Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, November 04, 2015

Arab countries keep treating Palestinian from Syria like dirt - but it is because they love them so much!

Ma'an published a report from the Shabaka NGO. Excerpts:

In January 2013, the Jordanian government announced a non-entry policy for Palestinian refugees. Since then, those Palestinians who had been able to cross into Jordan (usually relying on forged documents or smugglers) have lived in fear of being arrested and deported back to Syria. Furthermore, Palestinians who fled to Jordan cannot legally live in the refugee camps established for Syrians, but at the same time, cannot legally work to earn money to rent housing outside of camps. The one exception is Cyber City, which is more of a detention center than a refugee camp, and where Jordanian authorities have been transferring Palestinians who are in the country clandestinely since April 2012. Palestinians are confined to Cyber City unless they decide to return to Syria.

As for Lebanon, the authorities began requiring as of the end of 2013 that Palestinians from Syria apply for a visa before entering the country. And as of May 2014, Lebanese authorities were only allowing Syria-registered Palestinian refugees entry into the country if they had the documents needed to travel to a third country, limiting their stay in Lebanon to a maximum of nine hours. In May 2014, restrictions were placed on the ability of Palestinians from Syria to legally renew their residency papers. As a result, the majority of Palestinians from Syria who are currently in Lebanon live under the threat of arrest and deportation to Syria.

In Egypt, the government does not allow Palestinian refugees to register with the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). At the same time, Egypt falls outside of the area of operation of the UNRWA. Consequently, there is currently no UN agency responsible for the protection and assistance of Palestinian refugees in Egypt. Additionally, it has become all but impossible for Palestinians from Syria to get visas to Egypt. Because Palestinians (unlike other refugees in Egypt) cannot register with UNHCR, they cannot get residency permits, receive food vouchers, medical assistance, or any other services provided by UNHCR. Palestinians can currently apply for a one-month visa to travel to Egypt, but they also need to get clearance from Egyptian security services, a clearance that is rarely granted. Palestinians fleeing Syria for Egypt have been subjected to arbitrary arrest, prolonged detention or deportation to a third country, and collective expulsion by Egyptian authorities.

...The situation of Palestinians from Syria who are already inside Turkey is also far from ideal: Because Turkey is not part of UNRWA’s area of operations, Palestinians in Turkey do not have access to the agency’s assistance. Normally, these Palestinians would fall under UNHCR’s mandate. However, UNHCR services, which are distributed through the Turkish government, are not reaching Palestinian refugees, whose legal status in Turkey remains unclear. Part of the problem is that the Turkish government does not allow UNHCR to perform refugee status determination on its soil.

A Separate and Unequal Legal Status

Palestinian refugees maintain a separate legal status from other categories of refugees. This separate status is enforced through an exclusion clause in article 1(D) of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees that states that the convention does not apply to persons who are already being assisted by another UN organ or agency. At the time of the signing of the 1951 convention, Palestinian refugees were already receiving services from UNRWA and the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine and were thus excluded from UNHCR’s mandate. However, if interpreted correctly, article 1 (D) also means that Palestinians who are located outside of UNRWA’s normal areas of operation or who are unable to access UNRWA assistance immediately fall under the mandate of UNHCR.

It is worth recalling that the exclusion of Palestinian refugees from UNHCR’s mandate was pushed by Arab states, who feared that absorbing Palestinians with other categories of refugees would harm the right of return as a primary solution for Palestinians who were expelled or fled from their homes in 1948. However, as has been noted in Badil’s publication Al-Majdal, this exclusion has also contributed to the “construction of a separate and unique category of ‘Palestine’ refugees and therewith created an environment in which discriminatory policies can flourish”. Indeed, it is clear from the examples above that Palestinians fleeing the conflict have seen their mobility and access to international protection curtailed in part because of their Palestinian identity and separate legal status.

Furthermore, Arab states often justify their discriminatory policies against Palestinians in the name of protecting the Palestinian right of return. In an interview with the newspaper al-Hayat, Jordan’s prime minister Abdalah Ensour justified Jordan’s restrictive policies toward Palestinians fleeing Syria by explaining that allowing Palestinians from Syria into Jordan would absolve Israel of its responsibility toward Palestinian refugees.

He ended his explanation by saying that “Our Palestinian Brothers have the right to return to their country of origin. They should stay in Syria until the end of the crisis”. Similarly, the Lebanese government has generally justified its denial of basic rights (such as the right to work or to own property) to Palestinians on its soil as a form of support for the Palestinian right of return that is predicated on the non-integration of Palestinians into Lebanese society. The current hardships faced by Palestinians from Syria who are in Lebanon or those trying to reach Lebanon cannot be divorced from Lebanon’s pre-existing policies toward Palestinians on its soil.

Isn't it remarkable that in a world where the Palestinian issue takes up so much of the United Nations' time and so much of the media's attention, practically no one is talking about how Arab nations are treating their Palestinian brethren?

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.

Terrorist mom is very proud - and now her dead son is being used for blood libel (update)

Rusaila Shamasneh is very proud of her dead terrorist son.

On October 12, Muhammad Nazmi Shamasneh, 22, from the village of Qatana, got on a bus near the entrance to Jerusalem. He stabbed a 19 year-old IDF soldier, inflicting minor injuries, and tried to grab his weapon. He was shot and killed by police.

His body was released for burial, and now his mother Rusaila is celebrating his death.

"I am sad only because I was not with my son" at the moment of his death to join him in martyrdom, "but I am very happy for the death of my son for Jerusalem and proud of that," she said.

She insisted that all the visitors to her house act joyful at the "wedding" of her son.

Rusaila then went to the roof of her building and shot celebratory gunfire in joy at her son's death.

But the Paleesinian Authority is not done with trying to get propaganda value from Muhammad Nazmi Shamasneh.

From JPost:

Israel harvested the corneas from one of the bodies of a terrorist responsible for an attack at the entrance to Jerusalem last month, according to reports by Palestinian media.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health issued an official statement, claiming to have made the discovery at the morgue where the body was being housed.

The attack took place on October 12 on bus line 185. A terrorist sitting in the back of the bus stabbed a soldier, called out "Allahu akbar," and attempted to steal the soldier's weapon.

Yes, this is the same guy. Since he was not successful in murdering any Jews, now he is being used to create a blood libel.

It is the Palestinian way of recycling.

(h/t Ian)

UPDATE: More fun from the necromom. (h/t Bob K)

Those Israelis, humiliating an innocent young man (video)

Anti-Israel activists have been spreading this video they say of Israeli soldiers wantonly attacking a young man because he refused to humiliate himself by taking off his pants.

#WatchIsraeli Occupation Forces (IOF) brutally attack unarmed Palestinian young man for his refusal to take off his trousers2 November 2015, Occupied Jerusalem, Palestine#شاهد جنود الاحتلال يهاجمون شابا فلسطينيا أعزلا بوحشية ويعتقلونه على الرغم من رفع يديه وملابسه في القدس المحتلة#Zionist #False_Gods #Kabalah #Vodo_State_of_Israel #Gang #apartheid #Palestine #SaveAlAqsa #EndIsraeliOccupation#اعدام_طفل_فلسطيني #المسجد_الأقصى_يشتعل
Posted by Shehab News Agency on Monday, November 2, 2015

What cruelty! What brutality!Just taking a random Arab and forcing him to be humiliated like that!

A short time earlier, here is what this upstanding young man did. He attacked a tour guide by pummeling her on her head with a bottle.

But hitting a Jew on the head with a bottle is legal resistance against tyranny. Humiliating an Arab is a war crime. Those are the rules, as interpreted by today's top arbiters of morality and international law.

(h/t Gidon Shaviv)

Another Gaza store with a stabbing mannequin

From Reuters:

A mannequin holding a knife displaying a jacket that reads "stab" (L) is seen outside a clothes shop in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip November 3, 2015. The shop owner said the display was made in support of Palestinians committing stabbing attacks against Israelis.

This is besides the other one I showed on Sunday, which as Israellycool discovered, was outside a shop named "Hitler."

(h/t UK Media Watch)

11/03 Links Pt2: PA and Fatah: Israel had "no right" to be created; Amnesty's true mission

From Ian:

PA and Fatah: Israel had "no right" to be created
From Palestinian Media Watch:

On the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration of Nov. 2, 1917, the PA and Fatah repeated their claim that Israel has "no right" to be created and attacked the declaration, calling it "ominous".
The Balfour Declaration was a letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Baron Rothschild stating that "His Majesty's government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" and is seen as the basis for later international commitments to establish the State of Israel.
Abbas' Fatah movement posted the picture above of Balfour engulfed in flames, accompanied by the text:
"We will not forget the ominous promise, the Balfour Promise (i.e., Declaration) given by those with no ownership to those with no right"
[Official Facebook page of the Fatah Movement, Nov. 1, 2015]
The official spokesman of the PA National Security Forces, Adnan Al-Damiri, posted similar statements:
Text on photo:
"We will not forget the ominous promise, the Balfour Promise made by those who have no ownership to those who have no right. Nov. 2, 1917" [Facebook page of PA National Security Forces, Adnan Al-Damiri, Nov. 2, 2015]

Balfour Declaration Anniversary Erases Jewish Connection to Holy Land

It’s hardly surprising that the myth of an existing historical Palestinian state that was ‘colonized’ by European Jews continues to circulate if this is the sort of lazy historical background being fed to media consumers.
- Nowhere in the article does it mention that Palestine, as it was known as then, was a part of the Ottoman Empire and there had never existed an independent Palestinian state.
- Nowhere in the article does it mention that indigenous Jewish communities had lived in the Land of Israel going back over 3,000 years and there existed a continuous and uninterrupted Jewish religious and national connection to that land.
- The article mistakenly writes that the Balfour Declaration gave instructions “to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.” In fact, the Declaration supported a Jewish homeland, and not necessarily a state. The Balfour Declaration was but one step on the way to the fulfillment of the Zionist program of restoring Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish people’s ancient homeland.
- Indeed, to talk of Palestinians in those days referred to both Jewish and Arab residents of the land. When the Daily Mail refers to “without prejudicing the Palestinian communities already there,” it is not clearly stating just who those communities are, instead working on the presumption that Palestinian communities were Palestinian Arabs.
- This is compounded by the statement that “The Palestinians are furious that their land has technically been promised to the Jewish people.” In 1917 at the time of the Balfour Declaration, there was no national Palestinian identity – the non-Jewish residents of the land considered themselves to be part of the wider Arab nation and Arab nationalists sought an independent Arab state not in Palestine per se but as part of the Ottoman Arab Middle East as a whole.
- So it was not at that time “their land” that the Palestinians are allegedly furious that it had been promised to the Jewish people.
By missing out any historical context, the Daily Mail has erased legitimate Jewish rights that existed even before the Balfour Declaration and has constructed a Palestinian national identity that did not exist in 1917. (Note: this does not mean that a Palestinian identity did not emerge in later years.)

Amnesty's true mission

Amnesty International's conclusions on the situation here in Israel are always bizarrely perverse. The latest is no different: "Israeli forces have carried out a series of unlawful killings of Palestinians using intentional lethal force without justification ... based on the findings of an ongoing research trip to the West Bank, including east Jerusalem. ... The organization has documented in depth at least four incidents in which Palestinians were deliberately shot dead by Israeli forces when they posed no imminent threat to life, in what appear to have been extrajudicial executions. ... Since Oct. 1, Israeli forces have killed more than 30 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Israel either after stabbings were carried out or the Israeli authorities allege stabbing attacks were intended.
"There is mounting evidence that, as tensions have risen dramatically, in some cases Israeli forces appear to have ripped up the rule book and resorted to extreme and unlawful measures. They seem increasingly prone to using lethal force against anyone they perceive as posing a threat, without ensuring that the threat is real," Amnesty International wrote in a press release on Oct. 27.
As blogger Elder of Ziyon has already exposed, Amnesty's "in-depth documentation" is based on lies. This is the most egregious element of Amnesty's attempt to insert itself into the situation.

"Jews always split Muslim societies"

From Egypt's Misr5:

Jews are always working with the rule of divide and conquer, that is, they create differences between people in one country and in different countries around them so that they are the masters. Jews have walked this path a long time ago, even before the advent of Islam.

In Yathrib "Medina" (communities of Jews were supplying both sides of a war with money and weapons to perpetuate the war between them, and so the war lasted nearly 120 years.

This is the dirty role played by Jews in general...

Even now Jews are behind the strife in Syria, and in Yemen, as well as in Iraq, in Libya. In Egypt it is no secret that they control the money and the media, and this way they caused many cracks in Egyptian society...

Allah says, "Hold on to Allah and be not divided among yourselves ...".

The cartoon was not drawn for this article but it was used as the illustration to symbolize Jews tearing Muslim and Christian Arabs apart.

South African Israel-hater Suraya Dadoo. tweeted an article to me she wrote defending Hamas:

She writes, among other things:

Throughout the four-day visit to South Africa, Misha’al spoke at length about an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza, based on 1967 borders, with the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees. Hamas had committed itself to a just political solution – not merely a “two-state solution” where a Palestinian ‘mini-state’ has its major cities cut off from each other, its government unable to control its own water resources, develop its agriculture, or manage its trade with neighbouring states.

In a joint statement, Mary Kluk and Ben Swartz of the SAZF and SAJBD again invoked the Hamas Charter, claiming that “the core ideology of Hamas is underpinned by a rabid hatred of the Jewish people.” Yet, on the day the statement was issued, Misha’al was scheduled to meet progressive Jewish groups in Johannesburg.

“The problem is not Judaism or Jews, it is the occupation,” Misha’al said repeatedly during interviews.

According to Misha’al, the Hamas Charter is no longer a true expression of the movement’s overall vision, and does not reflect the current thinking of the movement. Hamas does not even use the Charter on its website and uses its election manifesto, and more recent documents, to describe its overall vision and objectives. For Israel’s apologists, however, Hamas has not gone far enough, and they demand that the movement formally abrogates the Charter.

Therefore, she writes, Israel should really negotiate with Hamas. (She pretends that Hamas would actually negotiate with Israel!)

So I went to the Hamas website to see their new, improved and moderate position filled with liberal ideas.

They wrote a press release to mark the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration yesterday. (Not in English, of course.)

The Hamas movement on this painful anniversary emphasizes the following:

First - The Balfour Declaration is unjust and void and unacceptable...

Second - The imposition of such an entity as a fait accompli by force through the expulsion of our people from their land can not change the facts of history and geography, because our people hold the steady and sacred rights and refuse to compromise at all costs.

Thirdly - we affirm our commitment to use the resistance in all its forms, especially the armed resistance as a strategic option is able to deter the occupation and recover the usurped rights and liberate the land and holy places and Al Aqsa and liberating the prisoners.

Fourthly - emphasize the need to enhance the uprising through a unified national consensus in the face of the Zionist attack on Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Fifthly - we call on the leaders of Arab and Islamic countries and all the Liberals in the world to bear the historical responsibility to help our people for liberation from occupation, providing support to our people and pressure the occupation to force them to stop the aggression against our people and leave our land and our holy places.

Sixth - we call upon the international community, especially the international organizations to act to protect Palestinian refugees everywhere, securing a decent life for them in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and to spare them the horrors of internal wars.

Seventh - We applaud the masses of our people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and in Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa and our prisoners in Israeli jails, to trigger resistance in every inch of the land of Palestine in defense of the land, honor and sanctities.

Hamas, as always, makes it clear that their goal is the destruction of Israel and the ethnic cleansing of all Jews from the land. And terrorism is their strategic method to accomplish that.

This is not a new message. Hamas has been remarkably consistent. Yet there are a lot of people who want to try to fool the world into believing that Hamas is not a terror group, despite its own explicit words.

11/03 Links Pt1: The Facebook Intifada; Why Palestinians Don't Want Cameras on the Temple Mount

From Ian:

NYTs: The Facebook Intifada

THREE weeks ago, my father was riding on a public bus in Jerusalem’s Armon Hanatziv neighborhood when terrorists from East Jerusalem shot him in the head and stabbed him multiple times. Afterward, as he lay unconscious in the intensive care unit of Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, fighting for his life, one question was on my mind: What inspired the two young Palestinian men to savagely attack my father and a busload of passengers?
My father, Richard Lakin, dedicated his life to the cause of Israeli-Arab reconciliation. Ever since moving to Israel from Connecticut in the 1980s, he spent his career teaching English to Israeli and Arab children. Inspired by his experience marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, he became a founding member of Israel Loves Iran, a social media initiative designed to bring the citizens of these two nations closer together. When news of his tragedy broke, many of the Christian, Muslim and Jewish residents of Jerusalem who knew my father and admired his work rushed to his bedside to pay their respects and say a prayer for his recovery. Even Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, stopped by on his recent visit to Israel.
Watching the well-wishers congregating in the intensive care unit, however, I realized that the world leaders who were having the most impact on the situation in the Middle East right now weren’t Mr. Ban or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Jack Dorsey of Twitter and other young entrepreneurs who shape the social media platforms most of us use every day.
It may sound strange to talk of Twitter and Facebook as relevant players in the war against terror, but as the recent wave of violence in Israel has proved, that is increasingly the case. The young men who boarded the bus that day intent on murdering my 76-year-old father did not make their decision in a vacuum. One was a regular on Facebook, where he had already posted a “will for any martyr.” Very likely, they made use of one of the thousands of posts, manuals and instructional videos circulating in Palestinian society these last few weeks, like the image, shared by thousands on Facebook, showing an anatomical chart of the human body with advice on where to stab for maximal damage.

Khaled Abu Toameh: Why Palestinians Do Not Want Cameras on the Temple Mount

The Palestinian Authority (PA) will continue to work against having cameras in the hope of preventing the world from seeing what is really happening at the site and undermining Jordan's "custodianship" over Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem.
Another reason the Palestinians oppose King Abdullah's idea is their fear that cameras would expose that Palestinians have been smuggling stones, firebombs and pipe bombs into the Al-Aqsa Mosque for the past two years.
The cameras are also likely to refute the claim that Jews are "violently invading" Al-Aqsa Mosque and holding prayers on the Temple Mount. The cameras will show that Jews do not enter Al-Aqsa Mosque, as Palestinians have been claiming. Needless to say, no Jewish visitors have been caught trying to smuggle weapons into the holy site.
It remains to be seen how Secretary Kerry, who brokered the camera deal between Israel and Jordan, will react to the latest Palestinian Authority escalation of tensions. If Kerry fails to pressure the PA to stop its incitement and attempts to exclude the Jordanians from playing any positive role, the current wave of knife attacks against Jews will continue.

Amb. Alan Baker: Palestinian Incitement to Violence and Terror: Nothing New, But Still Dangerous

Lessons to Be Learned
No peace process can be expected to prevail if it is constantly and systematically being undermined by a pervasive policy of incitement and indoctrination. All three factors make the peace process impossible: the fear, suspicion, and hatred against the other side emanating from the highest levels of government, permeating through the religious, social, cultural, and educational system, down to the youngest and most impressionable.
It is reasonable to assume that a culture of mistrust and hate, fanned by constant religious and public incitement, inevitably leads to violence and terror, and, as such, undermines the concept of peaceful relations. A leadership that openly and officially sanctions and encourages such incitement cannot come with clean hands to the international community and complain about lack of progress in the peace process.
Clearly, the institution of appropriate and effective public machinery within the religious, cultural, and educational infrastructures of the Palestinian Authority is a necessary and urgent requirement in order to supervise and prevent incitement at the public level. But such a policy could only be implemented if the Palestinian leadership were to demonstrate through its own acts, declarations, and behavior a sincere and genuine will to end incitement and halt its use as a weapon, and to live up to the Palestinian commitments in their agreements with Israel. The damage that has been done in molding the minds of countless children and youth to hate Israel, to hate the Jew, and to view terrorists as role models, will likely take many years, and possibly a generation, to mend.

Pal newspaper: Balfour Declaration worse than Holocaust (which is fake anyway)

Palestinian news site Amad has an op-ed about the Balfour Declaration, saying that it is far worse that anything that happened to Jews in the 20th Century:

The British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour's promise to the Jews to give them a homeland in Palestine is worse than the alleged Holocaust against the Jews in Germany in the Nazi era,

Balfour was advocating the displacement of an entire people and the extermination of any political, economic and social rights of an entire people. He granted the establishment of a homeland for Jews and Zionists and racists from all over the world in Palestine.

A comparison between these most prominent incidents in the twentieth century, the Balfour Declaration and the Holocaust:

Before Balfour, Jews were not more than 5% of the total population of Palestine, and the result of that declaration their numbers increased from fifty thousand immigrants to six hundred and fifty thousand of more than seventy nationalities coming from all over the world and depriving the Palestinians from their homeland amid the silence of international community and denial of indigenous land owners.

The second event was the Holocaust of Jews at the time of the Nazi movement, which saw the destruction of a large number of the Jews of Europe during World War II, according to Jewish story. This story has been employed by Jews on a large scale as a means of sympathy for them, and they are exaggerating and amplifying this incident so much so that the United Nations issued a 2005 decision to commemorate it on 27 January of each year, despite denials by many historians that dispute the facts and evidence of the gas chambers which are alleged by the promoters of the Holocaust.

The Germans encouraged the Jews to emigrate to Palestine in the 1930s, and the Jews had the sympathy of the whole world and provided assistance and support to them, setting up the Israeli state in Palestine, and Germany paid compensation to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and the State of Israel and still Israel blackmails Germany and the world with this Holocaust which is unconfirmed historically.

COmpare that with the racist the Balfour Declaration, which was approved by the United States, France, Italy formally as well as Japan, and in 1922 and approved by the League of Nations Council on the draft mandate, and the consequent disastrous consequences inflicted on the indigenous Palestinian people people of the land, displacing and killing them and torturing them and alienating them in all around the ground and thousands of Palestinian refugees who found that many countries closed their doors in their faces, ...

The Holocaust of Hitler opened to the Jews the doors of the world, and everyone was looking for ways to rectify this alleged Holocaust, and give them a home on the land of Palestine even though their population did not exceed fifty thousand at the time, while the Holocaust of Balfour displaced Palestinian people and prevented them from establishing their home on their own land and the land of their ancestors.

This is the sort of stuff that Palestinian Arabs accept as fact.

Peace Now panicking because there is so LITTLE settlement activity

In Ha'aretz, Peace Now's Lara Friedman and Hagit Ofran are clearly frustrated by Binyamin Netanyahu's accurate statement that settlement construction has actually slowed down under his watch.

But since they don't have any statistics to counter his statement, they rely on obfuscation.

Netanyahu... last week tried to turn the tables on the critics, claiming that settlements cannot be the cause of violence, since their growth has actually slowed during his time in office, compared to his predecessors. He probably based this claim on a statistic highlighted in a report in Haaretz, according to which the average number of new housing units built in settlements in the West Bank per year since 2009 has been lower than during the preceding 20 years.

But beware: a single statistic taken in isolation always obscures far more than it reveals.

OK, let's hear it.

So has settlement growth really slowed under Netanyahu? To begin with, the statistic on new housing starts ignores East Jerusalem, an area in which for the past six years settlement construction has been at its highest annual level since 2000. Much of this construction alters potential future borders, in significant ways, between Israel and Palestine; a new settlement called Givat Hamatos, approved under Netanyahu but not yet constructed, could be a potent deal-breaker.

Which construction that has been done under Netanyahu alters any future borders in any meaningful way? They don't say - they only point to one of the many plans that have gone nowhere.

Likewise, Netanyahu has outdone his recent predecessors with respect to settlement activity in the heart of East Jerusalem’s Palestinian neighborhoods. Virtually from the moment he took office, with the 2009 approval of a new settlement in Sheikh Jarrah, through last week’s settler takeover in Silwan, under Netanyahu the settler enterprise in these volatile areas has boomed.

Peace Now calls this building a "settlement."

Peace Now keeps very careful track of the numbers of every house. Yet here they won't say the actual number of houses purchased by Jews in Arab neighborhoods.

Because it is a handful. I'm sure they know the exact number but they won't tell you because it is so small.

The number of buildings owned by Jews in Silwan is exactly six. I don't know about Sheikh Jarrah but it cannot be much higher. I believe there are 20 buildings in Maaleh Hazeitim.

Peace Now, however, calls every single building a "settlement".

Another problem is methodological. Netanyahu has been prime minister for longer than anyone since the legendary David Ben Gurion. Comparing only two out of his three full terms in office is misleading. If we compare his entire time in office, including the 1990's, or if we compare his last tenure alone to the other tenures in recent years, Netanyahu has built more in settlements than any of his recent predecessors (except for Ehud Barak in 2000).

This is hilarious. Even though the new homes built under Netanyahu in the 1990s are meaningless towards his statement about how they have slowed down in recent years, Peace Now is so desperate to paint him as a militant expander of Israel's borders that they feel they must include those numbers - even though his 1990's settlement activity was no different than those of Labor prime ministers. But since he has been in office longer, Peace Now wants to change the statistics from "annual construction" to "total construction" in order to paint Bibi as worse than other PMs.

In contrast, during Netanyahu’s 2013-2015 term, new construction starts in West Bank settlements have spiked, reaching a higher level than under any government since 2000. This spike was driven by a surge in planning and tenders following the end of the moratorium, and by the Kerry-led 2013 peace effort, which was accompanied every step of the way by new settlement announcements and approvals. Based on data for the first half of this year, and barring a deliberate slow-down, this trend can be expected to continue in 2015.

Here Peace Now is resorting to its normal tactics of conflating statistics on housing approvals with actual construction. All the paperwork in the world doesn't translate into actual buildings, as we have seen. How many times has Peace Now warned about tens of thousands of approvals over the years? Where are those houses?

As I have shown previously, there can be as many as 8 separate approvals before a house is built. Peace Now warns about huge amounts of imminent construction which almost never materializes.

Peace Now loves to talk about how Israel is about to construct thousands of units in Ramat Shlomo - an overcrowded neighborhood that would remain in Israel under every and any conceivable peace plan - yet not a single new house has been built there in over a decade.

Peace Now keeps telling gullible media and governments that Israel is inexorably expanding and taking over Arab areas. Yet the pace of expansion has been glacial since Oslo.

But Peace Now's funding is dependent on these lies, so now that the truth about the slowdown has been publicized,they are panicking.

They end the article with a bit of truth that applies to them far more than it applies to Bibi:

Statistics can help track specific aspects of Israel settlement policy, but like any statistics, when cherry-picked they obscure more than they reveal.

Peace Now is dedicated to obscuring reality with cherry-picked statistics in this very article. It shows that they see their main sources of funding from the EU as potentially drying up if the settlements are really not the obstacle to peace that the Leftists need them to be.

It is really sort of pathetic that we have a leader of Israel, who claims to be supporting settlements, who is actually hindering them, and the people who should be celebrating that downturn of construction are angry at this slowdown because it threatens their revenue stream.

.@UNRWA worker calls Jews "the filthiest among mankind"

From the Facebook page of an UNRWA worker with the apparent name of Reem Kasem, we find this:

Oh Allah,

Just as you cleansed/purified the land with the water of rain,

cleanse/purify Palestine from the filthiest among mankind.

Say Amen oh Lord of the world

She also likes to include kids in the "non-violent resistance:"

Plus the usual pro-stabbing posts:

But UNRWA blames the stabbings on everything but incitement from their own workers.

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

Top Palestinian Excuses to Stab 80-Year Old Ladies

(Stabbing of old lady at :20)

Here is a list off the top of my head of excuses I've read over the years given either by Western apologists for Palestinian terror, or Palestinians talking to gullible Westerners, to justify terrorism, including Monday's stabbing of an 80 year old woman and a 71 year old man:

"Occupation"*
"Brutality"*

"Humiliation"
"Settler violence"*

"Muslims restricted from Al Aqsa"

"Jews allowed on Al Aqsa"

"Settlements"

Anniversary of Balfour/Partition/Israel's birth/Assassination of top terrorist/Deir Yassin...

Colonialism

"Terrorist Jews in Hebron"

"Poverty"

"The siege of Gaza"

The Gaza war
"Israel kills our people"

Checkpoints