Here's the version of this favorite in Gaza that you can get yourself in the US:
Gaza stores that sell Israeli products do not get threatened or boycotted or picketed.
That only happens in Europe and the US.
[Shmuel Bar, head of an Israeli software intelligence company] says he meets freely these days with Saudis and other Gulf Arabs at overseas conferences and private events. Trade and collaboration in technology and intelligence are flourishing between Israel and a host of Arab states, even if the people and companies involved rarely talk about it publicly. When a London think tank recently disinvited Bar from speaking on a panel, explaining that a senior Saudi official was also coming and it wasn’t possible to have them appear together, Bar told the organizers that he and the Saudi gentleman had in fact been planning to have lunch together at a Moroccan restaurant nearby before walking over to the event together. “They were out-Saudi-ing the Saudis,” he says.
Peace hasn’t come to the Middle East. This isn’t beating swords into plowshares but a logical coalescence of interests based on shared fears: of an Iranian bomb, jihadi terror, popular insurgency, and an American retreat from the region. IntuView has Israeli export licenses and the full support of its government to help any country facing threats from Iran and militant Islamic groups. “If it’s a country which is not hostile to Israel that we can help, we’ll do it,” Bar says. Only Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Iraq are off-limits.
The Saudis and other oil-rich Arab states are only too happy to pay for the help. “The Arab boycott?” Bar says. “It doesn’t exist.”
The Arab embargo of Israel, nominally in force since the Jewish state’s founding in 1948, necessitates that all business between Israel and most Arab states remain strictly off the books, cloaked by intermediaries in other countries. But the volume and range of Israeli activity in at least six Gulf countries is getting hard to hide. One Israeli entrepreneur set up companies in Europe and the U.S. that installed more than $6 billion in security infrastructure for the United Arab Emirates, using Israeli engineers. The same companies then pitched Saudi Arabia to manage overcrowding in Mecca. Other Israeli businesses are working in the Gulf, through front companies, on desalination, infrastructure protection, cybersecurity, and intelligence gathering.
Salman al-Ansari, a former banker and media executive who runs a new Saudi advocacy group in Washington, sent an even stronger signal in October. In an article for the Hill, he wrote that Saudi Arabia and Israel should form a “collaborative alliance,” rooted in open business ties, to assert their rightful place as the “twin pillars of regional stability.” Arab critics skewered al-Ansari for not mentioning the Palestinians in the article. He says the omission was intentional, reflecting his wish to change the old narrative of conditioning everything on Palestinian statehood.The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs published an article about how much Arab governments care about the US embassy move to Jerusalem. This part was most interesting:
We recently received from Palestinian sources, a report about what happened in a meeting between Abbas and King Salman at their December 21, 2016, meeting. According to this report, while the two were sitting in the king’s palace in Riyadh, a telephone call from President Sisi of Egypt was received to update the king that he had decided, while Mahmoud Abbas was in the king’s presence, to withdraw the Egyptian Security Council resolution against Israel. [It was submitted later by other Security Council members.] The King told Sisi, “Go ahead.” Abu Mazen said, “At least resist Trump’s decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem,” but Sisi said, according to the sources, “I am with Trump,” while the King of Saudi Arabia kept silent.
Augmenting the importance of Jerusalem may play on the nerves of Saudi Arabia as well, especially since the Saudis are anxious to preserve the supreme holy status of Mecca on the background of the Shiite-Sunnite split and the targeting of Mecca by Shiite missiles from the Yemen.Only a couple of weeks ago, Tzipi Livni openly met with Saudi Prince Turki al Faisal in Davos at the World Economic Conference:
Actually, Jerusalem is very important to the Palestinian Authority and the Muslim Brotherhood and is less important to other Arab countries and Saudi Arabia in particular, since the status of Mecca is now challenged by the Shia. The Saudis cannot tolerate a rivalry posed by Jerusalem.
In Davos w/ Saudi Prince Turki Al Faisal after discussing the region & peace process with Jordanian FM & Palestine Investment Fund Chair pic.twitter.com/XTzFHRfk15— ציפי לבני (@Tzipi_Livni) January 20, 2017
BDS Gulf, an activist group that supports the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign, said the meeting in Davos was part of “repeated and escalating violations” of the boycott of Israel.“What compounds our concern and dismay is that this violation is not the first of its kind by Turki al-Faisal and others, but is part of a series of flirtations between the prince and Zionist officials,” BDS Gulf added.Turki al-Faisal has been leading a rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia rooted in their common hostility toward Iran. This warming embrace included a high-level delegation to Israel led last summer by former Saudi general Anwar Eskhi.Last February, al-Faisal publicly shook hands with Israel’s then-defense minister Moshe Yaalon at a conference in Germany.In May, al-Faisal held a public discussion with former Israeli national security advisor Yaakov Amidror at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank affiliated with the Israel lobby group AIPAC.Previously, al-Faisal has appeared publicly with Amos Yadlin, the former head of Israeli military intelligence.A recent report by one of Israel’s most influential think tanks – headed by Yadlin – noted the growing ties with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf regimes as one of the positive regional trends for Israel.While they whine, they know the truth: Israel has a lot to offer Saudi Arabia and the other Arab countries, and "Palestine" has nothing at all positive to offer. Instead, it would be another avenue for the Muslim Brotherhood, via Hamas, to get a toehold in the region.
Israel said on Wednesday it would establish a new settlement in the occupied West Bank, the first since the late 1990s, to rehouse settlers evicted on the same day from an outpost built on private Palestinian land.
A statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said he was making good on a commitment to the settlers of Amona and had ordered the formation of a committee to locate a site where they could rebuild their homes.
"As promised a month and a half ago to the settlers, (Netanyahu) has set up a committee that will promote the establishment of a new settlement... It will begin work immediately to locate a spot and to establish the settlement," a statement from the Prime Minister's Office said.
The announcement was made shortly after Israel's Supreme Court rejected a government plan to rehouse some of the Amona settlers on an adjacent plot because it ruled that homes built there would also encroach on land owned by Palestinians.
According to the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, Israel last established new settlements in the West Bank in 1999, although outposts such as Amona, that settlers set up without official permission, have been built far more recently.
One thing I am seeing more and more of during these turbulent and crazy times is the pronouncement – mostly by liberal friends – that Donald Trump is the new Hitler. Or at least is on his way.Douglas Murray: Nine questions those protesting against Donald Trump’s immigration ban must answer
Whatever misgivings I may have about Donald Trump, I am disgusted by such pronouncements. Here’s a few reasons why.
He’s not
Donald Trump seems to be a lot of things. Arrogant. Impulsive. And even then, there are many who will disagree with me there. Nevertheless, there is no doubt he is not Hitler. Not even close.
True story. 6 million Jews murdered, and about another 5 million non-Jewish victims. That’s 11 million people murdered as a result of Hitler’s extermination program.
Donald Trump has murdered approximately 0 people that we know of. Oh, and wait, he does not have an extermination program.
I can’t believe I have to point this out. What the hell is wrong with you?
In my own view it would help immensely if the people who are lambasting the Trump administration had at least given some thought to the following questions and could go some way to giving answers to such questions as:Brendan O'Neill: Anti-Trump hysteria lets others whitewash their own crimes
1 – Do you accept that America (like many other countries in the world today) has security problems? Do you recognise that despite the giggly charts on social media showing lawnmowers to be more of a threat to American life than terrorism, there are legitimate security concerns that reasonable Americans might hold?
2 – Do you recognise that Islamic terrorism is not a figment of a fevered imagination, but a real thing that exists and which causes a risk to human life in America and many other countries? This isn’t to say that other forms of terrorism don’t exist – they obviously do. But how might you address this one (assuming you can’t immediately solve global peace, poverty, unhappiness, lack of satisfactory sex, masculinity etc)?
3 – If you do recognise the above fact then would you concede that large scale immigration from Islamic countries into the US might bring a larger number of potential challenges than, say, large scale immigration from New Zealand or Iceland?
4 – Is everybody who wants to visit Disney World morally akin to Jews fleeing the Holocaust? If not then what are the differences, and is it always wise to conflate the two?
5 – Would you recognise that Iran is one of the world’s leading state-sponsors of terror, and that, for example, an Iranian-born American citizen in 2011 was caught planning to carry out a terror attack in Washington (against the Saudi Ambassador)? Would you recognise that aggravating though a temporary halt on all Iranian nationals visiting the US might be, and many good people though it will undoubtedly stop, there is a reason that some countries cause a greater security concern than others? Might citizens of a country whose leadership regularly chants ‘Death to America’ present a larger number of questions for border security than, say, citizens of Denmark whose government rarely says the same? What would your vetting policy be to distinguish between different Iranians seeking to enter the US?
6 – Does the whole world have the right to live in America? This is a variant of the same question we Europeans should have been asking for years. If you do not think that the whole world has the right to live in the USA then who should be allowed to live there and who should not? Who might be given priority?
7 – If you believe in giving some people asylum, as I do, who should be given priority? Should asylum be forever? Or should there be a time-limit (such as up until such a time as your country of origin is deemed safe)? How do you deal with people who have been given asylum, whose reason for asylum is over (i.e. their country has returned to peace) but whose children have entered the school system (for instance)?
8 – Is it wrong that the Trump administration says it wishes to favour Christian refugees over Muslim refugees? This is a fascinating and difficult moral question. Many Christians refuse to accept that the plight of Christians – even when they are the specific target of persecution – should be given priority over anyone else. This is a noble example of Christian universalism, but is it wise or moral when you consider the limited numbers that can come in and if you accept that the entire persecuted world cannot arrive in America?
9 – How do you identify the type of Muslims who America should indeed welcome? And how do you distinguish them from the sort of Muslims who the country could well do without? In other words, what would your vetting procedures be? There are some people who have thought about this. But what is your policy?
If you think all of the above questions are simply ‘racist’ or ‘bigoted’ then I suppose the rest of us will just have to accept that we’re going to lose you to four years of shouting on the streets in vagina hats. But the rest of us should try to address these questions. We’re not going to be able to shout them away you know.
Then there’s Hillary Clinton, who was retweeted tens of thousands of times for saying of Trump’s order: ‘This is not who we are.’ But it is who she is. This is the woman who spearheaded the bombing of Libya, helping to plunge that nation into mayhem and creating hundreds of thousands of refugees in the process. Ed Miliband spoke at the Downing St demo. He was a fulsome supporter of the bombing of Libya. The people who helped to make swathes of humanity into refugees are virtue-signalling about Trump’s tough line on refugees. The people who caused, or okayed, instability in Muslim nations are pontificating about Trump’s tough words on Muslim nations. It is morally perverse. By any objective moral measurement, Clinton and Miliband did something worse to the people of Libya than Trump has, and yet this is ignored, or overlooked, drowned in the joyous moral kick that comes from hating Trump.
This is the true danger of historical illiteracy. To describe Trump as abnormal, as a break with proper American politics, makes normal the horrors of the past, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of Vietnam, of McCarthyism, of Iraq, Afghanistan and all the rest. It tells us, implicitly, that all of that was normal, better even.
This is my problem with the protests: they promote emotional fury at the expense of historical thinking, and in the process they play down the sins of the past. This is really bad for younger, fresher protesters in particular. They’re encouraged to think that until now, from the war to today, between Hitler and Trump, things had been pretty much okay, or at least ‘normal’. The protests aren’t radical at all. In fact they’re a boon for the warmongers and liars in the corridors of power who spy in the ‘Trump is Hitler’ cry an opportunity to rebuild their own moral standing. The out-of-control hatred for Trump doubles up, unwittingly perhaps, as an uncritical, conformist apology for pre-Trump, for the rot that came before him. It redeems barbarism.
By Israel Defense Forces (The Evacuation of Neve Dekalim) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
By Israel Defense Forces (The Evacuation of Bedolach) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
By Israel Defense Forces (The Evacuation of Shirat Hayam) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
By Israel Defense Forces (The Evacuation of Ganei Tal) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
By Israel Defense Forces (The Evacuation of Kfar Hayam) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
A street in the Judengasse in Speyer, Germany. (Wikimedia Commons) |
Anita Tucker |
Twice this month Palestinian Authority TV’s children’s program The Best Home had young children recite poems encouraging violence. One poem called for murder of Israelis “as we slaughtered them in your streets, Beirut.” The poem also urged Palestinians to seek death, emphasizing that if you are a member of Fatah, Mahmoud Abbas’ party, your “blood is food for the revolution”:What's Holding the Arab World Back?
Boy: “Today, O our West Bank, our Gaza, raise your voice
O our land, the time has still not passed
As we expelled them from Gaza and Sderot
As we slaughtered them in your streets, Beirut
For you, Yasser Arafat, for you we shall die
After the night comes the light of day, and the fig leave will be removed...
Tomorrow we will take our vengeance, and their leader will be carried in a coffin
We, Fatah, are a storm, and our blood is food for the revolution...”
PA TV host: “Bravo, Muhammad, thank you, thank you, thank you!”
[Official PA TV, The Best Home, Jan. 6, 2017]
What's holding the Arab world back? Why, by nearly every measure, are Muslim nations so far behind the West economically, culturally and scientifically? Bret Stephens, Global View columnist for the Wall Street Journal, explains.
Nikki Haley, the newly appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, phoned her Israeli counterpart on Monday to reinforce America's "ironclad support" for the Jewish state.
Haley pledged to Ambassador Danny Danon that she would block anti-Israel actions taken by the U.N., citing the security council's decision last month to condemn Israel for erecting settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
During her confirmation hearing before the Senate earlier this month, Haley vowed a pivot in U.S. policy toward Israel. The former South Carolina governor criticized the Obama administration's decision to abstain from the U.N. vote, calling the resolution a "terrible mistake."
"I will not go to New York and abstain when the U.N. seeks to create an international environment that encourages boycotts of Israel," Haley said on Jan. 18. "I will never abstain when the United Nations takes any action that comes in direct conflict with the interests and values of the United States."
Quebec massacre suspect "Liked" Sprite on his Facebook page, proving that Sprite drinkers are terrorists according to @MaxBlumenthal— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) January 31, 2017
For years, foreign policy critics, politicians and outraged members of the general public have been urging the US to defund and quit the United Nations. Some have advocated that a rival or successor organization should be established. Now there is a movement calling to “defund and replace” the troubled organization with a new world body: The Covenant of Democratic Nations. This writer has been a participating witness to the birth of that movement.Caroline Glick: The lessons of Roosevelt’s failures
Just days after controversial UN Security Council Resolution 2334 declared, among other things, that Israel’s Jewish connection to the Western Wall was effectively illegal, concrete replacement action began. It started with proposing an official international conference to endorse a diplomatic convention that would be ratified by countries as a binding treaty. The entire process would be limited to nations governed by democratic principles. Each member would or could defund the United Nations, while it labored to construct a successor entity dedicated to world peace along democratic principles with equal respect for all people regardless of religion, gender, race, identity or national origin. This body would also include a mechanism to resolve disputes.
A prime mission of the new world organization would be to re-ratify, amend or nullify all acts and resolutions of the United Nations and its agencies such as UNESCO. Just as unjust American laws perpetrating slavery, Jim Crow, segregation and institutional inequality were overturned, updated and reformed, so too could the damage done by the UN. Sensibly, most CDN nations would remain as vestigial members of the UN, overseeing its collapse — just like when the League of Nations was dissolved after World War II and replaced with the present UN.
The American Jewish uproar at Trump’s actions shows first and foremost the cynicism of the leftist Jewish leadership.Shmuley Boteach: Playing politics with the US Holocaust Museum
It isn’t simply that left-wing activists like Hetfield and Eisner cynically ignore that Trump’s order is based on Obama’s policies, which they didn’t oppose.
It is that in their expressed concerned for would-be Muslim refugees to the US they refuse to recognize that the plight of Muslims as Muslims in places like Syria and Iraq is not the same as the plight of Christians and Yazidis as Christians and Yazidis in these lands.
The “Jews” in the present circumstances are not the Muslims, who are nowhere targeted for genocide.
The “Jews” in the present circumstances are the Christians and Yazidis and other religious minorities, whom Trump’s impassioned Jewish opponents and Obama’s impassioned Jewish champions fail to defend.
Trump’s executive order is far from perfect. But in making the distinction between the hunters and the hunted and siding with the latter against the former, Trump is showing that he is not a bigot.
Unlike his critics, he has learned the lessons of Roosevelt’s moral failure and is working to ensure that the US acts differently today.
The gravest sin he committed, however, one which should disqualify him for any association with the Holocaust Museum, is his complicity in the genocide in Syria.
Like Nero, Obama has figuratively fiddled while Syria burned. After stating that Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his opponents would cross a red line that would trigger a US military response, Obama failed to back up his threat. This cowardly act was universally viewed by friends and foes alike in the Middle East as a sign of weakness, and left allies, including Israel, questioning whether they could depend on the US to protect their interests.
Fortunately for Obama, he had Rhodes to manipulate the “echo chamber” and sell the amoral narrative that America could not act to stop war crimes and genocide in Syria because it would jeopardize nuclear talks with Iran.
A bystander to genocide has no business in a position of honor or responsibility at an institution devoted to documenting past genocides and preventing future ones.
Rhodes was worse than a bystander, he was an active participant in the decision not to act to prevent the slaughter.
President Trump should call for Rhodes’ immediate resignation. In addition, a campaign should be conducted through the echo chamber calling on the chairman and the rest of the museum’s council to remove Rhodes forthwith to prevent his presence from tarnishing the reputation and mission of this vital institution.
Buy EoZ's book, PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
If you want real peace, don't insist on a divided Jerusalem, @USAmbIsrael
The Apartheid charge, the Abraham Accords and the "right side of history"
With Palestinians, there is no need to exaggerate: they really support murdering random Jews
Great news for Yom HaShoah! There are no antisemites!