Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, October 25, 2015

10/25 Links: Greasing the wheels of hate; 'Pro-Israel' J Street says Jews not indigenous to Israel'

From Ian:

The decision by South Africa’s ruling ANC Party to host a Hamas delegation last week should have aroused shock and dismay among countries truly committed to achieving a more peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians than is currently the case. Instead, the silence was deafening.
South African President Jacob Zuma chose to meet with Khaled Mashaal, the leader of the Gaza-based terrorist organization that openly declares its intention to establish an Islamic state upon the ruins of the State of Israel.
As Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt wrote in a letter to Zuma, “This meeting serves to legitimize Hamas, an unabashed terrorist organization, whose ultimate goal is the establishment of an Islamic Palestinian state through the violent destruction of the State of Israel.” Indeed, during the current wave of Palestinian violence in Israel, Hamas has called for an escalation of attacks against Israelis, including reportedly suicide bombings, and has publicly cheered terrorist attacks that have killed and wounded Israeli civilians.
“The reception of Hamas by the leader of South Africa and its ruling party gives official legitimacy to this terrorist, pro-violence, anti-peace, anti-Semitic organization,” the ADL said.
“This meeting will likely be seen as an act of hostility towards Israel, and create significant discomfort and apprehension among South Africa’s Jewish community.”

'Pro-Israel' J Street says Jews not indigenous to Israel'

It would seem to be a fairly basic principle for a pro-Israel organization to accept: that the Jewish people is an indigenous nation to the Land of Israel.
Not so for J Street and several other self-defined "liberal Zionist" organizations.
At the World Zionist Congress last week, a proposal entitled “Recognition of the Jewish People as Indigenous to the Land of Israel” was proposed by LAVI, a relatively small but active group of newcomers to the World Zionist Organization's legislative body.
While it seemed to be stating the obvious, the authors of the bill emphasized that expressing the principle of Jewish indigenous status in such clear terms was necessary to "answer... the core anti-Israel accusation that Jews are foreign colonialists in the country and instead affirms that the Jewish people have indigenous rights to live in their ancestral home."
But instead of receiving the unanimous support one might expect, the proposal faced dogged and determined opposition from J Street and other liberal factions - much to the incredulity of its supporters.
Making the opposition all the more bizarre was the fact that the bill clearly expressed that it does not necessarily "does not negate the indigenous status of any other people."

Bibi’s critics must not commit ‘Mufti denial’

Those who claim that Bibi singled out the Mufti from among hundreds of Nazi fellow-travellers and antisemites to ‘delegitimise’ the Palestinian cause ‘for political gain’ are engaging in ‘Mufti denial’.
How many antisemites went as far as the Mufti and recruited tens of thousands of Muslims to his three SS Bosnian Muslim divisions? They committed crimes so unspeakable that Yugoslavia demanded that the Mufti be indicted at the Nuremberg trials. According to Dr. Yosef Sharvit, the Mufti was even considered a greater Nazi criminal than Adolf Eichmann.
The failure of the Allies to bring the Mufti to trial meant that the Arab world was never de-nazified. Instead, 2,000 Nazi war criminals were given shelter in the Arab world, there to take antisemitism to stratospheric heights.
Antisemitism is not a by-product of the Arab-Israeli conflict: it has deep ideological roots. The Mufti’s alliance with the Nazis and with the German-funded Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, was not a mere matter of anti-colonial expediency. Their legacy of religious bigotry is still with us today, in the beheadings committed by Da’esh in Iraq and in the stabbings on Israel’s streets.
Some good may come out of the current controversy: more people may be moved to focus on the Mufti’s hugely significant role, a role that academia and the media have hitherto been inclined to ignore or downplay.

I feel reasonably certain that there is not a single individual on the planet today under more intense political pressure than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

If the guy blinks in the rain he gets smacked around from people throughout the world for not doing it correctly. I have never seen such persistent malice directed toward a western-style political figure. I am not even sure that Richard Nixon received this kind of unending abuse... even at the hands of Hunter S. Thompson. And, the thing of it is, what terrible crimes can you really lay at the guy's feet?

The man started no wars. Even last summer's strangely named Operation Protective Edge was a response to thousands of rocket attacks into southern Israel that went on for years without international complaint. His older brother, Yoni, was the lead in the elite Israeli army commando unit Sayeret Matkal that stormed Entebbi, Uganda, saving all those kidnapped people, and the only Israeli to have died in that operation. This makes Benjamin Netanyahu the younger brother not only of an Israeli national hero, but of a Jewish national hero, as well.

Now there is hysteria because he had the audacity to suggest that it was the Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem that convinced Hitler to slaughter the Jews.

The fact of the matter is that that the Mufti was all in favor of slaughtering the Jews in the Middle East to the very last man, woman, and child, unless they were willing to submit to Muslim rule, perhaps even then.

University of Maryland historian, Jeffrey Herf, has some words:

In his now famous comments at the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem on October 20th, Netanyahu claimed that Haj Amin al-Husseini convinced Hitler to change his anti-Jewish policy from one of expulsion to one of extermination.

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time [of the meeting between the mufti and the Nazi leader]. He wanted to expel the Jews,” Netanyahu said. “And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here [to mandatory Palestine],’” continued the prime minister. “‘So what should I do with them?’ He [Hitler] asked,” according to Netanyahu. “He [Husseini] said, ‘Burn them.’”

In the Knesset in 2012, the Prime Minister asserted that Husseini “was one of the leading architects of the Final Solution,” and that “he, more than anybody else, convinced [Hitler] to execute the Final Solution, and not let the Jews leave [Europe]. Because, God forbid, they would come here. Rather that they would be annihilated, burned, there.”

Jeffrey Herf is an important historian of Nazi Germany and he denies that the Mufti convinced Hitler to exterminate the Jews rather than deport them.

Herf is one of the prominent scholars, along with Matthias Küntzel and Paul Berman, among a few others, that is analyzing the connection between Nazi ideology and the rise of Islamic Jihadism in the twentieth-century via organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and their little off-spring such as Hamas and the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL). What he suggests is that Netanyahu overreached in an effort to "push back against efforts to diminish Husseini’s role as a collaborator and ideological soulmate with Nazi Germany."

As far as I am concerned, good for Netanyahu. It was the Mufti who screamed for Jewish blood in the 1920s for "defiling" al-Aqsa, just as the filthy-footed dictator Abbas does today.

Herf assures us that "while (the Mufti) agreed with Hitler about fundamental ideological issues, he was in no position to have a major influence on decision-making about German policy toward the Jews in Europe."

Nonetheless, Mohammed Effendi Amin al-Husseini, the Nazi Mufti, was important to Hitler's plans in carrying out the Final Solution in the Land of Israel and throughout the Middle East. Hitler's intention was to hand the baton over to Husseini once the Axis powers defeated the Allies in the Middle East.

In his self-defense Netanyahu said this:

My intention was not to absolve Hitler of his responsibility, but rather to show that the forefathers of the Palestinian nation, without a country and without the so-called ‘occupation’, without land and without settlements, even then aspired to systematic incitement to exterminate the Jews.

Netanyahu is correct.

This is not a war over land rights. This is not even a war wherein both sides desire to fight one another. The Jews do not want this fight and are willing to share the tiny Jewish homeland. The Jews in Israel are far more interested in creating computer software, medical technology, good food, unnecessary litigation, and Natalie Portmans, than they are in trying to stave off violently-crazed, Koranically-obsessed Arabs.

Herf notes:

The lies that Mahmoud Abbas and others have told in recent weeks about Israel’s supposed desire to somehow infringe on the rights of Muslims to pray at the Al Aksa Mosque have their origins in lies that are now at least 75 years old.

It goes on and on and on and on.

Mahmoud Abbas tells Israeli-Arabs - as Arafat did before him and as the Mufti did before him - that Jews want to conquer Al-Aqsa... which is, frankly, looking more and more like a perfectly dandy idea, if you ask me. In the 1920s, as they have done every decade, they draw the knives against old Jewish women and 13 year old Jewish boys on bicycles. One of the Mufti's major contributions toward the persecution and murder of the Jews during the Holocaust, aside from encouraging the British exclusion of Jews from "Palestine" with the White Paper of 1939, was his war time radio broadcasts in Arabic throughout the Middle East, calling on his fellow Arabs to launch themselves upon head-chopping sprees against their Jewish neighbors.

As Caroline Glick notes in an article for the Jerusalem Post entitled, Crazy like a fox:

Husseini used his position as well to scuttle British attempts to trade German prisoners of war for Jews. In one such documented episode, in 1943 Husseini appealed to SS commander Heinrich Himmler to cancel a deal to exchange 4,500 Jewish children and 500 Jewish adults from Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria to cancel the deal and send the Jews to Auschwitz.

Himmler bowed to his appeal. The Jews were sent to the gas chambers.

Glick also speculates that Netanyahu's gaffe may have been anything but:

Due to his “gaffe,” every Western media outlet reported on Husseini’s actions. Some even mentioned that in his PhD dissertation, current Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said the Holocaust was both a myth and a joint Zionist-Nazi project. For most Westerners, this is the first they’ve heard of the fact that the Palestinian’s George Washington was a Nazi war criminal.

Like I said, crazy as a fox.

Whatever Netanyahu's intentions, people must be made to understand that the roots of the Palestinian National Movement are fascistic, violently anti-Semitic, and deeply influenced not only by Koranically-based hatred toward Jews, but also by forms of early-mid twentieth-century anti-Jewish racism of the type that the Nazis excelled at and spread into the Arab world.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Arafat's uncle and the father of Palestinian-Arab nationalism, may not have convinced Hitler to undertake the Holocaust in Europe, but he was an enthusiastic supporter of the project and hoped to import not Jews, but the Holocaust, itself, into the Middle East.

If the Palestinian-Arabs had gotten their way during World War II there would be very few Jews left in this world. There are, in fact, very few Jews left in the world as it is, mainly due to Muslim and European racist efforts to trim Jewish numbers over the course of many centuries.

There are somewhere around thirteen to fourteen million Jewish souls worldwide, today. If the Mufti had his way there would be none of us left and this is the "George Washington", as Glick puts it, of the Palestinian National Movement.

The man was a racist and a murderer and his followers were Nazis.

Whatever Netanyahu may have gotten wrong, he certainly has that right.

Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 11 years and over 22,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

Fatah English message exact opposite of Arabic (poster)

Hypocrisy from Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party:

Source for English
Source for Arabic plus this
Arabic text: "Jerusalem's rage" #Jerusalem's rage
Fatah - Palestinian National Liberation Movement
The Commission of Mobilization and Organization

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

Some crude propaganda from the official Facebook page of Fatah (detail):

To illustrate "Israel," they choose Bibi, Yehuda Glick - who was nearly assassinated for demanding Jews have equal rights on the Temple Mount - and three generic Orthodox Jews.

As always, the minority of haredim are used to represent Israelis. Because, despite their protests that they have nothing against Jews, their entire hatred for Israel is based on the fact that they hate Jews. Nothing has changed in over 100 years,

The funny part is that their own photos of their heroes on the same Facebook page resemble the ISIS member pictured here a lot more than any Jews do.

Like this:

And this image supporting stabbing Jews:

And this:

The Sunday Times (UK) and IBT report on @UNRWA hate and incitement

The pressure is mounting on UNRWA and Chris Gunness to be more open about their big incitement and antisemitism problem.

From The Sunday Times (UK, paywalled):

A UN agency that runs schools and social services for Palestinians is facing calls to sack employees using social media to celebrate attacks on Israelis.

Facebook posts by UN staff have included photographs showing blood- drenched knives held by Palestinian men and women in keffiyeh scarves, throwing stones at Israel’s defence forces.

Almost two dozen UN employees have been exposed for publishing their support for a recent bout of stabbing attacks by Palestinians that targeted Israelis.

UN Watch, a Geneva-based watchdog, has called on the body, United Nations relief and works agency (Unrwa), to dismiss those who have posted the hate-filled messages.

Hillel Neuer, the director of UN Watch, said incitement to hatred, particularly by teachers, would only contribute to violence in the Middle East. He called on the UN to demonstrate that it would not turn a blind eye to racism among its staff.

“Governments that fund Unrwa would not tolerate this behaviour,” he said. “We have submitted screen shots of postings by 22 individuals, including by teachers, advocating the stabbing of Jews, and we don’t know what action is being taken against them.”

The UN conceded last week that some of those on its payroll had faced disciplinary action for violating the organisation’s rules on social media.

However, it also added that more than 90 “imposter Facebook pages” had been wrongly attributed to its staff by critics.

There are no figures for the number of staff involved in disciplinary action or the type of punishments meted out.

Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for Unwra, said one account identified by Neuer was attributed to a school in Syria that no longer existed and the former staff were no longer on the UN payroll.

“The school in question, because of the war, had long ceased to be an Unrwa school. It was that specific story that I called out as false,” Gunness told The Sunday Times.

“I am in no way defending staff who are found . . . to have violated neutrality rules. We are taking these allegations seriously and staff who are found to violate UN neutrality will be reprimanded.”

A total of 10 Israelis have been murdered in stabbing attacks and 49 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire, including 27 said to be attackers. One suspected attacker was shot dead yesterday by the Israeli military at a Jerusalem checkpoint.

John Kerry, the US secretary of state, met Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, and Jordan’s King Abdullah II yesterday as part of attempts to defuse the crisis.

Kerry secured backing for new rules on access to the Temple Mount, the holy site for Muslims and Jews at the heart of the crisis.

US congressional sources said the State Department had cut $80m (£52m) from its $370m economic grant to the Palestinian Authority to send a message that incitement could not be condoned.

The International Business Times also reported on the story.

I have been wondering why there are supposedly so many "imposter pages." Why are so many people supposedly pretending to be UNRWA teachers?

Here's someone I identified as an UNRWA teacher last month, Jordanian Emad Sbeihat. He posted pro-terror photos and an antisemitic cartoon.

Now, his Facebook page no longer identifies him as associated with UNRWA. No job is listed now.

However, his posts indicate that he still works at UNRWA. He recently linked to an UNRWA memo about school canteen, for example, and to posts from an UNRWA school in Jordan that he probably works for. He has posted announcements to protest the potential delay of UNRWA school year last August. And he has photos from within classrooms.

All while he posts "God curse the Jews and Zionists."

All evidence points to Sbeihat still working for UNRWA, but being forced to hide it on his Facebook "About" page. And he does not seem to be the only one.

Meaning that UNRWA is still trying to sweep the problem under the rug.

(h/t UK Media Watch)

International law prohibits banning Jewish worship on the Temple Mount

TOI reports:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday restated a pledge to retain intact the custom of not permitting non-Muslim prayer on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, which has been at the center of a recent spike in unrest.

“Israel reaffirms its commitment to upholding unchanged the status quo of the Temple Mount, in word and in practice,” he said in a statement.

The compound, which houses the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, was the site of two ancient Jewish temples and is sacred to both Jews and Muslims. It was captured by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War.

“Israel will continue to enforce its longstanding policy: Muslims pray on the Temple Mount; non-Muslims visit the Temple Mount,” he said, following up on comments earlier by US Secretary of State John Kerry after meetings in Amman with Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Kerry said Israel had agreed on steps to calm tensions over the flashpoint site, including 24-hour security cameras, an idea not specified in Netanyahu’s statement.

The prime minister did confirm, however, that there would be “increased coordination between the Israeli authorities and the Jordanian Waqf, including to ensure that visitors and worshipers demonstrate restraint and respect for the sanctity of the area, and all this in accordance with the respective responsibilities of the Israelis authorities and the Jordanian Waqf.”

Tensions over Al-Aqsa have sparked a recent wave of violence that has seen knife and gun terror attacks by Palestinians against Israelis along with daily clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces.

Israel has repeatedly denied persistent Palestinian allegations to the effect that it seeks to change the arrangements at the site in order to allow Jews to pray there.

Bibi's' declaration to stop Jews from praying on the Temple Mount may be against international law.

It is time to expand a previous article of mine where I describe how international law supports Jewish worship on the Temple Mount - a point that you will never hear from "human rights" NGOs.

As far as I can tell, not only do Jews have the right to visit and to pray on the Temple Mount, but if they wanted to build a synagogue there I cannot find anything in international law that wouldn't support them wholeheartedly.

The overriding consideration in international law is the right to be treated equally, and barring Jews from the Temple Mount is about as discriminatory as possible.

Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights says:

Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching.

In addition, Article 20 seems to prohibit the insults and incitement that Muslims engage in towards Jews on the Temple Mount:

1. Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.

2. Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.

Moreover, the UN Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief is filled with articles that would prohibit banning Jews from the Temple Mount:

No one shall be subject to discrimination by any State, institution, group of persons, or person on grounds of religion or other beliefs.

For the purposes of the present Declaration, the expression "intolerance and discrimination based on religion or belief" means any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on religion or belief and having as its purpose or as its effect nullification or impairment of the recognition, enjoyment or exercise of human rights and fundamental freedoms on an equal basis.

Discrimination between human beings on grounds of religion or belief constitutes an affront to human dignity and a disavowal of the principles of the Charter of the United Nations, and shall be condemned as a violation of the human rights and fundamental freedoms proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and enunciated in detail in the International Covenants on Human Rights, and as an obstacle to friendly and peaceful relations between nations.

All States shall take effective measures to prevent and eliminate discrimination on the grounds of religion or belief in the recognition, exercise and enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms in all fields of civil, economic, political, social and cultural life.

All States shall make all efforts to enact or rescind legislation where necessary to prohibit any such discrimination, and to take all appropriate measures to combat intolerance on the grounds of religion or other beliefs in this matter.

From these articles it appears that Israel is obligated to allow Jews to visit and pray there, and to protect them from those who want to take away their rights.

Here is where the codification of bloacking Jewish religious rights on the Temple Mount runs afoul of this Declaration:

All States shall take effective measures to prevent and eliminate discrimination on the grounds of religion or belief in the recognition, exercise and enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms in all fields of civil, economic, political, social and cultural life.

All States shall make all efforts to enact or rescind legislation where necessary to prohibit any such discrimination, and to take all appropriate measures to combat intolerance on the grounds of religion or other beliefs in this matter.

Blocking Jews from worshiping in their holiest place while allowing Muslims to do so is discrimination by any definition.

It is true that this same declaration says:

Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.

But this clause is referring to cases where the practitioners of the religion are the ones who are a danger to others, not when the others are so intolerant that they threaten violence. To invoke this paragraph to deny Jews' rights to the Temple Mount (which I suspect human rights organizations would do if pressed) would make the rest of that declaration a mockery. It would give veto power by any religious group over the rights of any other religious group by simply threatening violence.

Perhaps one can try to argue that limiting non-Muslim worship on the Temple Mount is similar to not allowing non-Christian worship in Christian holy places or prohibiting non-Jewish worship in synagogues. But that argument does not apply where the site itself has inherent sanctity for the group that wishes to worship.

In this case, one could argue that it is even worse, because the entire reason that Muslims consider this a holy spot is a derivative of the Jewish temples that were there first. But no one is seriously demanding that Muslims be banned from their mosques on the Temple Mount, just that Jews be given equal rights.

You remember equal rights, don't you? This isn't only a legal issue, but a moral one as well. Denying the rights of one party because of the threats of violence of another party is not something to celebrate. It is capitulation to blackmail.

In summary, not only is it outrageous to deny Jewish worship on the Temple Mount for Jews who wish to pray there, it is against the principles of international law, basic freedom of worship and equal rights that would be defended in every other circumstance and for every other religion.

Maintaining the "status quo" when the status quo is discriminatory is not a virtue. It is a travesty, and it gives justification and incentive for violence against those who fight for their religious rights. Those who are demanding equal rights are invariably described as extremists or worse.

Of course, we will never hear Human Rights Watch or Amnesty or the UN dare to defend the Jewish right to worship on the Temple Mount. Because Jews who want to do so are not considered to be worthy of protection by international law.

10/24 Links: Jerusalem Synagogue Massacre claims sixth victim; BDS activists guilty of discrimination

From Ian:

11 months on, rabbi dies of wounds from Jerusalem synagogue massacre

Almost a year after Palestinian terrorists killed four worshipers and a policeman at a synagogue in Jerusalem, Rabbi Haim Yehiel Rotman, who was critically injured in the attack, died from his injuries Saturday evening.
Rotman had been in a coma ever since two East Jerusalem terrorists armed with a gun, axes and meat cleavers stormed the Bnei Torah Synagogue in Har Nof last November and began attacking worshipers.
Rotman, 55, suffered a number of blows to his head from an axe.
Rotman is survived by his wife and their 11 children. He was being laid to rest at 10 p.m. Saturday night at Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul cemetery.
“He was one of the most special people in our community who always had a smile on his face,” a member of the Bnei Torah Synagogue told Israeli daily Yisrael Hayom.
“He was so loved by everyone in the community, and his death represents another blow to the community that was broken almost a year ago.”

Bassem Eid: Barbaric violence and the Palestinian failure of leadership

I am disheartened and worried about the violence being perpetrated in Israel by some of my fellow Palestinians. This latest wave of violence started at the Al Aqsa mosque in East Jerusalem. It has extended to the rest of East Jerusalem, then to the West Bank, and then to all of Israel. My biggest worry is that we Palestinians appear to have no responsible leaders, neither in the Palestinian territories nor at the Knesset. These leaders, instead of calming the violence, are fanning its flames.
This wave of violence will not help the Palestinians’ economic situation. It will not help our ability to convince anyone, let alone Israelis, that we deserve a state. And it will not help grow our civil society which we badly need to do if we are to ever be taken seriously as a peace partner. All that this achieves is to push us further back. Yet our leaders are content to preach hate then sit back and enjoy their financial perks while Palestinian society is crashing and burning.
Not surprisingly, Hamas is engaged in inciting violence. The IDF reported that Hassan Yousef, a co-founder of Hamas, is “actively instigating and inciting terrorism and publicly encouraging and praising the execution of attacks against Israelis.” This is expected from Hamas unfortunately, but the problem does not stop at Hamas.
At the start of this wave of violence, Palestinian President Mahmood Abbas said “The Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is ours… and they have no right to defile it with their filthy feet. […] We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah, Allah willing”. What kind of responsible leader would make such anti-Semitic and violent statements? The only conclusion one can draw from this is that Abbas is out of control and undeserving of the title he holds. Americans have denounced his rhetoric and so has the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon who is not exactly known for his pro-Israel bias.

Bassam Tawil: The Palestinian Jihad: Lies, Lies and More Lies

First, we are not seeing anything "popular." We are not seeing, as before, thousands of Palestinians participating in the violence or protests.
It is just another wave of terrorism: targeting Jews for being Jews. The terrorists and their apologists do not distinguish between a Jew living in the city of Beersheba, and a Jew from a West Bank settlement. For the Palestinian leaders and media, these Jews are all "settlers" living in "occupied territories."
The appropriate term for the current wave of terrorism is "jihad". The attacks on Jews in Israel and the West Bank are part of the global jihad that has been waged for many years against Jews in particular, non-Muslims in general, and even against other Muslims who might not agree with a differing version of Islam.
This jihad is not aimed at "ending occupation" or protesting against misery and checkpoints. The terrorists do not see a difference between a "left wing Jew" and a "right wing Jew." They do not ask their victims about their political affiliation before knifing them.
In a grotesque rewrite of history, UNESCO declared that two Jewish holy sites, Rachel's Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs, were Muslim holy sites.
This is a wave of terrorism based on lies. Palestinian leaders, including Abbas his officials in the Palestinian Authority and his Fatah faction, have been lying to us for months. They told Palestinians that the Jews are "invading" and "desecrating" Islamic holy sites with the purpose of destroying them. Abbas and his officials are urging Muslims to join the jihad against the Jews.
The leaders are now telling us that most of the terrorists were, in fact, innocent civilians who were shot dead by Israelis while on their way to buy food or going to work. Lying has become an integral part of the jihad against Jews. The campaign of lies, distortion and fabrications is not less serious than the terror attacks.
This is yet another phase of the worldwide jihad against all the "infidels" and "enemies of Islam." Those who are murdering Jews today do not hesitate to murder other non-Muslims tomorrow, especially those who are seen as Israel's friends, such as the U.S.

'The mufti planned to build crematorium in Dotan Valley'

The controversy over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's remarks on Jerusalem Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini's role in the extermination of European Jewry has promoted veteran journalist Haviv Kanaan to recall the malicious plan the mufti devised.
Kanaan published an article in Haaretz in 1970 in which he reviewed the senior Muslim clergyman's actions in 1942, when the Jewish community in then-British Mandate Palestine was preparing for the possibility of a Nazi invasion. Kanaan said that in 1968, while researching his article, he met with Faiz Bay Idrisi, a senior Arab officer in the Mandate Police, who spoke of al-Husseini's intention to build a crematorium in the northwest Samarian hills.
"Even today, as I recall what I heard from police officials and mufti supporters, chills go through my body," Idrisi told Kanaan at the time, recalling how in case of a German invasion "Haj Amin Husseini was gearing to enter Jerusalem at the head of the Muslim Arab Legion squadron he'd created for the Third Reich. The mufti's plan was to build a huge Auschwitz-like crematorium in the Dotan Valley, near Nablus, to which Jews from Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and North Africa would be imprisoned and exterminated, just like the Jews in the death camps in Europe."
This should come as no surprise in light of al-Husseini's known views and actions during the Holocaust, and prior to it. (h/t blue sky)

10/23 Links Pt2: Israel breached Iran airspace in 2012 in dry run for strike; Bibi: Crazy like a fox

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Ted Cruz: A fresh approach to American foreign policy – and US-Israel relations

US Senator Ted Cruz, the conservative Republican firebrand from Texas, is running for president. Up until a few weeks ago, his candidacy was met with indifference as the media and political operatives all dismissed the viability of his candidacy. But that is beginning to change. The voices arguing that Cruz, the favorite of Tea Party fiscal conservatives and Evangelical Christians may have what it takes to win the Republican nomination have multiplied.
Since arriving in Washington four years ago, Cruz has arguably been Israel’s most avid defender in the Senate. During Operation Protective Edge in July 2014, Cruz used his authority as a member of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee to force the Obama administration to end the Federal Aviation Commission’s ban on US flights to Ben-Gurion Airport. Cruz announced at the time that he would put a hold on all State Department appointments until the administration justified the flight ban.
Rather than defend its position, the administration restored flights to Israel after 36 hours.
Last summer Cruz led the national opposition to US President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. He brought thousands of activists to the Capitol to participate in a rally he organized calling for Congress to vote down the deal. Rather than use the rally as a means to promote himself, Cruz invited Republican front-runner real estate developer Donald Trump to join him at the rally. Trump’s participation ensured that the event received wide coverage from the national media.
I interviewed Cruz by telephone from the campaign trail earlier this week about his views on the purpose of American foreign policy, US-Israel relations, the Iran nuclear deal and the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

Elliott Abrams: A New Middle East Policy

Recently a group of Republican national security experts, mostly academics and former officials, joined to produce Choosing to Lead, a volume aimed at describing what a foreign policy for a new Republican administration in 2017 should look like. I contributed the chapter on Israel and the Arabs, and it can be found here.
Here’s one paragraph:
Sharing common enemies, Israel and its Arab neighbors have obvious common security interests. They face a dangerous enemy in Iran, newly enriched by the end of international sanctions and the unfreezing of more than $100 billion in assets. They also face a group of non-state and semi-state actors, the jihadis of al-Qaeda and ISIS, and the powerful Iranian-backed Hizballah. Meanwhile, the prospect of major conventional warfare between the Arab states and Israel is virtually nil. What is so striking now is that, although the United States managed to maintain balanced and friendly relations with Israel and the Arabs for decades, even when they were nearly at war (and sometimes even when they were at war), today we have poor relations with both sides just when their own relations are the least fraught in their history.

Israeli Journalist Under Fire From European Counterparts for Exposing Extent of French Antisemitism (INTERVIEW)

Israeli journalist Zvika Klein has recently become the target of hostile international media outlets and BDS activists for a feature he produced eight months ago.
Two France 2 reporters, Thierry Vincent and Julien Nativel, decided to put Klein’s thesis about French antisemitism to the test, by producing a video of their own, using the same model. Vincent, though not a Jew, donned a kippah and spent days wandering around Paris. The finished product was released last week.
Lo and behold, as Vincent said he had expected, the results were nothing like those of Klein.
“In the 12 days [I spent] with a kippah [on my head], I experienced no violence or insult,” Vincent asserted. “Antisemitism exists, as all the numbers say, but how is my video so different from that of Zvika Klein? Who is this journalist?”
Casting aspersions on Klein — whose newspaper is one of two media outlets owned by American-Jewish casino magnate Sheldon Adelson (the other one being Israel Hayom) – was easy for Vincent to do on political grounds. The left-wing leanings of his network, as well as its unfavorable coverage of Israel, are no secret.
Still, he did make a special trip to Jerusalem a few weeks ago to meet with Klein and interview him for a broadcast. It was during that session, Klein told The Algemeiner, that Vincent revealed he had created his own video, which yielded opposite results. Far from taunting him, Vincent showed, the public was friendly.
“I told him I was glad to hear that his experiences as a ‘Jew’ in Paris were positive, because all the French Jews I’ve spoken to say they’re afraid to be visibly Jewish,” Klein said. “And I stood by my own findings, which are more in sync with statistics about French antisemitism than his.”

What Harriet Sherwood didn’t tell you in her report on JK Rowling’s anti-BDS letter

However, there’s a striking omission in Sherwood’s own article. She failed to note her own support for boycotts against Israel, a position she made clear in her swan song at the Guardian in April of 2014.
Sherwood is of course entitled to her view that Israelis are “shielded from the [daily grind] of occupation”, and so perhaps only the “economic pain, isolation and global opprobrium” of boycotts will force Israelis “to take notice”.
However, Guardian readers, it seems, deserve to know that the author of a report critical of JK Rowling’s decision to prioritize Israeli-Palestinian co-existence over “discriminatory” boycotts is herself on record supporting a campaign of exclusion against the Jewish state.

"Legally obligated to resettle refugees?"

From Newsweek Europe:

The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, said in a statement issued on Wednesday that Britain must resettle more than a hundred Syrian asylum seekers who arrived at a British military base in Cyprus on boats after being abandoned by people smugglers.

The 114 Syrian refugees, including 28 children, arrived on two boats at the British base of Akrotiri on the southern Cypriot coast on Wednesday, after people smugglers left them at sea. They were permitted a temporary stay at the base despite arriving there illegally, as they had no legal permission to be present at the base. However, UNHCR says that Britain now has a legal responsibility to settle them.

Isn't that interesting? The official UN agency for refugees says that if they arrive in a country, or even a military base of a country, that country is legally obligated to take care of and resettle them.

Yet there are millions of people classified as "refugees" who get no such protection from the UN. Because they are Palestinian, UNHCR doesn't have any say over them, and UNRWA hasn't made such a demand in over fifty years for the host countries to resettle them.

Why does the world accept that Western nations must accept refugees against their will, while Arab nations that host fellow Arabs have no such obligation and can push the responsibility to another UN agency that is more interested in perpetuating the "refugee" problem rather than solving it?

10/23 Links Pt1: UNRWA Suspends Employees for Anti-Semitic FB Posts; Palestinian deformative years

From Ian:

Shmuley Boteach: Global silence as Jews are stabbed, slashed and murdered

Every day Jews are stabbed, slashed, shot, and murdered on the streets of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Beersheba. And every day the world lies about “violence on both sides,” as if Netanyahu and Israel are calling for Jews to take knives and stab Palestinians. John Kerry will blame Israel for the murder of its own citizens because of settlements.
There can be only one conclusion. Jewish blood is cheap and getting cheaper by the day. I know of no other ethnic or religious group on Earth who face daily incitement to genocide with the world making not even a peep of an objection.
A friend of mine who is an elected official took issue with my sharp denunciations of the Iran nuclear agreement. He said it was the only way to stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb. I said that even if he believed that, surely he could have demanded of the president to postpone all negotiations with Iran by a month every time they threaten Israel with annihilation.
Iran was desperate for the deal. They would have stopped. And if they didn’t, at least Congress could disabuse itself of the notion that Iran had anything on its mind other than the extermination of the Jews.
But the administration’s refusal to even once condemn Iran’s threats to murder all of Israel’s Jews is an immoral omission destined to forever live in infamy, especially when Iran violates the agreement, which they have already begun to do.

Palestinian deformative years

Lord Michael Grade and former Communities Secretary Sir Eric Pickles nailed it this week when they accused the British media and Foreign Office, in turn, of “promoting equivalence between the Palestinians perpetrators and their victims” and “turning a blind eye to the Palestinian propagators of vile ideology.”
Can we fix it? Well, probably no, we can’t. It’s always been this way. From early childhood, Jews are made the object of hatred and disgust, responsible for the failures in the Muslim world. It was as true before 1948 as it is today. Palestinians are not taught to hate Israelis because of Israel. They are taught to hate Jews because they are Jews.
Golda Meir, one of the founders of the State of Israel, knew this half a century ago, when she said: “Peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.”
Of course Palestinians are entitled to a country of their own -- even one that will, inevitably, like other Arab states, persecute other faiths and gays and women who drive and people on Twitter. A state like Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Libya, Oman, Algeria, Iran and 10 more where Israelis are forbidden.
It will be tyrannical, oppressive and pose a clear and present danger to the region. But, yes, the Palestinians deserve to call it their own. Israelis know and respect this. Because you have to be a grown up to make compromises, to see the bigger picture and plan for the future. You don’t throw tantrums and stones. You make adult choices.
At ominous times like this, with Israelis forced to use umbrellas and selfie sticks to defend themselves from brainwashed savages -- and incidents of Islamic anti-Semitism across Europe at record levels -- wishy-washy responses to Jew-hate and distorted media coverage of Israel’s plight only serves to fan the flames of ignorance and intolerance in this interminable conflict.

UNRWA Suspends Employees for Anti-Semitic Facebook Posts

The United Nations has taken disciplinary action against at least 22 employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) who used social media to promote anti-Semitism, the watchdog organization UN Watch reported Thursday. The employees’ misconduct was initially exposed in reports published by the watchdog organization in September and October.
The spokesman for United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon quietly announced on the UN website that UNRWA employees have, “in a number of cases,” [been] subject to disciplinary action, including suspension and loss of pay, following an investigation that verified evidence published by UN Watch — in one report last week, and another in September — of incitement to anti-Semitic violence committed by at least 22 UNRWA employees.
UN Watch noted that the disciplinary actions, which were communicated within a transcript of a press briefing and not a standalone announcement, were taken despite several vehement denials of misconduct by UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness.
In light of the above, UN Watch is now demanding a full apology from UNRWA spokseman Chris Gunness for his McCarthyite tirade against what he called UN Watch’s “baseless allegations about antisemitism.”
Blogger “Elder of Ziyon,” working in parallel, uncovered many similar instances of UNRWA employees posting anti-Semitic material on their social media pages and inciting violence against Jews. In one instance, he found that a UNRWA employee changed his profile picture on Facebook into an image of the “Like” icon superimposed on a knife.

Abbas’s brother-in-law gets life-saving heart surgery in Israel

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s brother-in-law underwent life-saving heart surgery at a private hospital in Tel Aviv on Tuesday, Hebrew media reported Thursday.
He was hospitalized at the Assuta Medical Center in northern Tel Aviv’s Ramat Hachayal neighborhood. The surgery was successful and he was said to be recovering in intensive care.
Despite recent tensions between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel approved the entry of Abbas’s wife’s brother to receive treatment in Tel Aviv, Walla reported. The report didn’t name Abbas’s brother-in-law. (h/t Bob Knot)

Five more workers who violate @UNRWA policies

So when can I expect my paycheck from UNRWA for doing the job that they are supposed to be doing?

Basem Arram, UNRWA teacher, promotes violence:

Ahmed Banat, UNRWA teacher, promotes violence:

Hazem Mitchell, UNRWA teacher, supports Hamas in this cover photo:

Halla Moh, UNRWA worker, is another fan of jihadist terror groups:

"Abou al Baraa," probably really named Yousef Zanhar, UNRWA worker, is yet another fan of the Hamas terror group:

Explicitly supporting violence, terror and terror groups must be the criteria UNRWA uses when hiring. (Ahmed Banat, above, only started teaching at UNRWA last week, showing how much UNRWA checks its employees.)

Unfortunately, all of those are against UNRWA's neutrality policy for which employees supposedly could be docked for pay or suspended or fired. We have no evidence that this has happened outside of UNRWA's tepid statement this week with no details.

Tour guides can't say "Temple Mount" on Temple Mount

From Ha'aretz:

This British-born Israeli tour guide may have one of the hardest jobs on earth these days. On the guided tours he leads up to the Temple Mount several times a week, Emmanuel Kushner is under instructions to keep politics out of the conversation — and when it can’t be avoided, at least make sure that whatever he says is politically correct.

With tensions over this Jewish and Muslim holy site boiling over in recent weeks, that can be a daunting task.

Kushner has developed some tricks for avoiding confrontation when entering the eye of the storm. “You guys all know Voldemort, the character from the Harry Potter books, as in ‘he-who-must-not-be-named,’” he begins his pep talk, as the group lines up outside the Temple Mount entrance gate designated for tourists. “Well, that’s gonna be our code. When we’re up there, and I say ‘Voldemort,’ I mean the Temple Mount. I just can’t use those words.”

Muslims refer to the site as the Noble Sanctuary, and language is critical in the current battle of conflicting narratives, all the more so when reference is made to its most salient symbols. These days, when many Palestinians have convinced themselves that Israel is determined to harm the historic mosques located on this site, the last thing a tour guide needs to do is rub in their faces the fact that this is also the site of the ancient Jewish temples.

Do Jews have the right to be equally upset when people call the area "Al Aqsa Mosque" or "Haram al Sharif"? Or are only Muslim sensibilities worthy of being protected?

And might that have to do with the fact that Muslims threaten violence if they become uncomfortable with facts, where even Jewish reporters consider the usage of the normative term for the holy site to be "rubbing it in their faces"?