Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, September 28, 2014

NY Times ignored Abbas "genocide" reference and State Dept. criticism

All the news that's fit to print?

The New York Times has a single article about Mahmoud Abbas' speech to the UN, and the entire article centers on whether he will try to bring a case against Israel to the International Criminal Court.

It doesn't say a word about his sickening characterization of an Israeli war against rockets as "genocide" - which was in the very first paragraph of his speech.

In this year, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Israel has chosen to make it a year of a new war of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people.

Other news services highlighted it, but the NYT doesn't want to make Abbas look like anything but statesmanlike.

Moreover, the Times didn't say anything about the State Department's denunciation of the speech. (Although it does not appear to be on the State Department website either.)

Most of the coverage of Mahmoud Abbas' speech at the UN has centered around his perverse description of the Gaza war as "genocide."

But some of his other remarks are perhaps more notable.

From the official transcript:

I affirm in front of you that the Palestinian people hold steadfast to their legitimate right to defend themselves against the Israeli war machine and to their legitimate right to resist this colonial, racist Israeli occupation.

At the same time, I affirm that our grief, trauma and anger will not for one moment make us abandon our humanity, our values and our ethics; we will always maintain our respect and commitment to international law, international humanitarian law and the international consensus, and we will maintain the traditions of our national struggle established by the Palestinian fedayeen and to which we committed ourselves since the onset of the Palestinian revolution in early 1965.

The first statement is a legitimization of terrorist rockets aimed at Israeli civilians - which is a war crime and terrorism by any definition. There is no other possible interpretation, given that he was using the Gaza war as the linchpin for the entire speech.

Both that statement and the following one show that Abbas is abandoning the original Oslo exchange of letters where Yasir Arafat claimed to renounce the use of terror and violence. Abbas is saying that he supports the methods of the "fedayeen" terrorists that first attacked Israel in 1965 - an attack against the Israeli water infrastructure - and those same Fatah terrorists went on to be behind airplane hijackings, mass murders and the Olympics massacre, among many others.

Abbas is praising these terrorists at the same time that he is using phrases like "international law, international humanitarian law and the international consensus."

Abbas did not say anything like this in his previous three annual speeches (2011, 2012, 2013) to the UN General Assembly. In each of those, he emphasized "peaceful, popular resistance" or similar terminology - here, he does not mention that term once, and instead lionizes terrorists and justifies terror.

To his mind, it is easy to reconcile Palestinian terrorism with international law, because Fatah has always claimed that "resistance" is legal under international law as their platform says explicitly:

Our struggle is also based on the provisions of international law that affirmed the right of people to resist occupation, and on their right to struggle for their freedom, independence and self-determination.

Other Fatah leaders have said as well that armed terrorism was never abandoned by Fatah.

Abbas just announced to the entire world that Palestinian terrorism is perfectly legal. But no Western diplomats will say anything about it.

Ultra-Left Haaretz columnist suffers discrimination against Jews at Bir Zeit U

From Amira Hass, one of the most Israel-hating writers at Haaretz:

The German Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and The Center for Development Studies (CDS) at Birzeit University organized a conference entitled, "Alternatives to Neo-Liberal Development in the Occupied Palestinian Territories – Critical Perspectives."

During the first presentation on Tuesday, two lecturers from the CDS approached me within ten minutes of each other, asking me to step outside, saying that they needed to talk to me. I asked them to wait until the break, but after they asked me a third time, I stepped out of the conference hall. "Am I not allowed to be here?" I asked, half-kidding, but one of the lecturers answered that there was a problem.

When I registered at the entrance of the conference I wrote next to my name the institution I belong to, Haaretz. For the past two decades, the lecturer said, there has been a law at Birzeit stipulating that Israelis (Jewish Israelis, that is) are not allowed on the university grounds. The students manning the conference registration desk saw that I had written "Haaretz," realized I was an Israeli, and ran to tell the university authorities. The security department in turn went to the conference organizers, the lecturer said. She and her colleagues were afraid, she told me, that students would break into the conference hall in protest over my presence.

From where we were standing in the entrance hall, I didn't see a throng of students approaching in order to oust me, the representative of the 'Zionist entity.' But when friends and acquaintances (including lecturers) telephoned afterward to find out what had happened, I then understood that the rumor going around was that students had attacked me. And so, for the sake of truth, this is not what happened. What did happen was that two lecturers demanded that I leave. So I left.

One of the lecturers explained that it is important for students to have a safe space where (Jewish) Israelis are not entitled to enter; that while the law is problematic, this was not the time or place to discuss amending it; and that, just as she could ask to treat me differently as an exception to the rule, another lecturer might ask for the same preferential treatment for Yossi Beilin, Israel's former justice minister who is known as one of the architects of both the Oslo Accords and Geneva Initiative and the initiator of the Taglit Zionist project. She also told me that Professor Ilan Pappe, author of the book 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,' among others, had been invited to deliver a lecture at Birzeit, but owing to the law, gave the talk off campus. The other lecturer told me that if I didn't write "Haaretz" in the registration form, I would have been able to stay. Still, another faculty member who I have known for 40 years walked past and said: "This is for your own protection [from the students]." ...

In the meantime, Katja Hermann, director of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation's Regional Office in the Occupied Territories, was told about the complication. Despite her appreciation of the importance of preserving a safe space for Palestinian students, much like feminists have created women-only spaces, she failed to understand why it is impossible to explain to protesting students ("who I don't even see," she noted) that this puritanism misses the mark. I am regularly invited to events organized by "Rosa," as the foundation is fondly nicknamed. The shocked Hermann then said that had she known about the law at Birzeit, and the decision to exclude me from the conference's audience, she wouldn't have agreed to hold the event within the university walls.

In the past twenty years, I have entered Birzeit University dozens of times, and have been an audience member at various academic conferences there. I have also interviewed faculty members both on and off campus. A year ago, an economics lecturer refused an interview, telling me, "It's not personal. But you know what the rules are." I didn't know there was a rule against being interviewed by Haaretz.

It is well known that the university doesn't employ Israeli Jews as academic staff, even from anti-Zionist left-wing circles. In 1998, my application to an Arabic course for foreigners was rejected. (A sarcastic friend, Iyad from Gaza, said back then: "With your Gazan accent, how can they accept you?") But I was never told that there was a university law against my very presence, as an Israeli Jew, on Birzeit's campus. The claim that the law applies to me because I am representing an Israeli institution is a shaky one: Palestinian citizens of Israel who teach at Israeli universities are not subject to the same policy. If I had known about the existence of such a law, I wouldn't have come to the conference. I have other places to invest my subversive energies.

I am writing about this incident precisely because I did not take it personally. I do not take personally the fact that some faculty members were hiding behind hypothesized angry students and a law that many others seem to be unaware of. In my opinion, it would have been more dignified to tell me explicitly: We do not differentiate between those who support the occupation and those who are against it, between those who report on policies to forcibly evict the Bedouin or those who carry out that policy; for us, there is only one place for every Israeli Jew - outside.

As Hass notes, this discrimination isn't against Israeli Arabs - only Jews.

(h/t Anne)

US airstrike kills Mavi Marmara "activist" in Syria

The World Bulletin (Turkey) writes:

A Turkish aid worker who survived the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010 has been killed in a US-led air strike targeting ISIL positions in the Syrian city of Idlib, Turkish media has revealed.
40-year-old Yakup Bulent Alniak was in Syria to carry out aid work ahead of the Islamic Eid al-Adha feast, organizing the distribution of meat of Syria's needy.

Alniak, who in 2010 escaped unharmed when Israeli commandos raided IHH Humanitarian Relief's Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara aid flotilla, in which ten Turkish citizens were killed after being hit by live ammunition, had been in Syria for two months.

He leaves behind his wife and two children.

Well, maybe he wasn't there exactly "to carry out aid work."

Other Turkish media say that he went to Syria to fight with the Syrian al-Qaeda offshoot the al-Nusra Front.

It seems that the supposedly peaceful IHH that sailed the Mavi Marmara is sending mujahadin to Syria to join the Sunni terror groups there.

Will they protest the US for killing their "aid worker"?

(h/t Rotter via Yenta Press)

09/27 Links: US slams Abbas’s ‘genocide’ UN speech as ‘offensive’; A Political Möbius Loop

From Ian:

Khaled Abu Toameh: Palestinians and the "Death Boats" Scandal

Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riad al-Malki claimed that each Palestinian paid $1,000 to Hamas personnel at the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. Others are believed to have paid $5,000 each to leave the Gaza Strip.
Malki said that preliminary investigations have revealed that the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have fallen victim to Hamas and Egyptian gangsters who managed to lure them with false promises.
According to various reports, some 13,000 Palestinians have already fled the Gaza Strip to Europe with the help of the gangsters. Most left through Hamas's smuggling tunnels or by bribing its security officials at the Rafah terminal.
Another 25,000 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip have applied to various European countries for immigration.
Although Hamas has denied any connection to the mass exodus, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip revealed that the Islamist movement had set up special offices to register those wishing to start a new life in Europe. They said that Hamas officials are providing the emigrants with forged visas and travel documents to enable them to enter Europe.

Pierre Rehov: Holy Land: The Perils Facing Christians

"All this talk about Israel being behind the pain of Christians in the Palestinian Territories is nonsense. Muslims intimidate us. They burn our stores, steal our real estate. They build mosques beside our churches, and make sure that the calls for prayer disrupt our services. They attack our daughters. There are many cases of rape that have never been reported. Families hide it out of shame, they move away. They flee." — Christian official.
Under dhimmi laws, non-Muslims under Muslim rule may not testify against Muslims, so it is virtually impossible for Christians whose lands have been stolen, or whose lives have been threatened, to appeal to the local legal system.
Apparently the story is only appealing when Israel can be blamed.

Michael Lumish: An Endless Political Möbius Loop.

This strikes me as a rather eerie moment in the seemingly endless Arab-Israel war.
We just recently came out of Operation Protective Edge and things are pretty much where I expected them to be. Hamas shoots rockets for years into southern Israel making life there something close to unbearable as Israeli children are practically born with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Israel thus kills a bunch of Gazans in securing the military objectives of degrading Hamas’s rocket capability and destroying those terror tunnels which were to be used to kidnap and kill innocent Jewish Israeli civilians.
Much of the west, naturally, ran with the Hamas playbook in the sense that they did their bit for the organization by screaming to the rooftops that Israelis are fascist, racist, apartheid, murderers… and, of course, they insist upon this because they ever so deeply care abut the well-being of the Jews under siege in the Middle East.
Hamas, meanwhile, was quite literally willing to lose a few thousand of its own people in order to give Israel an international public relations black eye and it was the western left that delivered that black eye, via the press, in fulfillment of what Dershowitz calls Hamas’s “Dead Baby Strategy.”
But now as Obama starts bombing the Islamic State in Iraq the level of howling against the Jews in Israel has abated for the moment and I feel like we’re just bobbing in the political waves. Obama just stood up before the United Nations and made some marshmallowy feel-good sounds that will amount to little or nothing.

!Shana Tova u'Metuka שנה טובה ומתוקה!

I want to wish all of my readers a Shana Tova u'Metukah, a happy and sweet year. May this be a year of good health, prosperity, joy and peace.

If you don't like this graphic, well, you can look at the one I made two years ago. Or three years ago,

I will not be blogging until Saturday night.

09/24 Links Pt2: Eichmann Is Alive and Well and Living in the Middle East; Thousand Protest Opera

From Ian:

Adolf Eichmann Is Alive and Well and Living in the Middle East

After 50 years of controversy, and many paperback editions, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem has now been consigned to the dustbin of history. The final nail in the coffin of Arendt’s thesis is Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem, which appeared in German in 2011 and has just been released in English. She has produced an eloquent, riveting work of history, which supersedes even David Cesarani’s excellent Becoming Eichmann.
Stangneth, an independent scholar based in Hamburg, spent 10 years combing through the Eichmann archives, reading many hundreds of pages of his impossibly messy handwriting, and listening to the taped conversations that Eichmann made with Willem Sassen and other Nazi exiles while they drank wine, reminisced, and defended the goals of National Socialism. She argues that the real Eichmann is the one revealed in the 29 hours of interviews recorded in Argentina in 1957, while he made his living as a rabbit farmer called Ricardo Clement (though everyone in the large Nazi community in Argentina knew Eichmann’s real name and history).
The case against Arendt, and the portrait of Eichmann that she gave to the world, is by now familiar: She coldly insists that the Holocaust was not a Jewish tragedy but a general human one, even while she demands superhuman ethical standards from the Jews. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

At UN, Obama says too many Israelis ready to abandon peace

Declaring the world at a crossroads between war and peace, US President Barack Obama said at the UN on Wednesday that the status quo in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is not sustainable, and that Israelis must not give up on peace.
“The violence engulfing the region today has made too many Israelis ready to abandon the hard work of peace,” he said. “That’s something worthy of reflection within Israel. Because let’s be clear: the status quo in the West Bank and Gaza is not sustainable.”
Obama also vowed to lead a coalition to dismantle an Islamic State “network of death” that has wreaked havoc in the Middle East and drawn the US back into military action in the region.
Speaking to the annual gathering of the United Nations General Assembly, Obama said the US would be a “respectful and constructive partner” in confronting the Islamic State militants through force. But he also implored Muslims in the Middle East to reject the ideology that has spawned groups like the Islamic State and to cut off funding that has allowed that terror group and others to thrive. (h/t MtTB)

Europe’s Anti-Semitism Comes Out of the Shadows

From the immigrant enclaves of the Parisian suburbs to the drizzly bureaucratic city of Brussels to the industrial heartland of Germany, Europe’s old demon returned this summer. “Death to the Jews!” shouted protesters at pro-Palestinian rallies in Belgium and France. “Gas the Jews!” yelled marchers at a similar protest in Germany.
The ugly threats were surpassed by uglier violence. Four people were fatally shot in May at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. A Jewish-owned pharmacy in this Paris suburb was destroyed in July by youths protesting Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. A synagogue in Wuppertal, Germany, was attacked with firebombs. A Swedish Jew was beaten with iron pipes. The list goes on.
The scattered attacks have raised alarm about how Europe is changing and whether it remains a safe place for Jews. An increasing number of Jews, if still relatively modest in total, are now migrating to Israel. Others describe “no go” zones in Muslim districts of many European cities where Jews dare not travel.

"Human rights organization says much of Middle East belongs to Israel"

The JordanZad Arabic website reports some astonishing news!

The Organization for Justice and Development for Human Rights stated that according to historical research, the existence of traces of Jewish temples in Jordan, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sinai and Palestine confirms that those countries were an integral part of the land of the kingdom of ancient Israel, which had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, which confirms a Jewish Israel.

The spokesman for the organization said that the Jews are indigenous to the Middle East and the Arab region, where they settled for thousands of years next to other peoples, including the Pharaohs, Chaldeans, Assyrians and Africans, Druze, Kurds and Armenians and Amazighs. They pointed out that the emergence of the Turks, Arabs and Persians in the area of the Middle East came through successive historical periods and they contributed to the expulsion of the indigenous people of the Middle East from their lands, including Jews, Kurds and Armenians and Amazigh.

As much fun as it is to read this in an Arab media outlet, it looks like there is no Organization for Justice and Development for Human Rights. This appears to be a very distorted version of this story (that was also in a recent linkdump):

An outspoken Moroccan poet has angered many of her countrymen by accusing the Arab world of imperialism and defending the Jewish people's right to a homeland in Israel.

In an interview with Med Radio last week Malika Mezzane, who is an ethnic Amazigh (or Berber), challenged the official line in the Arab world, where tiny Israel is accused of being "expansionist" and where Zionism - the movement for Jewish self-determination - is bizarrely equated with imperialism.

Asserting that it was in fact the Arab world which had pursued expansionist policies, Mezzane quipped that according to their own definition of the term, "Arabs are more Zionists than the Jews."

The Arab world, she said, believed that it was "God’s chosen people, and they have the right to extend their territory, at the expense of other nations."

Mezzane's own people, the Amazigh, are one of the indigenous non-Arab nations of northern Africa which who were conquered and subjugated by the invading Arab armies during the Muslim conquest in the seventh century.

Since then they have been subjected to persecution and periodic campaigns of cultural and physical ethnic-cleansing at the hands of Arab rulers in the region. In some cases, Amazigh calls for self-determination have been rejected by Arab states as somehow representative of "western imperialism" - a perverse inversion of the reality similarly employed by anti-Zionists against the Jewish state.

Further infuriating her listeners, Mezzane insisted that the Jews were justified in establishing "their state in Palestine, since it’s their homeland."

Apparently an expanded version of this interview was reported elsewhere and through the usual Arab media game of "telephone" it morphed into this story.

It is most interesting that JordanZad, which is very anti-Israel, didn't choose to dispute the history it reported.

(A small story but it seems like an appropriate one to end the Jewish year with. Shana tova!)

More from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Damascus, Syria, September 23 - The leader of a state deeply enmeshed in the support and arming of groups violently targeting civilian populations as a means of achieving political aims told visiting dignitaries today that he backs US-led efforts to combat groups violently targeting civilian populations as a means of achieving political aims.

President Basher Assad of Syria, who hosts the headquarters of various Palestinian terrorist organizations, told an Iraqi official that he welcomes any international operation to oppose terrorism. The president, whose government is currently involved in bloody civil war that has so far claimed nearly 200,000 lives and left millions homeless, considers the various rebel groups fighting its forces terrorists, even as his air force and army have used chemical weapons and indiscriminately targeted civilian areas for firebombing.

One of the chief sponsors of the Lebanese terrorist militia Hezbollah was apparently trying to portray his regime as anti-terror as the mostly Arab coalition conducted air strikes in and around Raqqa, the de facto capital of the emerging Islamic State. He accused other Arab states such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia of sponsoring terrorism, as they have backed some of Assad's foes instead of him.
Assad's remarks echoed those of Iran, also a Hezbollah sponsor, calling for action against terrorism. The regime in Tehran, which supports the Palestinian terrorist group Islamic Jihad, also expressed interest in joining the effort against terrorism.

The statement is not the first case of a Middle East sponsor of terrorism speaking out against terrorism. Longtime Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat continually denounced Israeli actions to neutralize Palestinian terrorism as "terrorism," while fomenting further terrorism against Israel. His successor Mahmoud Abbas takes a less active role in funneling funding and arms to terrorists in his organization's ranks, but continues to label Israel's actions terrorism and hold forth on the need to eliminate terrorism, while himself engaging in incitement to terrorism and in glorification of terrorists.

09/24 Links Pt1: U.S in Syria Parallels Israel in Gaza; Priest to UNHRC end witch hunt of Israel

From Ian:

Alan Dershowitz: United States Attack in Syria Parallels Israel's in Gaza

The air attack by American and Arab forces against ISIS and other terrorist targets parallels Israel's air attacks against Hamas terrorist targets in Gaza. According to retired General Wesley Clark, the United States air attacks are designed to degrade and destroy the infrastructure of the terrorist groups, including the electricity grid, the sources of their finance and other mixed military-civilian targets.
When Israel attacked Hamas military targets, including some that had mixed uses, it was condemned by the same Arab nations that participated in the joint United States-Arab attack in Syria. The difference of course is that the threat posed by ISIS is not nearly as imminent as the threats posed by Hamas. This is certainly true in relation to the United States and may also be true in relation to its Arab partners.
Among the most hypocritical nations participating in the US attack is, of course, Qatar, which not only condemned Israel for defending its civilians against Hamas rockets and tunnels, but actually funded the Hamas attacks and provided asylum for the Hamas terrorist leaders who ordered them. Hypocrisy is nothing new when it comes to the double standard applied by the international community against Israel. The United States and its Arab partners have the right to take preemptive action against terrorist groups without fear of UN condemnation, a Goldstone report, or threats to bring its leaders before the International Criminal Court. Yet everything Israel does, regardless of how careful it is to minimize civilian casualties, becomes the basis for international condemnation.
If the US attacks in Syria continue, there are likely to be civilian casualties, because ISIS will embed its fighters among civilians and the many hostages it has taken. When that happens, American and Arab bombs will kill some civilians. It will be interesting to compare the world's reaction to those civilian deaths with its reaction to deaths caused by Israeli rockets hitting human shields deliberately employed by Hamas. If the past is any predictor of the future, the ratio of civilian to terrorist deaths may be considerably higher in the American-led air attacks than it was in the Israeli air attacks. In past wars, such as those in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and the former Yugoslavia, the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths was far higher than the ratio brought about by Israeli firing into Gaza, where human shields are Hamas's tactic of choice.

Douglas Murray: Are Syria air strikes legal? Perhaps not, but why should we care?

‘Are Syria air strikes legal?’ asks the BBC as part of its lead story today. The answer is that nobody is very sure. But personally I do wonder: ‘Why should we even care?’
Is beheading people legal? Is crucifying people illegal? Probably not. But aside from some vague talk last month of international inspectors being sent in to Isis-controlled areas to try to collate evidence of war-crimes I have seen very little written about this.
This debate over the ‘legality’ of hitting Isis reminds me of nothing so much as the conversation after Osama bin Laden was shot in the head. I recall back then being on an edition of Question Time where, rather than expressing relief that a very bad man had been killed, everybody started talking about the legality or otherwise of the operation and then – save us – whether American forces had or had not buried the carcass of the dead terrorist with the proper Islamic funeral rites. Soon the conversation was not about the thousands of victims but about the niceties of Islamic sea-burial, whether they were wholly followed through and so on.
Personally I am not particularly bothered about whether it is ‘legal’ to strike Isis. International law is very far from being the set of Sinai-like tablets which young people in particular now seem to think it is. It is a very new, very flexible and completely evolving concept. Besides, lots of good things are not legal under international law. The campaign to save thousands of Kosovan Muslims in 1998 was not ‘legal’. In fact it was very much ‘illegal’ under international law. But it was still the right thing to do.

Priest tells UNHRC to ‘end witch hunt’ of Israel

A Greek Orthodox priest from Israel defended the Jewish state before the UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday, arguing that it is the only country in the Middle East where Christians are not persecuted, and imploring the 47 member nations to “end your witch hunt of the only free country in the region.”
“In the Middle East today, there is one country where Christianity is not only not persecuted, but affectionately granted freedom of expression, freedom of worship and security,” Father Gabriel Naddaf said.
“It is Israel, the Jewish state. Israel is the only place where Christians in the Middle East are safe.”

Jihadi relative of Toulouse killer walks free after police bungle

Confusion reigned Tuesday over the whereabouts of three suspected French jihadists arrested in Turkey who include the brother-in-law of Toulouse Jewish school killer Mohammed Merah after an apparent bungle by authorities.
The French interior ministry had announced that the three men, including the 29-year-old husband of Merah’s sister Souad, Abdelhoued Bagadhali, had been arrested by French police on their arrival at Paris’s Orly airport after being sent back from Turkey.
But it later turned out that the men had not landed in Paris at all, but were put on a flight to the southern city Marseille where they were — to their apparent surprise — able to walk freely from the airport.
The ministry claimed that after the pilot of the Paris-bound flight refused to allow them on board, the Turkish authorities put them on the flight to Marseille. But it insisted that Paris did not become aware of the change until after the men had landed on French soil.

NYT: US and Hezbollah are allies. Nasrallah: "US is source of terrorism."

The New York Times wrote:

They are sworn enemies who insist they will never work together, but in practice, Hezbollah and the United States are already working — separately — on a common goal: to stop the extremist Islamic State from moving into Lebanon, where Hezbollah is the most powerful military and political player and currently shares with Washington an interest in stability.

Weeks after Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group and political party, helped repel an Islamic State attack on the town of Arsal on the Syrian border, new American weapons are flowing to help the Lebanese Army — which coordinates with Hezbollah — to secure the frontier. American intelligence shared with the army, according to Lebanese experts on Hezbollah, has helped the organization stop suicide attacks on its domain in southern Beirut.

Hassan Nasrallh gave a speech yesterday that mentioned his opinion of the US:

On Hizbullah's position from the US-led coalition, Sayyed Nasrallah declared: "We are against the US's military intervention and against the international coalition, whether the target is the regime or the ISIL."

"Our principled stance does not change from one arena to another and we don't accept that Lebanon become a member of this coalition."

His Eminence explained that Hizbullah is against this coalition because America is the mother and source of terrorism and because it is the ultimate supporter of Zionist entity's terrorism.

"The US played a role in creating the Takfiri movements and it is not in an ethical position that qualifies it for leading a war against terrorism. The side that struck Japan with nuclear bombs, committed atrocities in the Vietnam war and stood against Gaza in the 50-day war is not ethically eligible to present itself as a fighter of terrorism."

According to Hizbullah Secretary General: "Based on Obama's statements, this coalition, is aimed at defending the US interests and this is not our business. All peoples in the region have the right to question America's motives."

On this level, Sayyed Nasrallah went back to the first days of July 2006 war: "They asked us to deliver our resistance arms and to accept the existence of multinational forces in the south of the border, in the airport and on the Lebanese territories."

" We rejected and toppled this scheme by the blood of our martyrs."

Notice that Nasrallah is bragging about violating UN Security Council Resolution 1701.

Some ally!

Arabs try to hijack IAEA meeting for anti-Israel agenda

Times of Israel reports:

Arab countries have circulated a resolution at a nuclear meeting that singles out Israel for special attention over its alleged nuclear arsenal.

The draft echoes previous such resolutions at annual meetings of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency.

Backed by 18 Arab states, including Syria, the resolution expresses concern “about the Israeli nuclear capabilities” and calls on Israel to join the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

“Israel alone possesses nuclear capabilities which are undeclared and not subject to international control, thus constituting a permanent threat to peace and security in the region,” the resolution states.

Israel has never acknowledged that it owns nuclear weapons.

The IAEA rejected a similar initiative, which the US spoke out against, in September 2013 by a vote of 51 to 43 at its annual meeting in Vienna, in which 32 nations abstained.

But that wasn't the only attempt by Arabs to politicize what would otherwise be an important conference.

The PLO representative had other things to accuse Israel of.

Salah Abdel Shafi spoke about the need to "validate reports that indicate the use of Israeli weapons containing radioactive materials against the Palestinian people during the recent aggression on Gaza."

The canard that Israel uses depleted uranium in war has been around since Lebanon in 2006, and even the UN found it to be baseless.

Abdul Shafi also said he was concerned for the effects that an Israeli nuclear accident might have. He said that there were "fears and anxiety because of the damage a disaster would have on the Palestinian people and the peoples of the surrounding Arab countries."

He expressed no concern for the fate of any Israeli Jews in case of such a nuclear accident.

To Arabs, the IAEA isn't an international organization that is meant to solve urgent issues that affect the entire world. It is just another tool to bash Israel.

Shiite Houthis take over Yemen's capital. Their logo says "Damn the Jews."

The fun in the Middle East continues:

Yemen's Houthi fighters have tightened their grip on the capital Sanaa after seizing much of the city in a lightning advance and signing an overnight deal to win a share of power, capping a decade-long uprising against the government.

On Monday, the heavily armed rebels raided the house of General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar and set up checkpoints across Sanaa, as the general and his allies fled and went into hiding.

They also raided the Suhail TV channel's headquarters in the capital, a day after the signing of a UN-brokered peace deal between the government and the Shia rebel group.

Here is the Houthi logo that they spray paint all over Yemen:

It says:

God is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Damn the Jews, Power to Islam."

(Some translate the fourth line as "Curse the Jews.")

Isn't that lovely?

Yemen's president has long claimed that Iran was behind the Houthi insurgency. He said that this capture of Sanaa was a "conspiracy is beyond any imagination. We were stabbed, and we were betrayed. . . . It is a cross-border plot where many forces allied together.”

But they hate Al Qaeda, so they must be out allies!

09/23 Links Pt2: Judea Pearl denounces Klinghoffer Opera; SJP Rutgers Calls for an 'Intifada'

From Ian:

Taking on the Terror Trio: Israel’s Strategy vs. Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic State

Following Israel’s Operation Protective Edge this summer, Hamas continues to control the Gaza Strip and openly considers any truce with Israel as a time to re-arm for the next conflict. Across Israel’s northern border, Hezbollah has been fighting to preserve the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but still poses a danger to the Jewish state. Meanwhile, the Islamic State has exploded across Iraq and Syria in a spectacle of unprecedented brutality that could one day also knock on Israel’s door.
What should Israel’s strategy be regarding this triumvirate of terror groups? JNS.org took the pulse of three Middle East and terrorism experts on the issue.
Where things stand with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic State Hezbollah and Hamas “pose a very particular threat to Israel but also a very special dilemma,” said Natan Sachs, a fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

Students For Justice In Palestine At Rutgers Calls For 'Intifada'

The Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at Rutgers University tabled in accordance with the "International Day of Action" against Israel and called for an intifada. Palestinian intifadas have included bus bombings, suicide bombers and the murders of hundreds of men, women and children by Islamic extremists.
The sign calling for an intifada read, "From Ferguson to Gaza, Intifada Intifada" while a second sign falsely accused Israel of being an apartheid state in the same vein as South Africa.
SJP's table on campus also encouraged the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel which attempts to isolate the Jewish state and strangle its economy.

Demonstrators protest Klinghoffer opera at Met season opening

Protesters calling for the Metropolitan Opera to cancel its production of “The Death of Klinghoffer” rallied outside the Met on its opening night Monday.
“We are going to be back here — everyone here and many, many more — every night of the Klinghoffer opera until the set is burned to the ground,” Rabbi Avi Weiss said in an address to demonstrators.
A coalition of groups in a statement called for the Monday afternoon protest at Lincoln Center, across from the Lincoln Center Plaza in Manhattan. Organizers say thousands are expected for the demonstration against a production that they contend promotes terrorism and anti-Semitism.
The opera depicting the 1985 murder by Palestinian terrorists of Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old Jewish-American man in a wheelchair, is set to premiere in October.
A letter written by Judea Pearl, the father of journalist Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered by militants in Pakistan in 2002, will also be read.
It reads, in part: “Choreographing an operatic drama around criminal pathology is not an artistic prerogative, but a blatant betrayal of public trust. We do not stage operas for rapists and child molesters, and we do not compose symphonies for penetrating the minds of ISIS [the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, also known as the Islamic State] executioners.”

Moderate Fatah group says "Death to Israel"

I spent a bit of time during the Gaza war pointing out that Fatah was shooting rockets at Israel just as enthusiastically as Hamas.

This is apparently a completely taboo subject. The Israelis don't want to embarrass Fatah leader Abbas, the media doesn't want to complicate their twin memes of "Israel vs. Hamas" and "Hamas bad, Fatah good."

But just in case you thought that there might be a slight difference between Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah members, here is what the cover image on the Fatah Abu Rish Battalions Facebook page was exactly one month ago, August 23: