Monday, January 11, 2021

01/11 Links Pt2: Democrats were for riots before they were against them; UAE reunites two more Jewish Yemeni families split for decades

From Ian:

Democrats were for riots before they were against them
In 2018, the media was writing up glowing stories about the hundreds of Women’s March members who were engaging in "direct action” to disrupt the Senate’s Kavanaugh hearings.

Hundreds of members from the radical leftist group had invaded the hearings and were arrested. Their travel expenses and bail for the disruptions were covered by the Women’s March.

Radicals from the March and other leftist groups blocked hallways, shouted down Senate members, and draped protest banners from balconies. Democrats cheered them on.

When a leftist mob assailed the Supreme Court, pounding on the doors, MSNBC called it an “extraordinary moment” and praised the crowd, “besieging the Supreme Court” and “confronting senators”.

"If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them," Rep. Maxine Waters had urged earlier that year.

Later, the Democrat House member told MSNBC, "They’re going to absolutely harass them".

In 2020, Black Lives Matter rioters vandalized the Lincoln Memorial and the WW2 Memorial, along with statues of Gandhi, General Kosciuszko, and Andrew Jackson. The racist thugs marched through the city starting fires, including at a historic church, and tried to besiege the White House. Attempts by federal law enforcement to fight BLM terrorism were falsely denounced as a brutal attack on “peaceful protesters”, and as “militarism” and “fascism”.

Democrat House members took to proposing bills to protect the racist mobs from law enforcement. Meanwhile the BLM mob besieged the White House and battled Secret Service personnel, allegedly forcing the evacuation of President Trump and his family to a bunker.

This was the new normal enthusiastically supported by Democrats and the media.

A bail fund backed by Senator Kamala Harris and Biden campaign staffers focused on helping the rioters and looters get out of prison. Along with any other criminals along for the ride.


‘Trivializing the Holocaust as Dangerous as Denying It:’ Fox News Host Pirro Slammed for ‘Kristallnacht’ Comparison
Fox News host Jeanine Pirro’s comparison on Monday of a political row over the hosting of a social media app with the Nazi regime’s Nov. 9, 1938 nationwide pogrom against Germany’s Jewish community drew a sharp rebuke from a senior US Jewish leader and Holocaust survivor, who warned that “trivializing the Holocaust is as dangerous as denying it.”

Speaking on her Monday morning show, Pirro accused tech giants Google, Apple and Amazon of having suppressed news stories that could have potentially harmed President-elect Joe Biden’s election campaign.

“And now that they’ve won, what we’re seeing is a kind of censorship that is akin to a Kristallnacht, where they decide what we can communicate about,” Pirro declared, referring to the decision of all three platforms to stop hosting Parler, an app that has become increasingly popular with militant supporters of Donald Trump in the wake of Twitter’s permanent ban on the US President.

Pirro’s analogy was condemned by Abraham Foxman — a Holocaust survivor and the national director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) who now heads the Center for the Study of Antisemitism at New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.

“Stay away from the Holocaust, especially if you’re ignorant about it,” Foxman told The Algemeiner on Monday afternoon.

“Kristallnacht was about Jewish lives, not freedom of speech,” Foxman explained. “Trivializing the Holocaust is as dangerous as denying it, and that’s what she was engaged in.”

“Kristallnacht” (Night of the Broken Glass) — the more common term for what historians of the Nazi period call Reichspogromnacht — erupted across Germany, Austria and occupied Czechoslovakia on Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, as members of the SA paramilitary and other Nazi thugs rampaged against Jewish-owned business and community institutions.

The Nazi-orchestrated violence took the lives of hundreds of Jews, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia. More than 250 synagogues were ransacked and destroyed during the pogrom, while up to 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and deported to concentrations camps.




Twitter CEO Glad Trump is Only Leader that Incites Violence (satire)
After permanently banning President Donald Trump from his platform, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says he is greatly relieved that the problem of world leaders inciting violence on his platform has been permanently solved.

“Removing a world leader for using his account to promote violent acts is a dramatic step,” Dorsey acknowledged. “Banning Trump could have all sorts of implications if there were other world leaders, let’s say, promising to bomb America and wipe another country off the map, or if a nation were using our platform to celebrate an ongoing genocide.”

“Luckily there was only one bad man, and he’s gone now,” Dorsey added.

As of press time, the world has finally been freed from violence after Apple removed Parler, an alternative social media platform, from its app store.

Cartoon of the Day: Israel-haters' secret weapon

Continuing with my series of recaptioning cartoons...




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  • Monday, January 11, 2021
  • Elder of Ziyon
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HRW's Ken Roth accuses US and Israel of "war crimes" more often than anyone else, by far

This morning Ken Roth, head of Human Rights Watch, tweeted this:


I have noticed that he really likes to accuse Israel of "war crimes," often for the heinous crime of building houses. 

So I looked at how often he used that term in 2020 and which countries he was referring to.

Judging from his result, the US and Israel are by far the worst violators of war crime on the planet.



This is just another data point on how Human Rights Watch and its leader are obsessed with Western nations and downplay the horrific, actual war crimes done by other countries.

In the case of Israel, three of the references were to "settlements" and the rest were to nothing in particular, just saying that Israel does "war crimes" in Palestinian areas without specifying them, because it is so obvious to him that Israel is one of the biggest violators on the planet that it doesn't even need specifying. . For Russia and Syria, they were very specific tweets about bombing civilians in Syria. 


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01/11 Links Pt1: Kissinger: Return to Iran deal could spark Middle East nuclear arms race; Hamas Forcibly Expels Residents from their Homes near Gaza-Egypt Border

From Ian:

Kissinger: Return to Iran deal could spark Middle East nuclear arms race
The new US administration should not return to the spirit of the Iran deal, which could spark an arms race in the Middle East, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger said Monday at a Jewish People Policy Institute online conference.

He criticized the 2015 Iran deal, which President Donald Trump left in 2018. President-elect Joe Biden seeks to return to it if Iran agrees to comply again with the agreement’s limitations on its nuclear program.

“We should not fool ourselves,” the 97-year-old diplomat, consultant and author said. “I don’t believe that the spirit [of the Iran deal], with a time limit and so many escape clauses, will do anything other than bring nuclear weapons all over the Middle East and therefore create a situation of latent tension that sooner or later will break out.”

The current leaders in Iran “don’t seem to find it possible to give up this combination of Islamist imperialism and threat,” Kissinger said. “The test case is the evolution of nuclear capacities in Iran, if these can be avoided.”

“I do not say we shouldn’t talk to them,” he added.

Dennis Ross, a former adviser to presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, interviewed Kissinger at the JPPI farewell event for its founding director, Avinoam Bar-Yosef.

Ross asked Kissinger what he would advise Biden and his administration to do to take advantage of the Abraham Accords, in which four Arab states normalized ties with Israel.

“We should not give up on what has recently been achieved in these agreements between the Arab world and the Israeli world,” he said. “I would tell the incoming administration that we are on a good course.”

The accords “have opened a window of opportunity for a new Middle East,” Kissinger said. “Arab countries understood that they could not survive in constant tension with parts of the West and with Israel, so they decided they had to take care of themselves.”
New CIA nominee Burns widely respected in US, pro-Iran nuke deal
His initial choice, former CIA acting director Michael Morrell, had been vetoed by some US Senate Democrats for defending the CIA against allegations of post 9/11 torture of terrorist detainees.

Instead, Biden appears to have picked Burns due to his expertise on Russia and an impression that he will rally respect and legitimacy both to the CIA and in the intelligence community’s relationship with other parts of the government.

He served as ambassador to Jordan during the Clinton administration and as ambassador to Russia during the George W. Bush administration. Burns was significantly involved in the Obama-era negotiations toward the Iran nuclear deal.

He has criticized President Donald Trump for pulling out of the deal and for the “maximum pressure campaign.” He has expressed doubts about the assassination of IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani.

In a January 2020 op-ed for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he has been serving as president, Burns and incoming National Security Advisor-designate Jake Sullivan wrote: “As we’ve argued before, we’re at this dangerous juncture because of Trump’s foolish decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal, his through-the-looking-glass conception of coercive diplomacy, and his willing hard-line enablers in Tehran.”


David Halbfinger’s Weird David Friedman Interview Ends Up Appearing More on Twitter than in the New York Times
The outgoing New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem, David Halbfinger, interviewed the outgoing American ambassador to Israel, David Friedman — and the result, which appeared in Sunday’s print newspaper, was just weird.

Halbfinger’s 1,500-word dispatch included two paragraphs from the hard left Foundation for Middle East Peace, the Alexander Soros Foundation-funded vehicle that supports the anti-Zionist New York Times opinion page contributing writer Peter Beinart. It includes another two paragraphs from “Husam Zomlot, who headed the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington.”

The third-party comments took so much space that there wasn’t room for much of Halbfinger’s actual interview with Friedman. Rather than publish a fuller version to the Times’ website, Halbfinger took to newly Trump-free Twitter — which is outside the paper’s paywall — and published two threads, totaling 44-tweets, of remarks from the outgoing-David-on-outgoing-David interview. Strung together, the tweets ran longer in accumulated word-count than the New York Times article, and were more informative, sticking more closely to Friedman’s comments.

As for the Times article reporting on the interview, it was inaccurate and tendentious. Halbfinger writes, “The Trump administration said it wanted to achieve peace. It will leave office this month as far away from that goal as ever.” Actually, it’s closer than ever to that goal: it succeeded, with the Abraham Accords, in advancing normal relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.

Halbfinger also writes, “It was Mr. Friedman, 62, who drove the radical overhaul of White House policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, dreaming up the seemingly endless list of political giveaways that President Trump bestowed upon Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters on the Israeli right.”

There was nothing “radical” about the Trump administration’s Israel policy. US-Israel relations have a strong bipartisan foundation based on mutual interests and shared values that transcends any particular presidential administration. Rather than characterizing American actions as “political giveaways,” the Times news article might have more accurately described the policies — such as moving the American embassy to Israel’s capital — as righting historical injustices, fulfilling long-made promises, and adhering to laws like the long-ignored Jerusalem Embassy Act. When the Obama administration provided $150 billion in cash and sanctions relief to the terror-supporting, genocide-pursuing Iranian government, the Times described it not as a “political giveaway” but rather as an exchange “in return for nuclear concessions.”
  • Monday, January 11, 2021
  • Elder of Ziyon

Palestinian Authority says films/videos made by or about Jewish residents of Judea/Samaria are racist and criminal

The Palestinian ministry of culture issued a report complaining about Jewish "settlers" who are involved in making videos and films about their lives, saying that they are "racist."

As the official Wafa news agency reports in a hate-filled report, "Behind the image of hilltop hooligans who block roads, throw stones at Palestinian vehicles, shoot at citizens and attack farmers in their fields, government agencies are spending millions to whitewash the image of settlements, create a religious and historical link between settlers and the West Bank and Jerusalem, and provide them with a cultural face."

The article particularly attacks the Gesher Multicultural Film Fund, which describes itself this way:
For more than two decades, Gesher has turned to film as a powerful media to reach the masses to promote a shared Jewish future.  In partnership with the AVI CHAI Foundation, The Gesher Multicultural Film Fund (GMFF) has funded and produced of over 500 broadcast hours of cinema and television, including award winning feature films, drama series’ and documentaries. The GMFF supports the production of films and television programs that reflect the diversity of Israeli culture and correct the stereotypical images of minority segments of society. The fund provides grants and editorial guidance to veteran film-makers, and scholarships and training for promising young scriptwriters, producers, and directors emerging from minority segments of the population.

The Gesher Multicultural Film Fund’s Jerusalem Brew, Ushpizin and Shtissel are just a few of the top-rated television shows and movies that have demonstrated a large-scale impact on Israeli Society.
But to the Palestinian Authority, this is Gesher: "The Gesher Foundation launched a new colonial racist tender for those who believe that the Jewish race is superior to the Arab race."

It also describes an award-winning Israeli film, Red Cow, this way:

The movie “Red Cow” 2019, directed by: Tsivia Barkai Yacov, talks about a lonely girl (Benni) who lives with her father in a settlement in Silwan, East Jerusalem. Reconstructing the Third Temple: (Benni) takes care of and raises the red cow until it grows and the Jews build the temple in Jerusalem.

There are crude references to religious references, texts and myths that deny the Palestinians of their place. Benni falls in love with Yael, who works in the army, and with the intensification of tension between the Palestinians and the settlement residents, and a sense of danger between them, she decides to search for her for a common future with her family.

The film focuses on the settlers' relationship with the Torah land and promotes all their lies about it. It also fabricates many lies about what they calls “Palestinian terrorism” against the rights of the Jews.
The PA goes on to say, "the goal of producing these films is far from showing aesthetic, artistic and human values, rather their point is incitement and propaganda. ...In general, the production of these films is a crime, as it promotes the idea of ​​stealing the land of others, and showing them in international festivals is considered a crime (because it normalizes the idea of Jews living in settlements.)

Which is more racist - Jews making films about their lives, or saying that Jews who make films about their lives are inherently racist?


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  • Monday, January 11, 2021
  • Elder of Ziyon

The vaccine libel keeps going: Haaretz adds more lies

Every day there are more articles about how Israel is not fulfilling its obligations under international law in providing vaccines for Palestinians. Israel haters keep adding to the libel in each new article.

The latest comes from Haaretz, written by Australian "human rights" lawyer Shannon Maree Torrens.

She says that Israel is not only not providing vaccines for Palestinians, but that it is actively blocking them from going to Palestinians:
As many around the world with the privilege of decision, autonomy and movement are debating whether or not to take the COVID-19 vaccine when it becomes available to them, for others the issue is not when they will receive it but if and how the vaccine will be made available to them. 

Such is the case for the people of Gaza. 
Why would anyone think that the people of Gaza won't ever get vaccines? The PA has been making deals and procuring vaccines just like every other country, and like most countries they have not yet arrived. But Torrens is saying that Israel won't even allow those vaccines to come:
It is one thing to blockade a people for supposedly security purposes, as Israel has done with respect to Gaza since 2007, which is already an inhumane act with little justification, but it is another level of deplorable behavior to then deny those who are occupied and blockaded a life-saving vaccine during a once-in-a-century pandemic that has killed over 1.9 million people worldwide.
Israel has never blocked medicines from the PA and Gaza. Never. But you know who has denied medicines to Gaza residents? The PA! And Hamas! 

As far as I know, Ms. Torrens never said a word about that. 

She then contrasts Israel with Australia and New Zealand:

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has secured enough vaccines to ensure that everyone living in the Pacific Island nations will be covered. Australia has also made plans to ensure access to the vaccine in the Pacific Islands – and neither New Zealand nor Australia are engaging in a military occupation of these Pacific Island countries. 
Israel has vaccinated more Arabs, including Palestinians, than the total number of people vaccinated in Australia or New Zealand - which is at this moment, zero. It is a little strange to compare the two cases when the Pacific Islanders have no advantage, vaccine-wise, than Palestinians do.

But when you look deeper at New Zealand's and Australia's plans for their neighbors, you see that things are not so different from how Israel is acting.

Every New Zealand citizen will receive the vaccine for free. The excess doses will be distributed in the states within the New Zealand Realm—Tokelau, Niue, and the Cook Islands. New Zealand will also offer the vaccine to neighboring states Tonga, Samoa, and Tuvalu. These nations may choose to accept the vaccine.
New Zealand has some level of responsibility for the nations within the New Zealand Realm. For the others, it depends on whether they want the vaccine or not - like Palestinians, they make their own choice.  Up until recently, every report says the Palestinians absolutely do not want vaccines from Israel. (That only seems to have changed when they realized the propaganda value of any Israeli delay.)

As far as Ms. Torrens' Australia goes, according to its own COVID-19 strategy:

The Australian Government has also entered into Advanced Purchase Agreements with Astra Zeneca-Oxford and CSL-University of Queensland for over 84 million units of vaccines, which Australia is able to donate to partners in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, should these vaccines prove safe and effective, and units are available above domestic needs.

Just like Israel, Australia is prioritizing its own citizens before considering giving the vaccine to its neighbors. 

By the definition of Israel-haters, this is "medical apartheid." 

This hypocrisy is of course not the only ridiculous thing about this article. As with every other similar article, it doesn't mention that if Israel would provide the current Pfizer vaccines to Palestinians, they would all go to waste because there is not adequate refrigeration equipment. Israel is still waiting for the Moderna vaccines to arrive. Logistics drives decisions, not the pie-in-the-sky demands of clueless international human rights lawyers.

Torrens says 

Torrens of course doesn't mention that her basic thesis is wrong: under the international law, the primary responsibility for providing health care in territories under occupation goes to local authorities, not the occupier. They should cooperate. Until now, there have been no reports that the Palestinians wanted to cooperate with Israel.

Plus, the idea that Palestinians are having their human rights violated by not getting vaccinations now  - ahead of even modern nations like New Zealand and Australia -  is completely unfounded. Palestinians will get vaccinated in 2021, ahead of many nations and behind others. 
Torrens' libel is in saying that this is in doubt because of Israel. It isn't. And that is the most libelous accusation of all. 





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  • Monday, January 11, 2021
  • Elder of Ziyon

Convoy of UAE COVID-19 aid arrives in Gaza. (I don't see anything for the PA.)

On Sunday, a convoy filled with medical aid from the UAE arrived in Gaza:



It appears to have arrived through Egypt.

Equipment includes some sort of oxygen concentrator, ten respirators, 20 ventilators, 456,000 masks, 2000 PCR kits for COVID, and thousands of various types of PPE.

Over the summer, the UAE tried to send aid to the Palestinian Authority and it was angrily rejected. This might be why they went to Gaza through Egypt, so as not to anger the PA even more.



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Sunday, January 10, 2021

  • Sunday, January 10, 2021
  • Elder of Ziyon

NYT interview with David Friedman (Twitter threads)

David Halbfinger of the New York Times held a long interview US ambassador David Friedman. It was too long for his article so he created two threads on Twitter to fill it out.

While Halbfinger’s bias shines through – especially with the comments he chose to highlight  on Twitter – it is a very worthwhile interview to read.

I edited it somewhat to make it more readable.

---------------------------

 

Thanks to @USAmbIsrael David Friedman for his time: The interview ran more than 2 hours. Lots of important/interesting stuff didn’t make it into piece. But for students of the conflict, it’s worth setting down some of that here.

 

Straining credulity, he insisted there’d been no pressure campaign vs. the Palestinians. “I would call it minimal accountability, not maximum pressure,” he said — “holding them accountable to sort of basic norms of conduct.”

E.g., after PA President. Mahmoud Abbas defied Congress and urged the the International Criminal Court to prosecute Israelis, allowing the PLO mission to remain in Washington would have required the administration to defy Congress, too. “None of us wanted to shut down the mission,” Friedman said.

Similarly, he argued that attacking UNRWA was not tantamount to harming the Palestinians, it was about defunding a “corrupt, decidedly unhelpful” agency that “perpetuates rather than relieves” suffering.

“Almost every single thing that was adverse to the Palestinians by way of aid was completely avoidable” had they conformed to U.S. laws, he said: “These were all unforced errors on their part.”

A product of the 5 Towns, he saw Palestinians through a lens refracted by having lived through periods of great tension in NYC.
Arguing that people mistakenly saw Israel as the “stronger party” with the “greater demands,” vs. the “poor and underrepresented” Palestinians, he called that “nonsense.”

“I mean, Israel's militarily stronger. If they weren't, they wouldn't exist. But from a perspective of the world, I mean, [the Palestinians] had this scheme going for a generation, of kind of holding the Arab street hostage throughout the world and people had to, you know, kind of show and pay homage in order to — it reminded me a lot of what @TheRevAl Sharpton used to do, where he would go threaten boycotts of various industrial companies unless they would hire him to teach the companies diversity programs. He'd get paid a lot of money, and then he wouldn't do a boycott. It's a great scam. And that's the way the Middle East used to work. And that just had to be broken.”

Another LI-NYC reference: Despite what many have called the unworkability of the Trump map, Friedman said: “We spent months working on ways to achieve contiguity. You can drive from Hebron to Nablus and never see an Israeli.” He recalled that when he worked in Manhattan, “I used to take the Midtown Tunnel to work every day. If you tell me that there's a river, that I go under a river, I don't know that. I never saw the river once. I drove under that thing for 30 years, never saw a river. So I take it on faith that there's an East River. I'm just saying that we created enough contiguity so that Palestinians could go throughout the West Bank without ever coming face-to-face with the Israelis.”

He said Israeli officials did not help write the Trump peace plan, though they were consulted about it often. “The editorial control was always ours,” he said. “This was entirely authored by us and almost entirely conceptualized by us.”

Having clashed with Tillerson, he clicked with Pompeo, and worked for a year on the overhaul of settlements policy later dubbed the “Pompeo doctrine.” Peace talks would only gain traction with the Israeli right, he said, if Israel could come to the table “without the accusation that somehow it’s a thief and being asked to return things that it stole. Israel will not and should not come to the table on the basis of being an illegal occupier of stolen land.”

He said it was pointless for U.S. to ask Israel for a settlement freeze, “because for them, I think a freeze of construction is the acknowledgment that the land doesn’t belong to them.”
Still, he denied there was a U.S. interest in expansion of settlements with one exception: “It’s important to send a message to the Palestinian terror apparatus that their efforts will fail” by “expanding a settlement in a place where they commit an act of terror,” he said. “That’s a very specific message that I endorse.”

He said history had shown that, contrary to the arguments of critics of the occupation, “the status quo is not unsustainable, but I think the status quo is suboptimal and should be.”
(NB: "Suboptimal" is a signature word.)

Yet, Friedman said that endless subjugation of the Palestinians posed no threat to Israeli democracy. “I don’t think it has anything to do with Israel’s democracy because Israel’s democracy is the function of the citizens, and these are not citizens of Israel.”

Some Israeli critics have faulted him for outflanking Netanyahu from the right, e.g., by endorsing maximalist Israeli positions on refugees and Jerusalem without the caveats that Israeli officials usually add to preserve maneuvering room. This, they warn, may have created unrealistic expectations among the Israeli public about what can be achieved. Friedman did not dispute this: “That may have been an unintended consequence” of articulating what he thought were “achievable compromises,” he said.

He acknowledged denouncing Palestinian violence often, and Israeli violence rarely, but said this was because Palestinian acts of terrorism were “rewarded” by Palestinian leaders. Jewish terrorism, he asserted, was condemned by the Israeli government. (Condemnation of attacks on Palestinians is actually quite rare.) But he expressed confidence in the Israeli justice system to prosecute Jewish attackers: “I’m not looking to put my finger on the scale,” he said.

On the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, the Trump peace plan held a contradiction: The status quo — Muslim prayer only, other faiths can visit but not pray — should “continue uninterrupted” and be “preserved”; but “people of every faith should be permitted to pray” there.  Last year, Friedman clarified that the White House hoped this would happen by agreement, but wouldn't impose it. But then UAE and Bahrain peace deals stated that Muslims may pray “at al-Aqsa Mosque, and Jerusalem’s other holy sites should remain open for peaceful worshippers of all faiths.”

Careful readers like @DanielSeidemann noted this could reduce Muslim exclusive to the mosque, but leave rest of Temple Mount open to Jewish prayer — shattering status quo and fulfilling longstanding Muslim fears. I asked @USAmbIsrael if he disagreed with that reading.

“No,” he said, “but I think it remains aspirational. But I don’t disagree with the language.” He went on to acknowledge the “sensitivities." "Aspirationally, we would like to get to a place of greater openness. But we’re not there yet. We’re not going to force it.”

Asked if he favored giving the Saudis a role on the Temple Mount as an incentive to normalize with Israel, he said he had “never thought of that at all,” acknowledged that would pose a threat to Jordan and said “I have no interest in picking a fight with anybody.”

Trading annexation for normalization was a “no-brainer” because it was only suspended. A more permanent abandonment of the idea, he would not have supported, he suggested, making clear his views of land-for-peace:

“I don’t think it would’ve been appropriate for Israel to, especially without the consensus of the Israeli population, to just give up territory permanently for any agreement with another country,” he said.

He volunteered no mistakes. Despite having been outlasted now by Abbas, and had no dialogue with the P.A., he did not second-guess the decision to close Jerusalem consulate and downgrade U.S. mission to the Palestinians.  He said it ended the situation of “two missions essentially in the same country reporting back to Washington with conflicting views, with no obligation that they reconcile those things.” Now, that was done inside the Embassy, he said, and “I don’t put my thumb on the scale. You know, I want to hear all the views that I would sort of reflexively disagree with. If I’m missing something, I want to hear it.”

He had an interesting take on this 2010 friction (nytimes.com/2010/03/10/wor…) between Biden and Netanyahu over a settlement announcement:

 

“The reality here is whenever under the last administration somebody of significance came to visit, the Israeli left would immediately publicize whatever they could find in terms of settlement expansion, to create that friction," he said.  “I mean, there was an attempt to create that friction. It was strategic friction. Our view is this doesn’t help, we don’t need to have this.”

Instead, he said, he agreed with the Israelis that they should build “from the inside out” — to expand settlements “with the least amount of damage to the overall footprint. And that’s how they’ve been operating over the last four years.”

He lavished praise on Netanyahu, singling out his ability to “compartmentalize” and maintain “disciplined, objective, strategic thinking in times of stress.” But said he would have worked as closely with another PM, even a lefty.

“I have deep disagreements with the Israel left, but I have deep respect for the Israel left because I think that the Israel left, you know, they put their money where their mouth is: They send their kids to the army, they pay their taxes, they live in this area, they take the risks. They have a view as to how the Zionist dream should be actualized and they’re entitled to it. Very different than I have a view of the American left, who I think really are not sufficiently educated on the subject and aren’t willing to take the risks.So, I mean, if the American left is wrong, they don’t suffer.” 

Finally, there's talk of his forming an Israel-based pro-settlement group. He hinted: “I will stay in the space somehow, but I just don’t know how,” he said. “I’ll try to maintain a voice. I mean, it’s a huge drop-off when you no longer have access to the president.”

  • Sunday, January 10, 2021
  • Elder of Ziyon

Jewish high school in Casablanca is now 90% Muslim - but still teaches Hebrew and Jewish subjects




While some considered the inclusion of Hebrew culture in school curricula during the 2020-2021 season as an unprecedented measure, at Musa Ibn Maimon [Maimonides] High School, this been in place for a long time. At the study desks at the educational institution in Casablanca, Jewish and Muslim students have been studying side by side for more than 60 years.

Within this institution, which was established in 1950, students learn Hebrew and Arabic, and celebrate Jewish and Islamic religious holidays. What makes this institution unique in Morocco is that about 90 percent of the students, today, are Moroccan Muslims.

Perhaps this atmosphere of harmony is not alien to Morocco, which has always been in the forefront of preserving Jewish memory.

The director of Musa Ibn Maimon High School, Shimon Cohen, said in a statement to MAP that the institution is affiliated with the International Israeli Union Network, which carried the name “The Union” after the independence of Morocco, and  used to run  dozens of schools in Morocco, the first of which was opened in Tetouan in 1862. 

He said that the number Muslim pupils when they opened this  high school did not exceed between 5 and 10 percent.

Mr. Shimon Cohen considered that the influx of Moroccan Muslim students to high school is due to the common values ​​and strong relations that bind them to the adherents of the Jewish religion. He added that the dealings with Moroccan Muslims "reveal a set of virtues such as humility and human warmth, which are priceless feelings that our Muslim brothers express whenever we see them or talk to them."

He stressed that "these virtues must be taught and preserved, and I seek to make this institution a model for the rest of the educational institutions, here and anywhere else."

Besides the rigor, quality of teaching and the standard of teachers, which is the key to the success of the institution, a family atmosphere prevails among the approximately 400 pupils.

It is a model for coexistence and education between Jewish children and their Muslim peers who share the classroom and the recreation area and play. Rather, these links extend outside the walls of the institution to the point of friendship between families.

And Mr. Cohen considered that "these efforts may be just a drop in the ocean, but each one of them must do what he can and contribute, albeit a little, in order to consolidate the mutual respect between Muslims and Jews."
Here's video of the school.




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01/10 Links: What Amnesty International gets wrong about Israel’s vaccine programme; Is J Street Misrepresenting Its Real Mission?; How is technology and data helping Israel become the first country to vanquish Covid-19?

From Ian:

What Amnesty International gets wrong about Israel’s vaccine programme
Meanwhile, the Ramallah administration was lagging behind. Having squandered sackfuls of public money over the years on everything from mansions for its leaders to payments for terrorists, while propped up by billions of aid dollars, its finances were not in good shape. And it suffered from a fundamental lack of coordination between different arms of the government.

Corruption, factionalism, a lack of proper elections – Mahmoud Abbas is currently 16 years into a four-year term – and incompetence had resulted in a government that often struggled to meet the basic needs of its citizens.

Speaking off-the-record as Israel moved towards vaccinating a million-and-a-half people, a senior PA official said earlier this week that given the sluggish progress, he would not rule out asking the Jewish state for help. When asked whether he had done so already, he paused before muttering: ‘yes and no’.

In truth, Palestinian liaison officials had already quietly contacted Israel’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) department to request the vaccine. The Israelis had agreed to help. Assisting the Palestinians made sense, since it was vital to maintain a degree of goodwill in coordination between the two sides on the West Bank.

According to Israel’s state broadcaster, ‘dozens’ of doses were then secretly delivered into Palestinian hands, enough for the most prominent members of the leadership – though exactly who received the jabs remains unknown. The operation was shrouded in secrecy. Partly, this was due to Palestinian shame at going cap-in-hand to Israel. Partly, it was to avoid appearing nepotistic and incompetent to ordinary Palestinians who were waiting with mounting frustration for news about the vaccine.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health had no idea about the secret delivery. In a statement, it denied that the episode had taken place. Then, in a sign of the confusion at the heart of government in Ramallah, it conceded that Israel had made an ‘informal’ offer of 20 doses on a trial basis – though it claimed that the Palestinians had turned the proposal down.

Seen in this light, the picture bears little resemblance to the narrative pushed by the likes of Amnesty International. The Palestinians neither expected nor requested help from Israel. They held no sense of grievance, even as hand-wringing commentators from overseas sought to stir up resentment by reporting that a great injustice had been done.

Palestinians appear to be seen by some as an infantilised people in need of Western intervention. But this is certainly not how they see themselves.
The Media’s New Anti-Israel Slander — Vaccines
Israel’s extraordinary success in speedily vaccinating its population has been lauded globally. As of this writing, almost 13% of Israelis have already received the first COVID-19 vaccine — well over a million people in just a couple of weeks.

However, while many in the media are looking at Israel’s vaccination drive as an example to be followed, others are using it as one more excuse to bash the Jewish state.

Media outlets including the Washington Post, NPR, and the notoriously anti-Israel British paper The Guardian have run spurious and arguably libelous headlines asserting that Israel is preventing Palestinians from being vaccinated. “Palestinians excluded from Israeli Covid vaccine rollout as jabs go to settlers” read one Guardian headline.

Unfortunately, due to the media’s obsession with proving Israel’s bad faith and the Palestinians’ victimhood, they cannot praise Israel without a backhanded snipe at the Jewish state.

However, the truth of the matter is that this story about Israel supposedly withholding coronavirus vaccines is simply another malicious media attack.

First, regardless of all the good that Israel does in the world, inevitably the haters step forward to paint Israel as evil. They cannot afford for Israel to receive credit, because it will demolish the fallacious anti-Israel foundations they have built.

Former Knesset member Einat Wilf put it best on Twitter when she wrote: “Israel advances status of GBTQ? ‘Pinkwashing.’ Israelis lead world as vegans? ‘Veganwashing.’ Israel sets up first mobile hospital in devastated Haiti? ‘Harvesting organs.’ Israel is global vaccination leader? ‘What about Palestinians?’”
Amb. Alan Baker: Is J Street Misrepresenting Its Real Mission?
According to its website, the Congressional lobbying organization calling itself “J Street” was established “to serve as the political home and voice for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans” through “organizing pro-Israel and pro-peace Americans to promote U.S. policies that embody our deeply held Jewish and democratic values and that help secure the State of Israel as a democratic homeland for the Jewish people.”

In its founding aims and principles, J Street declares its overriding aim as “reshaping political perceptions of what it means to be pro-Israel.”

The first and evidently central provision of J Street’s basic principles acknowledges that Israel faces enemies, and J Street expresses support for Israel to defend itself and live in security and peace within internationally recognized boundaries.

However, J Street’s political manifesto detailed on its website would appear to run counter – and even to undermine – any such sentiments.

On the one hand, J Street presents itself and is perceived by many naïve elements within the Jewish and non-Jewish communities as a genuine lobbying organization with the veneer of supporting Israel and expressing concern for its welfare. But, on the other hand, one can nevertheless see, behind the misleading platitudes and sweeping statements in its manifesto, that J Street’s substantive political viewpoint is openly radical and partisan, identifying itself clearly with the Palestinian narrative, and aligning itself with other openly critical-of-Israel organizations such as the Israel Policy Forum, Brookings, and the International Crisis Group. J Street has failed to welcome and promote the normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states, apparently because they downgrade the urgency J Street feels for a Palestinian state. The organization has actively lobbied against military aid to those Arab states that normalized relations.
  • Sunday, January 10, 2021
  • Elder of Ziyon

Stop using Jews as pawns to score political points, @TedCruz and @AOC.

Over the weekend, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ted Cruz got into a Twitter argument over which side was more antisemitic:

Does any of this make Jews feel more secure as American citizens?

On the contrary. Both sides are using Jews as a political football. Neither of them are expressing support for Jews, but using charges of antisemitism to smear their opponents.

secure

And the Jews are stuck in the middle.

This is not the way to do makes Jews feel comfortable with your messages. The way to do it would be to fight the antisemites who are ostensibly on your side.

It shouldn’t be hard for Cruz or other Republicans to unequivocally condemn the antisemitism that we saw in Washington last week or the attack on the Jewish museum.  There is a serious amount of Jew-hatred among Trump supporters and that must be condemned from the Right more than it is. I didn’t see anyone screaming at the guy wearing the “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirt.  (And saying “Nazis are evil” is hardly brave.)

It shouldn’t be hard for AOC to condemn the antisemitism that we see on the Left from BDSers, from people who follow Louis Farrakhan, and from Arab antisemites. If the Left wants to show they are serious about antisemitism, they should accept the IHRA working definition and stop lying that it suppresses legitimate criticism of Israel.

Only when you risk losing your own antisemitic fanbase will we believe you really care about Jews and that you are sincere in fighting antisemitism. Until then, please, don’t use Jews to score political points.

We aren’t pawns and – except for those of us whose political ideologies are extreme - we can sense when we have true allies as opposed to people who are trying to use us.

  • Sunday, January 10, 2021
  • Elder of Ziyon

Iran bans American, British COVID-19 vaccines - seemingly out of fears of GPS tech being secretly injected



DW reports:

Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in a live television broadcast on Friday that he has told the government to reject British and American-made vaccines.

"Imports of US and British vaccines into the country are banned. I have told this to officials and I'm saying it publicly now," Khamenei said.
Why would Iran do that?

They are working on their own vaccine, that just started Phase I clinical trials, but those would be months away from being ready. 

Khamenei tweeted that the American and British vaccines are "completely untrustworthy" and French vaccines "aren't trustworthy," either. (Twitter took that tweet down.)

Khamenei's fear seems to stem from a bizarre conspiracy theory about vaccines injecting GPS chips in people's bodies.

Al Arabiya reports that Iranian hardliner Hussein Kanani said on TV,  "There is a lot of information according to which some vaccines inject electronic chips and implant a Global Positioning System (GPS) in our bodies to control all our actions and movements, to the extent that we become a human machine in the hands of others." 



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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 19 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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