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(h/t Trip Gor, Ibn Boutros)
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Israel this week temporarily suspended the delivery of cement to Gaza’s private sector after it discovered that Hamas was siphoning the material, which is intended to rebuild destroyed houses.Hamas official denies stealing cement, warns of ‘explosion’
The Office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) monitors the flow of cement into Gaza to ensure that Hamas has not used it to construct tunnels to attack Israel. On Friday COGAT posted on its Arabic Facebook page that it suspended the transfer of cement to Gaza because some deliveries had been diverted by Imad Elbaz, the deputy director-general for Hamas’s economics office.
“This is a blatant violation of agreements for the rehabilitation mechanism,” COGAT said in its Facebook post.
COGAT head Maj.-Gen. Yoav Mordechai temporarily halted the shipments until the matter is fully investigated, COGAT said. adding that it regretted that Hamas continues to pursue its own personal agenda at the expense of Gaza’s residents.
The UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Nickolay Mladenov, issued an unusually sharp response on Monday, accusing Hamas of theft.
“Those who seek to gain through the deviation of materials are stealing from their own people and adding to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza,” Mladenov said.
A Hamas official on Tuesday denied Israeli charges of siphoning off cement imports to Gaza and warned of a potential “explosion” unless a cement ban is lifted.6 Months of Terror in Israel
Israel on Monday announced it had stopped private imports of cement to the Hamas-run Palestinian enclave, accusing Imad al-Baz, deputy director of the economy ministry, of diverting supplies.
But Baz denied any offense, saying the imports were in line with a UN-brokered Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism, aimed at allowing for reconstruction following a devastating 2014 war with Israel.
“We don’t interfere with the cement mechanism,” he told AFP, adding that all cement distribution sites in Gaza are monitored by Israeli cameras.
He warned that Israel’s decision would have “dire consequences” including “stopping the wheels of reconstruction, destroying the economy and increasing unemployment with adverse repercussions for tens of thousands of citizens.”
Ilana Dayan: If [Bibi] invites you to a meeting tomorrow, would you come?Netanyahu called Abbas' bluff yesterday, saying that he has cleared his schedule for the week and Abbas is welcome to meet with him whenever he wants.
Abbas : I'll meet him.
Ilana Dayan: Anywhere?
Abbas: And any time.
VALUES CHECKLIST *We are convening a group of individuals whose core values align with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence. Participants in this delegation should agree with the following three basic principles. Please check the following 3 boxes to indicate your alignment with the core values of this project:
Cultural Adaptability and SensitivitySorry! Your Jewish star necklace and yarmulke are symbols not of Judaism but of "settler presence." Never mind that tens of thousands of Palestinians work in Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria for people wearing yarmulkas, or that they go to Jewish medical clinics where people wear such terrible symbols. Never mind that they many attend a "settler university" in Ariel, and even sleep in its dormitory.
As international activists, we are entering a place and a culture that are not our own. Mindful of the fact that we will be entering into Palestinian communities with their own culture, we believe that sensitivity and adaptability are crucial to engaging in our work respectfully and responsibly. This may range from dressing modestly (shoulders, knees covered, even in the heat) to refraining from intense public displays of affection. Moreover, it is vitally important to the success of our work that we be understood to be a solidarity rather than a settler presence. Many external markers of Jewish observance -- kippot, tzitzit, jewish stars, etc -- are viewed as symbols of settler presence. We ask all participants to refrain from publicly displaying external signs of Jewish observance while we are in the Occupied Territories.
An anti-Semitic protest attended by just 12 far-right supporters in north London has been branded “pathetic” and “sad” by leading Jewish groups.
A handful of people turned up for Saturday’s protest at the war memorial in Golders Green, an area with a large Jewish population, and held up a banner with the slogan “This is London not Tel Aviv”.
Another banner labelled the Shomrim, a north London Jewish neighbourhood watch group, “police impersonators”.
To occasional boos and jeers speaker Jeremy Bedford-Turner made a long, rambling speech telling people “the future is white”.
Footage was later uploaded to YouTube, with the description claiming it had been held “deep inside The Jewish Republic of North London”. The video culminated in Mr Bedford-Turner waving a pork pie in the air before taking a bite.
Their protest came less than a year after a previous anti-Shomrim march planned for the area was moved to central London after a coalition of campaigners called for it be relocated.
Mark Gardner from the Community Safety Trust, who helped get that event moved, said: “The demonstration was quite pathetic.
“But it’s still disturbing that they wanted to come to Golders Green and quite sickening to think of these people defiling a war memorial by their presence.”
Jonathan Arkush, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, branded the demonstrators “a handful of sad people”.
He said: “I saw on the organisers’ video one of them ranting away for 25 minutes while one of his mates was trying to get him to shut up.
“The ranting man ate a pork pie which he seemed to think would cause Jews offence. Well, I’ve got news for him. We have no problem at all with anyone eating pork, it’s just that we don’t.”
The EU Ambassador to Israel, Lars Faaborg-Andersen, participated last week in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper's anti-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) conference where he reiterated the EU's stance that Israeli “settlements” are “illegal under international law” and are “a hindrance to the peace process.”NGO Monitor: An Important First Step: British Gov't Ends Funding for War on Want
Faaborg-Andersen additionally termed the 1949 armistice line an "internationally recognized border” even though the 1949 line is neither internationally recognized, nor is it a border.
Legal Grounds, a grassroots initiative established to inform about and promote Israel’s legal land rights, called on the Ambassador to publicly debate Professor Eugene Kontorovich, a renowned expert on international law at Northwestern University and senior legal think tank fellow in Israel.
Legal Grounds claim the EU's stance contravenes the officially recognized rightful presence of the State of Israel in Judea and Samaria according to international law: “These rights were recognized unequivocally by the League of Nations, and reaffirmed in Chapter 80 of the UN Charter. Moreover, the EU stance runs contrary to its previous commitment implicit in its having witnessed and signed Oslo II, an agreement based on stipulations by UN resolutions 242 and 338 that Israel is entitled to ‘secure and recognized’ borders.”
Legal Grounds believe that Faaborg-Andersen should be held accountable for his inaccurate statement regarding legal facts. (h/t Yenta Press)
The end of UK government funding for a radical anti-Israel group and accompanying disclosures of antisemitism at its events highlight the urgent need for due diligence, transparency and accountability in all NGO funding frameworks, stated NGO Monitor. According to media reports, War on Want, which is leader of boycott campaigns against Israel and companies that do business with the Jewish state, is no longer being funded by the British government.Edgar Davidson: Story that Government has stopped funding War on Want is a lie*
“This is an important, albeit belated, step by the British government,” said Prof. Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor. “Other institutional donors, in particular the European Union, should follow suit and immediately end their funding for this anti-human right organization.”
NGO Monitor research shows that the British government, via the Department of International Development, had provided War on Want with almost £500,000 in 2012-2015. The EU provided an additional £211,000.
For more than a decade, NGO Monitor has been tracking the crude anti-Israel campaigns of War on Want, in direct violation of requirements for a UK-registered charity. Documentation containing such information was submitted to the DFID and presented to Members of Parliament.
I am sorry to have to break this news to everybody celebrating the Telegraph story that the Government has stopped funding the antisemitic 'charity' War on Jews Want as a result of its anti-Israel incitement. The above is a screenshot from War on Want's website today, which gives you a pretty good indication of how un-bothered they are by the Telegraph story (War on Want essentially does nothing other than campaign against Israel so, as far as they are concerned, the Telegraph is simply advertising what they do best). The Press release from War on Want that is referred to in the highlighted section is reproduced below. They claim they have not been criticised by the Government and that they have not sought Government support for years.Clinton Confidante's Son: Palestinians Recover Their 'Dignity' In Violence Against Israelis
For once War on Want is more or less telling the truth (it's incredible how many Jews continue to delude themselves that David Cameron's government would ever actually take real action against Israel haters). War on Want no longer asks for direct funding from the British government** for the simple reason that it gets it indirectly from the EU and Comic Relief (which of course is run by the government funded BBC). As I pointed out only last month, Comic Relief recently awarded War on Want its largest grant ever £590,719 (in 2013 it got £139,407 from Comic Relief and in 2014 it only got £27,790). But it is the EU that continues to be their main financier** - which, of course, is also partly funded by British taxpayers.
As my many previous reports on War on Want confirm, Cameron's government and the Charities Commission know all about War on Want's activities and refused to do anything about it - publicly at least. Maybe behind the scenes they were sufficiently embarrassed to suggest discreetly to War on Want that they should stop applying for direct Government funding. Either way, Gilligan's Telegraph report will make no difference at all except almost certainly lead to increased funding from Comic Relief and the EU and some additional Israel haters who have now been alerted to what they do.
Hamas' military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, said Monday that one of its members had died in an accident during a "Jihadi mission" in the northern Gaza Strip.Hamas still refers to him as a "martyr."
The brigades said in a statement that 24-year-old Musab Muhammad al-Sheikh, from Jabaliya in northern Gaza, was accidentally shot dead by a bullet from his own gun.
Further details on the circumstances of his death and the nature of the "mission" were not provided.
Al-Sheikh's funeral was scheduled for Monday at 12 p.m. in Jabaliya refugee camp.
Members of the al-Qassam Brigades are regularly killed during training exercises or in Gaza's notoriously dangerous tunnel networks in the north and south of the blockaded coastal enclave.
When the University of California Regents recently passed a statement condemning “anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism,” it avoided a broader proposal to equate anti-Zionism with bigotry. But this and similar efforts around the country to condemn anti-Zionism are part of a well documented, politically motivated national campaign to shut down speech critical of Israeli policies and deny the experiences of more than 750,000 Palestinians who were made refugees by ethnic cleansing at the creation of Israel.His links to "prove" a "well documented, politically motivated national campaign" to shut down free speech come from ridiculusly biased sources. Of course no one is trying to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel - they are against the absurd, one-sided demonization and de-legitimization of Israel that applies rules to the Jewish state that to no other country on Earth has to live up to.
My relatives were among the Palestinians displaced. They did not deserve to be expelled from their homes, nor do any of the Palestinians who are still being uprooted because of Israeli government policies.Without knowing where his relatives were from, we cannot know if they were "expelled." Chances are pretty slight. And to say that people who build illegal houses or raise terrorists do not deserve to have their homes taken away from them is hardly a true statement.
Anti-Zionism is a principled anti-racist position.Actually, it is always a bigoted position meant to deny the Jewish people, alone among all peoples, the right to self-determination. (And when called on it, they deny that the Jewish people exist - which is antisemitism, too.)
The notion that there should be freedom and self-determination for Palestinians leads me to call on Israel to respect the United Nations mandated right of return for forcibly displaced refugees and their families.Here he links to UN resolution 194 which is not law, nor is it a "mandate," nor is it a "right" - even according to its own language.
It is my conviction of equality that compels me to speak out against Israeli apartheid, with over 50 laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel and render them second-class citizens.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once again invited Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to Jerusalem for talks, four days after Abbas said in a Channel 2 interview that he was waiting for such an invitation.Rivlin calls for talks with Palestinians, says he would meet Abbas
“A few days ago on Israeli television, I heard President Abbas say that if I'd invited him to meet, he'd come,” Netanyahu said before a meeting with Czech Foreign Minister Lubomír Zaorálek. “So, as I said this morning to an American Congressional delegation, I'm inviting him again. I'm clearing my schedule this week. Any day he can come, I'll be here.”
Netanyahu said that he and Abbas have “a lot of things to discuss, but the first time is ending the Palestinian campaign of incitement to murder Israelis.” Netanyahu said his door “is always open to those who want to pursue peace with Israel.”
During Thursday’s Channel 2 interview, Abbas said that he had offered to meet Netanyahu. “I will meet with him, at any time. And I suggested, by the way, for him to meet,” he said in English. Asked what became of that overture, Abbas said: “No, no - it’s a secret. He can tell you about it.”
President Reuven Rivlin spoke on Monday of the need for direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians and said he was willing to meet Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to further this goal.Abbas Rejects Peace and Palestinian Statehood, U.S. Media Rejects Coverage
"Without mutual trust between the sides there won't be negotiations and there won't be a solution," Rivlin said during a statement in the presence of visiting Czech Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek
The president said that he listened to Abbas' recent address, calling the Palestinian leader's words a "little more promising."
This is the third known occasion in which Abbas has rejected a potential opportunity to gain a new Palestinian Arab state. (Jordan, with a majority Palestinian Arab population, at least until the current Syria refugee influx, occupies a majority of the land originally designated for the post-World War I Palestine Mandate.) The Palestinian leader—currently in the tenth year of a single, elected four-year term—dismissed U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s proposal to restart negotiations for peace with Israel and a Palestinian state in 2014 and an Israeli offer in 2008 after the Annapolis conference, which he acknowledged was refused “out of hand” (“Abbas admits for the first time that he turned down peace offer in 2008,” The Tower, Nov. 17, 2015). Abbas’ predecessor, Yasser Arafat, also rejected statehood and peace with Israel in 2000 at Camp David and 2001 at Taba.
Major U.S. news outlets failed to report Abbas’ rejection of Biden’s offer. According to a Lexis-Nexis search, not a single article appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times or USA Today, among others, on the latest Palestinian rejection of statehood and peace.
This is not to say that there wasn’t any coverage of Israel in the days following Biden’s visit. In a March 14 editorial entitled “Mr. Netanyahu’s Lost Opportunities,” The New York Times blamed the Israeli prime minister for the lack of a “two-state solution” while excusing Abbas as “a weak and aging leader.” The “newspaper of record” failed to specifically note any of Abbas’ refusals of statehood and peace.
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Iranian ballistic missile with "Israel must be erased from the face of the earth" in Hebrew and Farsi |
Like most of Washington, I was under the impression that the nuclear negotiations with Iran ended in July. There was the press conference in Vienna, the U.N. resolution that lifted the sanctions on Iran and the fight in Congress that followed. That turns out to have been wrong.
I should have been more suspicious when no one actually had to sign anything at the end of the negotiations or when the "deal" was not submitted to the Senate as a treaty for ratification. And while it's true that the Iranians have disposed of nuclear material, modified sites and allowed more monitoring, they also keep haggling over the terms.But the US has caved on the dollar transactions (with a fig-leaf of doing it through third countries.)
Now, according to an Associated Press report, the Obama administration is considering a rule change to allow some Iranian businesses to use off shore financial institutions to access U.S. dollars in currency trades. When the White House sold it to Congress, senior Treasury officials promised the nuclear agreement would not allow such dollar transactions, since Iran's financial system has been repeatedly designated as a concern for money laundering. It was not part of the "deal" that was agreed in July, which only lifted nuclear related sanctions on Iran, but kept in place other sanctions to punish the country's support for terrorism, human rights abuses and its ballistic missile program.
Over the summer, Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress that the U.N. resolution that ended international sanctions on Iran's nuclear program would nonetheless retain language that prohibited Iran from testing ballistic missiles. And yet a March 28 letter from the U.S. and the European Union to the U.N. Secretary General this week conspicuously declined to call Iran's recent ballistic missile tests a "violation" of that resolution.And that wasn't even the first:
This caught the attention of Rep. Mike Pompeo and two of his fellow Republican House members, Pete Roskam and Lee Zeldin. In a letter to Kerry sent Thursday, they write, "The seeming American refusal to name these Iranian tests as violations is in direct conflict with the administration’s earlier commitments."
The White House sees it differently. This week Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser for strategic communications told reporters that Iran's missile tests were not part of July's nuclear agreement, which is strange because most experts consider missiles that can deliver a nuclear weapon to be part of a country's nuclear program.
Again, the Iranians have been firm on this point. There is barely a day that goes by when the country's leaders don't affirm that they have a sovereign right to test as many missiles as they choose. And in case the message wasn't clear, Iranian television made sure to broadcast images of those missiles emblazoned with Hebrew words that said "Israel must be wiped off the earth."
This pattern began over the summer when Obama himself assured Congress and the public that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would have the ability to inspect any suspicious site that it wanted. The Iranians countered that their military facilities were off limits.
It turns out they were right. When the IAEA devised a plan to inspect Iran's Parchin facility, the Iranians refused international inspectors access and allowed only a ceremonial visit from the agency's director. The Iranians were allowed to collect their own site samples.
Under the patronage of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman, Minister of Culture and Information Adel Al-Toraifi inaugurated Riyadh International Book Fair 2016 on Wednesday.Wonderful! A book fair that the US supports and that teaches Arab readers about other cultures, politics and technology!
A large audience attended the opening ceremony at the Riyadh Center for Exhibition and Conference, including top Ministry of Culture and Information officials, diplomats and representatives of local and international publishing houses along with the general public.
Around 500 local and international publishers and countries are participating in the fair, displaying a wide variety of books on science, technology, history, literature, politics, religion, languages, geography, medicine, engineering and education.
The United States is one of the major participating countries. “First, I would like to congratulate Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman and Ministry of Culture and Information for professionally organizing this large event. We are very happy to participate in this major Saudi culture event because of its importance to our bilateral cultural relations,” US Cultural Attaché David Edginton told Arab News.
“The fair is a good opportunity for us and all participants and visitors to exchange ideas and information freely,” Edginton said.
The ministry has set strict rules to protect intellectual property at the fair. Other rules include warnings against displaying or selling any books or cultural materials not approved by the ministry.
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!