Israel and is based on a critically acclaimed 2008 novel by David Grossman about a mother who tries to escape from her worry over her son’s military service by going on a hike in the Galilee.

The play, part of the Lincoln Center Festival, is being presented July 24-27 “with support of Israel’s Office of Cultural Affairs in North America,” according to a news release. This is the main point of contention in the letter, even though Mr. Grossman, the play’s author, has been an outspoken critic of the Israeli government in the past. The letter was organized by Adalah-NY, an advocacy group that calls for the boycott of Israel over its treatment of Palestinians.

“It is deeply troubling that Lincoln Center, one of the world’s leading cultural institutions, is helping the Israeli government to implement its systematic ‘Brand Israel’ strategy of employing arts and culture to divert attention from the state’s decades of violent colonization, brutal military occupation and denial of basic rights to the Palestinian people,” the letter reads.

Debora Spar, the president of Lincoln Center, rejected the calls for the play’s cancellation.

“While we acknowledge the feelings of those who would prefer that we not allow that performance to continue, we will not be canceling it,” Ms. Spar said in a statement.

The pro-Israel Creative Community for Peace responded with their own letter with 45 high-level entertainment industry executives denouncing the attempt to ban the play.

But in their counter-letter, the CCFP brings up an interesting point:

As we know, government support is crucial for the arts. Just this month, in fact, there are at least three other events at Lincoln Center that include support from governments around the world:
The film “Birdshot” — funded by the Doha Film Institute, a Qatari organization headed by the ruling Al Thani family — was screened there on July 6.
From July 3-8, the American Ballet Theatre — funded by the US federal government together with the governments of New York City and New York State — is performing its “Tchaikovsky Spectacular.”
And from July 26-30, the Bolshoi Ballet — which lists as its partners two Russian government news agencies — will perform “The Taming of the Shrew.”
While some of us at CCFP (and perhaps even at Lincoln Center) may disagree with various actions of these governments, we can all agree that punishing artists from these countries by shunning them for receiving crucial funding from their governments is not the answer. Depriving audiences of their work, their perspectives, and their contributions to culture around the world is imprudent.
Punishing artists from Only One of these countries — as the signatories of open letter are attempting with Israel — is both imprudent and discriminatory.

Yes, there is no one protesting Qatari or Russian involvement in subsidizing the arts. Only Israel.

Apparently, the BDS folks have no problem with those who subsidize Islamic terror or those who support Syrian war crimes when they subsidizing art. Only Israel.

Now, why might that be?

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(This post is pinned to the top on July 10, scroll down to see other posts for today.)

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