Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

09/20 Links Pt2: A definition of anti-Israeli anti-Semitism; A Dangerous Mix of Truth and Fiction

From Ian:

Obama: Israel cannot ‘permanently occupy, settle Palestinian land’

US President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that while the Palestinians should reject terror and incitement, Israel must recognize that it cannot “permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land.”
“Surely Israelis and Palestinians will be better off if Palestinians reject incitement and recognize the legitimacy of Israel. But Israel must recognize that it cannot permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land. We all have to do better,” the US president said at the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
In his wide-ranging address, Obama sought to use his last appearance before the global body to define how his leadership had put the world on a better trajectory over the last eight years. At the heart of that approach, Obama said, is the notion that conflicts are best solved when nations cooperate.
The president cited his administration’s outreach to former adversaries Cuba and Myanmar as key examples of progress. He also cited the resolution last year “of the Iranian nuclear issue through diplomacy” as a key achievement over the past eight years.
In his address, Obama spoke of a “less violent” and “more prosperous” world but one rife with “uncertainty, unease and strife,” as nations struggle with a devastating refugee crisis, terrorism and a breakdown of order in the Middle East.
“Despite enormous progress, governing has become more difficult, and tensions are more quick to surface,” he said, adding that the world now faces a choice, to “press forward with a better model for cooperation and integration, or retreat into a world that is sharply divided.”

David Collier: Stupidity, The Hinde Street Methodist Church and Israel

It’s the 19th September 2016. My attention was drawn this week to an exhibit in London at the Hinde Street Methodist Church. An exhibition that seeks to enlighten Londoners about ‘what it is like to cross a checkpoint everyday’. It is called “You cannot pass today”. It is based on ‘checkpoint 300’, a crossing between Bethlehem and Jerusalem.
Odd really. Even internal European travel can be problematic, and just a few weeks ago I stood for over an hour in a queue at an airport. Not sure what ‘experience’ Londoners are lacking. Borders can be frustrating. We all know that.
Yet Hinde Street Methodist Church decided that it wishes to divert funds from a deserving cause so yet another exhibition against Israel could go ahead.
I was busy preparing for the new academic year. Soon, I will be moving from campus to campus, talking to students, trying to understand the hate. Then Hinde Street knocked on my door. I decided to go and see what they wanted me to learn.
The event apparently is part of the “World Week for Peace in Palestine & Israel”. I found information on this from ‘The Palestine Israel Ecumenical Forum (PIEF)’ which judging from their stated goal of ‘ending the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories’, is just another one sided anti-Israeli movement hiding under the umbrella of a church group.
The information packs are the usual fare. The action card instructs you how to lobby your local MP, begging them to blame Israel. The section on additional resources lead with Mondoweiss and the Electronic Intifada. Let’s face it, this is one sided hatred of Israel dressed up in the costume of the local priest.

Richard Millett: Anti-Semitic comments show the Method in the Methodists’ Madness.

I went to Hinde Street Methodist Church’s exhibition in London about Israel’s security checkpoints today expecting something on the scale of the St James’s Church’s lifesize reproduction of Israel’s security barrier outside their own church in 2013 which cost £30,000 to construct. Hinde Street Church’s reproduction, however, was more of an IKEA job.
First, all of the exhibition was inside the church and second, the checkpoint was made from simple plywood with various negative commentaries about the wall, including quotations from the Bible, attached to it.
There were also real photographs of Israeli checkpoints, some sort of jenga section and three prayer stations for silent contemplation.
Third, the Zionist Federation and the Board of Deputies had spent the weekend persuading the church to accept as part of the exhibition literature (including two big boards) explaining why the security checkpoints are so necessary (see below).
The exhibition didn’t seem to be busy (it runs till friday) but the ZF/BOD literature will be effective in countering those unsuspecting members of the public who wander in. My hunch though is that the exhibition will only attract real Israel haters coming to have their views on the Jewish state confirmed.
David Collier and I sat at a prayer station in discussion with two elderly British women for about 15 minutes. We played dumb about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one of the women proceeded to tell us, inter alia, that Israel has an “unkind society” and that Israel in the West Bank is akin to Putin conquering the Ukraine and transporting Russians there.

Fatah celebrates terror. Like they do every day.

The Fatah Facebook page celebrates terror literally every day.

Today they show this newly colorized picture of airplane hijacker Leila Khaled and late Fatah terrorist Abu Jihad:

The caption says, "We are from January the 1st [1965 - the first Fatah terror attack], oh homeland... one generation salutes the next one."

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

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“Why? Why are they doing this?” Over the past year Israelis have been horrified again and again at the seemingly ever decreasing age of the terrorists attacking us. Young children are picking up knives and going out to kill Jews – with full knowledge that they will not survive the attempt.

How does a child become a murderer? Why would a child kill?

Although we all find ourselves surprised each time, this issue is not new. The answer to how this happens is also very clear. It is right in front of us. The problem is that we don’t want to see….

“Why did you want to do it?” the reporter asks 14 year old Husam Abdul from Shechem. The teenager had been sent to explode himself in order to kill Israeli soldiers.

The reporter tries to put words in the Husam’s mouth: “You did it for Paradise right?” but as children often do, Husam blurted out the inconvenient truth: “Because the people, they don’t love me.”

This happened years ago but it will never leave me. This boy represents all the boys sent to kill. This one scene is a vivid example of the problem that is currently overwhelming Israel and the rest of the free world.

No one wants to look at this. It’s too ugly, too horrible to comprehend. We westerners like to believe that everyone is the same; everyone has the same morals and ideals. Everyone loves their children the same etc. Unfortunately, that is just not true.

During Operation Protective Edge Israelis tried to explain to the world that Hamas uses women and children as human shields, that teaching children to aspire to martyrdom is child abuse. I don’t think people outside Israel, even those that follow what happens here, truly understand what this means. No one wants to comprehend something so twisted…

14 year old Husam was sent to blow himself up by grown-ups. He didn’t go off on a whim; this is not a childish prank. Grown-ups took a child, strapped a bomb on him (you will see in the video how difficult it is to remove the suicide belt, after all it’s not meant to come off) and then sent him off to die. Someone significant in this boy’s life convinced him that dying would raise his value in the eyes of the people closest to him – his father, brother, cousin, uncle…

“You did it for Paradise, right?”

Someone that knows that Israelis consider children precious, picked a child to go kill Israelis, coldly calculating that softhearted Israelis would let this boy approach close enough to explode, killing himself and IDF soldiers or, if he had gotten through the checkpoint – Israeli civilians.

This is not a problem created by a single sick person, it permeates the society. Life is not precious and the end justifies the means – even if that means sending your own child to die.

Please watch this video. Notice the details, particularly the contrast between the behavior of the soldiers and that of the boy, considering the mission he was sent to accomplish. At the end of the video you will see that it says there were “four similar attacks attempted at that checkpoint within months and children are no longer a surprise”. The English subtitles are not written professionally but I think the English is clear enough to understand – Husam’s case is one example amongst many. It no longer surprised anyone that a child was sent as suicide bomber because it had happened before. Since then this type of child abuse has become more frequent and even more extreme (for example the terrorist that attacked IDF soldiers in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge with a baby in his arms). So many people around the world decry Israeli checkpoints. Does watching this video help you understand why checkpoints are necessary? Why soldiers must search everyone, including children?

Now we are seeing more and more children and young people choose to commit terror attacks on their own initiative. They have learned their lessons well; they know what is expected of them.

“You did it for Paradise, right?”

Golda Meir once said: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”

She was right.

And it is only when this is understood worldwide that there will ever be any hope for peace.

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09/20 Links Pt1: Glick: Defending Ourselves to Death; UN ground zero for antisemitism

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Defending Ourselves to Death

It is the job of the government, the police and the courts to make clear that crime doesn’t pay. It is their failure to drive home this message consistently that empowers radicalized thugs from Jaljulya to spread feces on Jewish graves.
Likewise, the problem in Gush Etzion isn’t that area communities haven’t taken the necessary steps to protect their residents or that the IDF suffers from a manpower shortage. The problem is that Palestinians in Odeh’s middle-class community, which overlooks Efrat, and in surrounding villages feel free to plan terrorist attacks against their Jewish neighbors as they sit in their living rooms and watch genocidal broadcasts on Hezbollah, Hamas and Fatah TV.
As for the Golan Heights, sooner or later, Hezbollah and Syrian government forces, along with their Iranian overlords can be depended on to open a new front against Israel in the Golan Heights if they become convinced that Israel’s main countermove will be to permanently deploy a missile defense battery along the border. Missile defense batteries don’t scare enemies away. They merely challenge their ingenuity.
No one doubts that the government wants to defend Israel’s citizens – alive and deceased. But despite their good intentions, our leaders are failing us. Our political, military, police and bureaucratic leaders are failing us because our foes – at home and abroad – have come to believe that we aren’t willing to do what is necessary to defeat them.
Our leaders are failing us because they refuse to act on the sure knowledge that an over-reliance on defensive measures does not deter aggression. It invites aggression.

Palestinian speaks in city

A Palestinian human rights activist turned commentator blamed a lot of people Monday evening for the failure of Muslims and Jews to make peace in Israel.
Bassem Eid offered his Fort Wayne audience a list of groups he said are doing nothing to try to resolve the decades-old conflict: Palestinian leaders, the Egyptian government and other Arab countries, the United Nations, President Barack Obama’s administration and the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement.
But Eid spared Israel itself during his remarks at the History Center. His appearance was sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Fort Wayne and the Harry W. Salon Foundation.
“Imagine that Israel is interested in the reconstruction of Gaza while we, the Palestinians, are much more interested in the destruction of Gaza,” Eid said about Palestinian territory in Israel.
Pointing to wars in the region, Eid said Israel is “probably the most safe place in the Middle East. “As an Arab, as a Muslim, I don’t want to be Syria, I don’t want to be Libya, I don’t want to be Iraq, I don’t want to be Yemen. It’s much safer for myself and for my children to keep ourselves” in Israel.
Arab leaders want the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to continue because it is “the only way the Arab leaders can keep on corrupting their own people,” he said.

Simona Sharoni is an academic fraud who wrote an article earlier this year that pretends that there is a relationship between Israeli policies and men raping women on college campuses.

"Intersectionality," you know.

After she exposed herself as an idiot, it is natural that people would start to look at her background a little bit. This is the person who helped send Rachel Corrie to Israel to protest IDF actions for college credit, and she may be one of Corries' mentors who told her that her "whiteness" would protect her, something that may have directly caused her death as the poor, stupid girl felt she was invincible in front of the slow-moving bulldozer that couldn't see her.

Someone, apparently from Stand With Us, filed a Freedom of Information request to SUNY Plattsburgh, where she now teaches, to find out about Sharoni's hiring, employment history and participation in academic conferences.

It is a legal request. It is a moral request to find out whether state-funded employees who teach New York students are really qualified to do so. There is absolutely nothing wrong with trying to find out this information.

But Sharoni suddenly went from being the principled, strong voice speaking truth to power that she pretends to be into a whining, quivering weakling who is complaining, "Look! I'm being persecuted by the evil, all powerful Lobby!"

I'll let Electronic Intifada explain:

[O]n 6 September, Sharoni says she was informed by a school administrator that an individual had made five requests under New York’s Freedom of Information Law asking for records on her hiring, employment history and participation in academic conferences.

According to Sharoni, Sean Brian Dermody, assistant to the vice president for administration and director of management services at SUNY Plattsburgh, asked Sharoni to help with the request by locating the records and turning them over.

The next day, Sharoni says, Dermody sent a follow-up email asking her to give him all correspondence in her possession related to her hiring. Sharoni began working at SUNY Plattsburgh in 2007. She became a professor in 2010.

In the latest update, Sharoni says she was informed that a request was made to disclose all of her travel authorizations and records of what she did and who paid for it.

Ken Knelly, a spokesperson for the university, stressed to The Electronic Intifada that the administration must follow the law. “We are subject to the New York State Freedom of Information Law,” which he says was created to ensure that the government and its institutions are responsive to the public. “The law is based on a presumption of access.”

In response to concerns that the requests may be part of a campaign of intimidation and harassment, as Sharoni and MESA argue, Knelly said the school will review the requests. “Based on the content of individual records requested, we can restrict access if exemptions apply in accordance with state law.”

“We need to follow the law,” he said.

Bob Freeman, executive director of New York’s Committee on Open Government, told The Electronic Intifada that according to precedent dating back to the beginning of the Freedom of Information Law, public records are accessible to anyone without regard to the nature of their interest.

Freeman noted that a request can only be denied if it meets the standard of an “unwarranted invasion of privacy.” He remarked that if every government employee could protest that a Freedom of Information request was intended to intimidate them, then not many requests would be granted.

But Sharoni wants to pretend to be the victim:

“My administration’s utter silence on the matter until today,” she added in reference to Ettling’s email, “underscores an alarming trend in higher education of appeasing external political entities by curtailing the free speech and academic freedom of faculty and students who according to administrators work on ‘controversial issues.’”

“It is an attempt to undermine and discredit scholarly work on Israel/Palestine that includes calls to hold Israel accountable for its systemic human rights violations and repression.”

But Sharoni has no intention to retreat from her work. “I am going to deal with my sense of insecurity and vulnerability by speaking up even louder on these issues, by refusing to let administrators define support for justice in Palestine as controversial and by letting colleagues who don’t work on these issues know what are the broad implications of the loss of academic freedom.”

Sharoni here admits that the FOI requests are not affecting her academic freedom at all.

If she is so brave, and has nothing to hide, and if these requests aren't chilling her speech one iota, and if they are legal requests, then...why is she whining about it?

The reason is because victimhood is sine qua non for anti-Israel activists. They must claim that the Israel Lobby is all powerful and that they are the victims, while at the same time saying that they are brave and they fight despite the crushing weight of pressure from the Zionists.

This case shows that this narrative is utterly false. The truth is that there is no quashing of academic freedom by asking questions, and a true academic would welcome people seeking out information.

Sharoni doesn't base her research on facts. She comes up with her assertion of Israeli evil first, and then tries to shoe-horn any wisps of evidence she can find from any other field to support her foregone conclusion.

No wonder she is against anyone trying to find actual facts.

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The anniversary of "filthy feet"

Today:

A Palestinian teenager was shot and killed while attempting a stabbing attack on an IDF soldier near Bani Na’im, outside of Hebron, on Tuesday morning, the army said, marking a fifth straight day of attacks in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

The alleged assault was the ninth such attack in under a week, with the vast majority occurring in Jerusalem and the Hebron area, where Palestinians live in close proximity to settlers and Israeli troops.

Earlier on Monday, two Hebron residents tried to stab a group of border guards near the city’s Tomb of the Patriarchs holy site before they were shot, according to police.

On Friday, two residents of Bani Na’im were shot by security forces as they rammed their car into a bus stop near the Kiryat Arba settlement. Three Israeli teenagers were lightly hurt as they ran to escape the attack.

Israeli officials are puzzled as to why the outbreak occurred now:

The renewed surge in attacks caught many Israelis by surprise, as the violence that marked 2015 and early 2016 appeared to have waned in recent months, and raised fears that regular attacks could return.

Officials fear the upcoming Jewish holidays and the recently ended Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday could be behind the raised tensions.

The holiday and the month of September “are always more susceptible to spikes in violent Palestinian activities,” a military official, speaking anonymously, said Saturday.

“The motivation and inspiration to carry out attacks against Israelis remains strong,” the official said.

The key to the renewal of attacks may be related to something else.

On September 16, 2015, Mahmoud Abbas made one of his most antisemitic speeches ever. MEMRI translated it this way:

Everybody is asking what we should do. We will knock on all possible doors, in order to make the voice of Jerusalem heard. Onward we go, Allah willing. We salute you and all the men and women in ribat. We salute every drop of blood spilled for the sake of Jerusalem. This blood is clean, pure blood, shed for the sake of Allah, Allah willing. Every martyr will be placed in Paradise, and all the wounded will be rewarded by Allah.

Dear brothers, we are all here for the sake of Jerusalem. I tell you in all honesty, a Palestinian state without Jerusalem will never be. The Palestinian state must include its capital, noble Jerusalem – with its capital, East Jerusalem, which was occupied in 1967. We do not allow any of their measures. All these divisions… The Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher are ours. They are all ours, and they have no right to defile them with their filthy feet. We shall not allow them to do so, and we shall do whatever we can to protect Jerusalem.

September 16th marked the beginning of the current wave of attacks.

Palestinian Arabs are very sensitive to anniversaries. Abbas' incitement directly led to last year's spree of murders, stabbings, shootings and car rammings.

It seems more than coincidental that the current wave began on the exact anniversary of Mahmoud Abbas' antisemitic incitement speech.

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Talmudic rituals captured on video!

Yehuda Glick visited the Cotton Market adjacent to the Temple Mount on Monday - and broadcast himself live on his Facebook page.

The entrance to the Temple Mount (the Cotton Gate) is there, but is off-limits to Jews.

However, the rule that the police had created to forbid Jews from praying in the Muslim quarter has been rescinded, so Glick said a couple of prayers.

As he is leaving, he wishes a "shana tova" (Happy New Year) to all, and he says specifically to Muslims in the market, "Inshallah, there should be peace here, for us and for you."

Naturally, Arabs freaked out over these "Talmudic rituals" by the "far-right" Glick.

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Rania Khalek is a Nazi - if you embrace @intifada's reporting style

The screaming headline top story at Electronic Intifada on Sunday and most of Monday was this one by Rania Khalek:

Khalek and EI head Ali Abunimah want readers to associate being "pro-Israel" with racism and hatred of Muslims. And this crazy habitual criminal from Florida is all they need for their bigoted readers to connect the dots.

As Khalek says:

In a 12 July Facebook post, Schreiber wrote, “ALL ISLAM IS RADICAL , and should be considered TERRORIST AND CRIMANALS [sic].”

With such rhetoric, Schreiber was echoing the anti-Muslim messages emanating from organizations and high-profile individuals who have been spewing anti-Muslim hatred for years.

And who are those individuals and organizations? Follow the links and you find many pro-Israel organizations and people who are surely against Islamic terror and Islamic political extremism, but most of whom do not in any way "spew anti-Muslim hatred."

Under EI's rules of journalism, if you can find any link between a criminal bigot and a Zionist - they vote for the same party, for example - then the Zionist is proven to be bigoted. If A and B both belong to set C then A=B. This is the false equivalence fallacy and it is Electronic Intifada's lifeblood.

EI has a long history of using guilt by association using this fallacy. It does it to an insane degree - it appears that if someone's uncle's dog's previous owner once said something that could be interpreted as pro-Israel, they label him as a "Zionist extremist." Using this bizarre logic, Khalek once attempted to link me with Anders Behring Breivik using a post where I explicitly called him evil, a psychopath and a terrorist. (Max Blumenthal eagerly picked up on that association, showing that his journalistic standards are exactly equal to those of Electronic Intifada.)

If those are the rules, then we can safely link Rania Khalek and Ali Abunimah with everyone who shares their opinions that a Jewish state should not exist. By their own rules, the editors and fans of Electronic Intifada can all be associated with neo-Nazis.

And ISIS.

And the KKK.

And Syria's president Assad. And Saddam Hussein. And Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei. And Islamic Jihad. And Hamas.

In fact, if Khalek can associate a crazed arsonist with pro-Israel organizations who she claims are Islamophobic (most of them aren't, by any sane definition), then it would make a great deal of sense to associate Khalek and Abunimah with the Palestinian who used a meat cleaver to slice up a New York cop, and who had previously harassed Jews by screaming "Allahu Akbar" outside a synagogue. He is just doing what his fellow Palestinians like to do to civilians in Israel. After all, there is no doubt that the madman was pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel, just like they are. Therefore, by their logic, they are associated with their fellow Arab who attacks innocent New Yorkers.

But why stop there? The 9/11 terrorists also shared the same anti-Israel and anti-American philosophy Khalek and Abunimah do. Therefore, Khalek is linked to Al Qaeda, using her own methods of fact-finding and journalism! She's just as bad as Bin Laden, who hated Israel just like Khalek does!

(Actually, the links between Abunimah/Khalek and antisemitism are far closer than the links they try to forge between Zionists and racists. After all, they explicitly deny the right of the Jewish people to self-determination.)

I don't need to resort to such lazy and illogical methods to smear haters like those who write for Electronic Intifada. Their own lies damn them directly. But it is important to show how low they are willing to go to push their agenda by using their major weapons of guilt by association and false equivalence - even when there is no association to speak of.

Why do they rely so heavily on this method?

Because when it comes down to actually debating facts and ideas, they've got nothing.

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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.”