Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, April 30, 2015

04/30 Links Pt1: IDF field hospital in Nepal treats nearly 100, delivers baby, Treats 'Miracle' Survivor

From Ian:

On first day, IDF field hospital in Nepal treats nearly 100, delivers baby

Israel’s field hospital in earthquake-hit Nepal began operating Wednesday morning, with staff treating nearly 100 patients and delivering their first baby — a boy — on the first day, according to an IDF spokesperson
Among the patients were some 30 Israeli nationals. Most were suffering from dehydration and were soon released to their hotels.
Over 250 doctors and rescue personnel were part of an IDF delegation that landed Tuesday in the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu, in the wake of Saturday’s magnitude-7.8 earthquake that devastated large swaths of the mountainous country, killing at least 5,000 and leaving some 8,000 wounded and tens of thousands seeking shelter and food.
The Israeli group set up the field hospital with 60 beds, including an obstetrics department, and was operating in coordination with the local army hospital.

Ethiopian Doctor Who Lit Yom Ha’Atzmaut Torch Heads IDF Team in Nepal

Israel’s first Ethiopian doctor, who lit one of the traditional torches on Yom Ha’Atzmaut give years ago, is leading the IDF medical team in Nepal.
Dr. Avi Yitzchak made Aliyah in the early 1990s in the Operation Shlomo airlift and has become a symbol of success for the Ethiopian community.
He arrived in Nepal five days ago, when he said there was absolutely nothing in the realm of first aid, and decided where to set up a field hospital, which went into operation immediately.
“We began accepting patients from the Nepalese army hospital that was not able to function well, especially in the field of surgery,” said Yitzchak, who specialized in surgery when he studied medicine at Soroka Hospital at Ben Gurion University.
“We are receiving citizens of Nepal with medical problems that the Nepalese army hospital cannot treat beaus they accept only soldiers and their families,” Dr. Yitzchak said from Katmandu.
When not in the army, Dr. Yitzhak works as a surgeon at Soroka.

Israel doesn’t care what you think

To Whom It May Concern,
If I hear one more time on Facebook, Twitter, et al that Israel’s field hospital in Nepal is somehow connected to the conflict with the Palestinians, I’m going to permanently block the person saying so on the grounds that they’re stupid.
Here’s the thing: Israel is an entire country, with all the complicated impulses and competing agendas of any human society. It is perfectly capable of being involved in two completely different things at once, of being angelic in one arena and terrible in another, just like every other country. The IDF doesn’t go to Nepal to avoid the Palestinian issue. It goes because Israelis have honed emergency medicine into an art form, and because the IDF has never quite shed its founding culture of adventurousness, and, above all, because there are people out there who desperately need help.
Those who see in every good news from Israel “hasbara” (propaganda) are missing the single most important fact you can know about Israel — that it isn’t a political campaign begging for your vote. It is a nation. With two million schoolchildren, dozens of cities, its own cinema scene and a language spoken nowhere else in the world. It doesn’t go away if it loses some imaginary popularity contest. And as with any human society, it offers an endless stream of failures and successes that will let you “prove” any narrative you want. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Mahmoud Abbas is responsible for thousands of Syrian Palestinian deaths

The Action Group for Palestinians in Syria now count 2,771 Palestinians killed since the start of the Syrian civil war. 100 were killed in March alone.

Many of them could have been saved if it wasn't for the deep desire by Arabs to destroy Israel - and a conscious decision by "leader" Mahmoud Abbas.

In January 2013, Mahmoud Abbas bragged that he chose to let the Palestinians die rather than enter his territories.

Abbas told a group of Egyptian journalists in Cairo late Wednesday that Ban contacted Israel on his behalf.

Abbas said Ban was told Israel "agreed to the return of those refugees to Gaza and the West Bank, but on condition that each refugee ... sign a statement that he doesn't have the right of return (to Israel)."

"So we rejected that and said it's better they die in Syria than give up their right of return," Abbas told the group.

Abbas said this in Arabic, without any shame. Because his audience knows that the real purpose of the "right to return" is to destroy the Jewish state, and has nothing to do with "Palestinian rights."

Since the Yarmouk crisis escalated in recent weeks with ISIS taking over part of the camp, the Arab world and the media have shone a small spotlight on the area where so many Palestinian Arabs have been living. But they won't say anything about how Abbas had the chance to save them, and probably still can.

The Action Group for Palestinians in Syria is an offshoot of the Palestinian Return Centre. The major NGO dedicated to helping Palestinians subscrines to the same twisted, sickening philosophy that Mahmoud Abbas does - they only want to save them if they remain useful pawns to destroy Israel.

We have heard nothing negative about this outrageous statement by Mahmoud Abbas from Amnesty International, Oxfam or Human Rights Watch. In fact, those groups purposefully misinterpret international law to justify Abbas' contention that there is a legal "right to return" for Palestinians - and their own antipathy towards Israel ensure that they will not disagree with Abbas' perverted morality that it is better for Palestinians to die than to give up a "right" that is literally nonexistent and that was created for the sole purpose of destroying Israel. (UN resolution 194 deliberately does not call it a "right" and the UN itself interpreted the resolution far more narrowly than Israel haters do today.)

It is scandalous that Mahmoud Abbas has not been called out for his despicable words that sealed the death sentence for thousands. And the silence from "human rights" organizations speaks volumes about their real desire to save lives when their pet Palestinians literally and explicitly prefer to see their people die.

In December 2013, the European Court of Auditors released a report on their direct financial support to the Palestinian Authority.

Among the findings of the audit (which found billions of euros of support missing) was that thousands of PA workers were being paid to do nothing.

[T]he audit found indications that in Gaza a considerable number of civil servants were receiving salaries, partly funded by Pegase DFS, because they were eligible for support by virtue of being on the PA payroll but who were not going to work due to the political situation in Gaza (see paragraph 6). Out of 10 Gaza beneficiaries selected by the audit for interviews, three stated that they were not working, while one was absent. The audit also found that the State Audit and Administra-tive Control Bureau was obliged, in accordance with PA regulations, to pay salaries for its 90 staff members in Gaza, all of whom are unable to work. These findings are consistent with estimates based on data from interviews provided in a 2010 evaluation of Pegase contracted by the Commission which indicated that 22% and 24 % respectively of the staff employed by the PA Ministries of Health and Education in Gaza were not working at the time.

The EU is now making noises that the gravy train is over.

A European diplomat said the European Union informed the Palestinian Authority in a recent communication that Europe would not be able to continue financial support for the salaries of staff in the Gaza Strip while they aren't actually working. The diplomat, who preferred not to be named, told a local Arab newspaper that "it has become extremely difficult for the EU to continue to justify contributing to the payment of staff salaries in the Gaza Strip in the absence of a solution to this issue as these employees did not attend to their work since 2007".

The diplomat said, "The objective of direct financial assistance provided by the European Union to the Palestinian Authority is to enable them to provide basic services to citizens and enable them to continue their performance...In the absence of the ability to achieve this we have said to the Palestinian Authority that the European Union will not be able to provide open support to pay Palestinian Authority salaries to those who are not enrolled in their jobs."

"We can not defend to our parliaments the payment of salaries to employees who are not working."

The diplomat said that the return of thousands of employees in Gaza to their jobs in the education and health sectors could be done very quickly, especially in light of the urgent need in Gaza for employees in these fields. The solution to this issue must come quickly, he said.

Why did it take 16 months for the EU to even have this conversation with the PA?

It is interesting that even after the latest pretense of unity between Hamas and Fatah, the Fatah workers in Gaza are still not doing their jobs even in health and education. This shows yet again that Hamas cares far less about Gazans than it does about its own political desires.

Why doesn't anyone compare Baltimore to Hamas police? (update)

Now that police beatings are in the headlines again, it is fashionable for so-called progressives to equate the police with Israeli soldiers - as if Israeli police and soldiers are the quintessential example of police brutality.

From The Guardian:

David Simon, the creator of The Wire, has again weighed in on unrest in his adopted city of Baltimore, turning his frustration from the protesters to the “army of occupation” of the city’s police.

“They were collecting bodies, treating corner folk and citizens alike as an Israeli patrol would treat Gaza, or as the Afrikaners would have treated Soweto back in the day. They’re an army of occupation. And once it’s that, then everybody’s the enemy.

I will bet anything that the lowest private in the IDF in Gaza last summer would act with more restraint towards those trying to kill him than David Simon would. I would also bet that the same private knows more about international law and the laws of armed conflict in protecting civilians than David Simon does.

To use Israel as the standard of brutality is not only an obscene slander, but it shows how successful anti-Israel propaganda is, and how open and susceptible otherwise intelligent people are to being manipulated by the haters.

Even more absurd is that the standard for treating Gazan civilians like subhumans comes not from Israel - but from those Israel was fighting..

This AFP report from yesterday will get about 1/10th of one percent of the coverage that stories about Israel do:

Police in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip beat and arrested protesters on Wednesday at a youth rally in the north of the besieged coastal territory, an AFP correspondent said.

More than 400 demonstrators gathered in Shujaiyeh, a neighborhood in eastern Gaza City that was razed during a July-August war between Hamas and Israel, urging reconstruction and calling for an end to intra-Palestinian division.

This undated video shows how much restraint Hamas shows towards civilians in Gaza.

It is not easy to find videos like this on YouTube in English. And coverage of daily Hamas brutality is minuscule compared to the much exaggerated, out of context and often fictional stories of Israeli law enforcement brutality.

Meanwhile, videos showing Israeli police helping Arabs - videos that completely destroy the lazy assumptions that journalists and writers like Simon make - are even more rare: This is not a coincidence. Journalists are lazy in accepting the fiction of widespread Israeli brutality, and anything that shows that to be false is naturally going to be buried because it is too hard to explain the reality to readers compared to reporting-by-meme.

This video shows an army patrol reviving an Arab in Hebron whose heart stopped after he was electrocuted.

Clearly, these soldiers are frantically trying to save the life of someone that David Simon thinks they passionately loathe.

People like Simon are well meaning - and are literally clueless that they are being brainwashed every day by an army of anti-Israel activists and a complicit media that discards even the appearance of objectivity while willing to accept and repeat the narrative of hate without question.

But when David Simon writes his own analysis for the public, he has the same responsibility as any journalist to get his facts right. His being exposed to lies for decades is not an excuse to skip fact-checking.

The irony is that much of the audience for these lazy reporters want to know the truth, even if Simon doesn't. There is a reason that the most popular video I've ever uploaded, with 400,000 views, shows IDF soldiers acting kindly towards Arab children.

(h/t Alexi, Ian)

UPDATE: Simon changed the text in his original article from Gaza to the West Bank. I suppose I could link to more videos of Israeli patrols playing soccer with Palestinian youths, but clearly he stands by his account of how Israel treats Arabs like dirt, and that turns him from someone who one could assume was duped by the media into someone who is doing the duping.

Young Arabs worldwide say they love Israel and the IDF

Al-Monitor reports:

It all began as a personal project by a young Israeli Arab who lives in northern Israel. He wanted to use social networking to convince other Israeli Arabs that the Israel Defense Forces are not some “army of evil” and that its soldiers are not as bloodthirsty as they tend to be portrayed in Arab propaganda films. He soon learned, however, that in the digital age, there is no end to surprises. Instead of messages and responses from the Israeli Arab audience he was targeting, he began receiving messages of peace and love from young Arab men and women from across the Arab world.

M. is an Israeli Arab Muslim who served in the IDF. He spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. Last year, he came across a series of billboards sponsored by the Balad Party as part of its campaign against the recruitment of Israeli Arabs into the IDF. He decided to fight back. “I saw the signs that were hung in Arab villages, and I kept track of the Facebook campaign being run by activists of Balad and the other Arab parties under the name ‘TZaHaL ma bistahal’ ['The IDF isn’t worth it']. It infuriated me,” he said.

“Activists would show up in the main square of Shfaram with bits of rubble, as if the rubble were from Gaza. They carried big signs too, as if they were trying to say, ‘Look what the army that is calling on you to enlist is actually doing in the Gaza Strip.’ Some of the activists would even paint their faces red, as if they were injured, while they tried to relay their message of ‘Don’t enlist!’ to young Bedouin, Druze, Christians and Muslims. I decided to respond to them on Facebook, so I made a page called ‘TZaHaL bistahal’ ['The IDF is worth it'], but instead of getting responses from the young Arabs to whom I was directing my personal campaign, I started to get photos and texts from young people around the Arab world. My jaw dropped.”

The photos and video clips sent from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan and other countries can be found on the Facebook page "BeTzaHaL" ("In the IDF"), and there are lots of them. One young woman from Saudi Arabia filmed a green Saudi passport. Her voice plays in the background, against a street scene in Jeddah, with a message for the people of Israel: “Good evening. I am a young woman from Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. I am a member of one of the better-known tribes of the Hijaz, and I am showing you Darajeh Square, a famous landmark in Jeddah. I’d like to send a message of peace and love to Israel and its dear citizens. I know it is surprising that a Saudi Arabian citizen sends a message to the people of Israel, but it is a basic principle of democracy that everyone is free to voice an opinion. I hope the Arabs will be sensible like me and recognize the fact that Israel also has rights to the lands of Palestine.”

A young man from Iraq shot a picture of his passport along the Tigris River. “I want to send a message of peace and love to the dear Israeli people,” he says. “I decided to shoot this video and tell you, ‘True, we are two countries that do not have friendly relations, but that doesn’t matter. I believe that the number of people who support Israel here will grow consistently.’”

Other young people send M. photos of their passports with handwritten messages in Hebrew, Arabic and English. It is always the same: “We love Israel.” One Egyptian police officer took it a step further by including his police cap along with his passport in the shot and wrote in Arabic, “We love, love, love Israel and its army.” He even added a picture of a heart with a Star of David in the middle of it.

M. said that the whole thing began with a young Coptic woman from Egypt who emigrated to the United States, where she experienced racism and manifestations of hatred toward Copts. “I quickly learned that she also speaks Hebrew, like many young people who studied Hebrew at Cairo University,” he said. “So I said to her, ‘Why don’t you do a little something to spread the message, so that people in other countries will see and hear that there are other voices in the Middle East?’ She sent a photo of her passport, and pretty soon I started getting pictures of passports from all across the Arab world. The very next photo came from Iraq.”

M. also engages the senders in private conversations, which are not posted publicly. “After I got the video from Baghdad, I asked the person who sent me the clip what it was that caused him to express support for Israel. He responded, ‘You’d be surprised. I’m not the only one. There are a lot of young people here who think like me. Everything that is happening to us here in Iraq — the killings, the terrorism, the veritable bloodbath — showed us that Israel has nothing to do with it. There are many young people living in Iraq today who have no religion. They are fed up with the religious wars between Sunnis and Shiites and want to live their lives without religion.”

M. says that he has also been receiving messages from a young student in Jordan. A member of a prominent clan, she claims to have many senior army officers in her family. What impresses her most about Israel is its liberalism. “I was amazed to learn that they have gay pride parades and that single-sex marriages [performed abroad] are accepted there,” she confided to M. “She told me that although she realized that her sexual orientation is different, in a traditional society she cannot come out as a lesbian, especially since she is a member of a prestigious clan. All she can do is be envious of the fact that in Israel, just a few dozen miles from the Jordanian border, a whole different life is possible.”

Over the past year, M. continued to receive a daily stream of messages from young Arabs, shedding light on yet another aspect of the dramatic changes underway in the Arab world. Yes, there are wars, revolutions and a return to traditional religions. There are bloody struggles between Shiites and Sunnis and the Islamic State has risen. At the same time, however, many young people long for another reality, even if perhaps it cannot be implemented in their own countries. Syria and Iraq have been torn apart, Yemen is fighting the rise of the Houthis and in Egypt, young people continue to dream of how liberalism and democracy might one day beat back religious zealotry.

It is certainly possible that the phenomenon encountered by M. during his private protest is a fringe one, but in an era of open skies and open Internet, no leader, not even a dictator, can block borders once they have been breached.

The Facebook page has some great videos.

04/29 Links Pt2: The legal fight against 'Jenin, Jenin'; In WW2 ICRC “lost its moral compass”

From Ian:

Bereaved families continue their legal fight against 'Jenin, Jenin'

Representatives of bereaved family members and Israeli soldiers who fought in the Battle of Jenin in 2002 are outraged that police were called over the tent they set up to protest the film, which they say defames Israeli soldiers.
Last Wednesday, on Israel's Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism, the protest tent was erected outside Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein's office to protest his decision not to open judicial proceedings against Israeli Arab filmmaker Mohammad Bakri for his film "Jenin Jenin" and its portrayal of Israeli soldiers.
In many Israelis' eyes, the film constitutes libel against Israeli soldiers by portraying the battle, in which 23 Israeli soldiers and 52 Palestinians were killed, as a wide-scale massacre of Palestinian civilians, a claim refuted by the U.N., as well as Human Rights Watch and other nongovernmental organizations. Weinstein, upholding the decision made by his two predecessors, said in December 2014 he had not been presented with "extraordinary claims not known before."
Representatives for the soldiers who fought in the battle have appealed to the president, prime minister, Knesset speaker, defense minister, Israel Defense Forces chief and attorney general to overturn the decision.
Attorney Israel Caspi, who fought in the Jenin battle and is representing the bereaved families and the soldiers, told Israel Hayom, "Police came to us and questioned us under the pretense that there had been a disturbance, which is a lie."

We Must Sever All Connections to Unesco

In 1975, the great violinist Yehuda Menuhin refused to participate in a Unesco event in Paris after the agency passed an anti-Israel resolution. From Germany, even leftist writer, the famous Heinrich Böll, denounced Unesco for its stance on Israel.
That should be the behaviour of cultural personalities today, those who believe in truth and fairness, as well: they should stop working with Unesco unless it withdraws its anti-Semitic resolutions, while academicians from around the world should express their support for the Israeli archeologists working in Jerusalem.
The measures taken by Unesco against Israel, in addition to being intolerable, are grotesque. The cultural cancellation of Israel justifies its physical annihilation. It is a process of extermination already used by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, which led to the death of million of Jews.
Unesco is a United Nations body that has the task to defend education, science and culture. What is happening is a perversion and a reversal of its role.
I will personally refuse to cooperate with this body until it eliminates its intolerable anti-Semitic spirit. This entails not accepting their invitations and refusing to report on their good initiatives. Brave and free people should do the same.
Israel can win this battle only with the support of the Westerners who still care about the fate of their civilization.

Red Cross chief slams his own group’s WWII record

The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross attacked his organization’s World War II record, saying it “lost its moral compass.”
Peter Maurer, presenting the keynote address Tuesday at a Geneva commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi death camps, said the ICRC “failed to protect civilians and, most notably, the Jews persecuted and murdered by the Nazi regime.” Maurer said his group “failed as a humanitarian organization because it lost its moral compass.”
The commemoration event, jointly sponsored by the ICRC and World Jewish Congress, was attended by 200 senior members of Geneva’s diplomatic corps. It featured a panel discussion with Deborah Lipstadt, an Emory University Jewish history and Holocaust studies professor, and James Orbinski, the former international president of Doctors Without Borders, according to a WJC news release.
During World War II, the ICRC, headquartered in Geneva, was the principal humanitarian institution maintaining communications with both the Allied and Axis powers. While the ICRC provided assistance and protection to Allied prisoners of war held by Nazi Germany, it did not do the same for Jewish deportees because the Nazis refused all humanitarian requests to help Jewish victims. At the same time, the ICRC did not publicly denounce the deportation of Jews to concentration camps.

Latest videos of antisemitic harassment - and soccer - on the Temple Mount

Here we see the army of screaming Muslim women following a group of peaceful Jews strolling on their holiest spot.

It is as pure a view of antisemitism as one can imagine, and the Muslims are very proud of them.

Only after the Jews exit the holy spot do they start singing. (I really want them to adapt a "Yibaneh Hamikdash" tune to "Allahu Akbar" and start dancing every time they hear the chants outside the Mount gates.)

This soccer game was filmed during Passover:

Area Man Can Prove Jews To Blame For Everything (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Dearborn, MI, April 29 - Local hairdresser Malik Hassan regularly wows customers with his uncanny ability to convincingly argue that Jews are behind every negative phenomenon ever documented, Detroit-area sources reported Wednesday.

Mr. Hassan, 28, often regales his clients with feats of logic and analysis involving history, science, current events, politics, and various social issues, always adducing evidence to buttress his thesis that Jews control world affairs, but only in an evil way. The unmarried father of two typically holds forth for about fifteen customers per day at the Saara Salon, whose name involves a play on words that uses a Semitic root that means both "hair" and "storm," the latter a tribute to the sensibilities of Dearborn automotive hero Henry Ford and his dedication to exploring alleged Jewish conspiracies as often featured in the publication Der Stürmer.

"Malik is a master," says coworker Ayaan Faridi, 26. "Within three minutes of hearing about the earthquake in Nepal, he'd already put together the pieces and come up with a persuasive line of reasoning as to how the Jews caused the disaster, and how they stand to profit from it. I couldn't do his argument justice, but his basic point was that you can't trust those Jews."

Ms. Faridi recalled an earlier instance, several months ago, in which Hassan linked Jews to Bubonic plague, autism, chemtrails, and pollution from hydrofracking, doing so with a fluidity and facility that astounded her. "He was pulling information from I don't know where, but he had every last one of us convinced," she recounted, to nods from the other hairdressers.

Accusing Jews of nefarious conspiracies is nothing new. Hassan's uniqueness lies in his original application of them to everyday developments in a way that compellingly explains how there is no need to engage in self-examination or improve oneself, since all evil comes from the monstrous, all-encompassing Jewish conspiracy, says social scholar David Duke.

"Any cultured person will have encountered the eminently reasonable notion that the Jews orchestrated 9/11, faked the Holocaust, arranged for Kennedy and Lincoln to be assassinated, what have you. I think where Mr. Hassan excels is the smoothness with which he weaves his narrative, bringing in even the most innocent-sounding facts and showing how, in actuality, they point ever more convincingly to a comprehensive, worldwide, eternal Jewish plot to enslave the rest of humanity."

Hassan recently began to outdo himself, noted Duke, in showing how Jews were responsible for events that until now were thought to precede the advent of Jews entirely. "I heard him last week, and he blew my mind. I'd never before considered how Jews might be to blame for the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs; for the decline of the Egyptian Old Kingdom (2686-2181 BCE); and the mysterious cataclysmic event that violently tore a huge chunk off the Earth in its early period in order to form what became the moon."

Even more impressive, said a frequent client at the salon who declined to be named lest the Jews get to her, Hassan can even demonstrate how Jews can reach into fiction and folklore to manipulate events. "He just told me how there's no way to explain the Death Star's destruction of Alderaan unless the Jews were ultimately behind it," she said, still stunned.

"It's like there's no longer any boundary between fact and fantasy."

04/29 Links Pt1: Israel’s aid team to Nepal larger than any other country’s; One Israeli Still Missing

From Ian:

Israel’s aid team to Nepal larger than any other country’s

Israel’s aid team to the earthquake-battered Himalayan nation of Nepal is the largest in manpower of any international aid mission.
Over 250 doctors and rescue personnel were part of an IDF delegation that landed Tuesday in the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu, in the wake of Saturday’s magnitude-7.8 earthquake that devastated large swaths of the mountainous country, killing at least 5,000 and leaving some 8,000 wounded and tens of thousands seeking shelter and food.
The Israeli group set up a field hospital with 60 beds that began operations on Wednesday in coordination with the local army hospital.
Nepal’s Prime Minister Sushil Koirala and the Nepalese Army’s chief of staff visited the field hospital to attend its opening ceremony.

Nepal field hospital, Israel’s largest ever, set to open Wednesday

After a series of delays, the Israel Defense Forces field hospital in Kathmandu will start treating thousands of those injured in the weekend’s devastating earthquake Wednesday morning, kicking off Israel’s largest ever effort of its kind.
The hospital’s opening will come a day after Israeli teams began search and rescue operations, though they did not find any survivors.
An IDF spokesperson said the hospital, located next to the Nepali military hospital, will be operational by 8:30 a.m. local time and treat some of the thousands of injured Nepalis hurt in the 7.8 magnitude quake, which claimed the lives of over 5,000 as of Tuesday afternoon.
Nepalese officials expect the death toll to climb to as high as 10,000. Around 8,000 people have been injured while the United Nations estimated that eight million people had been affected.
The Israeli hospital and crew only landed in Kathmandu Tuesday morning, after a series of strong aftershocks delayed the flight by a day, and soldiers immediately began setting up, said Col. Yoram Laredo, who is heading up the army’s relief effort.

PMW: Palestinian Antisemitism: Jewish plan to conquer the world‎; Judaism permits killing Gentiles

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an Antisemitic forgery describing how Jews allegedly plan to subjugate the world under Jewish rule. It was published in Russia in 1903 and translated into multiple languages. In 1921, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was exposed as a false document. Palestinian Media Watch has documented that Palestinians present The Protocols as a true manifestation of Jews' and Israelis' aspirations for the future.
PA TV also recently served as a platform for demonizing statements by a Gazan university professor. In an interview, Dr. Ibrahim Abrash, political science professor at the Al-Azhar University, explained that Judaism is based on extremism and that it permits stealing from and killing Gentiles:

Judaism permits stealing from and killing Gentiles, says Gaza university professor

Fatah official speaks about "Protocols of Elders of Zion" as true Jewish document

Fatah Spokesperson Osama al-Qawasmi:‎ "According to Israel's ideology, strategy ‎and policy from 1956 until now, Gaza is outside the Israeli ideological thinking. Even in ‎their Protocols [of the Elders of Zion] and even in their Bible [it says]: 'Don't live in ‎Gaza.'" [Official PA TV, April 5, 2015‎]

The humanitarian crisis for Gaza surfers continues

Things keep getting worse in Gaza.

There is a shortage of surfboard wax.

As a result, they have to manufacture their own substandard types of wax, exacting a terrible psychological cost.

I hope the UN Human Rights Commission addresses this crisis immediately.

"Jews destroyed the Arab character of the Jewish Quarter" (NYT, 1971)

From the New York Times, May 29, 1971:

It sounds ridiculous to claim that the Jewish Quarter had an "Arab character" after only 19 years, but isn't it equally ludicrous to characterize all of Jerusalem outside the Green Line as "Arab East Jerusalem"? Yet that is what is routinely written today.

Jews were a majority in Jerusalem since the 1860s. Since 1900, Jerusalem's Old City and its neighborhoods/villages in the east, north and south have been under 18 years of Ottoman rule, 30 years of British rule, 19 years of Jordanian Arab rule and 47 years under the rule of the Jewish state. For some reason, the 19 years of illegal Jordanian occupation is considered the status quo, the anomalous 19 years that makes the entire area supposedly "Arab."

But it isn't. Jerusalem has never been an important city to Arabs or Muslims except during times that it was controlled by Jews or Christians. Jews didn't only live in the Jewish Quarter, but they lived throughout the city as well as in supposedly "Arab" neighborhoods like Silwan - a Biblical village later settled by Jews who called it Kfar HaShiloach.

There were even synagogues and yeshivot in the Muslim quarter 150 years ago.

As absurd as the headline of this story is, only a few decades later the world now believes the lie.

(h/t/ Ahron, YMedad)

Map depicting the MV Maersk Tigris’ original path toward the UAE and diversion after being intercepted by the IRGCN. (Source: marinetraffic.com)

The best roundup of what happened yesterday in the Persian Gulf comes from the (Asia/Pacific) Diplomat site:

The shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz have long been highlighted as a potential flashpoint amid the simmering geopolitical tensions between the United States and Iran. Its waters are of particular geostrategic significance given that over a third of the world’s petroleum traded by sea passes through the region. Iran has repeatedly emphasized its dominance over the waters, threatening to blockade the strait in a time of crisis. Today, we saw an acute manifestation of Iran’s audacity when the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) seized and escorted the Marshall Islands-flagged MV Maersk Tigris, a shipping vessel belonging to Denmark’s A.P. Moller–Maersk Group and chartered by Singapore-based Rickmers Shipmanagement, toward the Iranian port at Bandar Abbas. The incident sparked a response by U.S. Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT), which ordered the USS Farragut, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer that was 60 miles from the point of the Tigris’ interception, to respond to the vessel’s distress signal.

Saudi Arabia-backed, UAE-based Al Arabiya was among the first sources to break the news in English. It reported that Iran had fired warning shots (true) and seized a U.S.-flagged vessel (false). Nevertheless, the initial reports sparked considerable online panic at the prospect that the United States and Iran could be headed for a major confrontation. The report also noted that the crew of the ship numbered 34 and were American. Needless to say, U.S. citizens being held against their will by Iran hits a raw nerve for the United States given certain historical events. We’ve since learned, thanks to Reuters, that the Tigris’ has a crew of 24, most of whom hail “from Eastern Europe and Asia.” In the process of the seizure, the IRGCN fired across the bow of the ship. Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steve Warren told CNN that “the master was contacted and directed to proceed further into Iranian territorial waters. He declined and one of the IRGCN craft fired shots across the bridge of the Maersk Tigris.”

In the wake of the Tigris incident, CNN learned that a U.S.-flagged ship had been intercepted by the IRGCN – on Friday, April 24, four whole days before the Tigris incident. Reportedly, the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet issued a notice to commercial ships to exercise caution in the Persian Gulf and the Hormuz Strait following the incident.

The Marshall Islands isn’t normally a country whose name you’ll read at the center of a major international incident, but the fact that the Tigris was flagged with the country’s flag complicated the situation. After gaining independence from the United States in 1986, the Marshall Islands enjoys pseudo-protectorate status under the United States’ security umbrella. As per the Compact of Free Association governing the relationship between the United States and the Marshall Islands, the United States “has full authority and responsibility for security and defense matters in or relating to the Republic of the Marshall Islands.” The U.S. Defense Department’s lawyers have determined, however, that for the purposes of the Tigris‘ capture by the IRGCN, the U.S. has no obligation to respond or come to the defense of the Marshall Islands-flagged vessel. (Eli Lake and Josh Rogin have more on the Marshall Islands angle over at Bloomberg View.)

.@CBSDavidMartin "Pentagon lawyers have determined..US has no obligation to come to the defense of a Marshall Islands-flagged vessel at sea"
— Major Garrett (@MajorCBS) April 28, 2015

There is a flip side to the US agreement to defend the Marshall Islands - it is that the Marshall Islands cannot defend itself. As a State Department factsheet explains,

The United States has full authority and responsibility for security and defense of the Marshall Islands, and the Government of the Marshall Islands is obligated to refrain from taking actions that would be incompatible with these security and defense responsibilities.

By relying on the US for its defense, it means that if attacked, the tiny country has no alternative means of defense.

Which means that when the Defense Department lawyers say that the Tigris does not fall under that agreement, the Marshall Islands has no recourse. On the contrary - the US would probably act to stop any move by the Marshall Islands to confront Iran militarily.

The symbolism cannot be lost on Israel and the Gulf countries who have been told for decades that the US will defend them against aggression. Here, the US has openly and swiftly signaled that in today's world, such defense is much more rhetoric than reality.

This is all besides the more general promise by the US to keep the shipping lanes to the Gulf open for all that seems to have been significantly weakened..

US allies are being told that they cannot rely on the US anymore and that any assertions to the contrary are just words. America will make noises, for sure - the USS Farragut is just that - but the US message to its allies is much louder than the message that the destroyer is supposedly making to Iran.