Most of the conversation was about this article of mine, the biggest Israel-related story of the decade that no one wants you to know.
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Recently, my wife and I visited Yeshiva University's museum on 16th St in NYC to see the Arch of Titus exhibit. We saw the museum's full-size 3-D computer recreation of the famous scene of the Jewish prisoners of war carrying the Temple relics (menorah, shulchan [table], trumpets) to Rome. We also saw the displayed collection of 20-30 coins of the Second Temple period, minted in Palestine, some by the Jews and some by the Romans.Advocates Call for Action Against UN Official Who Headlined Anti-Israel Event at University of Toronto
In one small corner of a display case, I saw the "complete collection" of coins minted by non-Jewish Palestinian governments from 1917 back through the Byzantine period, the Arab (invaders from the Arabian Peninsula and the east) Period, the Roman period, the Greek period, the Persian period, the Jewish monarchy and before that.
The complete set of these coins minted by non-Jewish Palestinian authorities fits comfortably in one small corner of a display case because these coins do not exist and have never existed. There are no such coins. Zilch, zippo, nada, cero, efes, null, gornicht, nuttin. The empty set. There was never an identifiable, Arab Palestinian people, or a Palestinian ethnic identity until the mid-20th century when some Arab hate merchants realized that such a peoplehood and ethnic identity would be useful in opposing the national aspirations of the Jews.
Until the 20th century, "Palestine" was understood by Arabs to be a province in Greater Syria. From 1948 until 1967, Arabs in the part of Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) living under Jordanian control were comfortable with Jordanian nationality and ethnicity. There was no problem in the Arab mind with Jordanian sovereignty on the West Bank of the Jordan River because everyone, Arab and non-Arab, knows that Jordan is Arab Palestine. The post World War I formation by the British of the country of Transjordan resulted in the first example of Palestinian Arabs holding sovereignty in any part of Palestine. During the previous several centuries, the Turks held sovereignty in Palestine.
Advocacy groups are urging action against a United Nations official who headlined an event organized by an anti-Israel group at the University of Toronto (UT) last month.The Palestinian 'pay-to-slay' budget continues
Michael Lynk — special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory — was the featured lecturer at a November 29th event cosponsored by Canadian Friends of Sabeel and Emmanuel College, UT’s theological school.
According to the Jewish human rights group B’nai Brith Canada, “attendees at the event were required to pay for tickets, with the proceeds earmarked for Sabeel’s operations.”
Sabeel is a leading proponent of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, with its work largely focused on Christian congregations in North America and Europe. The group peddles a Palestinian variation of “liberation theology,” which rejects a Zionist interpretation of the Christian Bible, and has accused Israel of operating a “crucifixion system” against Palestinians.
Lynk in turn is charged by the UN with investigating “Israel’s violations of the principles and bases of international law” — a mandate criticized for both presupposing Israeli guilt and failing to address potential abuses committed by Palestinian factions. A law professor at Western University in London, Lynk has previously endorsed boycotts of Israel and was described before his appointment as “an ardent anti-Israeli activist” who “plays a leadership role in groups that advocate against Israel” by the monitoring group UN Watch.
“By headlining a fundraiser for an extremist group that seeks to boycott Israel, Rapporteur Lynk breached the UN Code of Conduct,” charged UN Watch chief Hillel Neuer. “He promoted a group that targets the same state he is investigating, thereby violating his duty of impartiality, as well as the prohibition against using his office for third party gain.”
In the UK the Daily Express has been running a vigorous campaign exposing the lunacy of the country's £13billion annual overseas aid budget. Every day they publicise a new example of some inappropriate spending. Yet, by far and away the worse example of all - the 'Palestinian' pay-to-slay budget - is never mentioned. This should be an open goal for the Board of Deputies. The British public is sick of the overseas aid budget. If the Board - instead of spending its money fighting 'Islamophobia' - paid for a few ads to expose the pay-to-slay scandal - the Government would come under real pressure to stop these payments once and for all. And that would be a real contribution to the fight against terrorism.
Europe is the epicenter of the political war against Israel. Europe fights Israel on the streets of Europe. Europe fights Israel in the corridors of power in Brussels, other Western European capitals and the UN. Europe fights Israel in Israel itself.Ben Shapiro: No, Protests And Violence Against Israel Aren’t Trump’s Fault. They’re Just Anti-Semitism.
Europe’s war against Israel is a passive-aggressive campaign fought and denied simultaneously. But in recent years, the mask has fallen over and over again.
In the days that have passed since US President Donald Trump’s dramatic announcement that the US recognizes that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital and is beginning to take concrete steps to move its embassy to the city, Europe’s war against Israel has again become impossible to deny or ignore. Europe’s response to Trump’s announcement has been extreme, violent and more outspoken than the response of the Arab world.
The EU-funded Palestinian Authority reacted to Trump’s move by exhorting its subjects to riot and attack Israelis.
Sunday, Yassin Abu el-Qura heeded his call. Qura stabbed Asher Elmalich in the heart and critically wounded him. Elmalich was a security guard at Jerusalem’s central bus station.
According to Channel 2, Qura is a member of a prominent family of Fatah members with close ties to the PA and its EU- and US-funded and trained security forces. His father is the commander of one of the security forces in Salfit, in Samaria. Two of his brothers are also PA security officers.
Around the same time Qura was stabbing Elmalich, the British government announced it was providing the PA with 20 million pounds in supplemental budgetary funding.
Qura’s attack was notable because it took place against the backdrop of lackluster attendance at PA-organized protests. As former US Middle East mediator Aaron David Miller tweeted on Sunday, the low attendance at these demonstrations, like the low attendance at anti-US and anti-Israel demonstrations in the Arab world is an “indication of how much the region has changed [in recent years] and the loss of centrality of [the] Palestinian issue. [The] Palestinian street is exhausted; the Arab street has disappeared.”
But while the Arab street was indifferent to Trump’s declaration, the European street went berserk. Thousands of protesters assembled in London and Paris, in Berlin and Stockholm. They burned Israeli flags and called for the annihilation of Israel and the murder of Jews.
On Monday, a would-be suicide bomber failed at killing Americans in the same way he failed at life: self-implosion followed by utter shame and humiliation. But Ayaked Ullah, 27, still garnered a hint of media sympathy by stating that Israel’s recent bombings of the Gaza Strip had driven him to action. According to CNN:
Recent Israeli actions in Gaza compelled Ullah to carry out the attack, a law enforcement source said. The suspect was upset, in his words, with the "incursion into Gaza," the source said, but did not elaborate on what incursion he may have been alluding to. Israel launched airstrikes this weekend against what it said were Hamas targets in Gaza after several rockets were fired out of Gaza towards Israel. This came amid widespread protests over President Trump's move to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
This is asinine. The attack was planned for a certain amount of time; the only incursions into Gaza happened this weekend. But this is the constant lie from Islamist sympathizers: that it’s Israel that lies beneath their evil. That’s not true. It’s hatred of Jews.
In Malmo, Sweden, a synagogue was firebombed, supposedly in retaliation for President Trump’s announcement that Israel’s capital is Jerusalem. What does the synagogue have to do with Trump’s announcement? Nothing. But Jews are Jews, and must be attacked. Protesters in Malmo chanted, “We want our freedom back, and we will shoot the Jews.” A second synagogue was firebombed in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Meanwhile, in London, protesters chanted, “Khybar, khybar,” a Koranic call to violence against Jews. And in New York, Imam Mohammad Qatanani of Passaic, New Jersey chanted, “With our souls and our blood, we will redeem you, oh Aqsa!” Nerdeen Kiswani, representing the New York City Students for Justice in Palestine, shouted that all of “Palestine” should be liberated, including Tel Aviv. Demonstrators chanted “Khybar” as well.
Does any of that have to do with Jerusalem? Does any of it have to do with Israel? Or does all of it have to do with religious hatred of Jews?
On Friday, it seemed that every journalist in Jerusalem was waiting for something to happen at the Damascus Gate in the Old City—one of the most popular entrances Muslims use to reach the famous Al-Aqsa mosque for Friday afternoon prayers, and a common site for big protests. Yet the resulting melee was not the massive demonstration everyone seemed to be waiting for.
Israeli soldiers stood in dozen-person groups at the entrances Muslims use to reach Al-Aqsa, and in frequent smaller clumps all along the way. I asked one soldier stationed at the corner of Al-Wad, the street leading to the mosque, whether this Friday was any different from others, and whether he expected any problems. He smiled, and said it was the same as any other day. A few feet away, a man selling bread concurred. “Every day is a day of rage,” he told me in Arabic.
The divided city is one claimed by both Israelis (in West Jerusalem) and Palestinians (in East Jerusalem) as their capital, and American presidents have typically treated its status as an issue to be resolved through negotiations. In the wake of Trump’s announcement, people in the Palestinian half of the city are angry, but few seemed eager for the new intifada, or uprising, that some Muslim leaders are calling for.
Crowds of men began streaming into the city for midday prayers. A few older women obligingly shouted things like “Trump is bad!” when they saw the waiting crowd of foreign journalists. All was quiet for about an hour, and then the same giant crowd streamed back out, many people stopping to shop on their way back to the Damascus Gate, where the cameras were conveniently waiting.
The area outside Damascus Gate is literally set up like a stage: Big steps lead down on three sides to the lowered platform where people emerge from the Old City. A few dozen people stood on the steps and chanted in Arabic, holding a sign featuring a truck that called on America to “dump Trump” and another sign showing Trump’s lips as urinals. A throng of journalists surrounded this group, outnumbering them roughly three-to-one. As protesters moved, the cameras shifted around them, moving like a flock of birds near a power line. Most Palestinians, however, went home.
Ever since his election in 2005, Mr Abbas has rejected violence and called upon his people to pursue statehood through diplomacy. Now the calls from within the Palestinian national movement for a return to intifada, ie, a violent uprising, are growing.Does The Economist really have that short a memory?
For more than 20 years, Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian’s chief peace negotiator, has chased the dream of a two-state solution and the hope of an independent Palestinian state.Left out is that Erekat was the chief negotiator in both 2001 and 2008 when the Palestinian Arabs rejected Israeli peace offers.
He followed it to the White House under four different US presidents, haggled over it in secret and public negotiations with hard faced Israeli negotiators, and defended it against sceptical Palestinians on the streets of Jericho.
But in the minutes after Donald Trump’s announcement that the US was recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Mr Erekat stood in front of the television cameras and concluded that his dream of two decades was finally dead.
“Unfortunately, President Trump just destroyed any possibility of two states,” he said in a quivering voice.
"It was for the British that Jerusalem was so important – they are the ones who established Jerusalem as a capital," said Prof. Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, a historical geographer at Hebrew University. "Before, it was not anyone's capital since the times of the First and Second Temples."
Both Israelis and Palestinians claim the city as their political capital and as a sacred religious site. Israel controls the entirety of the city. Any peace deal would need to resolve that.Actually, when the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181 in 1947 in favor of the partition of the land between a Jewish and Arab state, the resolution would make Jerusalem into a "corpus separatum" under UN trusteeship for up to 10 years. But as a General Assembly resolution, it was only a suggestion, not binding and definitely not an official designation of any kind. The Jews accepted it but the Arabs rejected it and attacked after the British left. And that was the end of that.
The city's status has been disputed, at least officially, since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Before that, the United Nations had designated Jerusalem as a special international zone. During the war, Israel seized the city's western half. It seized the eastern half during the next Arab-Israeli war, in 1967.
This passage in today's @nytimes editorial is stunningly cynical: "East Jerusalem was exclusively Arab in 1967." It was indeed exclusively Arab. Because 19 years earlier, Jews, long a plurality in the area, were forced out.— Gilead Ini (@GileadIni) December 6, 2017
The Swedish reaction to #Trumpjerusalem announcement is odd,calling it a "catastrophe" and "dangerous",as #Sweden unilaterally recognized #Palestine 4 years ago and called it a "step toward peace".Why the double standard from Swedish FM @margotwallstrom ? #JerusalemEmbassy— Annika H Rothstein (@truthandfiction) December 7, 2017
Key detail: Palestinian violence isn't spontaneous and organic, as western media presents it. It's orchestrated & controlled by the PA and Fatah as a form of political blackmail. And Trump refused to be blackmailed. https://t.co/6Ghnoxm6gs pic.twitter.com/4yisQSTPeS— Noah Pollak (@NoahPollak) December 7, 2017
After decades of threats intimidated Trump’s predecessors and other world leaders to pretend Jerusalem is not Israel’s capital or face violent consequences, it turned out the blackmailers were bluffing. Even the Palestinians couldn’t manage much fury during the three days of rage declared by Mahmoud Abbas. Sure, there were a few demonstrations, but most seemed to be orchestrated for the benefit of journalists who flocked to the area in hope of a conflagration. The demonstrations in Jerusalem were more severe after Israel installed metal detectors at the entrance of the Temple Mount than they were after the U.S. announcement.When all is said and done, what happened?
The press has already moved on to other issues after the disappointing lack of bloodshed, but there should be a reckoning for all the supposed experts and officials who predicted an apocalypse.
This alliance consists of activists and international staffers from the UN and the NGOs; the Western diplomatic corps, particularly in East Jerusalem; and foreign reporters. (There is also a local component, consisting of a small number of Israeli human-rights activists who are themselves largely funded by European governments, and Palestinian staffers from the Palestinian Authority, the NGOs, and the UN.)That bias accounts for some of the media misrepresentation of events.
But when it comes to covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ignorance apparently is bliss. Misconceptions about what goes on here plague the international media. The binary good guy/bad guy designation tops the list. Someone has to be the good guy (the Palestinians are assigned that job) and someone has to be the bad guy (the Israelis get that one). And everything gets refracted through that prism.Apparently, the media bias against Trump, the already existing anti-Israel bias and the ignorance of some in the media has resulted in a perfect storm of horrendously inaccurate stories.
Iran’s minister of defense said the US administration’s provocative decision to recognize the city of al-Quds (Jerusalem) as the new capital of Israel is going to accelerate the demise of the Zionist regime.Hold on: Don't the Iranians want to hasten Israel's destruction?
The White House’s move to declare Quds the capital of the fake Zionist regime will bring closer the end of the Israeli regime and strengthen Muslim unity, Brigadier General Amir Hatami said in a gathering of Defense Ministry officials in Tehran on Monday.
Slamming the US president for his “provocative and unwise” decision about al-Quds, the general said the Israeli occupiers would never experience calm and have no way but to leave the Palestinian territories.
He further held the US and Israel accountable for the escalation of tensions and bloodshed in the region, saying the US president should accept responsibility for his “anti-security decision.”
Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei has described the US controversial move as a sign of “weakness and incompetence”, saying, “The Islamic world will definitely stand against this plot and the Zionists will receive a bigger blow.”
Antisemitic Chants, Calls for New Intifada at a Times Square Demonstration Protesting Trump's Jerusalem Declaration pic.twitter.com/HE3EXEHPpS— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) December 11, 2017
On December 5, Greece, Cyprus, Italy and Israel signed a memorandum of understanding for constructing an underwater gas pipeline from the Eastern Mediterranean region to Greece and Italy, which will allow the transportation of newly discovered Cypriot and Israeli gas reserves to mainland Europe.(h/t MB)
At an energy summit in Nicosia, Cyprus’ Energy Minister Yiorgos Lakkotrypis and his Greek and Israeli counterparts Giorgos Stathakis and Yuval Steinitz as well Italian ambassador in Cyprus Andrea Cvallari, who represented Italy’s Energy Minister Carlo Calenda, signed the document for the promotion of the East Med pipeline in Cyprus on December 5.
...
For his part, Steinitz was quoted as saying that the East Med pipeline is “very realistic” and could help secure Europe’s energy future.
EastMed will connect Israel’s Leviathan and Cyprus’ Aphrodite gas fields to Greece and Italy. The initial estimate of the cost of the pipeline, which will be able to transport 12-16 billion cubic metres of gas per year, is around $6 billion.
The next step will be the signing of an intergovernmental agreement in Crete in the spring of 2018.
Buy EoZ's book, PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
If you want real peace, don't insist on a divided Jerusalem, @USAmbIsrael
The Apartheid charge, the Abraham Accords and the "right side of history"
With Palestinians, there is no need to exaggerate: they really support murdering random Jews
Great news for Yom HaShoah! There are no antisemites!