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"The equation facing the Palestinian factions is clear: Hand over the terrorists and there will be no wall. The Palestinians have proven that they are unable to take security matters into their own hands in this camp." — Lebanese security official.JPost Editorial: Fires and Hezbollah
These anti-Palestinian practices are regularly ignored by the international community, including mainstream media and human rights organizations, whose obsession with Israel blinds them to Arab injustice. A story without an anti-Israel angle is not a story, as far as they are concerned
Typically, Western journalists and human rights activists do not even bother to report or document cases of Arab mistreatment of Arabs. This abandonment of professional standards is why apartheid laws targeting Palestinians in several Arab countries are still unknown to the international community.
The Lebanese authorities also say that they decided to build the wall after discovering several tunnels in the vicinity of Ain al-Hilweh, used to smuggle weapons and terrorists into and out of the camp.
The new wall will not solve the real problem -- namely the failure to absorb the refugees and grant them citizenship. Palestinians living in Arab countries are denied citizenship (with the exception of Jordan) and a host of basic rights.
In the past few days the nation has faced one of the worst brushfires in its history. Nearly a thousand hectares of forests and rural areas have been destroyed in Zichron Ya’acov, Neveh Shalom, Modi’in, Neveh Ilan and Nataf. Tens of thousands were evacuated from their homes in the Haifa area alone.
Israel’s under-staffed firefighting forces have been battling day and night to stop the flames from spreading.
Firefighters and equipment from abroad have provided important backup. In times of natural disaster – even when many of the fires seem to have been the result of arson – nations come together. Israelis received help from Palestinians and Turks as though the political differences that normally taint relations did not exist.
Thankfully, as of this writing there have not been any casualties. This is a testament to the success of firefighters and other rapid response teams.
However, the fires provide an opportunity to reflect on the dangers of a very different scenario.
The media may have hailed the arrival of the Supertanker from the United States, but the heads of Israel's Fire & Rescue Authority said Sunday there is no need for the massive firefighting aircraft at present.
The Supertanker landed in Israel on Friday night, but was only put to use on Saturday in the Jerusalem Mountains area, over Nataf.
It took to the air again on Sunday afternoon, but found itself circling idly over the sea near Zikhron Ya'akov and the Haifa Bay area after all of the major fires had already been put out.
While acting Fire Commissioner Shimon Ben-Ner said there was no need for the Supertanker, the aircraft is operated directly by the Israel Police and it is the police that will eventually decide whether or not to use it.
On Saturday, police demanded to use the firefighting aircraft in the forests that border Highway 1, while the Fire & Rescue Authority determined there was no operational need for it. Eventually, despite disagreements between the two emergency services, the Supertanker was used to help extinguish areas that were still on fire near Nataf.
The massive firefighting aircraft, which reached Israel after firefighters had already gained control over the fires in Haifa, was one of 21 planes that took to the sky to help put out the blazes that plagued Israel last week.
In total, some 325 foreign nationals participated in firefighting efforts.
Hezbollah military officials have held their first ever direct meeting with their Russian counterparts in a landmark sitdown that tackled the Aleppo front, according to a daily close to the powerful Lebanese militant organization.This report, if true, combined with the news of the Hezbollah military parade recently on Syrian soil, gives the impression that Hezbollah has transformed from a terror group to a conventional military force.
“Less than a week ago, Aleppo witnessed the first direct meeting between Hezbollah field commanders and Russian army officers,” Al-Akhbar reported Thursday.
The Lebanese daily said that the gathering “came at the request of the Russians” who were impressed by Hezbollah’s military performance during the “Battle of Martyr Abu Omar Saraqeb,” a failed rebel offensive launched in late October against regime positions in western Aleppo.
The significance of a militia turning into an army is substantial. If Hezbollah sticks to such a format, it means that the party will lose its ability to fight asymmetric wars, and will be forced to engage in regular army-to-army battles. This means that Hezbollah will lose its ability to blend in with non-combatants, or launch its offensive from civilian neighborhoods. After all, tanks and artillery do not really fit in small streets and cannot be hidden behind bushes.This is way too rosy a viewpoint. Just because Hezbollah is acting like a regular army in Lebanon doesn't mean it has the desire to act that way against Israel. After all, the tactic of using human shields is worthless against the rebel forces in Syria.
If Hezbollah’s militia sticks to its new setup as a conventional army, then the party will have to calculate its wars more carefully. Hezbollah already avoids battle with Israel after Tel Aviv announced its Dahiyeh (Suburb) Doctrine and razed large areas of Beirut’s southern suburbs, as well as Shiite villages in the south in the 2006 War. Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of neighborhoods containing Hezbollah and its supporters exacted a heavy toll on the party, and have forced it to avoid further wars with the Israelis, despite all the bravado from Hezbollah’s leaders.
With an army instead of a militia, Hezbollah will have to fight its future wars with Israel out in the open, which should be good news for Shiite non-combatants and the Lebanese at large, who lost a considerable chunk of their infrastructure, such as bridges, that Israel destroyed to hinder the movement of the party’s invisible fighters in 2006.
Now that Hezbollah’s fighters are visible, Israel will have less reason to hit Lebanon, and will instead engage Hezbollah in head-to-head combat, which Hezbollah says they are not shying from this time, arguing that in any future war with Israel, the party’s fighters will not sit back and defend, but might pressure the Israeli north, attempting to win and hold territory.
For starters, it’s important to accept that the New York Times has always — or at least for many decades — been a far more editor-driven, and self-conscious, publication than many of those with which it competes. Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”We've seen this happen many times. With Israel, the narrative drives the stories, not the facts. And in the case of the Middle East, the NYT narrative is indeed what drives too many politicians and pundits in other media outlets to slavishly follow the Gray Lady's lead.
It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.
Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: “My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?”
The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.”
Having lived at one time or another in small-town Pennsylvania, some lower-rung Detroit suburbs, San Francisco, Oakland, Tulsa and, now, Santa Monica, I could only think, well, “Wow.” This is a very large country. I couldn’t even find a copy of the Times on a stop in college town Durham, N.C. To believe the national agenda was being set in a conference room in a headquarters on Manhattan’s Times Square required a very special mind-set indeed.
Inside the Times building, then and now, a great deal of the conversation is about the Times. In any institution, shop-talk is inevitable. But the navel-gazing seemed more intense at the Times, where too many journalists spent too much time decoding the paper’s ways, and too little figuring out the world at large.
The Civil Defence Department said that it had participated in fighting brush fires that swept large areas in Israel and the occupied West Bank after the Jordanian government received an official request for help this morning.That last sentence was clearly meant to head off criticism of the being "normalization" with Israel, saying that this goes beyond politics.
It said in a statement that the contribution is part of the humanitarian regional effort in which a number of countries, including Egypt, Turkey and the Palestinian National Authority, took part alongside other world nations. It added that the fires fall within the category of natural disasters.
As the smoldering embers of Israel’s massive, nationwide firestorm died out and thousands of evacuated families began returning home over the weekend, the country could take heart in the blessed fact that no one had been killed by the conflagration. The well-coordinated firefighting effort of both local and foreign crews, combined with orderly evacuations, was a reassuring sign that Israel, this time, had indeed learned from past mistakes.Anatomy of a firestorm: 180 injured, hundreds of homes in ruins, 33,000 dunams of parkland burned
The significance of this achievement can be measured by the failure of such systems not too long ago, in the Mount Carmel forest fire of December 2010, when 44 lives were lost in an abortive attempt by Prisons Service cadets to rescue inmates trapped in the Damun Prison. That fire raged for five days before being brought under control, also with the help of a fleet of firefighting planes assembled from foreign countries. One of the lessons of that disaster was that Israel did not have enough such aircraft – but even though we acquired more, this time they were not enough.
Another achievement since that time was Israel’s refining of its world famous disaster rescue capability, which was recognized recently by the World Health Organization as the No. 1 emergency medical operation in the world.
Israelis are renowned for the speed and effectiveness of our rescue efforts after earthquakes and other natural disasters anywhere in the world.
Unfortunately, we have been forced to learn such life-saving practices by confronting the suffering brought upon us by decades of terrorism. It is too early to determine whether the current disaster was the fault of nature – parched brush land waiting for promised winter rains being set on fire by perhaps a careless camper, then blown into a massive blaze by fierce winds – or was the fault, at least partially, of nationalistically motivated terrorists.
The wildfires that have raged across Israel over five days have left at least 133 people injured, rendered hundreds of homes unlivable and consumed tens of thousands of dunams of protected parks and nature reserves.Fresh blazes break out in north, West Bank, Jerusalem
The Magen David Adom rescue service reported Saturday that among the 133 people treated by the organization for fire-related injuries, one was seriously hurt and three others were moderately injured. The overall tally is likely higher, officials said, as some people – one estimate suggested as many as 50 – may have gone to hospitals on their own for injuries such as smoke inhalation.
Haifa was the worst-hit city from the blazes, with 527 homes completely destroyed, according to a Ynet News tally. Other reports have indicated a lower number, more than 400 homes, that were rendered unlivable in the northern city. Some 1,700 Haifa residents are not able to return home by late Saturday, Channel 2 said, because their homes are unlivable.
It appeared late Saturday that the worst of the fires — some of which are believed to have been started deliberately — were over. But dry weather and strong winds have played a major part in the spread of the flames, and rain was not forecast for several days.
The battle to push back the flames marked among the most difficult operations ever undertaken by Israel’s firefighters. Some 2,000 firefighters battled the fires since Tuesday, many of them working in grueling 24-hour shifts alongside 450 soldiers from the Home Front Command and 69 Cypriot firefighters.
Firefighters on Sunday continued to battle at least four fresh wildfires nationwide as the nearly week-long spate of blazes persisted.
A fire tore through a park in the northern town of Karmiel on Sunday afternoon. Firefighters were at the scene.
Another fire was reported Sunday in the area of the West Bank settlement of Halamish, where 18 homes were consumed by flames on Friday night.
A small brush fire broke out in the French Hill neighborhood of Jerusalem and another was extinguished next to the national police headquarters in the capital.
Earlier, police said that a fire raging in a field outside Moshav Rishpon, north of Tel Aviv, was attended to by firefighters. A police spokeswomen said that fire was “under control” and would soon be doused.
She said police and firefighters had yet to establish the cause of the fire.
Donald Trump’s winning platform includes pledges to ban Muslims from entering our country, to forcibly deport millions of people, to remove legal protections from vulnerable minorities and to reinstate the use of torture. The president-elect has threatened massive attacks on human rights and constitutional freedoms. Just last week, he appointed to the highest advisory position in the White House Stephen K. Bannon, a former publisher of Breitbart News, which the Southern Poverty Law Center calls the “media arm” of the white supremacist alt-right movement.
Even if Jews were not personally threatened as Jews, it would still be imperative for us to call upon all of the communal strength we have and all of the institutions we have fought to create to oppose threats to other people. This is an obligation that comes from our tradition. In the Torah, one of God’s first commands to the Jewish people after our liberation from slavery is to protect those who are most vulnerable, as we, too, know the experience of being strangers.
Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine extends its condolences to the Cuban people, the Palestinian people and the revolutionary movements of the world upon the loss of the former prime minister and president of Cuba and the historic international revolutionary leader, Comrade Fidel Castro Ruz, on Friday, November 25, 2016.The DFLP terror group made these posters:
Castro’s internationalist revolutionary commitment to fighting imperialism and capitalism – manifest in the revolutionary victory against US imperialism and its puppet Batista regime in the 1959 Cuban revolution – conistently stood with the oppressed peoples of the world in their confrontation of imperialism, Zionism, racism and capitalism. Throughout his life, Fidel was a supporter and an example of revolutionary struggle in Latin America, in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador and throughout the continent. From Angola to South Africa, Palestine to Mozambique, Bolivia to El Salvador, Castro’s legacy of international revolutionary solidarity and struggle continues to serve as an example in practice that transcends borders toward revolution, democracy and socialism.
"There are few more polarising political figures than Fidel Castro, a progressive but deeply flawed leader."It adds:
"Access to public services such as health and education for Cubans were substantially improved by the Cuban revolution and for this, his leadership must be applauded. However, despite these achievements in areas of social policy, Fidel Castro’s 49-year reign was characterised by a ruthless suppression of freedom of expression.
“The state of freedom of expression in Cuba, where activists continue to face arrest and harassment for speaking out against the government, is Fidel Castro’s darkest legacy."
After his accession to power following the 1959 revolution in Cuba, Castro oversaw dramatic improvements in access to human rights such as health and housing. This was accompanied by an unprecedented drive to improve literacy rates across the country.At the very end, it grudgingly mentions that Castro executed "hundreds" of people in trials. "Amid accusations that many of the trials were unfair, Castro responded: 'Revolutionary justice is not based on legal precepts, but on moral conviction... we are not executing innocent people or political opponents. We are executing murderers and they deserve it.'"
The Cuba Archive project (www.cubaarchive.org) has already begun the heavy lifting by attempting to document the loss of life attributable to revolutionary zealotry. The project, based in Chatham, N.J., covers the period from May 1952 -- when the constitutional government fell to Gen. Fulgencio Batista -- to the present. It has so far verified the names of 9,240 victims of the Castro regime and the circumstances of their deaths. Archive researchers meticulously insist on confirming stories of official murder from two independent sources.
Cuba Archive President Maria Werlau says the total number of victims could be higher by a factor of 10. Project Vice President Armando Lago, a Harvard-trained economist, has spent years studying the cost of the revolution and he estimates that almost 78,000 innocents may have died trying to flee the dictatorship. Another 5,300 are known to have lost their lives fighting communism in the Escambray Mountains (mostly peasant farmers and their children) and at the Bay of Pigs. An estimated 14,000 Cubans were killed in Fidel's revolutionary adventures abroad, most notably his dispatch of 50,000 soldiers to Angola in the 1980s to help the Soviet-backed regime fight off the Unita insurgency.
Buy EoZ's book, PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
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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!