Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, September 19, 2016

09/19 Links Pt2: The Durban Conference’s Hatred Still Affects Us; The Ethnic Cleansing of Jerusalem

From Ian:

Eugene Kontorovich: A Palestinian State Free of Jews?

In short, the Palestinians couching their objection as one about removing “settlers” rather than Jews does not change the harsh reality. There is simply no precedent in international practice for the demand. Whatever term one uses for such a demand, Netanyahu was clearly right to call attention to the extraordinary nature of the demand. It is also disappointing that, instead of exercising moral leadership on this issue, the ADL went against its mission by seemingly excusing singular treatment for Jews.
Yet the most controversial part of his comments were two words: ethnic cleansing. Indeed, the phrase invites criticism because there is no precise legal definition of the term. However, it is generally used to refer to the purge of other ethnic groups, rather than the group doing the cleansing. Indeed, that is why the international community demands that Israel remove the settlers itself, so the Palestinians won’t have to. One might call it ethnic pre-cleansing. Again, there is no international precedent for a country being required to forcibly remove its own population en masse.
While it may not be entirely apt, ethnic cleansing is definitely part of the story. Jews lived throughout what would later be called the West Bank until its conquest by Jordan in 1949. The Jordanians expelled every single Jew from the area they controlled. Unlike the flight of Arabs from Israel, the purge was clearly coercive, by the fact that not one Jew was left in the Jordanian occupied territory. This expulsion was clearly ethnic cleansing, and indeed it left the area clean.
Israel wrested this area, including the Old City of Jerusalem, from Jordanian control in the Six Day War. Much of the international community believes Israel was legally required to maintain the Jew-free status quo created by the Jordanian expulsion 19 years earlier. Any Israelis who do move into the area, in this view, are illegal settlers, and should be removed.
Assume that the presence of settlers is illegal. The only reason these people were “settlers” was the Jordanian expulsion of 1949, and their subsequent 19 year enforcement of a Jew-free territory. International law scholars like to say that Israel, as an occupying power, must maintain the prior status quo. Even assuming that is true, pointing out that the status quo was itself a result of recent, complete to-the-last Jew ethnic cleansing should hardly be bad form.

Honest Reporting: The Ethnic Cleansing of Jerusalem

Prime Minister Netanyahu has been condemned from all sides for a video in which he accused the Palestinians of seeking to “ethnically cleanse” Judea and Samaria. His charge that the Palestinians are seeking a state in which there would be no Jews was met by shock and revulsion from the international community. The media reported the reactions by the U.S. State Department and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon dismissing the Prime Minister’s claim.
The message was clear: How dare the Israeli Prime Minister make such a baseless accusation. What would lead him to think that the Palestinians would want a state with no Jews?
It seems that everyone who condemned the remarks needs a brief history lesson. Because in 1948, ethnic cleansing was exactly what was done to the Jews in Jerusalem and parts of Judea — the exact same places that the Palestinians demand as part of their state.
There had been a Jewish community living in the Old City of Jerusalem for thousands of years in 1948. Some residents’ families had lived there for generations.
But in an instant, this continuous Jewish presence was forcibly destroyed. Some Jews were murdered at gun point. The rest were forced out with nothing but the shirts on their backs.

Gerald Steinberg: 15 Years Since Durban — the Conference That Ushered in an Era of Israel-Demonization

For both supporters and detractors of the state of Israel, no single conference of the past 15 years has had a more enduring impact on the evolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict than the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa.
The event, which took place in September 2001, was hijacked by many of the over 1,500 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in attendance, as well as by governments that reject Israel’s right to exist. Multiple instances of antisemitic imagery and language were reported at the UN-sponsored NGO Forum, and Jewish attendees were intimidated and excluded. Even the initial governmental draft, prepared at a UN preparatory conference in Iran, sought to demonize Israel, reinstating the antisemitic slander that Zionism equals racism. In the mainstream Jewish community, the overwhelming majority of which professes the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, there were no delusions as to whom was being targeted as a whole when the term Zionist was used in such a derogatory context.
The virulent antisemitism and anti-Israel atmosphere led the United States and Israel to withdraw their delegations, noting the absurdity that a conference intended to combat xenophobia and intolerance instead singled out one particular ethnic group of one particular nation state for demonization.
While some of the anti-Israel rhetoric was ultimately removed from the final governmental Declaration and Programme of Action, the NGO Forum overwhelmingly adopted its own Final Declaration that depicted Israel as committing “crimes against humanity,” “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid” and “genocide” against the Palestinians. The NGOs at Durban also called for “a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state…the imposition of mandatory and comprehensive sanctions and embargoes, the full cessation of all links (diplomatic, economic, social, aid, military cooperation and training) between all states and Israel.”

+972 is upset:

Human rights organizations in Israel were in for a surprise on Monday when they opened Rosh Hashanah gift baskets sent by the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. Among the various goodies delivered in honor of the upcoming Jewish New Year — such as chocolates and honey —was a bottle of wine produced in the occupied West Bank.

A broad range of organizations including Peace Now, B’Tselem, and Yesh Din, Gisha which focus on Palestinian rights and settlement expansion in the occupied territories, were among those to receive the gift basket.

The wine, a Cabernet Sauvignon named “Dolev” is produced by the Zion Winery located in the West Bank settlement Mishor Adumim.

In other news - the US Embassy in Tel Aviv sends gift baskets to organizations who do everything they can to oppose the Israeli government.

Does the US Embassy also send baskets of gifts to Regavim, or Im Tirtzu, or others fighting for the human rights of Jews to live where they want?

If not, it shows that despite arms sales, official US policy is to oppose the democratically elected government of Israel.

If the US sends holiday gift baskets to NGOs that oppose government policies in any other nation, especially democratic allies, I would love to hear about it.

This is a bigger story than accidentally sending out wine that was harvested in Judea and Samaria. As if that is a crime.

(h/t Yenta)

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Nick Kristof’s fallacious history lesson on refugees (Petra Marquardt-Bigman)

Nick Kristof’s fallacious history lesson on refugees

Petra Marquardt-Bigman

Once again, last century’s Jewish refugees are used to plead for today’s mostly Muslim refugees. It was exactly a year ago that the Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor devoted several articles to this topic and eventually noted with great satisfaction that one of these articles “ended up being one of the most read articles on our Web site.” Now it is the New York Times’ (NYT) Nick Kristof who argues that “world leaders should reflect on” the failure to help Jews fleeing Nazi Germany during currently ongoing meetings in New York City about today’s refugee crisis. As Kristof grimly notes: “Without greater political will, this week’s meetings may be remembered as no better than the 1938 Evian Conference [where delegates from 32 countries made do with expressing sympathy for the plight of Jews without offering refuge], and history will be unforgiving.” Just a few weeks ago, Kristof declared “Anne Frank Today Is a Syrian Girl.”

Given Kristof’s attempts to revive this fallacious history lesson, it is useful to recall some of the responses to last year’s debate, most notably James Kirchick’s superb Tablet piece on “The Bad-Faith Analogy Between Syrian Refugees and Jews Fleeing Nazi Germany.”

While the comparison has also been embraced by some Holocaust survivors and their descendants as well as some Jewish leaders, anti-Israel activists were quick to do a really good job exposing the hypocrisy that helped this “history lesson” go viral. As I noted in a related blog post last year, I was actually alerted to the popularity of the comparison while monitoring the Twitter activity of notorious Israel-haters like Ali Abunimah and Max Blumenthal. Back then I argued:

“So when there is a debate about how to respond to the hundreds of thousands – projected soon to become millions – of mostly Muslim refugees and migrants fleeing war and poverty in their own countries, Abunimah and Blumenthal discover their sympathies for the Jewish refugees desperate to flee the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. The problem with this is that both Abunimah and Blumenthal are otherwise often busy promoting the 21st century version of the Nazi slogan ‘The Jews are our misfortune,’ which is: ‘The Jewish state is our misfortune.’

Obviously, if Israel had been established just ten years earlier, many of the Jews trying in vain to find refuge from the Nazis would have had a place to go to.”

This last point is still conveniently ignored by most of the people who are eager to transform the plight of Jews desperate to flee the Nazis into a “history lesson” that is useful for current political debates. But if one insists on using the fate of last century’s unfortunate Jewish refugees for the benefit of today’s refugees, the groups with the best claim would obviously be the Middle Eastern minorities who are fleeing murderous persecution by Muslim groups and states – notably the Yazidis as well as Middle Eastern Christians and Kurds.

Of course, such a distinction would be condemned as anti-Muslim bigotry, despite the fact that the Muslim refugees of today – very different from the Jewish refugees of last century – could seek refuge in many Muslim countries. Moreover, as I’ve noted previously, “the Muslim countries that are members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) boast of having formed ‘the second largest inter-governmental organization after the United Nations’ with a ‘membership of 57 states spread over four continents.’ Supposedly, the OIC ‘is the collective voice of the Muslim world’ and is dedicated to ‘ensuring to safeguard and protect the interests of the Muslim world in the spirit of promoting international peace and harmony among various people of the world.’” Surely the OIC can be counted on to prevent Kristof’s nightmare scenario that “this week’s meetings may be remembered as no better than the 1938 Evian Conference”? I have no doubt that if there had been 57 Jewish states spread over four continents in 1938, every single Jew who fled the Nazis would have found refuge – including Anne Frank and her family.

Furthermore, notwithstanding the disdain of liberals like Kristof, not all people who oppose Muslim immigration are bigots. There is the inconvenient fact that most acts of terrorism in western countries are committed by Muslims, and as anyone who follows the news will know, particularly European countries are facing serious problems with the integration of Muslims. There are plenty of problems in France, and a British study published last spring showed “that large numbers of Muslims don’t want to integrate, that their views aren’t remotely enlightened, and that more than a few of them sympathise with terrorism.” There is also a “new era of anti-Semitic violence in Europe,” which, as Jeffrey Goldberg put it, is “different from previous ones” because “traditional Western patterns of anti-Semitic thought have now merged with a potent strain of Muslim Judeophobia. Violence against Jews in Western Europe today, according to those who track it, appears to come mainly from Muslims.”

Perhaps western liberals who scold their fellow citizens for bigotry against Muslim refugees and migrants would be able to make their case more effectively if they acknowledged that westerners have no monopoly on bigotry – indeed, there are many indications that this is one of the few areas where the Muslim world is well ahead.

A Pew survey published in 2004 found “that Christians get much lower ratings in predominantly Muslim countries than do Muslims in mostly Christian countries. Majorities in Morocco (73%), Pakistan (62%) and Turkey (52%) express negative views of Christians.” In 2011, another Pew survey showed similar results:

“Muslims in the predominantly Muslim countries surveyed are more likely to associate negative characteristics with Westerners than non-Muslims are to associate them with Muslims. For example, nearly nine-in-ten (89%) Jordanian Muslims use at least three of the six negative adjectives* tested to describe people in Western countries, as do majorities in Egypt (81%), Turkey (73%), the Palestinian territories (71%), Pakistan (67%) and Indonesia (63%); only in Lebanon is this not the case. In contrast, Spain is the only Western country surveyed where a majority (60%) of non-Muslims associate three or more negative characteristics with Muslims. At least three-in-ten non-Muslims in Britain (39%), the U.S. (35%) and France (30%) do not attribute any of the six negative characteristics tested to Muslims.”

* i.e. violent, greedy, fanatical, selfish, immoral, arrogant

Then there are the shocking sermons by preachers seething with hatred against the “Other” – Jews of course, but also Christians and the West in general – that can be heard fairly regularly at the Al-Aqsa mosque, which is supposedly Islam’s third-holiest site. Is it even imaginable that anything remotely comparable could be preached over and over again in a major church or cathedral in the West?

But what makes the attempts to use the plight of Jews fleeing the Nazis for today’s debate so upsetting is the genocidal Jew-hatred that is incited by Muslim preachers and leaders all over the world – whether it’s a senior Al-Azhar scholar in Egypt, an Australian Islamist, a Kuwaiti scholar, a Palestinian Sheikh, a Yemeni cleric, a British Islamist, or the “global mufti” Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi, who once told his estimated 40 million viewers on Al Jazeera that he hoped the next Hitler-style “punishment” of the Jews “will be at the hand of the believers.”

Two years ago Kristof acknowledged in a column that “Anti-Semitism runs deep in some Muslim countries today” – but there was of course a “but”: “for most of history, Muslims were more tolerant of Jews than Christians were.” Kristof also worried plenty about stoking anti-Muslim bigotry with this column and tried last year to make the case that, as one critic put it, “the Bible is full of bad stuff while the Qur’an has some good stuff.”

Given Kristof’s concerns about “political correctness,” one might have hoped that he would have been more hesitant to exploit the plight of last century’s Jewish refugees for the benefit of today’s refugees. To be sure, the reports and images from the violence and war in the Muslim Middle East are heartbreaking. But there are many ways to plead for the victims of the region’s carnage without invoking the cruel indifference that was shown to the Jews trying to flee the Nazis. After all, if “Anne Frank Today Is a Syrian Girl,” are the regimes and groups that make her “Anne Frank” – Assad, Hezbollah, Iran, Russia and the assorted Islamists fighting in Syria and elsewhere – the Nazis? I’m pretty sure that is a comparison Kristof wouldn’t like at all.

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09/19 Links Pt1: Camps teach Palestinian kids that stabbers are heroes; America’s Accidental Moral Victory

From Ian:

PMW: Summer camps teach Palestinian kids that stabbers are heroes

One of the ways the Palestinian leadership turns terrorists into role models and heroes is by naming summer camps after them.
This summer, Palestinian children in the Jerusalem area were able to join a summer camp that was named “the Martyr Baha Alyan Pioneers” - after terrorist Baha Alyan who with an accomplice murdered 3 Israelis on a bus last October.
The camp was arranged “under the supervision of the [PLO] Supreme Council for Sport and Youth Affairs” - which is headed by Deputy Secretary of the Fatah Central Committee Jibril Rajoub - and “in partnership with the Jerusalem Suburbs Education Directorate,” which is under the PA Ministry of Education. [Donia Al-Watan, independent Palestinian news agency, Aug. 14, 2016; official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Aug. 16, 2016]
Children from the Bethlehem district were able to join the “Martyr Mamoun Al-Khatib Camp.” Al-Khatib was a 16-year-old terrorist who tried to stab an Israeli civilian on Dec.1, 2015.
The Al-Khatib Camp was also held “under the auspices of the [PLO] Supreme Council for Youth and Sports,” and the Deputy Secretary-General of its southern council, Najeh Al-Izza, spoke at the opening event. He “emphasized that the Supreme Council is focusing on the youth sector, as it is the foundation of the future and the hope of the present.” He went on to explain that “120 boys and girls will participate in the activities of the Martyr Mamoun Al-Khatib Camp.” [Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Aug. 17, 2016]

America’s Accidental Moral Victory

It tells you something about the moral bankruptcy of U.S. policy in Syria that one of the few times the U.S. has done something right, it was entirely by accident.
On Saturday, U.S. aircraft–apparently two F-16s and two A-10s–bombed what they believed to be ISIS forces in Syria’s eastern Deir al-Zour province. Within minutes, Russian personnel notified the U.S. command post in Qatar that the troops being bombed were in fact part of the Syrian army. The bombing immediately stopped but not before killing at least 62 Syrian soldiers. A senior administration official then issued this statement: “The United States has relayed our regret through the Russian Federation for the unintentional loss of life of Syrian forces.”
This was the first time that the U.S. had ever bombed Bashar Assad’s forces, which have been responsible for crimes against humanity, causing the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Syria’s civil war. But instead of justifying the bombing on the grounds that it is necessary not just to protect civilians but also to end the civil war which has fueled the rise of extremist groups such as ISIS, the U.S. has de facto apologized for the bombing! And to Russia no less, which has been providing the air cover for Assad’s forces to take back ground from the rebels.
Sensing the American confusion, the Russians are pressing their advantage with calls to convene an emergency UN Security Council meeting–something that Russia has never requested when Assad’s aircraft or its own have struck hospitals in Syria. A Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman is being quoted demanding a “full and detailed explanations about whether this was deliberate support of the Islamic State or another mistake.” She also said, tongue no doubt firmly planted in cheek, that “after today’s attack on the Syrian army, we come to the terrible conclusion that the White House is defending the Islamic State.”
This is what Secretary of State John Kerry gets for implementing the policy advocated by Donald Trump and actually pursued by President Obama–a policy of cooperating with Russia in Syria. Never mind that the U.S. and Russia have no interests in common: Moscow wants to see Bashar Assad stay in power in perpetuity; the U.S. wants to end the power of Islamist extremist groups, which will never happen as long as Assad is pursuing a war of annihilation against the Sunni population.

Security Expert: Lone-Wolf Islamist Terrorists Everywhere, Including in US, Inspired by Palestinian Attacks Against Israelis (INTERVIEW)

Lone-wolf Islamist terrorists around the world — including in the US — are drawing inspiration from Palestinian attacks against Israelis, an international security consultant and political risk analyst told The Algemeiner on Sunday, a day after eight people were stabbed at a mall in Minnesota (for which ISIS claimed responsibility), and 29 people were wounded in a bomb blast in New York City.
“We are going to see a rise in mass stabbings and vehicle-rammings by those with Islamist leanings, because they see how effective such methods are in places like Israel and they want to mimic it,” Dr. Joshua Gleis, president of Gleis Security Consulting, predicted for The Algemeiner. “The bottom line is that people are learning from one another.”
The surge of Palestinian violence against Israelis that began a year ago has seen countless stabbing and car-ramming attacks. The latest of these, as reported by The Algemeiner, took place on Sunday morning, in a settlement south of Jerusalem.
Regarding Saturday’s mall attack in St. Cloud, Gleis said, “It was most likely homegrown. It’s not like somebody sent this guy over from Yemen to do it. It’s much more likely he was indoctrinated online, did very little training, if any at all, and went out to conduct the attack. Anybody can buy a knife.”
Gleis highlighted the tough security task this presents. “Those seeking to do us harm are trying to find ways to do so before they get caught,” he said. “And they understand that if they are part of a large plot, there is a much greater chance of getting caught.”

Mahmoud Abbas, speaking to Palestinian students in Venezuela, said that the newest wave of stabbing attacks comes because Palestinian kids "have no hope."

During a meeting with 80 students Abbas said that every day there are martyrs and children carrying knives -but that kids carrying knives do it on their own. They aren't incited, Abbas, said, but they have lost hope and they try to stab Jews as a result.

An example of "no hope" came yesterday, as a woman who tried to run over Israelis was found out to havepushed for the attack to atone for her premarital relationship with her boyfriend, the driver, who was killed.

Abbas' claim that there is no incitement is too bizarre to even take seriously. He is the person who said one year ago that Palestinians should resist Jews visiting the Temple Mount by doing everything in their power and "We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah, Allah willing. Every Martyr will reach Paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah," as he encouraged the stabbings in the name of Jerusalem.

Abbas is the one who warmly hugs killers released from prison and who names schools and sporting events after mass murderers.

The kids pick up knives because they have "no hope"? No, they have lots of hope - hope of becoming heroes that Mahmoud Abbas and others can lionize.

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From the FBI:

The FBI is asking for assistance in locating Ahmad Khan Rahami. Rahami is wanted for questioning in connection with an explosion that occurred on September 17, 2016, at approximately 8:30 p.m. in the vicinity of 135 West 23rd Street, New York, New York.

Rahami is a 28-year-old United States citizen of Afghan descent born on January 23, 1988, in Afghanistan. His last known address was in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He is about 5’ 6” tall and weighs approximately 200 pounds. Rahami has brown hair, brown eyes, and brown facial hair.

SHOULD BE CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS

If Rahami is from Elizabeth, then he might also be involved in the bombs found this morning in that city.

Yesterday, the New York governor said that the bombing appeared not to be linked to international terrorism.

That may need to be re-thought.

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Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil, speaking at a conference in New York for Lebanese expatriates, said that he believes that children of Lebanese women should become Lebanese citizens just like children of Lebanese men can.

With two exceptions.

"We heard applause in this hall when requesting a bill to grant citizenship to children of Lebanese women married to foreigners, and I also applaud it, and say that this is right, because women do not differ from men," he said. "But, because of our Constitution, (and biology?) and so on, we cannot give citizenship to 400 thousand Palestinians. We know that for Lebanon to survive there must be exceptions".

He reiterated his position on Twitter, saying "I support granting citizenship to children of women under the law with the Syrians and the Palestinians as the exception to preserve our land."

Many on social media are calling Bassil racist. Even Lebanese who are against the naturalization of Palestinians who have lived there for three generations say that if they are children of Lebanese women they should become citizens. Only a few support him.

Children of Palestinian women who marry Lebanese men do become Lebanese citizens, so his statements are being interpreted as misogynist as well as racist.

Bassil is a Maronite Christian the head of the Free Patriotic Movement which is allied with Hezbollah.

Official Lebanese discrimination against Palestinians rarely makes it into Western media, and this case is no exception. The only English language site I've seen that mentions this is The New Arab blog. Sky News Arabic reported this story but not its English version.

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Palestinians accuse Israel of visiting Africa to take over the Nile

In July, after Binyamin Netanyahu visited several African nations including Ethiopia, Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki claimed on Egyptian TV that the purpose of the visit was to threaten Egypt with cutting off the supply of water upstream of the Nile with the Renaissance Dam being constructed in Ethiopia.

It turns out that this is only the tip of the iceberg for the conspiracy theories coming out of the woodwork in the wake of his visit.

Several newspapers published the research of a supposed expert in Jewish studies and Hebrew from Qena University. Faraj Kadri Fakharani seems to say that Ethiopian Jews reached great prominence in their nation in the 19th century and have worked ever since to take over the Nile, one of the most important rivers in the Torah and one of the borders of the Land of Israel mentioned in the Torah.

Fakharani says that Yemen's Jews, who are untainted in their lineage as pure Jews, exported their religion to Abyssinia in modern-day Ethiopia over 2000 years ago. The current Ethiopian leaders, he seems to say, are really Jews who will do anything necessary to wrest control of the holy Nile river from Egypt. The Jewish Ethiopian leaders, we are told, hate Egypt because of their enslaving the Jews in the Hebrew Scripture, as well as saying that God promised the Nile to Abraham but not to Ishmael's descendants, the Arabs.

Oh, and they threaten to block the Nile altogether.

It may sound like a nutty conspiracy theory to you, but a large number of Arabs believe this idiocy.

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Saeb Erekat published a statement on the 34th anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in which he does not say one word about the Christian Phalangists who actually murdered hundreds of Palestinians in Lebanon in 1982. Instead, he blames Israel and only Israel.

In his statement, he makes a claim that he has made before:

Erekat said that Israel was accepted as a United Nations member under the commitment to honor partition of Palestine resolution 181 and right of return of refugees resolution 194 as well as the UN Charter.

While the UNGA resolution that gave recognition to Israel mentioned the earlier UNGA resolutions, nothing in its language says that Israel's becoming a member of the UN is contingent on its acceptance of those non-binding resolutions. On the contrary, it explicitly notes that Israel had its own interpretation of them and took note of that.

Here is the text of UNGA 273 that shows Erekat is a liar:

Having received the report of the Security Council on the application of Israel for membership in the United Nations,
Noting that, in the judgment of the Security Council, Israel is a peace-loving State and is able and willing to carry out the obligations contained in the Charter,
Noting that the Security Council has recommended to the general Assembly that it admit Israel to membership in the United Nations,
Noting furthermore the declaration by the State of Israel that it "unreservedly accepts the obligations of the United Nations Charter and undertakes to honour them from the day when it becomes a member of the United Nations",
Recalling its resolutions of 29 November 1947 and 11 December 1948 and taking note of the declarations and explanations made by the representative of the Government of Israel before the Ad Hoc Political Committee in respect of the implementation of the said resolutions,

The General Assembly,
Acting in discharge of its functions under Article 4 of the Charter and rule 125 of its rules of procedure,
1. Decides that Israel is a peace loving State which accepts the obligations contained in the Charter and is able and willing to carry out those obligations;
2. Decides to admit Israel to membership in the United Nations.

There is no caveat to the UN's acceptance of Israel as a member. Erekat lies again.

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09/18 Links: Lord of the Lies reigns over BDS; Did Netanyahu Get a Bad Deal?

From Ian:

J Street, Americans for Peace Now urge Congress not to obstruct Iran deal

Two dovish pro-Israel groups joined a letter to Congress urging it not to obstruct the Iran nuclear deal.
The letter delivered Friday to the congressional leadership and copied to all members of the US House of Representatives and the Senate counsels against any “poison-pill provisions and measures that would seek to re-impose sanctions lifted under the JCPOA, albeit under a different justification.”
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is the formal name for the deal reached last year between six major powers, led by the United States, and Iran, exchanging sanctions relief for a rollback of nuclear development in Iran.
The letter was initiated by NIAC Action, a lobbying group affiliated with the National Iranian American Council. Among the signatories are J Street and Americans for Peace Now, liberal Jewish Middle East policy groups.
The letter is aimed at proposals by Republicans to add new sanctions to the Iran Sanctions Act, the current sanctions law which lapses at the end of this year.
Democrats in Congress want to reauthorize the Act as a means of warning Iran that the United States will remain vigilant in overseeing the deal, but oppose adding new sanctions.

Lord of the Lies reigns over BDS

Re-enter Ilan Pappe, now holding a comfortable Chair at Exeter University in the UK. He comes down from the ivory tower to be interviewed. After promoting the boycott by proclaiming that the “society under occupation” called for it, Pappe now begs that society to do something for itself for a change. The interviewer feels quite upset.
“Well, the Palestinians launched BDS,” Ruba Salih reminds Pappe.
“Yes,” Pappe says, pulling a face. “Not really, but yes. For historical record, yes.”
“It’s important!” exclaims the startled interviewer.
Reluctantly Pappe agrees. “It’s not true, but it’s important.” At which awkward point he skips to a different subject. in the words of David Collier of Beyond the great divide “What Pappe seems to be suggesting is that the Palestinians did not call for boycott, but rather were told to call for boycott.”
A belief in the good and necessary lie is embedded in the anti-Zionist system of thought. Pappe has been faithful to the belief throughout a rattled career. “I am not as interested in what happened as in how people see what has happened,” said Pappe in 1999. “My ideology influences my …writings. The struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are?”
Indeed the Lord of the Lie has never known. During his tenure at Haifa University he moderated a thesis on a purported massacre of 200 Arabs by a Jewish unit in May 1948. After the veterans of that unit won their case in a Tel Aviv court, the student was ordered to apologize for defaming them. And Pappe? The academic, to give credit where credit is due, never puts on a facade. Ideology rules, not integrity. He never lets facts get in the way. Zionists and their colonial implant are irredeemably bad. Full stop.

Fred Maroun: Lebanon's Hatred of Israel

Lebanon has many problems, including sectarian divisions, Iranian influence, spillover from the Syrian civil war, the weakness of its army, the ineffectiveness of its politicians, and the very existence of Hizballah, but Israel's existence next door is not one of them.
The animosity of Lebanon towards Israel continues today only because it provides a convenient excuse for Hizballah to maintain a formidable arsenal that it uses to control Lebanon and to help its allies in Syria.
Lebanon has a law forbidding its citizens from interacting with Israeli citizens. As Michael J. Totten wrote:
"Lebanese citizens aren't allowed to have any communication of any kind with Israelis anywhere in the world. If citizens of the two countries meet, say, on a beach in Cyprus or in a bar in New York, the Lebanese risks prison just for saying hello."
The Lebanese online news source NOW explains that law in detail. Even a dual citizen (of Lebanon and Canada for example) could be jailed for interacting in the most innocuous way with an Israeli.
The Lebanese delegation, for example, recently refused to share a bus with the Israeli delegation at this year's Olympic Games in Rio, prompting the Israeli minister of culture and sports to describe the incident as, "anti-Semitism, pure and simple, and the worst kind of racism." The incident was, however, hardly surprising, considering the history of Lebanese animosity towards Israel.

{This is dedicated to Shirlee of Jews Down Under fame. It was in conversation with her that I came up with the idea for this piece and she is currently recovering from some very serious spinal surgery, so please send good thoughts and prayers her way. - ML}

Those of us who care about the well-being of Israel are part of a movement.

We no longer generally think of it in such terms because Zionism fulfilled itself in 1948 and over the decades Jewish supporters of Israel have lost that sense of solidarity - that movement sensibility - that made the reestablishment of Israel possible to begin with.

What I am calling the "Movement for Jewish Freedom" is an attempt to reengage Zionism as a political movement grounded in solidarity with other groups who share common interests.

I imagine it as a subset of the movement for indigenous rights which, itself, is a subset of the international movement for the maintenance of liberal-democracies.

The Movement for Jewish Freedom is highly individualistic, fiercely idiosyncratic, and entirely non-partisan. It includes people as diverse from one another as Pamela Geller is from Alan Dershowitz.

Because the ideal of liberal-democracy is, by necessity, at the core of the Movement for Jewish Freedom it must oppose Islamic jurisprudence (al-Sharia). The reason for that is because al-Sharia is non-democratic and, according to its central precepts, must strip women, Gay people, and Infidels (kuffar) of their most basic civil liberties... often in a grotesquely violent manner.

Jewish Freedom Under the Umbrella of Liberal-Democracy

and Indigenous Rights

Many people who come out of the progressive-wing of the movement will squirm at notions like the necessity to "maintain liberal-democracies throughout the world." It will resonate as right-wing in a sort-of vaguely amorphous manner for many people. The word "neo-con" will quickly come to mind for some.

When I poke around the alleys and byways of the pro-Israel movement, however, I do not see much desire to impose liberal-democracy onto parts of the world that do not want it. This is a matter of culture. Some cultures are open to liberal-democracy and some are not. Liberal-democracy cannot be imposed upon cultures that do not want it, because then it would no longer be liberal democracy, now would it?.

Nonetheless, under the larger umbrella of liberal-democracy stands the movement for indigenous rights.

The movement for Jewish rights, in our ancestral homeland, is just one part of the much larger series of indigenous struggles throughout the world. The movement for the maintenance of liberal-democracy is key to indigenous rights because it is only through liberal-democratic systems that indigenous rights can be pursued as a matter of social justice. While the wheels of justice may grind slowly in the liberal-democratic West, at least they grind. In non-democratic systems, such as those bowing to Islamic law, submission is enforced through state violence. You get no discussion under these terms.

What you get are cracked skulls, wretched prisons, and torture.

A rising star within the Movement for Jewish Freedom, and a stalwart defender of indigenous rights, is Ryan Bellerose. Bellerose, a Métis from Canada - and the lone, sole American-style football playing, Native-American Zionist in the history of the universe - makes the point that Jewish people who care about the well-being of Israel would do well to embrace our own sense of indigeneity because we are, in fact, the only people on the planet with anything resembling a claim to indigenous status in that tiny part of the world.

Indeed, our ancestors lived and built and fought and made families in the Land of Israel for at least 3,500 years.

Our presence there well precedes the development of formal history. Thus to refer to the Arab invaders, who marched upon Judea and Samaria millennia later, as "indigenous" is to spit in the face of history.

I would submit to you that in order for the Movement for Jewish Freedom to advance toward its goal of Jewish autonomy on historically Jewish land - free from perpetual jihadi harassment and the constant screeching for genocide that so often comes out of the mosques - then we need to embrace our own sense as an indigenous people, among other indigenous people, fighting for rights of autonomy upon our own land.

As Bellerose has written, and I paraphrase, it is not merely a matter of standing on our tippy-toes, waving our hands in the air, and saying, "Hey! We're indigenous, too!" Instead, we need to politically engage with other indigenous peoples in a direct manner.

This will be difficult for many pro-Jewish / pro-Israel advocates because we do not generally think of ourselves in such terms and because the Palestinian-Arabs have already claimed that slot. But they have done so in a demonstrably false manner and we need always be ready to point this out.

In short, we need to stand with other indigenous peoples struggling for autonomy within liberal-democratic systems.

Our political opponents often seem comfortable with non-democratic forms of government. We, however, cannot afford to be. Nor, from any ethical perspective, would we want to be.

The Movement for Jewish Freedom is diverse.

It includes Democrats and Republicans and those unregistered with any political party, such as myself. It includes hard-right conservatives and even a few hard-left progressives. (Difficult to imagine, I know.)

We are across-the-board, politically, ethnically, and across religious identities. Most activists in the movement naturally tend to be Jewish people, but some movement activists are not Jewish. Bellerose is clearly not Jewish and neither is another great friend and activist within the movement, Chloe Valdary.

But those who are friendly toward the movement come from all religious backgrounds. The most prominent of these, of course, are American Evangelical Christians who are earnest about Genesis 12:2 and 12:3, which reads:

And I will make you a great nation, And I will bless you, And make your name great; And so you shall be a blessing; And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.

There are also, of course, plenty of Catholics who believe in Jewish autonomy in the Land of Israel. Plenty of Hindus and Buddhists and Theosophists and Rastafarians and even the random Muslim, or two.

One of the reasons for pro-Israel diversity around the world is disapproval of the jihadi tendencies among some within the Muslim faith. Our friends and supporters often recognize that al-Sharia is not only non-democratic, but highly fascistic in its implementation, thereby creating at least some sympathy for the Jewish people in the Middle East.

Jews and Christians lived as second and third-class non-citizens under the imperial boot of Islamic rule for thirteen centuries until the demise of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. That, I think, was probably more than enough.

Furthermore, of course, al-Sharia is not some noxious, but irrelevant, relic from the past, but is the reality of life for hundreds of millions of people from North Africa to the Arab world, on the continent of Asia, all the way to Jakarta.

Throughout the world all sorts of people from all sorts of different faiths and backgrounds and politics recognize this and are potential allies because they, too, understand that there is something deeply sadistic about any religious legal tradition that advocates, for example, the chopping off of a hand and a foot, from opposite sides of the body, as a form of "justice."

There are also ex-Muslims, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who oppose Qur'anic law, not to mention self-identified practicing Muslim reformers who acknowledge that Sharia seriously impinges upon the civil liberties of women, Gay people, and all "unbelievers."

Those of us who actively promote the movement for Jewish rights or Jewish liberty or Jewish freedom (whatever you want to say) include academicians like Cary Nelson and Gabriel Noah Brahm who edited The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel, which, as an aside, includes a piece by Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, of the AMCHA Initiative, entitled, "Interrogating the Academic Boycotters of Israel on American Campuses" that I well recommend.

The movement also includes prominent bloggers, such as the Elder of Ziyon, who - when he isn't plotting with the other Elders to take over first the world and then the rest of the universe - can be found exposing media hypocrisy and the kind of general nonsense that usually swirls around coverage of the Long Arab War Against the Jews.

The movement includes prominent legal analysts, such as Eugene Kontorovich, and journalists, like the Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh or Italian journalist Giulio Meotti, who is published in the Arutz Sheva and the Gatestone Institute, among numerous other venues.

It also includes artists and musicians, such as Matisyahu, and even much loved cartoonists, like Yaakov Kirschen, the creator of Dry Bones.

But, most importantly, it includes just regular Jews, and regular friends of regular Jews, who do not like the entirely unjust way that Israel is treated by the international community and who do not very much appreciate the kind of long-standing, Koranically-based, hatred and violence that gave us 9/11 and the recent destruction of the ancient city of Palmyra, by the Islamic State (IS), in Syria.

The Enemy

Diaspora Jews, particularly of the left-leaning variety and for perfectly understandable reasons, are deeply uncomfortable with even the notion of "enemy."

No normal people want enemies. Normal people do not want war or to be forced into a position where they must take action against another people.

Unfortunately, the Jewish people, generation upon generation, century upon century, faced grinding hostility by both Europeans and Arab-Muslims. Thankfully, the Christian peoples have moved beyond institutionalized Jew Hatred and today some of our best friends on the planet come out of the western churches.

Sadly, the same cannot be said of the mosques.

Our enemies include virtually every single Arab government and much (if not most) of their religious leadership.

Our enemies do not include Muslims, in general, but merely those who would subject the rest of us to the mercies of Islamic law.

Furthermore, much of the western-left, almost the entirety of the United Nations, the European Union and the Obama administration, have proven themselves consistently hostile to the well-being of the Jewish people through being consistently hostile to the well-being of the Jewish State.

This hostility is justified on the grounds that Israel is a racist, colonialist, imperialist, apartheid state that has pushed the innocent indigenous population off of their land, while refusing to allow them autonomy in a state of their own on that land.

And that is the "Palestinian Narrative" in a concise form.

In truth, Palestinian-Arab nationalism emerged out of the larger Arab nation as a weapon. At the very core of "Palestinian" identity is the cruel goal of eliminating the Jewish State of Israel. It is their very reason to be as an allegedly distinct people. Hostility toward Israel, and towards Jews, is the glue that binds them and allows them to claim a distinct ethnicity, of sorts.

Why?

Because Israel is the Dhimmi that Got Away and the Arabs don't like it.

Jewish sovereignty on the land of our ancestors is understood not only as a terrible humiliation to the entire Arab nation, but as a direct violation of the will of Allah. Thus Jihad is both obligatory and sacred.

The very existence of Israel flies in the face of Qur'anic imperatives to maintain and expand Dar al-Islam at the expense of all non-Muslims. The dhimmi is supposed to be humiliated upon paying the Jizya - they had to crawl - but it is Israeli Jews who have humiliated their former social superiors, through surviving and thriving in freedom from dhimmitude within the State of Israel.

Meanwhile almost the entire Muslim world wallows in poverty and ignorance, violence and genocide against Zoroastrians and Christians and Yazidis and the Ba'hai, and the constant intra-Muslim warfare between Shia and Sunni... and almost all of this they blame on the West or on the insidious, international "Zionist conspiracy."

The Arabs, "Palestinian" or otherwise, are not the victims of the Jews.

On the contrary, it is the Jewish minority in the Middle East who have been constantly persecuted by the great Muslim majority in that part of the world from the early 7th century until the present. It is not merely the Palestinian-Arabs, but virtually the entire Arab and Muslim worlds that are perpetually endeavoring to squeeze the Jews out of Israel, by any means necessary. These means include war and violence and intifada, lawfare, international diplomatic aggressions, the movement to Boycott, Divest from, and Sanction Israel (BDS), heritage theft and attempts at heritage obliteration, cognitive warfare (pdf) and Pallywood.

We can break down the contemporary phases of the Long Arab War Against the Jews as follows:

Phase 1, 1920 - 1947: Riots and Massacres

Phase 2, November 1947 - April 1948: The Civil War in Palestine

Phase 3, 1948 - 1973: Conventional Warfare

Phase 4, 1964 - Present: The Terror War

Phase 5, 1975 - Present: The Delegitimization Effort

There is a possibility that we can eventually overcome this perpetual hostility, but it will not come from Israeli concessions because those concessions are always pocketed by the Palestinian-Arabs and then used as the starting point for demands on further concessions.

Instead, we need solidarity among ourselves and among our allies within a political framework that benefits both.

And on that hopeful note, let's not forget to send some good thoughts and prayers to our friend Shirlee in Oz as she recovers from surgery.

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

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