Wednesday, February 14, 2018

  • Wednesday, February 14, 2018
  • Elder of Ziyon
Today is the fourth day of the strike by hospital cleaning staff in Gaza who have not been paid their salaries by the Palestinian authority.

There is no solution on the horizon. 

Dr. Ashraf al-Qudra, spokesman for the Ministry of Health, warned this morning of major health setbacks in cancer patients and those with blood diseases because of the lack of hygiene in hospitals.

"The suspension of cleaning companies poses a direct threat to the health of patients and public health in 13 hospitals, 51 primary care centers and 22 other facilities in the Ministry of Health through 13 companies," he said.

Photos of the hospitals with overflowing trash are being published in the Palestinian media.




One can certainly sympathize with the janitorial staff who isn't getting paid because of Hamas/Palestinian Authority infighting and pissing contests (a context that is missing in most of the stories about the issue.)

But there is still medical staff in these hospitals. Why don't they pitch in to empty trash cans outside?

We are constantly told about the high unemployment rate in Gaza. Why aren't the hundreds of thousands of idle able-bodied Gazans volunteering to help keep hospitals open by doing the (non-dangerous) cleaning tasks?

Why aren't the many NGOs in Gaza organizing teams to pick up, clean and dispose of the garbage?

Why can't the many Gaza women who posed for media cameras during the last war go to the hospitals and clean them up?

Palestinians constantly talk about how important dignity is to them. Is cleaning a hospital, allowing patients to be treated, too undignified for them?

This story isn't only about a labor dispute, nor is it only about a political dispute that puts people's lives at risk. It is also a story about how an entire culture has sprouted up where people are taught only to complain about what they claim to deserve - but that they aren't willing to lift a finger to help themselves.

(h/t Zvi)




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  • Wednesday, February 14, 2018
  • Elder of Ziyon
From YNet:

A Palestinian diplomat speaking to students at the United Nations headquarters in New York told them the Palestinians were proud to be throwing stones at Israeli forces and will continue teaching their children to do so.

In a recording obtained by Ynet, Abdallah Abushawesh, who serves as a senior adviser to the UN's Development Group and as a member of the Palestinian UN mission, is heard saying in broken English, "We are very clever and very expert at throwing the stones. We are very proud to do that. We will not stop to learn our kids (to do that)."

To the sound of sniggering from his listeners, Abushawesh went on to say that every Palestinian caught throwing stones by Israel gets sent to jail. "We are very proud that we are stone throwers. I'm one of them. Now I became a little bit older, but I stay resistant in the name of my kids," he continued.

The Palestinian diplomat later told the students about his own past as a stone-thrower during the first intifada. "I was in high school. I never missed an opportunity to throw stones. This is our life. We develop our resistance every day. We're proud of it," he said.

Abushawesh was speaking to a group of international relations students from McGill University who were at the UN for a tour and a series of meetings as part of their program.  


14 Israelis have been killed, and countless injured,  by Palestinian stone throwers, including:

Yehuda Shoham, a 5-month-old baby, was killed when a rock hurled by stone-throwing Palestinians crashed through the window of the car he was riding in, crushing his skull (2001)
Asher (25) and Yonatan Palmer (1) were killed when the car Asher was driving was attacked by stone-throwing Palestinians, causing it to crash killing him along with his infant son.(2011)
Tthe Biton's family car was attacked, near neighboring village of Kif el-Hares, with stones which caused it to get out of control and collide with a truck. Adele Biton was critically injured along with her mother and 3 sisters who were moderately injured, and died two years later.(2013)
The news isn't that Palestinians encourage stone throwing. That has been obvious for years.

The news is that a Palestinian diplomat, at the UN, is proudly telling college students that he supports teaching Palestinian children to use deadly force against Jews - and it isn't making world headlines.

The news media, by treating Palestinian bloodlust as something that is expected and not newsworthy, is complicit in encouraging the continued murders of Israelis. 

And what the hell is wrong with the McGill students who laughed when this animal bragged about using deadly force against Jews? That should be front page news in Canadian newspapers as well. 







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Tuesday, February 13, 2018

From Ian:

David Collier: KCL – will someone please protect the Jewish students?
Demonstrators as victims

It is also interesting to record how the demonstrators twist the events. They had chosen to come onto a campus to disrupt an event. The campus security tried, and partially failed to contain the protest. One demonstrator was not permitted inside because he held a megaphone. An instrument clearly designed (outside a door of an event) to disrupt. This became the tweet of the night:

So as Jewish students are huddled in a room, struggling to hear what their invited speaker against a background of vocal hate, the demonstrators portray themselves as the victims. In the footage, the security man explicitly references the megaphone (see under his arm). The person tweeting this is Ayo Olatunji, who is part of the UCL student union, and was part of the UCL protest and disruption in late 2016. More of a concern was this tweet by Ayo:

He claims he was denied, not because of his behaviour, his intent, or the need to uphold free speech, but because he is black. I saw this weaponisation of racism at Cambridge with Malia Bouattia, and recently being used at Warwick by Nicola Pratt. A truly divisive strategy. There is of course nothing about his colour mentioned in the footage.

The protestors have complained to the university. They are in ‘outrage’. Why? Just as I described their dissatisfaction at events at UCL two week ago:
‘They are disappointed that they are not allowing them to do what they want to do. To permit their demonstration, to deny the other, to allow them entry to the building, to let them disrupt the event, to deny the speaker the platform in the first place. They want to be armed with a security force to impose their demands. A fascist mentality. ‘

What of the Jewish students?

This is all intimidation. And it works. The university is not capable of fighting a war for the Jewish students, because this is not a battle of students. Palestine Solidarity Campaign advertise it, Friends of Al Aqsa live stream it, off-campus ringleaders turn up to assist in the organisation.

How many of those Jewish students who may have been intimidated by yesterday’s events, will not attend another meeting of its type? Will supporters of those Jewish students now look over their shoulder and say to themselves ‘it is not worth it’? How many of those who organised the event, will not organise another? Will invited speakers not want to come?

Intimidation works because it works through intimidation, not debate. Non-democratic forces are undermining our academic spaces. Values of equality, democracy, free speech are all under threat. When you have Jewish students forced to leave a room surrounded by haters screaming ‘shame’, alongside posts on Facebook calling these students ‘cockroaches’, then you have to accept you are in dangerous territory.




BESA: Mahmoud Abbas’s Speech: Who Was the Real Audience?
Mahmoud Abbas’s blatantly skewed account of the nature of Zionism and the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict should bring Israel’s policymakers and opinion shapers to enunciate anew the story they tell their own people and the world at large.

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s speech at the January 14 meeting of the PLO’s Central Council lasted two hours. Apart from the phrase “May your house be destroyed,” which became the headline for the speech, Abbas’s “historical” survey of the chronicle of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has drawn most of the Israeli criticism. According to Prime Minister Netanyahu, the survey underscored the root of the conflict: “The Palestinians’ rejection of the existence of a Jewish state in any borders.”

For the Palestinians, too, particularly the younger among them, much of the speech must have sounded like a tiresome history lesson. Yet political speeches of this kind often have more than one audience in mind. In this case, Israeli society with its various factions and leaders, along with the international community, was the main audience. Appealing to fashionable legal and moral fads, particularly in Western Europe, Abbas again set forth the supposedly problematic aspects of Zionism. His “historical survey” undoubtedly fails the minimum test of facts, but it is uncritically accepted in many circles. This poses a real challenge to Israeli policymakers and opinion shapers.

By every historical account, the Zionist revolution – the incredible ingathering of the exiles and the establishment of the flourishing and highly successful state of Israel – is a unique and unprecedented phenomenon. Those who insist on viewing it as yet another immigration wave among the 20th century global population movements fail to grasp the real nature of this revolution. In this respect, Abbas touched the key issue that, in his eyes, made the Palestinians the main victim of Zionism: if the Jews yearn for a safe haven, and the international community wants to provide them with one, why does it have to be in Palestine, at the Palestinians’ expense? (h/t Elder of Lobby)

  • Tuesday, February 13, 2018
  • Elder of Ziyon
Palestine Today reports that there are articles and social media posts encouraging a new kind of "resistance" -  a massive march of Gazans towards Israel.

The movement is called "The Great Return March" and it has a Facebook page. The goal is to get "millions" of Gazans to march towards Israel.

After all, they say, Israel does not know how to defend itself against thousands of humans.

One advocate of the march, Akram Atallah, says, "Israel has prepared itself for all wars, but not the possibility of confronting a flood of human beings."

The implication is that Israel would never kill Gaza civilians who don't pose a threat to life. But they won't say that part out loud.

Also, they forget that Palestinians have tried this before. In 2011, protesters from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Gaza and the West Bank tried to simultaneously enter Israel on "Nakba Day." A few hundred from Gaza were deterred when Israel fired some rounds towards them; one was reportedly killed. The Lebanese, Egyptian and Jordanian armies actively stopped the marchers from their borders.



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  • Tuesday, February 13, 2018
  • Elder of Ziyon


Every week, Rami Hamdallah, the "prime minister" of the Palestinian Authority, a person who has no real power, has a cabinet meeting where pronouncements are made and nothing is actually done.

The statements do show how much the Palestinian Authority likes to fool itself, and its own people.

This week the statements included:

The Israeli government will pass a law to impose Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, annexing settlement blocs and retaining the Jordan Valley. The Judaization and uprooting confirms the insistence of the Israeli government to renounce all agreements between the parties, a clear expression of its unwillingness to peace or any intention to reach a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Israel has tried to negotiate, the Palestinians refuse. Israel has shown willingness to compromise, Palestinians haven't. But the lies continue.

Taking such a step would not only be the end of the two-state solution, but the end of any hope for peace and would have repercussions for the entire region.

I am still astounded that these regular threats - couched in terms of warnings - aren't recognized as such by the West.

And let me remind you of how seriously the Palestinians take the "two state solution" that they insist they want.




The Council saluted our people to continue expressing their rejection of the unjust American decision and condemned the serious Israeli escalation of the occupation against our defenseless people, which led in recent days to the martyrdom of a number of Palestinian citizens and the occurrence of dozens of injuries, in addition to the wide circle of raids and incursions.
The "salute" includes the two Palestinians who stabbed two rabbis to death, which is what prompted the raids and arrests. The Palestinian leadership tacitly supports such murders.
The Council condemned the draft racist law submitted by the Minister of the Israeli war, "Avigdor Lieberman," deducting the allocations of prisoners and families of the martyrs, from the funds of the Palestinian clearing. 
Yes, they are defending paying terrorists and their families - and saying that anyone who disagrees is a "racist."
The Council also condemned the Israeli  intention to allow humanitarian aid to be provided by the international institutions to the Gaza Strip while continuing its unjust siege for the eleventh year in a row. Life, it bears full responsibility for the suffering of our people in the Gaza Strip.
Unreal - the PA, which only allowed Israel to restore electricity to Gaza when threatened by Israel, which withholds funds for hospitals and medicines and fuel for Gaza, is complaining when Israel allows humanitarian aid into Gaza - and blames Israel for the situation there, a situation that the PA has been actively exacerbating for the past year! 

If only there was a truly free Palestinian media. If only there were journalists on the ground there who had the guts to report on the truth (outside a few Israelis.) If only there was a real opposition movement that truly wanted peace. 






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From Ian:

Col. Kemp: Failure to support Israel against Iran could end in war
This is part of a wider Iranian plan not just to besiege Israel but also to achieve ascendancy over the Sunnis, including de facto control of Lebanon, increased dominance in Iraq, the destabilisation of Yemen, attacks on Saudi Arabia and aggression against international navies in the Gulf. Iran’s project has been largely facilitated by President Obama’s Middle Eastern policies, including his nuclear deal, which emboldened the ayatollahs and released billions of dollars to fund their aggression while paving the way to a nuclear-armed state.

Iran’s latest aggression against Israel could well lead to another conflagration. The IDF is braced for retaliation, mobilising forces and reinforcing air defences along the Syrian and Lebanese borders. Israel is not looking to escalate but Iran could be and a mistake or misreading by either side could trigger open war.

For years Israel has warned of the consequences of Tehran’s aggression, which could result in civilian deaths on a huge scale. Although President Trump is holding Iran to account, Israel’s warnings have been largely ignored by the West and the United Nations. Britain and the European Union could play an effective role in containing Iranian aggression but their answer is appeasement. Instead of sanctioning Iran and supporting Israel they mouth platitudes about restraint by both sides, which further emboldens Tehran. They prioritise saving the flawed nuclear deal that provides cover for their unprincipled trade links with Iran over saving the lives of innocent people.
Palestinian diplomat: We'll continue teaching our kids to throw stones
A Palestinian diplomat speaking to students at the United Nations headquarters in New York told them the Palestinians were proud to be throwing stones at Israeli forces and will continue teaching their children to do so.

In a recording obtained by Ynet, Abdallah Abushawesh, who serves as a senior adviser to the UN's Development Group and as a member of the Palestinian UN mission, is heard saying in broken English, "We are very clever and very expert at throwing the stones. We are very proud to do that. We will not stop to learn our kids (to do that)."

To the sound of sniggering from his listeners, Abushawesh went on to say that every Palestinian caught throwing stones by Israel gets sent to jail. "We are very proud that we are stone throwers. I'm one of them. Now I became a little bit older, but I stay resistant in the name of my kids," he continued.

The Palestinian diplomat later told the students about his own past as a stone-thrower during the first intifada. "I was in high school. I never missed an opportunity to throw stones. This is our life. We develop our resistance every day. We're proud of it," he said.

Abushawesh was speaking to a group of international relations students from McGill University who were at the UN for a tour and a series of meetings as part of their program.

  • Tuesday, February 13, 2018
  • Elder of Ziyon

Last week, The New York Times entered the world of dance.

In an interview, Israeli-American choreographer Hadar Ahuvia talked about her latest work - Everything you have is yours? To Ahuvia, that is no idle question. She is the granddaughter of Eastern European Jews who came to Israel -- and then years later, her parents moved with her to Florida and then Hawaii. Ahuvia has developed an interest in what she sees as the Israeli mimicking of Palestinian Arab culture.

Ahuvia touched on this in her interview:
One issue you explore is cultural appropriation, how the pioneers of Israeli folk dance, mostly Eastern European women, drew from social dance forms like Palestinian dabke.
It’s well-documented that these women went to Palestinian villages and watched them dancing and felt they held the steps for what new Israeli dances could be. And so they borrowed steps and wrote new music and created dances that were directly synchronous to the new music, and in this way it becomes a new Israeli dance.
This was their way of participating in the nation-building and what for them was this revolutionary moment. I don’t think that cultural exchange is bad, but I think it’s about the context of whose narratives get told and seen.
In a guest post she wrote for a blog, four days after the interview, Ahuvia goes further:
Increasingly our home [in Florida and Hawaii] began to mimic the Arab essence that is claimed as fundamentally Israeli. Hummus, tahini, olive oil zaatar, pita, baklava. And beside the Palestinian shepherd salad, the syncopated dabke and Yemenite steps, Turkish and Druz inspired melodies of early Hebrew songs and their synchronous dances. These kept us marinating in a Mediterranean Israeli identity, our distinction from the American Ashkenazi diaspora encroaching on us-- ameripoop-- treacherously symbolized by applesauce on latkes.
Ira Stoll, who writes a column for Algemeiner dedicated to exposing examples of New York Times bias, addresses how New York Times Accuses Jews of Stealing Folkdances From Palestinian Arabs.
Stoll addresses the one-sided view presented by the interview and supplies context with the opposing view ignored by the New York Times:
o  Former New York Times correspondent David K. Shipler, in his 1986 book Arab and Jew, also wrote about the accusation of cultural theft. He quotes a Ibrahim Kareen of East Jerusalem who claims, “The Israelis have stolen a lot of Palestinian culture...For instance, many dances. The Hora. This is Palestinian. Many dishes.” But Shipler goes a step further and writes, "The roots of folk dance are old and tangled, and while the Hora does bear resemblance to Arab dances, the origins are too deeply buried for any side to make clear proprietary claims.” 
o  According to the Jewish Women’s Archive article on the history of Israeli Folk Dance, "During the Second and Third Aliyah periods, between 1904 and 1923, the halutzim danced only dances that they had brought with them from the Diaspora — the Horah, Polka, Krakowiak, Czerkassiya and Rondo, with the Horah becoming the national dance." 
o  According to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Israeli folk dance is “an amalgam of Jewish and non-Jewish folk dance forms from many parts of the world,” describing the Hora as Romanian, and then continues that “Widespread enthusiasm for dance followed, bringing with it the creation of a multifaceted folk dance genre set to popular Israeli songs, incorporating motifs such as the Arab debka, as well as dance elements ranging from North American jazz and Latin American rhythms to the cadences typical of Mediterranean countries.”
We can even go a little further.

The Encyclopedia of World Folk Dance has a list of dances and their countries of origin. It includes the dabke. Not surprisingly, the dance is not a Palestinian dance -- it is an Arab dance.

And that fact does not negate the Jewish cultural history of the Jewish dance, The Hora:

(pages 138-139)

According to this, if the Palestinian Arabs are going to accuse Jews of stealing their dance, they will just have to stand in line -- behind Rome, Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, Georgia and Russia. Interestingly, according to this encyclopedia, the similarities of the Hora to the dabke are attributed to external flourishes to a dance that was already adopted.

All this raises the question of whether the Palestinian Arabs have ever copied anything from the Jews.
Daniel Pipes answers yes.

In Mirror Image: How the PLO Mimics Zionism, Pipes writes that "Palestinian nationalists have time and again modeled their institutions, ideas, and practices on the Zionist movement. This ironic tribute means that the peculiar nature of the PLO can be understood only with reference to its Zionist inspiration."

The similarities go beyond copying the purpose of the organization, such as the National Association of Arab-Americans emulating the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Some Palestinian organizations mimic the original Zionist organization as well:

Palestinian OrganizationZionist Organization
Anti-Discrimination CommitteeAnti-Defamation League
the Holy Land Fundthe Jewish National Fund
the United Palestinian Appealthe United Jewish Appeal

Pipes writes that the emulation goes beyond organizations and agencies:
o  Palestinian Arabs sometimes refer to themselves as the "Jews of the Middle East"
o  They claim that like Jews, they suffer prejudice, dispossession and expulsion despite being more educated than the majority population
o  Just as Jews were thrown out of multiple countries, they were forced out of Jordon, Lebanon and Kuwait in only 20 years
o  Palestinian Arabs claim their treatment by Israel is analogous to the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust
o  The Palestinian claim to a "Right of Return" mimics the Israeli "Law of Return"
And then, of course, there is Jerusalem:
Jerusalem is the only capital of a Jewish state, as well as a unique city in Jewish history, religion, and emotions. In contrast, the city is so minor in Islam, it is not even once mentioned in the Qur'an. Nor did it ever serve as a political capital or cultural center...
But based on what Israel has been able to accomplish, it is not surprising how far the Palestinian Arabs have gone in order to copy the very Zionists they condemn. The Jews wanted a state, the re-establishment of the Jewish state, so they were not content just to live off of the land.
The Jewish accomplishment during the Mandatory period was indeed impressive: by developing the Jewish Agency into a proto-state institution, Zionists created the bases for the full-fledged government that emerged in 1948. They already had a political authority, a military wing, an educational system, a mechanism to distribute welfare, and so forth. In contrast, Palestinians failed to match these institutions, and so found themselves disorganized when the British withdrew from Palestine in 1948...In effect, the Palestinians are trying half a century later to make up for their mistakes of the Mandatory period.
But we can go a step further. More than what Zionism inspired in Palestinian Arabs in the 20th century, what have Jews contributed to Arabs in general, and to Islamic culture overall, over the generations?
Could be quite a bit.

In Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, Shmuel Katz quotes Philip K. Hitti, a Lebanese American professor and authority on Arab and Middle Eastern history. Hitti writes in his History of the Arabs
But when we speak of 'Arab medicine' or 'Arab philosophy' or 'Arab mathematics', we do not mean the medical science, philosophy or mathematics that are necessarily the product of the Arabian mind or developed by people living in the Arabian peninsula, but that body of knowledge enshrined in books written in the Arabic language by men who flourished chiefly during the caliphate and were themselves Persians, Egyptians or Arabians, Christian, Jewish or Moslem. 
Indeed, even what we call 'Arabic literature' was no more Arabian than the Latin literature of the Middle Age was Italian...Even such disciplines as philosophy linguistics, lexicography and grammar, which were primarily Arabian in origin and spirit and in which the Arabs made their chief original contribution, recruited some of their most distinguished scholars from the non-Arab stock (Battleground, p. 111)
Bernard Lewis writes similarly in his book, The Arabs in History:
The use of the adjective Arab to describe the various facets of this civilisation has often been challenged on the grounds that the contribution to "Arab medicine", "Arab philosophy", etc, of those who were of Arab descent was relatively small. Even the use of the word Muslim is criticised, since so many of the architects of this culture were Christians and Jews.
During the period of greatness of the Arab and Islamic Empires in the Near and Middle East a flourishing civilisation grew up that is usually known as Arabic. It was not brought ready-made by the Arab invaders from the desert, but was created after the conquests by the collaboration of many peoples, Arabs, Persians, Egyptians and others. Nor was it even purely Muslim, for many Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians were among its creators. (p.14, 131)
With all that shared history and shared culture over 1,400 years, maybe the Arabs can share a dance or a falafel for old times sake.




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  • Tuesday, February 13, 2018
  • Elder of Ziyon
A couple of years ago I made this poster:


Now, Hanna has been selected as a finalist in the Miss Israel Pageant. With no controversy whatsoever.

It is always instructive that a country that  is more liberal than nearly any of the so-called liberal democracies in Europe still gets treated by leftists as if it is far-right.

And when Israel shows, again and again, how liberal and tolerant its citizens are towards women/gays/transgendered/Arabs/minorities, the only way that Israel haters can explain it is the absurd idea that millions of Israelis only pretend to be liberal in order to divert attention from "the Occupation."

It is the biggest conspiracy in history!

(h/t Yoel)





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  • Tuesday, February 13, 2018
  • Elder of Ziyon


Suhail Kiwan, apparently an Israeli Arab, writes in Arab48 that Jews weren't the only victims of the Holocaust.

He admits that Nazis targeted Jews. He's not sure how many Jews were murdered, but he magnanimously admits that even the killing tens of thousands of Jews on ethnic grounds like the killing of millions: "the important principle that the regime decided to kill Jews for being Jews."

That's the nicest kind of Holocaust denial.

However, Kiwan asserts, "There are non-Jewish victims of Nazism that must be recognized, and they are many, but the Palestinians are the most prominent."

The reason? Obviously, because the Jews after the war came to British Mandate Palestine, and "the Zionist forces destroyed [Arab ]villages and displaced about 900,000 of them, persecuted them after they were massacred, and killed all those who tried to return and occupied the rest of their homeland to this day."

Therefore, Kiwan says,  Palestinian Arabs "have the right to demand compensation from Germany as the Jews received compensation, as well as compensation from all the countries supporting Israel aggression at the expense of their presence."

It takes a lot of energy to constantly try to be the world's biggest victim entitled to free money forever.




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Monday, February 12, 2018

From Ian:

Tom Gross: The good news about Gaza you won’t hear on the BBC
I am not alone in thinking the BBC is not objective in its coverage. Even Lord Grade, the corporation’s former chairman, has accused the corporation of bias against Israel and said the BBC failed to give viewers ‘the wider context’ about the Palestinians.

This is not true of all BBC output: BBC Arabic will (like other Arabic language media) sometimes report on Gaza’s more prosperous side (see for example, this BBC Arabic report on restaurants in Gaza), in a way that most Western media (including the BBC in English) will not. Yet many Western journalists (and some diplomats) seem bent on painting a distorted picture of everyday life in Gaza, in what can only be seen as an attempt to portray Israel as some kind of monster-oppressor. (With Israel demonised in this way, no wonder anti-Semitic feelings in Britain are now running at an all-time high).

If the situation in Gaza is as bad as many Western journalists and diplomats claim, then why is Gaza’s life expectancy (74.2 years) now five years higher than the world average? I don’t recall any Western reporter mentioning that life expectancy there is higher than, for example, in neighbouring Egypt (73 years). Indeed, life expectancy in Gaza is almost on the same level as wealthy Saudi Arabia, and higher for men than in some parts of Glasgow.

In recent years, it has been difficult to escape reports of the dire situation in Gaza; former US president and Nobel peace prize laureate Jimmy Carter, for example, told us that ‘the people in Gaza … are literally starving’. Only three weeks ago, the lead front page story of the international edition of the New York Times contained further warnings about the risk of starvation. Meanwhile, Qatar’s own Al Jazeera is broadcasting analysis of the thriving consumer sector in Gaza’s economy, complete with restaurant owners discussing the expansion of their business to keep up with demand, and shots of plentiful fruit and vegetable markets.
Gaza’s thriving economy: Al Jazeera shows a side to Gaza that Western media won’t


Melanie Phillips: Damned if you do . . . and Trump and Netanyahu are certainly doing
Day in and day out, two men—two crucial world leaders—remain under a constant barrage of verbal attacks. They are subjected to an obsessional, unhinged and unprecedented stream of abuse, distortion, character assassination and malicious fantasies.

If you haven’t guessed, they are Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald J Trump. The campaign against them signifies a cultural disorder in the West that borders on the pathological.

Netanyahu certainly has his faults. One might list arrogance, moral cowardice and his tendency to be a control freak. He doesn’t take criticism well. He has failed to organize his government to deal with the psy-ops war waged so devastatingly against Israel in the court of Western public opinion. And maybe, who knows, some of the multiple corruption charges against him will stick.

Yet his achievements are formidable. Netanyahu enabled Israel to survive the sustained attempts to weaken it by President Barack Obama, arguably the most hostile American president to date regarding Israel. Netanyahu has led the Jewish state to become a dynamo in the fields of technology and R&D in large measure because of his liberalization of the Israeli economy. He has opened up new alliances through the pivot to Asia. He has held the line against the Palestinian /European axis of attrition. And he is riding the wave of a new regional order involving alliances with Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

In Israel and among the Western intelligentsia, however, it’s hard to overestimate the loathing he provokes. His achievements are ignored or blatantly dismissed. Instead, he is blamed (ludicrously) for preventing a solution to the Middle East impasse. No less risibly, he was held responsible for Obama’s hostility for eight years running. He is said to be an incipient dictator, a racist ethno-nationalist and an “alt-Zionist.” These are not criticisms; these are ravings.

Over in the United States, Trump certainly has his faults. One might list his zero concentration span, his disregard for detail, his carelessness with accuracy, his reckless and compulsive tweeting, his coarse and bombastic talk, and his failure to take criticism.

Yet his achievements after only one year in office are formidable. He presides over a booming economy with huge job growth; he is restoring the rule of law to immigration; he’s rolling back regulation; he’s made stellar appointments to the judiciary; he’s forcing Saudi Arabia to reform; and is confronting Iran, the United Nations and the Palestinians.

It’s impossible, however, to overestimate the contempt and horror with which he is viewed. He is accused of being racist and anti-Semitic, of undermining the rule of law, of behaving like Mussolini. While not a shred to evidence supports the claims against him of colluding with Russia, there is mounting evidence that elements of the FBI and justice department under the Obama administration have acted illegally against him.
PodCast: When Daniel P. Moynihan Stood for Israel, and for Truth, at the UN
In December, Nikki Haley, the current U.S. ambassador to the UN, denounced the world body for its condemnation of America’s recognizing of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Her performance put many in mind of a 1975 speech given by her late predecessor, Daniel P. Moynihan, assailing the UN’s infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution. Six years later, Moynihan returned to the same themes in a seminal Commentary essay, “Joining the Jackals,” in which he skewered the then-outgoing Carter administration for abstaining from two anti-Israel votes at the Security Council and for the generally craven attitude of its UN delegation. Greg Weiner, the author of a biography of Moynihan, revisits the statesman’s career in Turtle Bay and his commitment to Israel and to the West—and to the meaning of words. (Interview by Jonathan Silver. Audio, 31 minutes. Options for download and streaming are available at the link below.)

  • Monday, February 12, 2018
  • Elder of Ziyon
My favorite site for military analysis is the Liberty Unyielding blog by Commander (ret.) J. Dyer, and her article on the events in Israel and Syria on Saturday does not disappoint. Excerpts:

Iran’s probe with the drone is the latest in a growing series of probes and pushes in the region: probes against the postures of others, pushes against the status quo, pushes to establish new “realities on the ground.”

The region itself isn’t in balance anymore, and hasn’t been for some time.  The last chance to certify balance without an extended shoving match first was right around the latter half of 2013, when the Obama administration failed to defend a publicly declared “red line” on Syria, and did nothing to thwart the rise of ISIS.

In default of a “hyperpower” (as France used to call the U.S.) enforcing stasis, the natural state of human affairs is probing and pushing.  We forgot that after nearly 70 years of a Pax Americana.  But since the Arab Spring – and with hints of it even before that – we’ve been reminded of it almost daily.  Eventually it may sink in.

In the Middle East, Iran has been the chief prober and pusher, with ISIS, until last year, close behind.  But additional probes have developed through first- and second-order effects, and they are ongoing almost literally everywhere, from Morocco to the Philippines.

Iran affects, and is affected by, the whole complex mix of these probes.  The situation is especially unstable because the biggest factors for Iran are all changing at the same time.  Internal stability is crumbling.  The mullahs’ chief power projection project – the land bridge through Syria – has bogged down in recent weeks.

And the status quo in the larger region is in significant flux.  Events that Western observers don’t even recognize as related are presenting Iran with the prospect of unmanageable changes to the strategic status quo.

Anything that thwarts the revolutionary regime in Iran can be held to have a salutary effect.  But the more such effects there are, the more Iran will shift tactics and try to create problems where problems are advantageous to Iran.
...
In order to keep a cost-effective defense posture functional and realistic, Israel has to deter incursions like this one, not just keep responding to them. Hence the counter-strikes: first against the drone command vehicle, and then against the Syrian air defense force, to ensure that Syria pays a price – one that is useful to Israel and does relevant damage to Syria – for letting Syrian territory be used by Iran.
...
There is far, far more in great detail. Analysis that the media is ill-equipped to perform.

It is worthwhile to read the whole thing.




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  • Monday, February 12, 2018
  • Elder of Ziyon
UK-baed Al Araby has an article about a new book called "Incoherence of Biblical History: An Introduction to a different history of ancient Palestine" by Dr. Essam Sakhnini .

The book cherry-picks modern Biblcal scholarship and archaeological findings, and seems to fabricatge others, to come to the conclusion that the Bible has no factual basis, and especially that there were never any Jewish Temples in Jerusalem.

The author of the review stresses how scientific the book is, confusing footnotes with scholarship. But the point of the book is obviously not for knowledge but for propaganda - just as people will point to the work of Shlomo Sand or Ilan Pappe as being scholarly, when in fact they are just frameworks to put a scholarly coat of paint on a rusted-through toolshed of lies.

But I couldn't help wondering: since the Arab world is so interested in Biblical criticism, when are they going to put the Koran through the same critical analysis?

Especially since the Koran repeats a lot of the stories from Hebrew scripture to begin with!




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