Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, December 11, 2016

12/11 Links: Netanyahu decries Istanbul attack, says Turkey should condemn Palestinian terror

From Ian:

PA police prevent IDF from entering Jenin, fire rifles in air

Palestinian Authority police apparently prevented Israeli security forces from entering the West Bank city of Jenin on Sunday afternoon, according to videos posted on social media websites.
The Israel Defense Forces said it was looking into the incident.
In the footage posted by the Palestinian Ma’an news agency, the PA security officers, armed with assault rifles, can be seen standing in front of IDF vehicles, blocking their entrance into the city.
As the armored jeeps approach, the Palestinian officers can be heard shouting and cocking their weapons.
After a few moments, the Israeli armored jeeps make a U-turn and exit the city.
In one such clip, posted by the Hamas-linked al-Quds News Network, the Palestinian officers can be heard firing shots in the air as the Israeli vehicles leave the city.

Netanyahu decries Istanbul attack, says Turkey should condemn Palestinian terror

Israel condemns Saturday's terror attack on Istanbul and expects Turkey to condemn all terror attacks on Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.
Netanyahu's comments at the top of Sunday's weekly cabinet meeting came one day before Turkey's new ambassador was set to present his credentials to President Reuven Rivlin.
"In the struggle against terrorism there has to be a mutuality in condemnation as well as in thwarting the attacks, and that is Israel's expectation from all countries it has relations with," Netanyahu said.
In a Channel 2 interview last month, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he does not view Hamas as a terror organization, calling them instead a "political movement born from [a] national resurrection." He also said he meets with Hamas "all the time."
Netanyahu also noted that in a few weeks time, Israel will begin marking 50 years to the unification of Jerusalem.

Kurdish militant group claims deadly Istanbul bombings

A Kurdish militant group on Sunday claimed responsibility for twin attacks that ripped through the heart of Istanbul, killing 38 people, mostly police.
The claim was made in a statement issued by the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK), seen as an splinter group of the better-known Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
“A revenge squad from TAK carried out simultaneous attacks outside Istanbul Vodafone Arena stadium and Macka park at around 2230 local time (1930 GMT),” according to a TAK statement published on its website.
The militant group said the twin attacks were carried out by two TAK militants, without providing any details about the perpetrators.
Turkish government officials had earlier pointed the finger of blame at the PKK, which has waged a bloody campaign against the Turkish state since 1984.
The carnage prompted a sharp response from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who vowed Ankara would “fight the scourge of terrorism right to the end.”
“They should know that they will not get away with it… They will pay a heavier price,” the president said.

Cairo cathedral bomb blast kills at least 25

Egyptian media said Sunday a blast at Cairo’s main Coptic Christian cathedral killed 25 people and injured at least another 35.
The explosion occurred at St. Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in central Cairo.
The cathedral is the seat of Egypt’s Orthodox Christian church and is home to the office of its spiritual leader, Pope Tawadros II.
There were no claims of responsibility for any attack, but jihadists in Sinai have targeted Christians before, as well as Muslims they accuse of working with the government.
Egypt’s official MENA news agency said an assailant lobbed a bomb into a chapel close to the outer wall of the cathedral.
However, witnesses said the explosion may have been caused by an explosive device planted inside the chapel. Conflicting accounts are common in the immediate aftermath of attacks.

In a recent piece by Times of Israel staff we learn that, according to the Brookings Institution, a majority of Democrats consider Israel a "burden."

The great majority of Americans, however - 76 percent - disregard Democratic Party disdain for the Jewish state and see Israel as a "strategic asset." And they should. Aside from all the medical and technological breakthroughs that Israel is responsible for, it is also one of best allies the United States has in the world. Israel not only shares key intelligence information with the US government, it is also a bulwark of liberal democracy in a part of the world famous for brutal, head-chopping theocratic regimes that loathe both countries on religious grounds.

But none of this is new.

The Democratic Party betrayed the State of Israel and the Jewish people when it decided that making a home for itself of anti-Semitic anti-Zionists was a dandy idea. In almost any political venue controlled by Democrats anti-Semitic anti-Zionists hold a well-respected seat at the table alongside the Jews that they perpetually spit at as racist, colonialist, imperialist, militaristic, apartheid, scum.

From Daily Kos to the National Democratic Party, Jewish Democrats are taken for granted and held in contempt. And why shouldn't they be? American Jews are at least as slavish to the Democrats as are American black people and the party leadership knows it. This is why they did not hesitate to put up an anti-Zionist, like Keith Ellison, as the primary contender for DNC Chair.

After listening to arguments, I've decided that Democrats are right to back Ellison. Ellison is staunch in his support of the party, he is the first Muslim-American to join the ranks of Congress, and he, in both votes and values, represents the character of the Democratic Party as it is in the early twenty-first century.

A Touch of Historical Backdrop

From FDR to the present, great numbers of Americans viewed the Democratic Party as the vehicle for the people. If the Republicans allegedly represented the party of uncaring plutocrats, the Democrats developed a reputation for standing with American workers, the labor unions, and the regular people. Rolling into the 1930s and the Great Depression government and business ruled the United States. It took many decades of fighting and dying for the labor movement in the United States to earn the recognition and power that it received under FDR and the New Deal, thereby creating the economic possibility of a burgeoning American middle-class after World War II.

Following that war, American liberalism shifted from a focus on labor to a focus on ethnic minorities, or what you might call "rights liberalism," which would come to dominate Democratic politics in the form of "identity politics" by the turn of the century. So, for many of us growing up on the coasts following the Vietnam War, politics seemed simple and Manichean. It was a black and white choice between the forces of freedom and fairness versus the forces of traditional repression and prejudice.

In the early 1980s, however, the American cultural-political zeitgeist shifted quickly under president Ronald Reagan. Suddenly, according to singer-songwriter Huey Lewis (who I loathed) it was "hip to be square" and American college students shifted from a focus on the humanities and social sciences to business administration and the art of money-making. What those of us who held fast to the earlier, 1960s visions of our older brothers and sisters did not at first realize was that the social justice vision of American politics was strengthening beneath the surface of Reagan's America. It may have been a New Day for American conservatism, but the ideological children of Abbie Hoffman, if not Robert Kennedy, were gaining power just beneath the surface of American public life, particularly at the universities.

Why Trump Won

For many liberals it seemed that Reagan had done such a good job of trashing their political movement that they changed their primary self-identifying term from "liberal" to "progressive." The American Left was so savaged by the Gipper that by the end of the 1980s the very word "liberal" had fallen into disfavor. By the 1990s, when we were all familiarizing ourselves with Bill and Hillary, the progressive-left moved back into the foreground, yet seemed entirely incognizant of the amazing strides that the American people had made concerning fairness and decency toward ethnic minorities, women, and Gay people in the previous decades. By the Era of Clinton, the bad old days of de jeure racism was long over, Gay men and women were emerging from their closets, and almost everyone considered female corporate executives as natural as daytime.

Things were not perfect, and things will never be "perfect," but the United States had come a very long way in a very short period of time toward equality of opportunity for all Americans, regardless of ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. Instead of acknowledging this and moving forward in a potential spirit of harmony, the progressive-left during the Obama administration used gender, race, and class as political weaponry with which to demean, defame, and even ruin the lives of people who might fairly disagree with them on substantive issues.

Political Correctness became stifling to thoughtful people who realized it was no longer about fairness toward others, but about ideological bullying, repression of alternative thought and speech, social shaming, and legal harassment for the purpose of political dominance and power.

In this way, perfectly reasonable questions concerning the rise of political Islam became entirely verboten among the allegedly "sophisticated" on the coasts. Likewise, Americans who saw the chaos and violence and rapes associated with the Muslim immigration crisis in Europe, and who dared raise concerns, were lambasted as the worst people on the planet. Furthermore, Jewish American college students who support Israel, and thus the movement for Jewish freedom, were spit upon as baby killers and racists and supporters of genocide by those who claimed to represent the Left.

There were many reasons why Hillary Clinton got beat. The common wisdom is that a combination of angry white working-class racists and fearful white upper-class racists did Hillary in. As we got closer to November the progressives and the Democrats beat the drum of racism and sexism and hatred so intensely that they scared the holy hell out of their own children who hoped not to be snatched out of their beds by Nazis or Klansmen by the morning of November 10.

And this represents a major, and largely overlooked, reason why Democrats and progressives were weeping into their beers the next day. You cannot go around telling regular Americans, of any ethnicity, that they're a bunch of heinous racist, sexist, Nazis and then expect them to support your candidate.

However, if the Democrats believe that Israel is a burden to the United States then they need to bring in Representative Ellison to help relieve them of that burden. We all know about Keith Ellison by this point. He's an anti-Zionist who promoted the notion that Israel is an "apartheid" state, who voted against funding Israel's Iron Dome defense system, and who was a long-time admirer and supporter of Farrakhan's anti-Semitic (and stone-cold crazy) Nation of Islam.

Nonetheless, the Democrats should bring in Ellison as Chair of the DNC because it's important to Jewish people that you stop playing hide-the-salami with your anti-Zionism.

It's just good to know where people actually stand.

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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On Saturday Mahmoud Abbas hosted a celebration of Mohammed's birthday at his presidential palace in Ramallah.

Abbas' Presidential Advisor for Religious Affairs, Mahmoud al -Habash, gave a a speech on Abbas' behalf. In the speech, he said, "We are the heirs of the Pact of Umar, which the head of Palestine inherits today...through brotherhood among the Palestinian people, and through the work on the unity of our people."

Habash added that "this anniversary as an opportunity to renew our covenant to our Holy Prophet, ...you are the successor to [uphold] the pact of Umar and return Jerusalem under the banner of Palestine. "

Abbas was in the audience, applauding.

What is the Pact of Umar?

There are differing opinions as to its exact provisions, but it is the prototype of how to treat non-Muslims in an Islamic nation. The Pact itself may have been written specifically for non-Muslims in Jerusalem. According to Wikipedia, some of the rules include:

- Prohibition against building new churches, places of worship, monasteries, monks or a new cell. Hence it was also forbidden to build new synagogues.
- Prohibition against rebuilding destroyed churches, by day or night, in their own neighborhoods or those situated in the quarters of the Muslims.
- Prohibition against hanging a cross on the Churches.
- Muslims should be allowed to enter Churches (for shelter) in any time, both in day and night.
- Christians were forbidden to show their religion in public, or to be seen with Christian books or symbols in public, on the roads or in the markets of the Muslims.
- Palm Sunday and Easter parades were banned.
- Funerals should be conducted quietly.
- Prohibition against telling a lie about Muslims.
- If a Muslim wishes to sit, non-Muslim should be rise from his seats and let the Muslim sit.
- Prohibition against riding animals in the Muslim custom, and prohibition against riding with a saddle.
- Prohibition against any possession of weapons.
- Non-Muslims must host a Muslim passerby for at least 3 days and feed him.
- Prohibition against non-Muslims to lead, govern or employ Muslims.
- The worship places of non-Muslims must be lower in elevation than the lowest mosque in town.
- The houses of non-Muslims must not be taller in elevation than the houses of Muslims.
- Houses of the non-Muslims must be short so that each time that they would enter or exit their houses they would have to bend, in a way that it would remind them of their low status in the world.

This is in exchange for being "protected."

Abbas apparently approved and applauded a speech where he is regarded as the modern heir to the Pact of Umar where Jews and Christians are systematically discriminated against.

Ironically, this blatant exhortation supporting Muslim supremacism and keeping non-Muslims as second-class citizens in "Palestine" was given on December 10 - Human Rights Day.

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The National Catholic Reporter's Global Sisters Report has an article on a Benedictine convent in Jerusalem on the road to the Mount of Olives.

Most of the article is about how the sisters there are trying to restore old cisterns to water their olive trees and save thousands of dollars in water bills.

But it also mentions this:

The Benedictine convent is also unique because it is a semicloistered convent in the midst of one of the most impoverished and crowded East Jerusalem neighborhoods. Next door to the convent is a contentious Jewish settlement called Beit Hoshen, run by the group the City of David Foundation, whose ideological agenda is to purchase land in Arab neighborhoods and build heavily fortified Jewish residences, in an attempt to "Judaize" the area. Beit Hoshen is a single building with about 30 people.

"One year before I arrived, the [Beit Hoshen] building was sold," said Penka. "The [Palestinian] farmer owner lost his life. People don't like when you sell to Jews" in this neighborhood, she explained.

Oh.

The article also mentions matter-of-factly:

The location of the Jewish building means the road is now a flash point for riots whenever the political situation becomes shaky. Additionally, the sisters are located on the road toward the Mount of Olives, the holiest place for Jews to be buried, because it is believed that the arrival of the Messiah will come from the Mount of Olives and those buried there will be the first dead to be resurrected. But many Arab residents resent the endless traffic jams from funerals. Angry children and teenagers protesting the Israeli occupation sometimes throw stones at the Jewish people's cars exiting the cemetery.

Because stoning Jewish mourners is a perfectly valid expression of anger at "occupation."

These are massive violations of human rights, both Jewish and Arab, from the Palestinians - but no one is too bothered by it. Murdering farmers who sell land, or attacking grieving relatives attending a funeral, is simply how things are done in Jerusalem - no reason for any moral outrage over it.

(h/t Joe in Australia)

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Abbas greets US Consul General. The next day, in the same office, he greets a terror group.

From Mahmoud Abbas' Facebook page, December 6:

President Abbas receives US Consul-General in Jerusalem Donald Blome

From the same page, December 7:

President Abbas receives a delegation from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

The PFLP is a designated terrorist organization according to the US, Canada, Australia and the EU.

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12/10 Links: The Myth of Israel's Demographic Doomsday; Israel Shows How to Stop Terrorists

From Ian:

The Myth of Israel's Demographic Doomsday

Critics of Israel love to exploit Jewish fears and anxieties. The most extreme resort to Holocaust inversion, boycotts, blacklists, and other singling-out methods reminiscent of Europe's anti-Semitic past. Secretary of State John Kerry likes to wave around the threat of Israel's demographic extinction.
Acute Israeli sensitivity on this matter came to the fore in the late 1960s, when Israeli rule over the newly won Gaza Strip and West Bank was thought by many to be untenable owing to much-higher Palestinian birth rates. If Israel chose to annex the territories, it would be obliged either to disenfranchise their Palestinian inhabitants, making Israel undemocratic, or extend the vote and watch Israel's Jewish majority turn into a minority. For Israel to remain both a democratic and a Jewish state, according to the conventional wisdom, it would have to give the territories up. "The womb of the Arab woman," the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat famously said, was his "best weapon."
Fast-forward five decades. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), the number of (non-Jewish) Arabs living in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem (4.62 million) and in Israel (1.68 million) for the first time matches the number of Jews (6.3 million). Taking into account still-higher Palestinian birthrates, as neatly graphed out in a September 2016 full-page New York Times advertisement by a pro-Palestinian group, the Jewish population in the expanse of territory "from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River" is projected to decline to 44 percent in 2030.
In his drive to wrest Israeli concessions he believes will break the Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic logjam, Secretary Kerry has repeatedly warned of a demographic doomsday for Israel. "How does Israel possibly maintain its character as a Jewish and democratic state when from the river to the sea, there would not even be a Jewish majority?" he warned last December. Time is "running out" for Israel, Kerry maintains, insinuating that Arabs will be even less likely to accept a Jewish state as part of the former Palestine mandate once they become an overall majority, instead returning to their demand for a "one-state" solution. Israel then winds up "either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens — or ... a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state."

Israel Shows How to Stop Terrorists

Build a wall, secure the border, and vet Muslims to stop the infiltration of terrorists. This is not Donald Trump speaking – it is what has actually been done in Israel. Americans can take a page from Israel's Border Guard to protect themselves.
American Thinker interviewed author Samuel M. Katz regarding his book The Ghost Warriors, about Israel's elite force of undercover operatives. They are drawn from the nation's diverse backgrounds and ethnicities, united in their ability to walk among the enemy as no one else dared. They are called Ya'mas and use many undercover tactics.
Katz wrote the book to emphasize how "Israelis learned about using counter-terrorism inside city, street, and neighborhoods. The United States now realizes it is also something they will have to contend with, a struggle of civilizations. The book covers a period of Israeli history and is relevant to Americans because both nations must battle terrorism on a daily basis. It is a warrior's tale of a select group of individuals who accepted the challenge of going daily, nightly into enemy-controlled territory, usually in disguise. The enemy wonders who to trust or where the Israelis are lurking.
"Part of the Border Guards' strategy is to inflict 'terror' on the terrorists. They had to spend just as much time in watching their backs as planning terrorist attacks. Part of the Border Guard's duties is to capture the extremists to ensure the flow of information continues."

Douglas Murray: The Guilty Verdict Dutch Politicians Wanted So Much

Members of the Netherlands' Labour Party, who never of course were prosecuted, have wielded incomparably more damning icepicks than "fewer Moroccans".
The irony cannot have been lost on the wider world that on the same day that news of Wilders's conviction came out the other news from Holland was the arrest of a 30 year-old terror suspect in Rotterdam suspected of being about to carry out 'an act of terrorism'.
Internationally it will continuously be used against Wilders that he has been convicted of 'inciting discrimination' even though the charge is about a proto-crime – a crime that has not even occurred: like charging the makers of a car chase movie for 'inciting speeding'. As with many 'hate-crime' trials across the free world, from Denmark to Canada, the aim of the proceedings is to blacken the name of the party on trial so that they are afterwards formally tagged as a lesser, or non-person. If this sounds Stalinist it is because it is.
In the long-term, though, there is something even more insidious about this trial. For as we have noted here before, if you prosecute somebody for saying that they want fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands then the only legal views able to be expressed about the matter are that the number of Moroccans in the country must remain at precisely present numbers or that you would only like more Moroccans in the country. In a democratic society this sort of matter ought to be debatable.
If there is one great mental note of which 2016 ought to have reminded the world, it is how deeply unwise it is to try to police opinion. For when you do so you not only make your society less free, but you disable yourself from being able to learn what your fellow citizens are actually – perhaps ever more secretly – feeling. Then one day you will hear them.

Hamas official Fathi Hammad said that the terror group is s ready to export Qassam rockets to Arab armies in order "to fight the Zionist entity."

Hammad said that the rocket is comparable in quality to those produced by other international military rocket factories.

Exporting them might be a little difficult, since any exports would have to go through either Israel, through tunnels to Egypt or through the heavily-patrolled sea. Egypt would not take kindly to any rockets being smuggled into the Sinai while the army battles the Islamic State there.

Hammad didn't discuss the logistics of the budding Gaza export program.

Perhaps some human rights NGO can help them out in the name of opening up the borders of Gaza.

During his exclusive interview on Al-Aqsa Satellite Channel, Hammad emphasized - contrary to countless Western apologists for the terror group - that the main objective of the Hamas movement is to "liberate the entire territory of Palestine."

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12/09 Links Pt2: Amnesty International Attacks Democracies, Forgives Islamist Tyrannies; Planning the Holocaust in the Middle East: Nazi Designs to Bomb Jewish Cities

From Ian:

Amnesty International Attacks Democracies, Forgives Islamist Tyrannies

"Morally bankrupt." — Salman Rushdie, author with a $600,000 bounty from Iran's regime on his head, speaking of Amnesty International.
Amnesty sponsored a rally in Brussels, where Islamist speakers celebrated the 9/11 attacks, denied the Holocaust and demonized gays and Jews.
It seems that Amnesty turned its back on the battle of human rights in favor of a grotesque anti-Western bias. The Economist accused Amnesty of "reserving more pages to human rights abuses in Britain and the United States than in Belarus and Saudi Arabia."
Amnesty's secretary general compared Soviet forced-labor camps, where millions died of hunger, cold and executions, to a US military base where no prisoner has died, and which has prevented countless innocent civilians from being blown up.
"Canada is obliged to arrest and prosecute Bush for his responsibility for crimes under international law including torture", said Susan Lee, Amnesty International's Americas programme director. Amnesty also charged Obama of "war crimes."
Alan Dershowitz summarizes Amnesty's definition of Israel's "war crimes": "Whatever Israel does to defend its citizens."
A report by NGO Monitor detailed Amnesty's "systematic flaws in the reporting of human rights abuses; limited understanding of armed conflict leading to erroneous claims and incorrect analysis; and violation of the universality of human rights, including a consistent institutionalized bias against Israel through double-standards." There are even Amnesty's officials who called the Jewish State "a scum state."

What a Real Civil Rights Hero Thought of Jews, Zionism and Anti-Semitism

The real measure of a Civil Rights Leader is how he reacts to the persecution of others. On this crucial responsibility Bayard Rustin — the Civil Rights leader and strategist who worked as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s right hand man and organizer of the 1963 "March on Washington" — was always a step ahead.
A great test of Rustin's commitment to fighting anti-Semitism came during the 1968 School-Teachers' Strike in New York City. As Paul Berman wrote in The New Republic:
"In that strike, a social democratic trade union was pitted against a wave of neighborhood black nationalists demanding community control over the schools (and over the teachers' contracts). To support the teachers' union was, for Rustin and [A. Philip] Randolph, too, the obvious choice to make. Rustin became a top aide to Albert Shanker, the teachers' leader. ... Unfortunately the strike broke down into tribal warfare -- Jewish schoolteachers verses black neighborhood activists -- and Rustin, as a result, found himself in the novel and horrible circumstance of opposing an aroused black citizenry. Leaders more timid than himself, and more crafty, looked for ways to avoid taking sides during those very nasty months."
"But", writes Berman, "Rustin was incapable of drawing back." He had found "the Jewish rank and file" of the union "subjected by their opponents to all sorts of anti-Semitic vilification," and "he made a point of standing up against anti-semitism" — and did so very publicly, railing against "these young Negroes spouting material directly from Mein Kampf" in a 1968 speech to the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League.
Rustin was not an unbiased observer of these events. Not long after the Yom Kippur War was brought to a close, Rustin wrote in the Chicago Defender that "Israel, as a progressive and democratic nation, is the ultimate reflection of traditions which run throughout Jewish history and culture. Wherever Jews are, they stand firm for the extension of human rights for all people."

From The Boston Globe:

Sunday, Dec. 11, the Boston Chamber Symphony inaugurates a residency at Brookline’s Temple Ohabei Shalom with a program including Sergei Prokofiev’s “Overture on Hebrew Themes.” It was composed in 1919, while Prokofiev was living in New York City, but commissioned by colleagues from St. Petersburg who had formed a sextet — clarinet, string quartet, and piano — called the Zimro Ensemble. Dedicated to Zionism, Zimro performed Jewish-themed repertoire and raised funds for a proposed “Temple of Art” in Palestine. The group left St. Petersburg in 1918, touring Siberia, the East Indies, and Japan before coming to America. Clarinetist Simeon Bellison asked Prokofiev for a piece to anchor Zimro’s Carnegie Hall debut, providing the composer with a number of musical themes (which, in fact, Bellison may well have written himself). Prokofiev played the piano at the premiere.

...Prokofiev, though, left America, eventually returning to the Soviet Union. He sometimes dismissed his Zionist overture (the work’s almost relentless parade of four-bar phrasing struck him, in retrospect, as graceless) but nevertheless orchestrated it in 1934. Largely, Prokofiev remembered, while sitting in artist Pyotr Konchalovsky’s garden, having his portrait painted. “How are the Jews coming along?” Konchalovsky would ask, before suddenly, brusquely instructing the composer not to move.

Most online versions of the overture are from the original 1919 version, but here is one of the rarer orchestral versions:

As this site notes:

The Overture on Hebrew Themes was the first work to witness Prokofiev’s unexpected interest in Jewish music. It was also the first independent work (excluding arrangements) written by him in the United States. And Prokofiev was the first known Russian composer to base a Jewish score not on Jewish liturgical chants, but on klezmer tunes.(11) The history of this work is described in detail in his autobiography:
In the fall of 1919 the Jewish “Zimro” ensemble came to America. It consisted of a string quartet, clarinet, and piano, all of them fellow students of mine at the Petersburg conservatoire. The official purpose of their concert tour was to raise funds for a conservatoire in Jerusalem. But this was merely to impress the Jewish population of America. Actually they barely made enough to keep themselves alive. They had a repertoire of rather interesting Jewish music for diverse combinations of instruments: for two violins, trio, etc. They asked me to write an overture for a sextet, and gave me a notebook of Jewish themes. I refused at first on the grounds that I used only my own musical material. The notebook, however, remained with me, and glancing through it one evening I chose a few pleasant themes and began to improvise at the piano. I soon noticed that several well-knit passages were emerging. I spent the next day working on the themes and by evening had the overture ready. (12)

There is much more at that link about Prokofiev and his relationship with Jews.

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12/09 Links Pt1: UK Labour Leader Corbyn Attends London Launch of Anti-Israel Book; Western spring or European winter?

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Western spring or European winter?

People will only fight and die for nations to which they feel proudly attached. No one will willingly fight and die for the EU.
Current prospects, however, are alarming.
The erosion of national identity has created vicious group politics. These fights will probably escalate both verbally and physically. Here’s how this is likely to play out.
Muslim extremists will fight Jews and Israel in particular and Western society in general. The fascists will fight Muslims, Jews and liberals.
Liberals will support Muslim extremists because the fascists are fighting them, will continue to demonize Israel and Jews and will attack conservatives – who will thus vote in ever greater number for the far Right.
The more Islamist violence there is, the more the reaction against Muslims will increase; the more the Left will then support Muslims and demonize all who oppose them, thus encouraging more Muslim violence.
Jews will want to fight nobody at all but will get it in the neck from all sides.
Trump and Brexit offer some hope that this can be avoided. Restoring pride in Western national identity and the defense of the nation unifies rather than divides people. But if Trump or Brexit are seen to fail those who voted for them, all bets are off. The extremes of both Left and Right will be waiting, with their hobnailed boots on.

Caroline Glick: Israel’s first project with Trump

Israeli officials are thrilled with the national security team that US President-elect Donald Trump is assembling. And they are right to be.
The question now is how Israel should respond to the opportunity it presents us with.
The one issue that brings together all of the top officials Trump has named so far to his national security team is Iran.
Gen. (ret.) John Kelly, whom Trump appointed Wednesday to serve as his secretary of homeland security, warned about Iran’s infiltration of the US from Mexico and about Iran’s growing presence in Central and South America when he served as commander of the US’s Southern Command.
Gen. (ret.) James Mattis, Trump’s pick to serve as defense secretary, and Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Michael Flynn, whom he has tapped to serve as his national security adviser, were both fired by outgoing President Barack Obama for their opposition to his nuclear diplomacy with Iran.
During his video address before the Saban Forum last weekend, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said that he looks forward to discussing Obama’s nuclear Iran nuclear deal with Trump after his inauguration next month. Given that Netanyahu views the Iranian regime’s nuclear program – which the nuclear deal guaranteed would be operational in 14 years at most – as the most serious strategic threat facing Israel, it makes sense that he wishes to discuss the issue first.
But Netanyahu may be better advised to first address the conventional threat Iran poses to Israel, the US and the rest of the region in the aftermath of the nuclear deal.

Vic Rosenthal: The Third Lebanon War will be the Last Lebanon War

But today Hezbollah is entirely different from Hamas. Tehran has built it into an existential threat. If war breaks out we will have to unleash as quickly as possible the most powerful conventional weapons at our disposal against the rocket launchers. Look at the map! Perhaps such an attack would kill tens of thousands in Lebanon. But there’s no alternative. Israel is a tiny country with a concentrated population. We can’t absorb hundreds of missiles an hour, especially accurate ones with heavy payloads. We can’t afford to wait, not even a few minutes, once it starts.
Incidentally, if Hezbollah and Iran want to reap the benefit of the human shield strategy, then now is the time to do it. I suspect that Trump and his advisors would be less biased against Israel than the present administration, and therefore less likely to interfere with Israel’s response. Our enemies probably agree with me, and this means war is more likely in the next two months than at a later time. Maybe that’s why our officials have made the effort just now to ensure that Iran and Hezbollah understand the consequences of their possible actions.
It only makes sense to threaten Iran as well. The regime would be happy to sacrifice Lebanon and its people to destroy Israel, and the regime is pulling the strings, not Nasrallah. There need to be consequences for Iranian leaders too.
Evil is growing stronger and good is retreating. Deterrence may put off the reckoning for a time, but unless something completely unforeseen happens, the day will come when our PM will have to give the order to save one nation by destroying another. I’m glad I’m not the one to do it.

Hamas is celebrating its 29th anniversary today. It released this video showing its masked members going through Gaza streets in their many, many white Toyota pickup trucks.

Spokesman Abu Obeida said that this year, 22 Hamas members were killed during preparation of jihad activities - meaning work accidents and tunnel collapses.

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.@UNICEF and @UNDP rebuild a Gaza school that teaches violence and glorifies terrorists

The Gamal Abdel Nasser Secondary School for Boys east of Gaza City was destroyed during Operation Protective Edge.

UNICEF and the UNDP have contributed to rebuilding the school up to modern standards, to be the first "child-friendly" school in Gaza. It will have lots of open space, larger classrooms, and new labs.

The cornerstone ceremony was held this week.

Let's look at what this school teaches, since the UN has two separate agencies that support it so much.

Here is a video taken at the school in 2013 where students celebrated a depiction of an attack on an Israeli position, kidnapping a soldier and with a student finally destroying it with an RPG:

In 2014, the school hosted a speech by Ramez al-Halabi, a terrorist who had been in Israeli prison for eleven years for his involvement in planning two suicide bombing attacks, one in Kfar Darom (probably this one, that killed American Alisa Flatow and seven others) and the other in Netzarim (probably this bicycle bombing that killed 3).

Here are some paramilitary drills of students at the school in 2014:

Now it can be rebuilt to teach the next generation of terrorists,

Thanks to the UNDP and UNICEF.

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