Thursday, February 04, 2016

02/04 Links Pt2: Chomsky criticizes BDS!; The death of journalism; France: An Antisemitic Hell for Jews

From Ian:

US Jewish scholar Chomsky criticizes cultural boycotts of Israel

One of Israel’s harshest critics took to the airwaves earlier this week and denounced attempts to impose a cultural and arts boycotts against the Jewish state.
Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned linguist and scholar, told Al Jazeera earlier this week that the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign that limits its activities to targeting Israeli institutions involved in maintaining military control over the Palestinians in the territories is legitimate.
The MIT professor said that he differentiates between attempts to shun Israeli entities linked to its policies beyond the Green Line and efforts to ostracize Israelis with no connection to “the occupation.”
"Just as I do not suggest boycotting Harvard University and my own university, even though the United States is involved in horrific acts," he said. "You might as well boycott the United States."

The death of journalism

‎"Three Palestinians killed as daily violence grinds on" was the CBS headline after ‎three Arab terrorists armed with guns, knives and bombs attacked two border policewomen at Damascus Gate in Jerusalem. One of the police officers, 19-year-old Cpl. Hadar Cohen, ‎was killed in the attack. The other is in hospital with serious injuries.‎
There is nothing unique about this headline, though the Foreign Ministry ‎correctly slammed it as "biased and dishonest" and an example of ‎‎"unparalleled chutzpah."
Later in the day, CBS changed the headline to "Israeli police kill 3 alleged Palestinian ‎attackers."‎ Eventually, under strong pressure from multiple government agencies and countless critics on social media, the headline was again changed, this time to "Palestinians kill Israeli officer, wound another before being killed."
Too ‎little, too late.
Such headlines proliferate every time there is a terrorist attack (if it is reported at ‎all) and by now, they surprise few people, maybe apart from the Foreign Ministry. The ‎BBC and The Guardian, as well as the big news bureaus such as Reuters and AFP, positively ‎excel in headlines like this. In November, AFP published a list of countries suffering ‎from terrorism and infamously omitted Israel. ‎
This kind of "reporting" is biased to the point where it becomes equivalent to incitement ‎against Israel and collusion with the terrorists' aims. It is not journalism in any sense of the word. ‎What passes for news today constitutes a travesty of both journalism and any sense of moral ‎obligation that journalists once had to report the factual news, instead of pushing their own ‎highly politicized and subjective "narratives." Facts, as the Israel-hating historian Ilan Pappe once ‎said, do not matter. Only ideology does. Unfortunately, the profession that is paid to report only ‎facts, and to do so according to a certain ethical standard, has come to subscribe to that ‎essentially Marxist view of the world. ‎

France is pro Holocaust Memorials, Iran and a terrorist state

A decade ago, I created the “Future Holocaust Memorials” blog as a wake-up call to those nations who built Holocaust memorials yet turn their backs on those planning a Second Holocaust. This blogart project was honored in 2007 as an exemplary work of digital art by Rhizome Artbase at New York’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
In the tradition of Picasso’s Guernica, I propose to President Francois Hollande to double the size of the dozens of Holocaust memorials in France, built with crocodile tears to mark the murder of 6,000,000 Jews in Europe. These upgraded Holocaust memorials will include in advance the extermination of the 6,000,000 Jews in Israel today that Iranians and the Palestinians are planning with France’s help.
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, President Hollande enthusiastically welcomed Hassan Rouhani, president of the Holocaust-denying Iranian genocidal regime. Less than a week later, France threatened to recognize the establishment of a terrorist state of Palestine in the historic heartland of Israel. The Palestinians share with the Iranians the aim to wipe the Jewish state off the map.
Future Holocaust Memorials in the tradition of Picasso's Guernica
Future Holocaust Memorials are a wake-up call warning the world of France’s actions to trigger a second Holocaust. It follows in the artistic tradition of Picasso’s Guernica crying out against a barbaric prelude to genocide.

From the NYT:

The United Nations’ top human rights official urged Turkey on Monday to investigate a report that the army shot unarmed civilians in the mainly Kurdish southeast, and expressed alarm at a crackdown on journalists and critics of the country’s government.

Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, said Turkish authorities should open an independent investigation of the shooting in the southeastern town of Cizre.

The events were captured by what Mr. al-Hussein called an “extremely shocking” film by a Turkish journalist, which appears to show a group of people, some holding white flags, being shot at while they pushed a cart carrying bodies in view of an armored vehicle.

Two people were said to have been killed and nine others wounded in the episode about 10 days ago. The wounded included the journalist who had filmed the shooting, Refik Tekin. The local prosecutor’s office has issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Tekin, alleging that he is a member of a unnamed terrorist organization.

The government has severely limited journalists’ coverage of the southeast and has arrested some who have covered clashes between the government and Kurdish militants.

Mr. al-Hussein acknowledged the “major difficulties” that Turkey faces in the southeastern part of the country, where security forces are engaged in operations against Kurdish militants. But he also drew attention to deteriorating human rights in the area and emphasized that “if state operatives commit human rights violations, they must be prosecuted.”

Can you imagine the world outcry if this could have been blamed on Israel? There would have been an extraordinary UN session called. But for Turkey, hey, it's "shame on you.".

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see this exact video being edited as if the victims were Palestinians in a month or two.

(h/t Ronald)

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Vic Rosenthal's weekly column:

So it turns out that the advice Hillary Clinton gets from her advisers regarding Israel is overwhelmingly anti-Israel:

…the stream of anti-Israel advice received by Hillary was much more comprehensive than that which came from just [Sidney Blumenthal]. In the entire batch of Hillary’s emails, you will be hard pressed to find a single email that is sympathetic towards the Jewish state, from any of the people on whom she relied. …

These emails seem to demonstrate that a huge segment of her close advisers and confidants were attacking Israel, condemning Netanyahu, and strategizing about how to force Israel to withdraw from Judea and Samaria at all costs.

Someone recently remarked that “soon the US will get a president from the SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine] generation,” and that this is true of younger staff members already. Clinton is old enough to know better, but it seems she is hearing only one side of the story.

President Obama, too, is a special case. He is ahead of most of his age group, probably because of his third-world anti-Western orientation. But soon most educated Americans will have absorbed what is becoming the conventional wisdom: Israel bad, Palestinian Arabs good.

The universities are not the only institutions working overtime against us. The US media systematically underreports Arab terrorism: how many Americans know that since October 1, virtually every day has seen at least one murder or attempted murder of an Israeli Jew by an Arab? And much of the media implicitly or explicitly promotes the administration’s position that the reason the conflict continues is that “Israel is building settlements and won’t negotiate” – both false propositions.

There isn’t much that can be expected from over-educated academics, who live on a planet that exists only on the insides of their eyelids, and under-informed media people who care more about access to administration sources than truth. But what’s with the hard-headed political analysts that are advising the candidates? They are supposed to be developing policies that will advance the interests of the US in the world. Are they unaware that the world has changed significantly since the 1990s?

I have always believed that it was both in America’s practical interest and consistent with its values to back Israel. But until recently, it was possible to argue (and many did) that the need to guarantee the oil supply required the US to maintain good relations with the Arab nations – which implied that it had to continue to try to force Israel to abandon all the territory it had come to control in 1967.

But in the past decade and a half, several very significant events have occurred which have vitiated this argument. They are:

Technological developments that have increased the oil supply, especially in the US and Canada, and have brought about a precipitous reduction in the world price of oil,
The burgeoning Sunni jihad against the West, and
The advance of Iran in the region, aided by the splintering of its traditional enemy, Iraq, and by its recent diplomatic and financial gains from its humiliation of the US in nuclear negotiations.

America no longer needs to live in fear of the Arab ‘oil weapon’. At the same time, it is menaced by both the Sunni jihad pursued by groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda and the Shiite one of soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. The US then has a very practical interest in fighting the Sunni jihad and restraining Iran, as well as supporting Israel – which is the key to defending Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt against the jihadists of both stripes.

The “domino theory” applies here. If Israel goes down, so do its neighbors – and so does the rest of the eastern Mediterranean region. And there is no doubt that the Sunni and Shiite jihads are pressuring Israel with an eye on Europe. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi claims that the IS will “conquer Rome,” and it isn’t unimaginable that it might succeed.

The Obama Administration has taken a course almost completely opposed to America’s real interests, supporting the Muslim Brotherhood – part of the axis of jihad – allowing Iran a free hand in Iraq and Syria as well as failing to interdict its nuclear program, not taking serious action against the IS, and doing its best to force Israel to accept indefensible borders.

Barack Obama not only won’t act against it, he refuses even to admit that jihadist Islam is a threat to the West.

Obama’s motives are opaque, but they are probably composed of anti-colonialist ideology, a strong pro-Islamic and anti-Western bias, historical ignorance, and cowardice in the face of terrorist threats (like that historically displayed by European leaders). Regardless of the reason, his policy can seriously damage the US in the long run, exposing it to the threat of terrorism and even nuclear attack. And if it is in the American interest to keep the entire Middle East from becoming a jihadist stronghold, a strong Israel is the best defense.

So what’s wrong with Hillary Clinton’s advisers? Probably they are less concerned with the American interest than with personal interests. Although the Saudi regime is threatened by the IS, Saudi individuals are its biggest backers. They have a history of buying influence by paying off American functionaries – sometimes after they leave office, as in the case of Bill Clinton and of course Jimmy Carter. There are also persistent rumors that Hillary’s closest assistant and adviser, Huma Abedin, is sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The continued anti-Israel (and essentially pro-jihad) American policy is profoundly immoral, contrary to traditional American values, and not justifiable in terms of Realpolitik or in any other way. Its practitioners are either antisemitic or corrupt, and if it is not changed, it may result in the destruction of the Jewish state and a triumph for the Islamic jihad.

In that case, historians will write that if the first blow of World War III was struck on 9/11, its turning point against the West and toward Islam was the loss of Israel. Assuming anyone is left to write from a Western viewpoint, they will not be kind to those American leaders who sold Israel – and ultimately their own country – out.

A new American president will have the opportunity to reverse this irrational and dangerous policy. Here’s a tip for the folks advising Hillary and the other candidates: as my father used to say, the American people are not as dumb as they look.

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02/04 Links Pt1: At her funeral, slain border policewoman hailed as heroine

From Ian:

At her funeral, slain border policewoman hailed as heroine

Hundreds of people gathered Thursday afternoon for the funeral of Hadar Cohen, a border policewoman who was killed by Palestinian attackers in a stabbing and shooting attack outside Jerusalem’s Old City a day earlier.
Police said the 19-year-old, who was shot in the head by one of the Palestinian gunmen, managed to return fire before losing consciousness, helping to thwart a potentially worse attack by the three assailants.
Joined by Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan and Israel Police Chief Roni Alsheich at the funeral, in the military cemetery in Yehud outside Tel Aviv, friends and family praised Cohen’s heroism.
Cohen’s father, Ofer, eulogized his daughter, saying: “My beloved Hadar, my dearest daughter who was more beloved to me than anything. How am I supposed to say goodbye to you now?”
“Everyone says you were a hero, a true hero, who saved so many people with your body and soul. But no one truly knows you, my Hadar, your warmth,” he said, after reciting the Kaddish at his daughter’s grave.
“I’m proud of you. I’m proud of you and salute you,” he said.

Damascus Gate killers planned to attack group of civilians, police believe

Israeli security officials said Wednesday’s fatal attack at the Damascus Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem, in which Border Police officer Hadar Cohen was killed and a second policewoman badly injured, marked “an escalation” in the ongoing terror wave.
The three West Bank Palestinians who stabbed and shot at the Israeli forces had been sitting and waiting for a large group of Israeli civilians to enter or leave the Old City, and had planned to target them, Israel’s Channel 2 news reported on Wednesday evening, citing police sources.
“As far as we can tell from the armaments, [the terrorists] planned a larger, more sophisticated attack,” Jerusalem Deputy Police Chief Avshalom Peled said. “This is an escalation from what we’ve seen thus far. The police officers prevented a combined and much larger attack.”
Husam Badran, an official with the Hamas terror group, also called the attack “a turning point,” apparently referring to its severity and sophistication during a terror wave that has mostly consisted of lone stabbers.

Honest Reporting: Is Murdering Israelis Just “Human Nature”?

Once again, Ban presented no evidence as to the drivers of violence and extremism. So let’s do what the Secretary-General did not, and actually examine history, facts and human nature.
Question: Is violence against civilians really a natural response to territorial disputes throughout the ages?
Answer: No.
Oxford University Press recently published a thorough academic study of more than 2,000 militarized, territorial disputes around the world from 1816 to 1996. The analysis demonstrated that only 17% of militarized territorial disputes escalated into war within one year, and only 30% escalated into war within five years. In other words, humans usually do NOT respond to territorial disputes with violence. That’s not an opinion, that’s just history.

Question: Does Ban Ki-moon actually believe that terrorism (against people other than Israelis) is “human nature?”
Answer: No.
A UN Secretary-General has to deal with a lot. For example, right now 190 different countries are engaged in territorial disputes. Further, according to the Armed Conflict Database, there are 42 violent conflicts raging around the world (as of 2015), and in the year 2014 alone, these conflicts produced 12,181,000 refugees and 180,000 fatalities.
Yet in over seven years as UN Secretary-General, we have not been able to find even one example of Ban Ki-moon referring to any of these deaths as “natural” or “human nature,” except for the murder of Israelis.

This is the self-portrait of cartoonist Omayya Joha.

Her work has been featured in this blog as the source of some of the most popular antisemitic and inciting cartoons being published nowadays in Arab media.

There is an article in Al Sharq where she whines that Facebook has been warning her about complaints that she is getting, she assumes from Jews, about her cartoons.

The EoZTV version of this story is here. You can continue the article below.

Her Facebook page is still up today. And here are some of her images that Facebook does not consider offensive enough to take down:

First, the unintentionally ironic ones:

Yes, Israel stabbing Arab women.

Here she is upset that Arabs care more about soccer than Al Aqsa, so the Jews take advantage of it. Not mentioning that the Arabs play soccer on the courtyards of Al Aqsa!

She incites Arabs to riot over Al Aqsa by claiming that Jews are fueling the flames.

Now, the antisemitic cartoons that are still on her Facebook page:

But Facebook did take some of her work down. She even made a cartoon about that, blaming - well, you know:

These cartoons are not on her page, probably because of those evil Jews shown above complaining about them.

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Today is World Cancer Day, which means it is yet another excuse for Palestinians to blame everything evil on Israel.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health released a press statement saying that the rate of cancer in Gaza has increased dramatically from 2009 to 2014, from 65.6/100000 to 83.9/100000, according to a new study.

The press release quoted the study as saying "the impact of the repeated aggression of the Zionist occupation during the past ten years, in which all sorts of internationally prohibited weapons were used that may have contributed to this increase."

The Ministry called for an international conference to discuss how Israel is to blame. Pesticides, smoking and obesity are minor factors compared to "Zionist aggression. "

The interesting thing is that the rate of cancer in the West Bank has increased in the same time period by virtually the same amount, according to an article I quoted last month. Since no one is yet accusing Israel of using depleted uranium or white phosphorus in the West Bank, then perhaps the increase in Gaza cancer has nothing to do with Israel either.

Tellingly, the MOH didn't bother to issue any statistics from the West Bank on World Cancer Day, only Gaza - just to blame Israel for cancer.

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Here's how the official Wafa news agency reported yesterday's terror attack:

Three Palestinians have been fatally shot by Israeli police in Jerusalem, after they purportedly attacked with gunfire and knives Israeli policemen outside Bab al-Amoud Gate in Jerusalem, seriously injuring two Israeli policewomen, according to local sources.

An Israeli police report stated that two policewomen were seriously wounded in the gunfire and stabbing attacks carried out by three Palestinians identified as Ahmad Rajeh Zakarneh, Mohammad Ahmad Kmail, and Ahmad Najeh Abur-Rob.

WAFA correspondent said that, shortly after the incident, Israeli police sealed off Bab al-Amoud area, along with all the gates of Jerusalem’s Old City. Police reportedly attacked Palestinian locals present there with teargas canisters and stun grenades. [This seems to be made up - EoZ]

On January 26th, the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said it was "human nature" for Palestinians to react violently to Israel's nearly 50-year military occupation.

Speaking at the UN Security Council's Middle East debate, Ban said the new year had begun as 2015 ended, “with unacceptable levels of violence and a polarized public discourse across the spectrum in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory.”

He added that Israeli security measures were failing to “address the profound sense of alienation and despair driving some Palestinians – especially young people.”

I guess that they didn't read Ban's NYT op-ed where he claimed he was in no way justifying terror attacks.

Or perhaps - they did, and understood him perfectly.

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State Department spokesman makes a moral stand against Palestinian terror (video)

From The Jewish Press:

Finally, after months of calmly responding to the incessant badgering by Palestinian Arab journalist Said Arikat to manipulate the State Dept. spokespeople into making statements that were then promoted as positions attacking Israel, State Dept. Spokesperson John Kirby had enough.

Kirby, a pleasant looking former Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy, is generally unflappable, with a calm demeanor and a quick smile lost his cool – as much as he was capable – at the Wednesday, Feb. 3 daily press briefing.

Kirby had just responded to Matt Lee, the Associated Press reporter, who asked whether the State Dept. was going to condemn the terrorist attack by Palestinian Arab terrorists on two border patrol policewomen at Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate, which took place earlier in the day.

Kirby said on behalf of the State Dept. “we do strongly condemn the attack in Jerusalem today in which two border police officers were attacked with automatic weapons.

“As before, sadly, once again, we have to extend our deepest condolences to a mourning family and to friends and the community of the victim, and we wish the injured officer a full and complete recovery. As we’ve said before, there’s no justification for these attacks,” the spokesperson said.

What Kirby didn’t mention, but surely knew, was that the police officer who was murdered, Hadar Cohen, was a 19-year-old girl, and her fellow officer who was severely wounded was only 20 years old.

But Arikat could not allow to pass a single statement of compassion made by the U.S. towards Israel. Instead of simply moving on to another topic, Arikat, so conditioned to getting in the last word and twisting any comments into ones that can be construed as
anti-Israel, had to take a stab.

ARIKAT:” But you’re not,” he started, “These border police units, they are part of an occupying force. Correct? You agree with that?

KIRBY: “the-they-this was border police officers that were on duty doing their job.”

ARIKAT: “No, I mean, I understand you want to condemn this and that’s your prerogative, but, I mean, the flip side of that – I mean,” Arikat stumbled about a bit, and then got to his point:”But how should the Palestinians respond to an overwhelming military presence that basically suffocates their lives? How – what they should do, in your opinion?“
And this is when Kirby, finally, lit into Arikat. He didn’t raise his voice and he didn’t use vulgar terms. But finally, after so many months, Kirby gave back to Arikat what Arikat should have been getting all along. Instead of allowing a reporter in the room to use the daily press briefing as an opportunity to aggressively lobby for his people’s political positions, Kirby shut down Arikat with a hard dose of truth.

Kirby responded to Arikat’s effort to turn a brutal terrorist murder of a 19-year-old Israeli girl doing her job – to protect Israeli citizens – into a justified response to the “Occupation.” Kirby said, through ever-so-slightly tightened lips:

Let me tell you what is not the way to do it, okay? The way to not do it is through attacks like today. The way to not do it is to incite those attacks with rhetoric that inflames these tensions. The way to do it – the way to move forward here – is through peaceful dialogue and conversation, and to take affirmative steps in both word and in action to walk people away from this kind of violence. That’s the way to do this.

The sad thing is that most of the world seems to believe what Arikat said, that all terrorism against Israelis are justified because their lives - which are better by nearly every objective measure than that of citizens of most Arab countries - are supposedly being "suffocated."

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02/03 Links Pt2: NY Times gets Pallywooded by JVP; Wix unveils 2016 Super Bowl ad

From Ian:

Amb. Alan Baker: France’s Ultimatum to Israel – Legally Flawed and Politically Imprudent

France Undermines the Oslo Accords It Witnessed
The commitments set down in this agreement, to negotiate the permanent status of the territories as well as other central issues such as Jerusalem, borders, settlements and refugees, are solemn Palestinian and Israeli obligations which France, together with its EU partners, as well as the United States, Russia, Egypt, Jordan and Norway are obligated to honor after placing their signatures on the agreement as witnesses.
By the same token, the UN General Assembly in its Resolution A/50/21 of December 4, 1995, supported by France, expressed its full support for the Oslo Accords and the peace negotiation process.
In its capacity both as a signed witness to the agreement, as well as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, it is incumbent on France, which voted in favor of the UN resolution endorsing the agreement and the negotiation process, not to attempt to undermine the same agreement and process, nor to prejudge issues that are still open and to be negotiated.

Anne Bayefsky: The UN Commemorates the Holocaust with Israel-Bashing

It is hardly a secret that the UN agenda is to find reasons for treating the Jewish state differently — notwithstanding the UN Charter’s promise of equality for nations large and small. The settlements bandwagon is one of many.
In effect, the “occupation” rant is the PC version of ISIS’s “Allahu Akbar.” It has been the Arab cry since the minute of Israel’s birth in 1948 and is the verbiage that presages destruction, not peaceful coexistence. It is the complaint about Jews living on Arab-claimed land, despite the fact that ultimate ownership of this land — according to legal agreement — is to be decided by negotiations, not UN fiat.
The bigger picture tells the story. The UN just wrapped up a year in which there were a total of 26 General Assembly resolutions condemning specific countries for human-rights abuse: 19 — that’s 73 percent — against Israel and one, for instance, against Syria. In 2015, the UN Commission on the Status of Women adopted one resolution condemning a country for violating women’s rights: Israel — for violating the rights of Palestinian women.
Finding excuses for demonizing Jews, discriminating against Jews, delegitimizing Jewish self-determination, and just plain old Jew-hatred, is thousands of years old. It has a name, anti-Semitism.
Which is where the UN’s international Holocaust Remembrance Day comes in. At the UN, it provides cover. So on January 27, Ban Ki-moon showed up at the General Assembly’s annual commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz.
After checking-off “present” in his Holocaust remembrance speech, the secretary-general could manage to mention anti-Semitism only once, and only together with “anti-Muslim bigotry.” His UN secretariat also used the day to promote the claim that there were multiple Holocausts, adding for the first time to the rostrum of the annual event a Sinto speaker, who repeatedly referred to “the forgotten Holocaust of the Sinti and Roma.”

Sir Eric Pickles: A thriving vibrant Jewish community is an integral part of British identity

There is a darkness descending on universities across Europe.
What should be institutions of lightness and open discussions risk becoming places where Jewish students need to move discreetly, avoiding the attention of their peers. Late last year I talked to Jewish students in France, they spoke of violence on their campuses and a conflating of Israel and Jewish opinion. Just as worrying are the consorted attempts to delegitimize Israel and present it on every occasion as outside the community of nations.
This is not a passive policy; it involves the denial of a platform to speak, and the drowning out of opinions when they are expressed. In some cases, it has become the thinnest of veneers for anti-Semitism.
Last week we saw its latest manifestation at one of London’s leading universities, when an unruly mob of protesters attacked a classroom where the former head of the Shin Bet (Israeli Security Agency), Ami Ayalon, was speaking with a small group of students. Slogans were chanted, fire alarms were set off and windows were broken. A group of bullies set out to frighten those attending into submission, and into silence.

EU funded Ma'an: Moderate in English, incitement in Arabic

We have mentioned previously that the Palestinian Ma'an news network is heavily funded by Western sources. And it is not hard to understand why - among all the English-language Palestinian Arab media, it most closely adheres to journalistic standards.

But in Arabic, it is as biased and inaccurate as other Arab media. And that sometimes even spills over into incitement.

Today, in English, it says:

70 right-wing Israelis tour Aqsa compound, Palestinians denied entry

Dozens of right-wing Israelis toured the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound on Wednesday under Israeli police escort, while a number of Palestinian men and women were denied entry to the holy site.
Witnesses said that as many as 70 Israelis entered the compound through the Dung Gate, accompanied by nearly 20 Israeli Border Police and two Israeli intelligence officers.

(Even in English, Ma'an leaves much to be desired. Dung Gate is a gate to the old city of Jerusalem, not the Temple Mount; the Moroccan (Rambam) gate is the only one that non-Muslims are allowed to use to enter. And how do they know that the visitors are "right wing"? Some religious Zionists have leftist political positions.)

In Arabic, however, the story reads this way:

Dozens of settlers stormed Al-Aqsa

Dozens of settlers and members of the so-called "border guards" and occupation intelligence officers on Wednesday morning entered Al-Aqsa Mosque, through the Mughrabi Gate.
A Ma'an news reporter in Jerusalem quoted witnesses as saying that 70 settlers, and 19 members of the border guards with their guns and two intelligence officers, stormed through the Aqsa gate during the "morning raids", amid worshipers present in the squares, while preventing women and men access to the Haram for the sixth month in a row, after the inclusion of their names in the lists called "black lists" under the pretext that they stir up trouble in al Aqsa.

In turn, Sheikh Azzam al-Khatib told Ma'an that the occupation is escalating things in the Al Aqsa Mosque on the one hand and against the Islamic Waqf on the other hand in an unprecedented way.

Given that the current wave of stabbings and shootings against Jews are supposedly because of Jews peacefully visiting Judaism's holiest site, by falsely reporting that they are "settlers storming Al Aqsa" Ma'an is inciting its readers.

Ma'an used to routinely use the word "storming" in English as well, but criticism from places like this blog shamed them into being slightly more accurate in English. But in Arabic, they have no shame using the words that are being used to incite terror attacks.

And Western nations are supporting this incitement.

Here are the "storming settlers" - a group of school students:

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Hamas Hires Flintstones To Drive New Tank (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Gaza City, February 2 - The militant Islamist movement that rules the Gaza Strip unveiled yesterday what it called a tank it had developed, and today announced it had entered into a contract with the Flintstone family to provide the vehicle's locomotive power.

Hamas brought its new vehicle to a rally in honor of the seven fighters who died last week when a tunnel collapsed on them, but photographs revealed that the heavy tank treads that normally moved such a mechanized weapons platform were for appearance's sake only: from certain angles, the wheels of an SUV were visible as the true source of the tank's movement. The images quickly became the subject of ridicule by Hamas's rival movement Fatah. A spokesman for Hamas told reporters today that the use of another vehicle to move the tank - made of fiberglass and sewage pipes - was merely a temporary measure in place during the rally, but that in the long term the movement had engaged the services of Fred and Wilma Flintstone and family, who have extensive experience in innovative solutions for the propulsion of vehicles.

"We are pleased to announce that the Flintstones have agreed to take this contract," said Mahmoud al-Zahar. "They have demonstrated for decades that they possess the technical capacity and experience to move heavy vehicles without dependence on fossil fuels, which is obviously an important consideration for us." The Gaza Strip is entirely dependent on imports of gasoline, natural gas, and other fuels from Israel.

The Flintstones did not return a phone call seeking comment today, but former associates of theirs called the hiring by Hamas a smart move. "One of the bedrock assumptions for Hamas must be that in any large-scale conflict with Israel, which has happened with some regularity over the last several years, they're going to be bombed back to the stone age," said William Hanna. "While Hamas's ideology and politics are a perfect fit for the stone age, their dependence on technology has remained firmly in the anthropocene. Recruiting Fred and his family could serve them not only in terms of providing their new tank with a non-fossil-fuel-dependent engine; it can really help them adapt in the long-term to living like cavemen, which seems to be the lifestyle they prefer, both for themselves and the people of the Gaza Strip."

It remains unclear when the contract will begin. A neighbor and friend of Fred Flintstone, who identified himself as Barney Rubble, told journalists that Fred's schedule might prevent him from taking on more than simply moving the tank. "Fred's bowling league nights are basically non-negotiable, I can tell you that," he said.

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Fatah Facebook page celebrating murderers

From Fatah's Facebook page:

And:

I guess celebrating the murder of a 19 year old woman is "natural."

Hadar Cohen is, of course, a real martyr, who helped stop what would have been a much worse attack.

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