Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, May 22, 2016

05/22 Links: Beware the Echo Chamber, Fear the Media Savvy Left, Stick to the Truth; At the epicenter of BDS

From Ian:

NYTs: As Hamas Tunnels Back Into Israel, Palestinians Are Afraid, Too

Residents said they had heard thudding noises below an incongruous-looking nearby shack that they think covers a tunnel entrance. They said they were too afraid to ask the truck drivers or other men they see around the shack what was going on.
“How can we say they are helping when they are building tunnels?” a woman asked of Hamas, tapping the rubble under her feet.
Naji Sarhan, the deputy housing minister in Gaza, denied that Hamas was taking construction material, particularly cement, intended for reconstruction, instead accusing vendors of illegally selling their supplies on the black market. He said Hamas had “its own ways” to obtain building materials.
In Beit Hanoun’s “Caravan Quarter,” a cluster of donated mobile homes where hundreds have been camped since the war’s end as they wait to rebuild, the anger was palpable.
“We have a Gaza City under the ground, and we have nothing up here,” said one 23-year-old in the camp, who spoke on the condition he be identified only as Akram, and said he made a living delivering groceries.
A neighbor who is 29 and goes by the name Abu Mohammad, said that the danger of nearby tunnels made him reluctant to rebuild. “I give it 99.5 percent that our house will be destroyed again,” he said. “I go crazy thinking about it.”

Simon Wiesenthal Center denounces ‘Israel-bashing’ Romeo and Juliet play

A new adaptation of William Shakespeare’s famous play Romeo and Juliet was denounced by the Simon Wiesenthal Center for its perceived “Israel-bashing.”
The play, currently in previews at Theatricum Botanicum in California’s Topanga Canyon, is set in contemporary East Jerusalem and includes uniformed Israeli soldiers lording over Palestinians. In the play, a character depicting an Israeli soldier executes an unarmed Palestinian woman at close range.
“Shakespeare’s classic love story has been hijacked to demonize the State of Israel,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the Jewish NGO’s associate dean, said in a statement. “We do not believe in censorship, but this production has degraded a classic play into a heavy-handed, anti-Israel propaganda platform.”
“As currently staged, Romeo and Juliet is a ‘lose-lose’ proposition,” Cooper continued. “The play loses, the public loses and the truth loses. The genius of Shakespeare should be used to illuminate the human condition and promote understanding of issues, not the distortion of reality,” he concluded.

IsraellyCool: Roger Waters Narrates And Pimps For Anti Israel Propaganda Movie

This next video is 24 minutes, which is 24 minutes of your life you won’t get back. But it does show how utterly dishonest the anti Israel side are. As well as Roger Waters sprouting his BS while wearing a keffiyeh. Just in case you did not already know on whose side of the conflict he stands.
Waters joins the executive producer of the propaganda film Sut Jhally, who looks a bit like Doc Brown. But think big shmuck rather than great Scott. His face also looks like it is suffering from an illegal occupation by his eyebrows.
Waters acts as narrator for the film, which seems to be about how the “Israeli public relations campaign to influence U.S. public opinion.” Which sounds a hell of a lot like those antisemitic tropes about Jews being behind the media.

I do not know how many of you are familiar with Michael Burd and Alan Freedman's radio show, Nothing Left, from J-AIR out of Melbourne, but you definitely should be.

I say this, of course, because they have been foolish enough to put me on the show a few times and therefore my ego impels me to write this.

The thing of it is, J-AIR is a niche station and Nothing Left is a niche show within a niche station.

Our little band of pro-Israel / pro-Jewish bloggers and commenters definitely know what this is like.

The Tradition of the "Little Magazine"

We are provoking small-scale conversations among one another in much the same way that the so-called "little magazines" in New York City throughout the twentieth-century did so.

Nothing Left is a part of our greater international network and we are the "little magazines" of our day.

In fact, Jonathan Tobin, of Commentary has spoken with the guys on-air at Nothing Left and Commentary is one of the few "little magazines" still in operation.

{Somebody beat The New Republic to something resembling death once Marty Peretz retired, made aliyah, and was no longer their to defend the magazine. The Nation, of course, while derived from the noble Abolitionist tradition, has clearly lost its way and tends toward sympathy with political Islam. And, needless to say, Mother Jones staggers on across the Bay, but does anyone care?}

The analysts that Michael and Alan have attracted to the show represent a "who's who" of the pro-Israel / pro-Jewish community from all over the world.

They include famed attorney Alan Dershowitz, Isi Leibler on a weekly basis, my friend Shirlee Finn of Jews Down Under fame, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin of AMCHA, Dr. Michael Harris of Stand With Us, analyst Dr. Martin Sherman of the Jerusalem Post (maybe!), political radio personality Dennis Prager, Lori Lowenthal-Marcus of The Jewish Press, Professor Mordechai Kedar, Professor Mathias Küntzel, Professor Denis MacEoin, Dr. Robert Spencer, MK Moshe Feiglin, journalist Daniel Greenfield, activist Pamela Geller, journalist Melanie Phillips, Abe Foxman of the ADL, and on and on and on.

I tell you guys, it is an impressive list and I only touched on some of the people that I am familiar with. But, as you can see, these are all formidable individuals within the Jewish community and any of the pro-Israel political blogs would be proud to gather such an esteemed line-up.

The latest episode, number 99 from May 17, features Prof Alan Johnson, Pat Condell, MK Sharren Haskel, Isi Leibler, and guest host Mary Werther, with a brief editorial from yours truly.

Those of you familiar with this blog are probably familiar with Pat Condell. Pat, I believe, has about had it with political Islam, if not Islam, more generally. Speaking as a member of a tiny ethnic minority that was persecuted for thirteen long centuries under the boot of Arab-Muslim imperial rule, it is not difficult for me to see why. Condell's contribution, however, is not an interview, but a piece concerning the latest Gaza war.

Professor Alan Johnson

The discussion with Professor Alan Johnson was, however, brilliant. I was not familiar with the gentleman but he is a political theorist, the editor of Fathom, and a current member of the UK Labour Party.

He is, thus, in a perfect position to discuss the manifold ways that Labour is ripping itself to pieces over anti-Semitism... as those of us from "across the pond" break out the popcorn.

Burd and Johnson discussed "open warfare" within the UK Labour party, the heinous former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, and his equally heinous colleague Naz Shah who suggested that the Jews of Israel should be transplanted into the middle of the United States someplace, perhaps Nebraska.

They discussed holocaust inversion, the fact of rampant anti-Semitism within the British Muslim community and the exportation of classical anti-Semitic tropes into contemporary anti-Zionist discourse through that community and their allies on the progressive-left.

MK Sharren Haskel

What was equally interesting to me, however, is Michael's discussion with Israeli MK Sharren Haskel. Haskel is the youngest seated member of Likud and perhaps the youngest member of the Knesset, period.

With luck she represents the coming leadership within Israel, itself, if not merely within Likud. She has got something very fresh and very straightforward, while maintaining both compassion and clarity of thought on the issues... or so I thought as I listened through her segment.

She was a combat soldier in the IDF during Intifada Number 2 and experienced the pain of the field on "my body and on my soul."

She is working on Israeli / Arab-Muslim diplomatic relations in the Middle East and actually sounds rather optimistic. This is hardly surprising because she cannot enter into conversations in the hopes of easing tensions within a spirit of pessimism, now can she?

She talks with Michael about the ways hard-left groups within Israel undermine Israeli well-being and the fact that Israeli Arab MKs stood with murderers in Intifada Number 3, the Car Ramming / Stabbing / Knife Intifada. She also supports a potential new Israeli law that would curb the ability of traitors within the Knesset to support violence against Jews.

She is friendly to the rights of Gay people and even supports the use of medical cannabis. In fact, although she claims not to use that substance, she is the Chairman for the Medical Cannabis Caucus in the Knesset.

"Medical Cannabis Caucus in the Knesset"?

Just roll that around your tongue a few times!

Most importantly, however, she recognizes that the Arab-Muslim war against the Jews in the Middle East is not a land dispute, but a cultural-religious conflict by a much larger hostile and foreign national group (the aggressors from the Arabian peninsula) versus the much smaller indigenous population from Judea and Samaria.

This is a concept that we need to bang into the heads of western authorities.

Isi Leibler

The last thing that I want to do is give Isi Leibler short-shrift.

The guy was a primary leader within the Australian Jewish community for decades who made aliyah and is now writing for various outlets, including the Jerusalem Post.

Leibler drops in to Nothing Left on a regular basis and he is one of those old-school, no-nonsense Jews who want for the Jewish people, not to mention the Jewish State, to stand up strong for itself.

His conversation with Michael revolved around the fact that that there is no other country in the world whose very existence is called into question other than Israel; this, despite the fact that, as Leibler says, "we are the most successful resurrection of a nation that has ever taken place."

Nothing Left and Michael Burd and Alan Freedman should be congratulated for airing their 100th show this Tuesday.

I bet Leibler will have some interesting words.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

On Friday, AP revealed that the Ploughshares Fund, a group that the Obama administration aide Ben Rhodes had identified as a key partner in creating a pro-Iran deal "echo chamber," had given over half a million dollars to J-Street:

In The New York Times Magazine article, Rhodes explained how the administration worked with nongovernmental organizations, proliferation experts and even friendly reporters to build support for the seven-nation accord that curtailed Iran's nuclear activity and softened international financial penalties on Tehran.

"We created an echo chamber," said Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, adding that "outside groups like Ploughshares" helped carry out the administration's message effectively.

J-Street, the liberal Jewish political action group, received $576,500 to advocate for the deal.

But there was an even more direct connection between White House propaganda efforts and J-Street.

J-Street's Jeremy Ben Ami was a frequent visitor to the White House in the months leading up to the Iran deal.

White House records show that Ben-Ami has been a frequent guest, with 12 visits between 2012 and 2014. While some of these visits were as a guest in lavish White House parties with hundreds of other guests, some of the meetings were more intimate, with top White House officials.

On April 27, 2012, Ben-Ami met with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough along with the leader of J-Street PAC, Daniel Kohl. Also at the meeting was Mehdi K. Alhassani, special assistant to the Office of the Chief of Staff of the National Security Council, a former Muslim Student Association leader at George Washington University that some right-wing sites have tried to link to the Benghazi coverups.

Ben-Ami met with Matt Nosanchuk, the White House liaison to the American Jewish community, three times in 2013, each time along with small groups of people considered Jewish leaders. One other time he met in another group with Nosanchuk's predecessor, Jarrod Bernstein, indicating how critical J-Street was considered to White House efforts to influence US Jews towards its positions.

The meetings that most link J-Street to White House efforts to push the Iran deal through occurred in January 2014.

On January 14, Ben-Ami met with Ben Rhodes along with Morton Halperin, Senior Advisor for the George Soros' Open Society Institute, along with J-Street's Vice President of Government Affairs Dylan Williams.

And shortly thereafter, on January 23, when Ben-Ami and Williams met with Ben Rhodes again, this time in the White House Situation Room.

Ben-Ami's private access to top White House officials continued after that. He met one-on-one with Philip Gordon, Special Assistant to the President and White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf Region, in February 2015, and had another one on one meeting with Robert Malley, Gordon's successor, in May.

Shortly thereafter, J-Street launched a website, Iran Deal Facts, that slickly lied about what the deal meant. It took serious money to create it.

J-Street has also publicly aligned with the National Iranian American Council, the unofficial pro-Iran lobby in the US, in pushing the Iran nuclear deal. NIAC's head Trita Parsi also enjoyed some intimate meetings with White House officials in 2014, mostly with Rumana Ahmed, the While House Muslim advisor, and also with Jewish liaison Matt Nosanchuk

We cannot know exactly what was discussed at these meetings between J-Street leaders. But between Ben Rhodes' braggadocio about how he manipulated public opinion on the Iran deal through the Ploughshares Fund, the fact that J-Street was by far the largest recipient of Ploughshares' funding in 2014 (it received $100,000 from the find in 2013 as well), and Jeremy Ben-Ami's meetings with Ben Rhodes and other top White House officials, it is apparent that J-Street has not been working for Israel's best interests.

J-Street is nothing but a paid shill for the White House to split the US Jewish community and put it at odds with how Israelis feel.

CORRECTION: Originally I wrote that the "Iran Deal Facts" website was no longer there, but it had a different URL than I thought.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

On Friday, I wrote about a French medical advice site that erased Israel from the map and said that travel to Israel was less safe than Syria.

EoZ readers wrote to the site to complain, and Alyssa Cohen Kaplan received this reply:

There is no willingness on our part to take a position for or against anyone . Some of our country sheets certainly require revision . We have company. Thank you for pointing out some inconsistencies.

They changed the maps for both Israel and "Palestine" to this one:

It is a start.

I don't know if anyone wrote to them from the stories about the topic in The New Antisemite and Dreuz.Info but since Alyssa received the reply, it looks like we did get results.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

The 25th anniversary of the "naqba" you never hear about

25 years ago, in 1991, Kuwait expelled over 350,000 Palestinians.

And no one mentions this anniversary.

Many of the Palestinians in Kuwait had lived there for over a generation. Entire families were raised there.

But after the PLO embraced Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, the Palestinian residents became targets. There were four fatal bomb attacks in Palestinian neighborhoods in late 1990. Kuwaiti forces

Here is a description of what happened 25 years ago in Kuwait:

The terror campaign after the war started as early as the arrival of the Kuwaiti forces on February 26, 1991. Kuwaiti militants were quoted saying that they would shoot suspected Palestinians when they found them in their apartments. Four main militia groups and two state institutions participated in a concerted effort to terrorize and persecute Palestinians in Kuwait. Two of the militias were headed by the state security officers Adel Al-Gallaf and Hussain Al-Dishti. The third was headed by Amin Al-Hindi, a gangster who specialized in rape, torture, stealing, and killing. The fourth was the group known as August 2nd, which specialized in psychological warfare against Palestinians. The army and the police forces represented the two state institutions that were involved in this terror campaign.[24]

Two Palestinians were shot dead near a traffic circle, on February 27.[25] On March 2, Kuwaiti tanks and soldiers rolled into Palestinian communities, mainly Hawalli. House-to-house searches for weapons and alleged collaborators resulted in the arrest of hundreds of Palestinians.[26] People were also arrested at checkpoints for no reason other than being Palestinians. Typically, they were beaten instantly then taken to police and detention centers where they were tortured for confessions.

Despite the military censorship, newspapers began to report a dramatic rise in the number of injured Palestinians in Mubarak Hospital.[27] Scores of people were treated from severe beating and torture. Six Palestinians were brought to the Hospital shot dead in the head, execution style.[28] By the third week of March, hundreds of people were treated from torture injuries and thousands stayed in detention centers for interrogation.[29] Amnesty International reported that the torture of Palestinians was continuing in Kuwait by the third week of April. A 24-year-old Palestinian had been beaten for hours, had acid thrown over him, and had been subjected to electric shock torture.[30]

The terror campaign continued throughout 1991 achieving its main objective: terrorizing Palestinians enough so that they would leave the country. To expedite the process, the government took several other measures to evict those who did not leave. First, Palestinians working for the government were fired or not rehired. Second, Palestinian children were kicked out of public schools and subsidies for their education in private schools were stopped. Third, new fees became required for health services. Fourth, housing rents increased and people were asked by Kuwaiti landlords to pay rent for the entire crisis-period.[31]

More important were the feelings of injustice and insecurity Palestinians began to experience as a result of the terror campaign. It became unsafe to walk in streets or to stay at home. Rape stories functioned as a decisive pushing factor for the remaining Palestinian families. The "censored" Western media rarely reported on this part of the campaign. The CNN TV network covered one of these rape stories. Lubbadah[32] told the same story together with many others. The Middle East Watch group also told several stories of rape.[33]

On May 27, 1991, several members of a Kuwaiti militia group entered the apartment of a newly married Palestinian couple. They divided themselves into two groups. One group took the twenty-six year old bride, Najah Yusuf As'ad, to one room where they raped her one after the other then they shot her with nine bullets in the head. The other group took the thirty-year old groom, Muhammed Musa Mahmood Mustafa, to another room where they also raped him one after the other then they shot him with four bullets in his spine. When they finished committing their crimes, they sat in the apartment, drank tea, then called the bride's family several times telling them what happened to their daughter. Another story was about A.M.M., an eighteen-year old Palestinian girl. She was kidnapped and gang-raped for two days then was brought to Mubarak Hospital on May 25, 1991. Her family said that she was kidnapped in front of her house by Kuwaiti young men. A third story was about S.M.A.D., a twelve-year old Palestinian girl, who was also kidnapped in front of her house in Al-Rumaithiyah, on June 6, 1991. She was also gang-raped for two days by a group of Kuwaitis. A fourth story was about F.M.A.F, a fifteen-years old Palestinian girl, who was kidnapped in front of her house in Al-Farwaniyah, on June 4, 1991. She was raped for two days then was brought to Al-Adan Hospital. Finally, a Palestinian woman in her fifties was kidnapped and raped by a group of Kuwaiti men about the same age. A Kuwaiti man approached her offering help. He gave her an address where she can receive social assistance. When she went to the address, she was kidnapped and raped for a week by several Kuwaiti men who then left her in a deserted area.[34]

The government also intensified its efforts to evict the remaining Palestinians directly through deportation. Between the middle of June and the first week of July 1991, about 10,000 Palestinians were deported to the Iraqi border.[35] On July 8, the Minister of Interior Affairs, Ahmed Hamoud Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, announced that there were about 1,000 more Palestinians in detention camps waiting for deportation.[36] Actually, these deportations forced tens of thousands of other Palestinians to leave, mainly family members, because they could not practically stay when the head of the household or the main bread winner was deported.

The deportees were dumped at the Iraqi border near Safwan. Gradually, it became known as the Safwan Refugee Camp. Many of the deportees to this camp were tortured and brutally beaten by Kuwaiti troops. In most cases people were simply "dumped" there without any legal deportation procedures.[37] Typically, people were arrested at checkpoints, then beaten and tortured to admit that they were collaborators. If they did not admit, they would be deported to Safwan Camp.[38] One of the Camp deportees was Fayiz Nadir, a 23-year-old Palestinian. He was burned 10 times with an iron on his arms, feet, and head. Another one was Abdul Qadir, a 30-year-old Algerian. He was arrested together with Fayiz Nadir for two weeks. He saw 109 men in the detention center with their hands tied behind their backs, often blindfolded. When the men were brought to the interrogation, they were kicked and jabbed with gun butts. Electrical wires were put on their fingers and temples. They were given water twice a day and food once every four days.[39] A Sudanese truck driver, Mustafa Hamzah, was arrested and blindfolded for two weeks in the Salmiya Girls' Secondary School. He named the Kuwaiti 1st Lt. Abdul Latif Al-Anzi as the person who was in charge of that detention center. A Palestinian deportee told the New York Human Rights Group that he was tortured in that school. They burned him with a cattle brand, beat him, then dumped him by a roadside.[40]

Torture, assassinations, rape, and the planned and public ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes.

Why aren't Palestinians marking this anniversary? Why isn't any "pro-Palestinian" group talking about this "naqba?"

You know why. The entire reason people pretend to be "pro-Palestinian" has nothing to do with their love for Palestinians but because of their hate for another group.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

05/21 Links: J-Street and Ploughshares were paid to promote Iran deal; The Mirage of BDS Momentum

From Ian:

J-Street was paid by Obama administration to promote Iran deal

J-Street received more than half a million dollars to advocate for the Obama administration's controversial nuclear deal with Iran, it has been revealed.
The liberal Jewish group, which bills itself as "pro-Israel and pro-peace" but which critics say takes solely anti-Israel stances, was paid the money by the White House's main surrogate organization for selling the deal.
The Ploughshares Fund was named in an explosive New York Times profile of Obama aid Ben Rhodes, in which the President's chief spin doctor listed the central groups responsible for creating an "echo chamber" in order to promote the deal, even when the White House's official line didn't jibe with the facts.
According to Associated Press, the group's 2015 annual report details several organizations which received substantial funds to peddle the official White House line on the nuclear deal. Among them was National Public Radio (NPR), which received a $100,000 grant to promote "national security reporting that emphasizes the themes of U.S. nuclear weapons policy and budgets, Iran's nuclear program, international nuclear security topics and U.S. policy toward nuclear security."
Other grantees included: The Arms Control Association ($282,500); the Brookings Institution ($225,000); and the Atlantic Council ($182,500), who "received money for Iran-related analysis, briefings and media outreach, and non-Iran nuclear work," according to AP. (h/t Yenta Press)

Rhodes' Echo Chamber' Group Paid NPR To Cover Iran Deal

In a disturbing revelation of how much the Obama Administration’s plans to sell the Iran nuclear deal involved the corruption of the media, AP reports that The Ploughshares Fund [funded by Soros], a group identified by Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes as one of the groups that helped build an “echo chamber” to promulgate the administration’s narrative, gave National Public Radio $100,000 last year to report on the deal and ancillary issues.
The Ploughshares Fund's mission is to ostensibly "build a safe, secure world by developing and investing in initiatives to reduce and ultimately eliminate the world's nuclear stockpiles," but as Rhodes revealed in an article in The New York Times Magazine, the fund was one of a group of nongovernmental organizations that worked to engender support for the deal. Rhodes said brazenly, "We created an echo chamber.”
The GOP had slammed the deal as being a product of White House spin.
Ploughshares’ 2015 annual report stated that the grant to NPR supported "national security reporting that emphasizes the themes of U.S. nuclear weapons policy and budgets, Iran's nuclear program, international nuclear security topics and U.S. policy toward nuclear security.” Board chairwoman Mary Lloyd Estrin bragged in the report that the success of the Iran deal was "driven by the fearless leadership of the Obama administration and supporters in Congress, less known is the absolutely critical role that civil society played in tipping the scales towards this extraordinary policy victory."
Ploughshares spokeswoman Jennifer Abrahamson protested to AP, "It is common practice for foundations to fund media coverage of underreported stories,” adding that funding "does not influence the editorial content of their coverage in any way, nor would we want it to." NPR admitted that Ploughshares has funded NPR's coverage of national security since 2005; every grant descriptions since 2010 mentions Iran. (h/t Yenta Press)

Media-Darling Muslim Selfie Girl: ‘Hitler Left Some Jews So We’d Know Why He Killed Them’

A Muslim girl who took a “defiant” selfie at an anti-Islam protest in Belgium allegedly posted anti-Semitic comments on her Twitter, Facebook, and Ask.fm accounts, according to a Belgian former soldier and a leading Dutch website.
Zakia Belkhiri, 22, was lauded as an “inspiration” by the media as her picture next to Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) protesters went viral.
But web sleuths have now claimed that Ms. Belkhiri’s “peace sign” in the picture is perhaps out of character for her. They claim she tweeted in 2012: “Hitler didnt kill all the jews, he left some. So we [would] know why he was killing them”.
The tweet, seen in these screengrabs, appears to have been sent on the 29th December 2012, is now circulating social media as people attempt to draw attention to Ms. Belkhiri’s alleged racist views. As Ms. Belkhiri has now deleted her account it is not possible to verify these tweets.
Shortly before she deleted her accounts, Ms. Belkhiri tweeted: “I DON’T HAVE ANYTHING AGAINST JEWS THOSE TWEETS ARE FAKE THEY ARE PHOTOSHOPPED BUT if you don’t believe me that’s your choice people”.
But social media users are also claiming her Ask.fm account allegedly read: “f#ck that Jewish language” when she was asked if she wanted to learn Hebrew while critics claim her Facebook account expressed her hatred for Jews.

05/20 Links Pt2: The Israel That Arabs Don’t Know; A week of ordinary French anti-Semitism

From Ian:

IDF-critiquing NGO faces court debate on revealing its sources

The State Prosecutor’s Office has demanded that Breaking the Silence name its sources, saying anonymous witnesses allow potential lies to spread and make it impossible to investigate alleged abuses.
According to Israeli media reports earlier this year, the army is demanding testimonies that primarily relate to evidence of alleged war crimes and compliance by IDF troops with illegal orders. The State Prosecutor’s Office — officially acting on behalf of the army as the matter pertains to a civilian organization — presented the petition to the court.
Breaking the Silence co-founder Yehuda Shaul said the hearings were aimed at closing down the NGO, and insisted the group is determined to protect the identities of its sources.
The NGO provides a platform for military veterans to describe what they say were disturbing aspects of their service in the 2014 war in the Gaza Strip and in operations in the West Bank.
It has faced increased political pressure in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presides over one of the most right-wing governments in the country’s history.
In March, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, who on Friday morning announced his resignation, accused the NGO of “treason” by asking discharged soldiers to reveal classified information, a charge denied by the group.
The Military Police have also demanded the names of the NGO’s sources — a request it refused.

The Israel That Arabs Don’t Know

On my flight from Rome to Tel Aviv on Israel’s El Al airlines, I thought about what awaited me and what I would see. Although I had an idea of what Israel was like and friends who have told me of their experiences working there, memories of the accumulated assumptions about the place that I had gained throughout my childhood in Egypt presented a conflicting counter narrative. I wondered which was the truth: what I now knew, or what had been instilled in us Egyptians as children. Do the “Jews” in Israel actually hate Arabs? If they found out I was Egyptian, would treat me poorly? Would I be verbally or physically abused if Israelis heard me speaking Arabic?
Halting my train of thought, a man sitting next to me with his wife asked me something in Hebrew. In English, I explained that I didn’t understand the language. The man then apologized and asked in English, “Where are you from?” When I answered that I was from Egypt, he and his wife smiled genuinely and welcomingly. These were not the fake smiles our schools, society, television, and film had attributed to Israelis and Jews.
When I arrived in Israel’s financial capital, Tel Aviv, the airport’s clean atmosphere and facilities left me wondering whether I had left Europe. Its modernity left little doubt that I had entered a developed country.
On the road from the Ben Gurion Airport to Jerusalem (al-Quds)–Israel’s political capital–I saw wide, clean roads, filled with trees and captivating natural scenery. I took notes on everything, in line with my mission to relay the truth of life inside Israel. Once I had arrived in the political capital, I visited the Ministry of Exterior, the Knesset, and the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum.
I met with both Arabs and Jews of Arab origin, and they recounted their memories of life in Iraq, Egypt, and the other countries from which they had come. I listened to how they had left those countries after bitter experiences of incitement and hatred. Life had brought them to a place where they peacefully coexisted. Unfortunately, the truth of coexistence has been muddled with the help of many media organizations. (h/t IsraellyCool)

A week of ordinary French anti-Semitism

September 1972, Munich’s Olympic Village, “31” block. Some of the Israeli athletes were Holocaust survivors. The Black September Palestinian terrorists took them hostage demanding the release of 234 terrorists in the Israeli jails. But Black September was not there for an exchange or negotiation, what they wanted the killing of Jews, the young representatives of the Israeli people hosted by the nation which once planned the Holocaust.
The Olympic Village was located a few kilometers from Dachau.
The Cannes Film Festival has now hosted “Munich: A Palestinian Story” by the Lebanese filmmaker of Palestinian origin Narsi Hajjaj. Ilana Romano, widow of Yossef Romano, who was murdered in the massacre, has refused to cooperate with this film because the director insisted on defining as “freedom fighters” the Black September terrorists who killed her husband, while the murdered Israelis are called “representatives of an occupying country”.
A year ago, it emerged that at least one of the athletes, Yossef Romano, was castrated bythe Palestinian kidnappers in front of his companions. Hajjaj, however, called the massacre not a terrorist act, but an “international incident”.
Roger Cukierman, president of the Council of Jewish Organizations in France, voiced “anxiety and deep concern” over the viewing in a letter to Cannes Film Festival President Pierre Lescure and French Culture Minister Audrey Azoulay.
Resoundingly ghastly is the fact that the Cannes Festival agreed to host and commercialize this anti-Semitic movie.
But this has been a week of ordinary French anti-Semitism.

From the PLO "Department of Culture and Information" website:

[PLO Executive Committee Member Dr. Hanan] Ashrawi commented on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to appoint Avigdor Lieberman as the defense minister: “Such a decision is extremely dangerous—Lieberman, who has called for the beheading of Palestinians and for their transfer outside the state of Israel, is a serious threat to peace and stability, and his appointment will generate a culture of lawlessness, extremism, violence, and hate in Israel.”

In 2011, Ashrawi went on CNN to defend Hamas terrorists joining the Palestinian government.

Hypocritical much?

By the way, despite all the hysterics that we are reading today about Lieberman painting him as an ultra-right extremist, he supports a two-state solution. He supports (under the right conditions) Israel dismantling some settlements.

For a decade now, Avigdor Lieberman has taken on the mantle of Ariel Sharon before him - a crazed ultra-right nationalist who wants to kill all Palestinians. As with Sharon, the reality is not close to the rhetoric. Yes, Lieberman says some outrageous things, but when he calls to "behead" those Israelis who actively act against the state he is obviously not speaking literally, even though it is in the interests of many to pretend that he is. (He also doesn't call for "transfer." He calls to redraw the borders so Jewish sections outside the Green Line become part of Israel and Arab sections inside become part of a Palestinian state. It will never happen, but redrawing borders is not "transfer.")

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

...And here's the final proof that Prashad is an academic fraud.

There are two ways of proving that someone is an academic fraud.

One is to prove that he or she knowingly lies.

Yesterday I proved with a high degree of probability that popular Trinity College professor Vijay Prashad lied, by claiming that Hamas does not deny the right of Israel to exist. He quoted selectively from a 2009 New York Times article and used Khaled Meshal's words to pretend that he accepted Israel's existence, but he didn't bother to mention that the article itself said explicitly that Meshal refused to accept Israel's existence.

I then brought a much stronger proof using Meshal's own words, on video, that leave absolutely no doubt about his opinion.

But perhaps Prashad was just being sloppy, and he didn't notice the part of the NYT article where Meshal was shown to hold the opposite view. Or maybe he read about it secondhand. And perhaps this Middle East scholar was unaware of the many other statements in Arabic by Hamas that explicitly denies Israel's right to exist.

That possibility, that Prashad is just a sloppy professor and not a malicious liar, was put to rest when he sarcastically responded to my tweet about his article:

This means that he read my post and decided that proof that pushing anti-Israel propaganda is more important than truth. The Alternet article he wrote remains unaltered; he did not issue a correction or change the words.

Any person who claims to be a scholar, who works in academia, and yet who consciously decides to lie is simply a propagandist and should not be allowed to work at any self-respecting institution of higher education.

Unfortunately, today's colleges think that free speech includes the right to teach lies.

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05/20 Links Pt1: Poking a gaping hole in the Palestinian narrative; Has the UN Human Rights Council become Frankenstein?

From Ian:

IDF Blog: ISIS threatens to wipe out Israel. Here’s why we’re taking them seriously.

Facts at a glance:
- ISIS in Egypt started out targeting Israeli targets, such as Israeli pipelines carrying gas between Israel, Egypt, and Jordan.
- The most dominant terrorist organizations in the Sinai have ties to Hamas. ISIS fighters train in Gaza before returning to the Sinai. Hamas helps with training, medical care, transferring funds, and assisting with communications.
- In 2012, the Egyptian Army started Operation Sinai to destroy tunnels between Hamas in Gaza and militants in Sinai. These same tunnels were used to smuggle weapons into Gaza to attack Israel.
- Top ISIS leaders have repeatedly threatened major attacks against Israel. We take their threats seriously.
Israel’s border with Egypt has long been volatile, with terror groups shaking the stability in Northern Sinai. Our newest threat in the region is an offshoot of a deadly international terror organization: ISIS in the Sinai. The terror capabilities of ISIS’s Sinai branch are cannot be ignored. Their shootings, bombings, projectiles, and other attacks have killed both civilians and soldiers. Israel has always been a primary target of the group from its inception. Ansar Bait al-Maqdis (ABM) and their anti-Israel rhetoric has only increased since their incorporation into the Islamic State.
The situation in the Sinai has undergone serious changes over the last five years. Here are some key points in the evolution of the ISIS threat in the Sinai:

ISIS threatens global war with Israel

Islamic State threatens Israel in an article in its weekly newsletter this week, saying that unlike Hamas, the “war on Israel will not be limited by geographical boundaries or by international norms.”
According to the article in the Al-Naba newsletter identified by the Jihad and Terrorism Threat Monitor of MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute) and shared with The Jerusalem Post, Israel feels threatened by ISIS because of the “collapse” of neighboring states and the Sunni terrorist group’s advance toward the borders of the Jewish state.
For this reason, Israel has started to fight against Islamic State in Sinai and Syria, it says, adding that the entire world is now an arena for the fight against all the “polytheist combatants, including the Jews,” who are legitimate targets. Israel is using jets to attack Islamic State in Sinai, the article claims.
“The collapse of the Sykes-Picot statelets, which were tasked with protecting the Jewish state; the approach of ISIS mujahideen toward its borders; [Israel’s] fear of the spread of its [ISIS’s] methodology among the oppressed Muslims inside those borders [i.e. fear that ISIS ideology is spreading among Israeli Arabs]; and the manifest failure of the Crusader states who protect the Jews to win the battle against it [ISIS] – all these are factors that caused the Jewish state to not sit idly by in face of this danger,” it says.

Poking a gaping hole in the Palestinian narrative

Most people have never heard of the Eshkol plan, and you might be wondering why.
The answer is really very simple: it pokes a gaping hole in the narrative put forward by the Palestinians and their supporters, who assert that the root of all Israeli-Palestinian discord lies in the events of 1967, rather than in the long-standing and deep-seated Arab desire to wipe Israel off the map.
The fact is that had the Arabs and the Palestinians sincerely accepted Eshkol’s proposal, regional peace in the Middle East would be entering its sixth decade already and the so-called Palestinian question would have been resolved long ago.
Going back still further, if they had come to terms with Israel’s establishment in 1948 rather than choosing war, the entire region might have flourished.
At this point, there is no turning back the clock, and in light of subsequent developments, Eshkol’s plan is as unworkable now as it might have been sensible back then.
But even after so many decades, it is worth recalling his audacious proposal, if only to highlight where the underlying fault truly lies for the ongoing conflict: with the Palestinians and their defenders.
So next time you hear someone blathering about how the “occupation” is the cause of all our troubles, just think back to the grandfatherly figure of Levi Eshkol, the peace he offered to make in 1965, the Arab hatred and enmity with which it was greeted and just how different things could have been.

Egyptian paper: "These ten Jews control the world economy"

I always wondered who they were, and now popular Egyptian newspaper Vetogate lists for us the ten Jews who run the world economy.

Haim Saban

Haim Saban
Patrick Drahi
Yitzhak Tshuva
Shari Arison
Idan Ofer
Ronald Lauder
Rupert Murdoch (who is not Jewish)
Sheldon Adelson
Irving Moskowitz
Bernard-Henri Lévy

Now you know!

(corrected headline from "world "to "world economy," h/t Oren K)

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A popular French health website, DocteurClic, has a section on the dangers of traveling to other countries.

Here is the map it uses to travel to "Palestine":

In general, it is safe to travel to "Palestine" which is entirely occupied, although from the map it is unclear exactly who is occupying it. Perhaps Great Britain.

It does have a section on traveling to Israel, which is apparently a state in two sections somewhere on the Mediterranean:

For Israel, it says that it is very dangerous to travel:

The troubled political climate, lack of stability in the region and the situation on the ground makes it dangerous country for travelers.

In addition, the low level of health does not allow the traveler to ensure optimum safety in terms of the management of health problems. Health infrastructure is poor or very degraded.

Precautions are needed to avoid many worries or to compromise a part of your stay.

It is in any essential way to know the safety rules to be respected during trips.

Who knew Israel's health system was so primitive?

It has similar rules for "Palestine," but it adds for Israel:

Travel is not recommended in this country, except for imperative professional reasons.

Due to the increase in suicide bombings and their random and unpredictable, visitors should exercise extreme caution.

In all major Israeli population centers:

avoid places and rush hour: market squares, pedestrian streets, shopping centers, restaurants located on major streets, cafés, clubs, gatherings of any kind on the highway;
refrain from using public transport (buses, taxis, trains)
Do not participate in any event,
rent a mobile phone and tell the number to friends or acquaintances, or even the French official representations.

These instructions apply especially to pilgrims planning to visit Jerusalem and Bethlehem, but also in Galilee (Nazareth Christian sites near the Sea of Galilee: Taghba, Capernaum, Cana, Mount of Beatitudes, Mount Tabor ...) .

While Israel is rated amber for travel, Egypt is considered green. So is Jordan.

And so is Syria, which is green in every single category.

Travelers to Israel are warned about respiratory diseases in the dry air but not for Jordan or Syria.

(h/t The New Antisemite)

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