Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, May 06, 2017

05/06 Links: Double standard on Holocaust denial; UNESCO: Adding more fuel to the fire of hatred

From Ian:

A French political leader who referred sympathetically to a prominent Holocaust denier has been forced to resign in disgrace.
But a Palestinian political leader who referred sympathetically to the same Holocaust denier was welcomed at the White House this week. Why the double standard? Jean-Francois Jalkh, leader of France’s National Front party, resigned in disgrace on April 28 after it was revealed that in a 2000 interview he said it was “impossible” for the Nazis to have carried out mass murder with poison gas. As his source, Jalkh cited the convicted Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, whom he described as “trustworthy.”
Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas has referred to Faurisson in similar terms, in a bizarre and disturbing book that Abbas wrote in 1983 called The Other Side: The Secret Relations Between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement.
The central thesis of the book, which Abbas wrote as his doctoral dissertation at Moscow University, is that David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders “collaborated with Hitler” and wanted the Nazis to kill Jews, because “having more victims meant greater rights and stronger privilege to join the negotiating table for dividing the spoils of war once it was over.”
The “real” number of Jews murdered by the Nazis was “much lower” than six million and might well have been “below one million,” Abbas wrote. “Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions – fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand.”
One of the alleged authorities whom Abbas cited was the same Holocaust denier at the center of the recent controversy in France. “In a scientific study published by the French professor Robert Faurisson, he challenges the existence of gas chambers which served the purpose of killing living Jews,” Abbas wrote. “He claims that the gas chambers were only used to burn corpses, out of fear of spreading plagues and viruses. It would not take a great effort in order to prove and document this aspect of the truth.”

Ben-Dror Yemini: Adding more fuel to the fire of hatred

Op-ed: Resolutions like the one adopted by UNESCO on Tuesday may have no practical validity, but it’s hard to ignore their cumulative damage. Diplomatic jihad is scoring achievements, and to hell with the facts.
There is no cause for celebration, as there was and remains an unenlightened majority in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), as well as in all other UN institutions. Tuesday’s vote, on Israel’s Independence Day of all days, is part of a war of attrition waged by the Muslim world against Israel. A diplomatic jihad. These may be false resolutions with no real meaning, but with one resolution after another—the attrition is working.
The problem isn’t the Muslim world, which is in a state of darkness. Between fighting against Israel and fighting for itself, it favors the battle against Israel. There is not a single point of agreement in the Muslim world, apart from the hostility toward Israel. There is no need, therefore, for resolutions against jihad, which is massacring mostly Muslims, and there is no need to settle the conflict between the Shiites and the Sunnis, and there is no need to deal with the illiteracy and improve the status of women. Nothing is important, just Israel and Israel.
This obsession is harming Israel, but it is harming the Muslims themselves much more, because there is a direct link between the hostility toward Israel and the troubles of the Muslim world. The more hostile it is, the bigger its troubles.

Can Trump Survive Abbas?

Donald Trump was something of a motivational speaker when he welcomed Mahmoud Abbas, the gerontocrat at the helm of the Palestinian Authority (PA) for the last 12 years, to the White House on May 3.
At their joint appearance, Trump was confident and beaming. Abbas, in turn, came across as eager and respectful. As Trump surely knows, to sell something you need to believe in it — and to look like you believe in it. In tone and body language, both leaders pulled that off in their comments on the prospects for a final Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, even if they came across as overly self-conscious in doing so.
On the face of it, there is no doubting Trump’s personal investment in securing what he sees as the ultimate deal.
“Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve always heard that perhaps the toughest deal to make is the deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians — let’s see if we can prove them wrong,” Trump declared. Yet whether his administration has the mettle and the patience to pull off a lasting agreement that will suffer many false starts along the way remains very much an open question.
For his part, as he stood alongside Trump, Abbas gave the impression of playing ball more than he ever did when President Barack Obama was in charge. During Obama’s second term, Abbas refused direct talks with Israel following the collapse of the 2013-2014 negotiations, and instead pursued a policy of sulky unilateralism that aimed to secure international recognition of a Palestinian state.
“We believe that we are capable and able to bring about success to our efforts because, Mr. President, you have the determination and you have the desire to see it come to fruition and become successful,” Abbas gushed. Perhaps he can afford to do so. In Mideast policy circles right now, there is much talk of the positive response Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s international negotiations representative, has encountered among Palestinians. This, in turn, has made the Trump administration more amenable to entreaties from Arab leaders to bring Abbas into the heart of the negotiating process.

05/05 Links Pt2: Phillips: Melanie at Berkeley; Sanders rejects BDS in interview with Al Jazeera

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Melanie at Berkeley

Third fact. There was never a Palestinian nation or a Palestinian people. No Arabs ever considered themselves to be Palestinians. They thought of themselves as part of an Arab nation. There was no identification with the land known as Palestine. After all, the name itself was entirely artificial. Judea, the land of the Jews, was only called Palestine by the conquering Romans who wanted to erase its Jewish identity.
When in the 1920s the League of Nations decided to resettle the Jews in the land, the Arabs living there at the time considered themselves pan-Arab or southern Syrian. There was NO distinctive culture, language, literature, history or tradition based on the area known as Palestine, other than that of the Jews.
Many people who lived there then weren’t even Arabs at all. A 1920 British government handbook noted: ‘The people west of the Jordan are not Arabs but only Arabic-speaking. The bulk of the population are fellahin… [agricultural labourers of diverse backgrounds]. In the Gaza district they are mostly of Egyptian origin; elsewhere they are of the most mixed race.”
Many of those who now claim Palestinian ancestry going back through the centuries are instead the descendants of those who poured into Mandate Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s, many of them illegally, on the backs of the returning Jews who were seen as bringing work and prosperity with them.
There’s no such thing as Palestinian national identity, and the Arabs have always admitted this. In 1937, the Syrian leader Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi said: “There is no such country as Palestine. Our country was for centuries part of Syria. ‘Palestine’ is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it.”
In 1946 the Arab historian Professor Philip Hitti observed: “There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not”.
In 1977 Zahir Muhsein, a member of the PLO executive committee, said: ”The Palestinian people does not exist…Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.”
The so-called Palestinian agenda always been to destroy the Jewish homeland. Which is why Mahmoud Abbas says the Palestinians will never accept Israel as a Jewish state. Which is why their maps and insignia depict Palestine as incorporating the whole of Israel. Which is why they teach their children to hate Jews, steal their land and destroy the Jewish homeland. To understand the present, we have to understand the past.

Mottle Wolfe: Mr. Terrorist Goes to Washington (and weekly re-cap)

Mottle and Brian John Thomas (Brian of London) catch you up on the news from Israel and around the world.
In this episode: Mahmoud Abbas visits Trump at the Whitehouse, Hamas releases their new and improved ‘moderate’ genocidal new platform, UNESCO show once again just how irrelevant they are, and Israel gets a dose of Bieber fever!

The Most Intolerant Wins - or, why the West is doomed (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

I was forwarded this fantastic and lengthy essay by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It is way too long to reproduce here but I will try to shorten it to make the point:

Read the whole thing.

The best example I know that gives insights into the functioning of a complex system is with the following situation. It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for that .

The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in way not predicted by the components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will never (one can safely say never for most such situations), never give us an idea on how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not a collection of ants. This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by which parts and whole differ because what matters is the interactions between such parts. And interactions can obey very simple rules. The rule we discuss in this chapter is the minority rule.

The minority rule will show us how it all it takes is a small number of intolerant virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of courage, for society to function properly.

...A strange idea hit me. The Kosher population represents less than three tenth of a percent of the residents of the United States. Yet, it appears that almost all drinks are Kosher. Why? Simply because going full Kosher allows the producer, grocer, restaurant, to not have to distinguish between Kosher and nonkosher for liquids, with special markers, separate aisles, separate inventories, different stocking sub-facilities. And the simple rule that changes the total is as follows:

A Kosher (or halal) eater will never eat nonkosher (or nonhalal) food , but a nonkosher eater isn’t banned from eating kosher.

Someone with a peanut allergy will not eat products that touch peanuts but a person without such allergy can eat items without peanut traces in them.

Which explains why it is so hard to find peanuts on airplanes and why schools are peanut-free (which, in a way, increases the number of persons with peanut allergies as reduced exposure is one of the causes behind such allergies).

Let us apply the rule to domains where it can get entertaining:

An honest person will never commit criminal acts but a criminal will readily engage in legal acts.

Let us call such minority an intransigent group, and the majority a flexible one. And the rule is an asymmetry in choices.

Another example: do not think that the spread of automatic shifting cars is necessarily due to the majority of drivers initially preferring automatic; it can just be because those who can drive manual shifts can always drive automatic, but the reciprocal is not true.
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The method of analysis employed here is called renormalization group, a powerful apparatus in mathematical physics that allows us to see how things scale up (or down). Let us examine it next –without mathematics.

Figure 2 shows four boxes exhibiting what is called fractal self-similarity. Each box contains four smaller boxes. Each one of the four boxes will contain four boxes, and so all the way down, and all the way up until we reach a certain level. There are two colors: yellow for the majority choice, and pink for the minority one.

Assume the smaller unit contains four people, a family of four. One of them is in the intransigent minority and eats only nonGMO food (which includes organic). The color of the box is pink and the others yellow . We “renormalize once” as we move up: the stubborn daughter manages to impose her rule on the four and the unit is now all pink, i.e. will opt for nonGMO. Now, step three, you have the family going to a barbecue party attended by three other families. As they are known to only eat nonGMO, the guests will cook only organic. The local grocery store realizing the neighborhood is only nonGMO switches to nonGMO to simplify life, which impacts the local wholesaler, and the stories continues and “renormalizes”.

...In the same manner, the spread of Islam in the Near East where Christianity was heavily entrenched (it was born there) can be attributed to two simple asymmetries. The original Islamic rulers weren’t particularly interested in converting Christians as these provided them with tax revenues –the proselytism of Islam did not address those called “people of the book”, i.e. individuals of Abrahamic faith. In fact, my ancestors who survived thirteen centuries under Muslim rule saw advantages in not being Muslim: mostly in the avoidance of military conscription.

The two asymmetric rules were are as follows. First, if a non Muslim man under the rule of Islam marries a Muslim woman, he needs to convert to Islam –and if either parents of a child happens to be Muslim, the child will be Muslim[. Second, becoming Muslim is irreversible, as apostasy is the heaviest crime under the religion, sanctioned by the death penalty.

Under these two asymmetric rules, one can do simple simulations and see how a small Islamic group occupying Christian (Coptic) Egypt can lead, over the centuries, to the Copts becoming a tiny minority. All one needs is a small rate of interfaith marriages. Likewise, one can see how Judaism doesn’t spread and tends to stay in the minority, as the religion has opposite rules: the mother is required to be Jewish, causing interfaith marriages to leave the community. An even stronger asymmetry than that of Judaism explains the depletion in the Near East of three Gnostic faiths: the Druze, the Ezidi, and the Mandeans . Unlike Islam that requires either parents to be Muslim, and Judaism that asks for at least the mother to have the faith, these three religions require both parents to be of the faith, otherwise the person says toodaloo to the community.

...This idea of one-sidedness can help us debunk a few more misconceptions. How do books get banned? Certainly not because they offend the average person –most persons are passive and don’t really care, or don’t care enough to request the banning. It looks like, from past episodes, that all it takes is a few (motivated) activists for the banning of some books, or the black-listing of some people. The great philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell lost his job at the City University of New York owing to a letter by an angry –and stubborn –mother who did not wish to have her daughter in the same room as the fellow with dissolute lifestyle and unruly ideas. [5]

The same seems to apply to prohibitions –at least the prohibition of alcohol in the United States which led to interesting Mafia stories.

Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.

An insight as to how the mechanisms of religion and transmission of morals obey the same renormalization dynamics as dietary laws –and how we can show that morality is more likely to be something enforced by a minority. We saw earlier in the chapter the asymmetry between obeying and breaking rules: a law-abiding (or rule abiding) fellow always follows the rules, but a felon or someone with looser sets of principles will not always break the rules. Likewise we discussed the strong asymmetric effects of the halal dietary laws. Let us merge the two. It turns out that, in classical Arabic, the term halal has one opposite: haram. Violating legal and moral rules –any rule — is called haram. It is the exact same interdict that governs food intake and all other human behaviors, like sleeping with the wife of the neighbor, lending with interest (without partaking of downside of the borrower) or killing one’s landlord for pleasure. Haram is haram and is asymmetric.
From that we can see that once a moral rule is established, it would suffice to have a small intransigent minority of geographically distributed followers to dictate the norm in society.

I was at a large multi-table dinner party, the kind of situation where you have to choose between the vegetarian risotto and the non-vegetarian option when I noticed that my neighbor had his food catered (including silverware) on a tray reminiscent of airplane fare. The dishes were sealed with aluminum foil. He was evidently ultra-Kosher. It did not bother him to be seated with prosciutto eaters who, in addition, mix butter and meat in the same dishes. He just wanted to be left alone to follow his own preferences.
For Jews and Muslim minorities such as Shiites, Sufis, and associated religions such as Druze and Alawis, the aim is for people to leave them alone so they can satisfy their own dietary preferences –largely, with historical exceptions here and there. But had my neighbor been a Sunni Salafi, he would have required the entire room to be eating Halal. Perhaps the entire building. Perhaps the entire town. Hopefully the entire country. Hopefully the entire planet. Indeed, given the total lack of separation between church and state, and between the holy and the profane, to him Haram (the opposite of Halal) means literally illegal. The entire room was committing a legal violation.

As I am writing these lines, people are disputing whether the freedom of the enlightened West can be undermined by the intrusive policies that would be needed to fight fundamentalists.As I am writing these lines, people are disputing whether the freedom of the enlightened West can be undermined by the intrusive policies that would be needed to fight Salafi fundamentalists.

Clearly can democracy –by definition the majority — tolerate enemies? The question is as follows: “ Would you agree to deny the freedom of speech to every political party that has in its charter the banning the freedom of speech?” Let’s go one step further, “Should a society that has elected to be tolerant be intolerant about intolerance?”

This is in fact the incoherence that Kurt Gödel (the grandmaster of logical rigor) detected in the constitution while taking the naturalization exam. Legend has it that Gödel started arguing with the judge and Einstein, who was his witness during the process, saved him.

I wrote about people with logical flaws asking me if one should be “skeptical about skepticism”; I used a similar answer as Popper when was asked if “ one could falsify falsification”.

We can answer these points using the minority rule. Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. Actually, as we saw, it will eventually destroy our world.

So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities. It is not permissible to use “American values” or “Western principles” in treating intolerant Salafism (which denies other peoples’ right to have their own religion). The West is currently in the process of committing suicide.

(h/t Sam)

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05/05 Links Pt1: Glick: Trump’s tragic mistake; When international guarantees utterly failed

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Trump’s tragic mistake

By all accounts, US President Donald Trump is a friend of the Jewish state.
It is due to Trump’s heartfelt support for Israel and the US-Israel alliance that his meeting Wednesday with PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas at the White House is most discouraging.
By meeting with Abbas, and committing himself to working toward achieving a peace deal between Abbas and his PLO and Israel, Trump undermines Israel.
He also undermines himself and his nation.
Israel is the most immediate casualty of Trump’s decision to embrace Abbas and the PLO, because the PLO is Israel’s enemy.
Abbas is an antisemite. His doctoral dissertation, which he later published as a book, is a Holocaust denying screed.
Abbas engages in antisemitic incitement on a daily basis, both directly and indirectly. It was Abbas who called for his people to kill Jews claiming that we pollute Judaism’s most sacred site, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, with our “filthy feet.” The Palestinian media and school system which he controls with an iron fist both regularly portray Jews as evil monsters, deserving of physical annihilation.
Abbas’s PLO and his Palestinian Authority engage as a general practice in glorifying terrorist murderers. As has been widely reported in recent weeks, his PA and PLO also incentivize and underwrite terrorism to the tune of $300 million a year, which is paid, in accordance with PA law, to convicted terrorists sitting in Israeli prisons and their families.
And that’s just the money we know about.
In welcoming Abbas to the White House, Trump chose to ignore all of this in the interest of fostering a peace deal between Israel and the PLO.

When international guarantees utterly failed

As we approach next month’s 50th anniversary of the 1967 war, we should not forget one of the enduring lessons learned from the run-up to the conflict.
Namely, that agreements need to stand on their own merits and cannot be based on abstract international guarantees about the future. This idea was seared into Israel’s consciousness in May 1967. This painful lesson reinforced the Zionist ethos of self-reliance.
Menachem Begin would later famously say: “There is no guarantee that can guarantee a guarantee.”
On May 22, 1967, Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran, a critical blow to Israel which relied on oil imports from Iran. Israel believed it had received a guarantee from the international community in 1957 that it would reopen the Straits if Nasser again closed them, as he had in 1956.
After the Suez Crisis (Sinai Campaign) of 1956, prime minister David Ben-Gurion conceded in principle to withdraw from the peninsula, but requested several assurances before Israel could move ahead: Among the assurances he sought were that the Straits of Tiran wouldn’t be blockaded again, and that Israeli ships would have access to the Gulf of Aqaba and the Israeli port at Eilat. He also sought assurance that the UN Emergency Force (UNEF) in Sinai couldn’t be withdrawn just due to the sole demand of the Egyptians.

The greatest video you will see this week, guaranteed. pic.twitter.com/wM4iEHKCIV
— Im Tirtzu (@IMTIzionism) May 4, 2017

A Jordanian of Palestinian descent in Turkey with way too much time on his hands created a replica of the "Al Aqsa Mosque" on a truck chassis.

Majed Abu Namous, 37, spent months putting this together, in order to emphasize the importance of Jerusalem to Muslims.

For some reason, Muslims don't have to be reminded of the importance of Mecca with stunts like this.

Actually, the centerpiece is the Dome of the Rock while Al Aqsa is relegated to being next to the driver.

Namous drives around the town of Antakya and hands out literature about the site, to convince Muslim youth to fight against Israeli control of the city.

The vehicle doesn't look like it would be legal for road use.

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One week ago, the Palestinian Authority stopped paying Israel for supplying electricity to Gaza.

There were many news stories about this attempt by the PA to pressure Hamas to give up power in the enclave.

NGOs warned of a humanitarian crisis, as Hamas/Fatah infighting had just recently shut down the Gaza power plant for lack of fuel. So nearly all the remaining electricity in Gaza comes from Israel.

Turning off the remaining electricity to Gaza would have almost unfathomable consequences - water shutdowns, hospitals closing, and a true humanitarian crisis.

Mahmoud Abbas is willing, for his own political ends, to directly hurt his people in immediate and dire ways.

A funny thing happened this week, though.

Israel didn't turn off the electricity.

Despite the thousands of pages of NGO reports that Israel is doing everything it can to hurt Palestinians and to make their lives miserable, Israel has, at its own expense, continued to provide electricity to Gaza.

That's about $3 million so far.

No one knows how long Israel can continue to fill in the gaps that the Abbas refuses to pay, but what is certain is that Israel cares more about Palestinian lives than Mahmoud Abbas does.

Why is this not being reported anywhere?

The only way you would know this from the media is the absence of photos from Gaza of kids studying by candlelight.

So many pundits, reporters, politicians and NGOs have created an environment where Israel is depicted as a heartless colonial power while Palestinians are poor defenseless victims. This story shows that the Palestinian leaders willingly use their own people for their own selfish, political ends - and Israel is the only player in the world who is actually willing to help Gazans and to stop what would have been a true disaster.

The UN didn't offer to pay. The EU didn't offer to pay. Qatar didn't offer to pay. Saudi Arabia doesn't care.

Israel, which has every right to wash its hands of the issue, has stepped up and continued to do what the entire world refused to do. It has done what the Palestinian leaders themselves refuse to do.

Usually, Israel haters try to say that the only reason Israel does anything they would otherwise approve of is "hasbara." But Israel is not bragging about providing this electricity, and it is actively looking for a solution where it doesn't have to pay.

It just refuses to act like Mahmoud Abbas wants to turn off the switch and leave Gazans with nothing.

That doesn't fit the narrative of bad Israel/good Palestinians.

That's why no one is mentioning this.

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Gaza exports are steadily increasing. No one reports it.

I found this chart in a weekly report by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations.

Gaza exported about $10 million worth of goods so far this year, mostly to the West Bank but there is a fixed amount of produce that goes to Israel every month as well.

Some $30,000 of exports reached the US.

Jordan, on the other hand, has been reducing the amount of Palestinian agricultural goods that it imports.

None has gone to Egypt or other Arab countries.

(I know in the past Gaza goods have been exported to Europe, I don't know why that seems to have stopped.)

Are "pro-Palestinian" NGOs celebrating this ~200% increase in Gaza exports since last year?

No - they deliberately are ignoring it.

Gisha, the main Israeli NGO that digs deep into Gaza imports and exports, doesn't want to compare Gaza trade now with last year or the year before. It wants to make Israel look as bad as possible, so the only comparison it makes (in its "Gaza Cheat Sheet: Real Data on the Gaza Closure") is to compare exports to 2007, the year Hamas took over Gaza. The implication is that Israel has no right to impose restrictions on a territory whose leadership remains committed to its destruction.

Israel's primary function, as with any other normal state, is to provide security for its citizens. That requires maintaining a balance between ensuring that Gaza and the other territories have healthy economies and not allowing them to become more of a military threat, which in Gaza's case comes from Hamas taking advantage of its citizens and foreign aid. The pattern has been that Israel loosens restrictions - until there is a major terror wave or a war. This tightrope of trying to help ordinary Palestinians while minimizing their ability to attack Israel and Israelis is a difficult one.

But NGOs aren't interested in exploring this nuance. The reason is, as always, money.

There is plenty of money for NGOs that want to demonize Israel. There is little interest in funding any organization that actually tries to uncover the facts without bias.

Thanks to this obscure UN program that, as far as I can tell, only started to create these weekly reports this year, we have some actual data to prove that the anti-Israel NGOs will twist the facts to make it appear that Israel acts capriciously against ordinary Gazans.

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More proof that the "Nakba" isn't about remembering a catastrophe but about destroying Israel

From Haaretz:

Thousands of Israeli Arabs marched in northern Israel on Tuesday, commemorating the Nakba, or "catastrophe," when more than 700,000 Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1947-49 Israeli War of Independence.

The march also followed a dispute with the police over the timing and location. The police protested the scheduling − the same day as Israeli Independence Day − saying they could not secure two enormous events on the same day.

They had also received complaints that the Nakba march would pass a memorial to Israeli war dead from the Yechiam convoy, which delivered supplies to a beleaguered kibbutz during the war. In the end, a compromise kept the march on Independence Day but changed its path.

Wakim Wakim, chairman of the Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced, said the message to the Israeli government was “your Independence Day is our Nakba Day, and this independence led to the destruction of 532 Palestinian villages.”

“They gambled on the old dying and the young forgetting,” Wakim said. “But the young are leading the march today and making a new, clear statement that the right of return is a fundamental right for the displaced and refugee Palestinians.”

Nakba Day is May 15.

These Arabs specifically chose to protest on Israel's Independence Day, which goes according to the Hebrew calendar. The one and only reason is to position it not as a day of memory or sorrow but a day of protest at Israel's very existence, specifically on Israel's day of independence, no matter what day of the Gregorian calendar it comes out on.

And the organizer says quite plainly that he wants to destroy Israel by not only having the fake refugees "return" but by also having the Israeli Arabs "return" to the exact spots that their great-grandparents lived.

Especially if Jews live there now.

It isn't about independence. It isn't even about "return." It is all about uprooting Jews from the Middle East.

All the rest is a smokescreen.

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05/04 Links Pt2: B'tselem whitewashing the murderous pasts of terrorists; IAF Independence Day 2017 Flyover

From Ian:

UK’s top Anglican cleric, rabbi hail Jewish ties to Jerusalem

A day after UNESCO voted to deny Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, UK Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby on Wednesday saluted the historic Jewish connection to the city, after praying side by side at the Western Wall.
While both men declined to comment directly on the vote – Welby said he had not followed the UNESCO discussion – both affirmed the centrality of the city to the Jewish people.
“The Temple Mount is the site of a historic temple and that is the very heart of the people of Israel over many, many centuries, millennia in fact,” Welby told reporters at the Western Wall Plaza.
Mirvis had earlier shown Welby the house where he and his wife used to live in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, noting that Hezekiah’s Wall was discovered underneath his old apartment block.
“What you can see today is layers of history taking us all the way back through time, seeing the Jewish presence in the city, as a symbol of the centrality of Jerusalem to the Jewish nation,” Mirvis said. (h/t Zvi)

David Harris: Israel at 69

“The coming into being of a Jewish state in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand, or even three thousand years.” (Winston Churchill)
Israel celebrates its 69th Day of Independence this week. Let me put my cards on the table. I’m not dispassionate when it comes to Israel. Quite the contrary.
The establishment of the state in 1948; the fulfillment of its envisioned role as home and haven for Jews from around the world; its wholehearted embrace of democracy and the rule of law; and its impressive scientific, cultural, and economic achievements are accomplishments beyond my wildest imagination.
For centuries, Jews around the world prayed for a return to Zion. We are the lucky ones who have seen those prayers answered. I am grateful to witness this most extraordinary period in Jewish history and Jewish sovereignty ― in the words of Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem, “to be a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.”
And when one adds the key element, namely, that all this took place not in the Middle West but in the Middle East, where Israel’s neighbors determined from day one to destroy it through any means available to them — from full-scale wars to wars of attrition; from diplomatic isolation to international delegitimation; from primary to secondary to even tertiary economic boycotts; from terrorism to the spread of anti-Semitism, often thinly veiled as anti-Zionism — the story of Israel’s first 69 years becomes all the more remarkable.
No other country has faced such a constant challenge to its very right to exist, even though the age-old biblical, spiritual, and physical connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel is unique in the annals of history.

Douglas Murray on immigration, Islam and identity

Douglas Murray hopes his new book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, won’t be seen as incendiary.
Given that it opens with the line “Europe is committing suicide”, it’s hard to see how it won’t. Murray is a gay, English Right-wing journalist who has written books about Lord Alfred Douglas, Neo-conservatism and Lord Saville’s Bloody Sunday Enquiry. More controversially, he is an overt critic of Islam and of mass migration into Europe who does not mince his words. “You only have two options: to say what you think or be quiet. The second has never come naturally and what people don’t want to say is often the most interesting thing to write about,” says Murray, taking a sip of his cappuccino.
Broadly speaking, his thesis is that the unprecedented levels of migration into Europe coming at the same time as the continent has lost faith in its beliefs and identity will result in its downfall. The combination of guilt about our past, declining birth rates and the demise of traditional Christian values, together with the abject failure of multiculturalism, means Europe as we know it will cease to exist within the lifespans of most people alive today.
Murray contends that by being a tolerant society that is inviting in “the whole world” we risk welcoming in millions of people from other cultures, “some of whom hold less liberal views than the majority of people in the countries they have come into”.

Work accident! Islamic Jihad terrorist blows himself up

Kamel Tayseer Qureika, 24, from Gaza City, a member of Islamic Jihad, was killed in a "work accident." today.

He was a member of the "Mujahideen unit for engineering and manufacturing." He sustained a serious injury during "preparation and processing," which sounds like he was building a bomb.

As the ancient Hebrew blessing for such events goes, כֵּן יִרְבּוּ .

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Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

The latest UNESCO resolution on “Occupied Palestine” is both nothing and something.

It is nothing because it changes nothing. It cannot render “null and void” Israel’s possession of Jerusalem or its status as our capital city (echoing Hamas’ new document of principles, p.11). It cannot make ma’arat hamachpela or kever rachel “Palestinian” sites. And it cannot make UNESCO something rather than the nothing it has become, because its passage of a series of similar resolutions shows that it is a creature of anti-Israel politics rather than an organization to promote international cooperation.

On the other hand, the resolution adds to the massive accumulation of documents, maps, slogans, manifestos and resolutions in UN agencies, churches, and universities – none of which in themselves change anything – that declare that we, the Jewish people in their sovereign state, are nothing. A historian of the 30^thcentury might come upon this pile of documents and believe that there is a country called “Palestine” that is “occupied,” although there would be a far smaller collection of sources testifying to the existence of a state called “Israel.” They might wonder how nothing can occupy something.

Although millions of Arabs, other Muslims, Europeans, Ha’aretz writers, and other enemies of Israel have been so far unable to dislodge the tenacious grip of the Jewish people from their land by force or the combination of force and guile called “diplomacy,” they have been able to produce thousands of tons of paper attesting to the proposition that we don’t exist, and to the extent that we do, we oughtn’t to.

When it comes to mass production of “content,” we can’t compete. There is a UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, as well as a Division for Palestinian Rights which maintains the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine. And that’s just the UN. Think about the thousands of journalists and academics around the world who at this very moment are writing articles and publishing papers that explain how everything from Palestinian honor killings to American police shooting black people is Israel’s fault.

News coverage from world media is abysmal. Nobody expects good treatment from Al Jazeera, owned by our friend the Emir of Qatar; and of course the New York Times is terrible, possibly thanks to its historic discomfort with the fact of its Jewish ownership. Reuters and AP are also very problematic. I could go on, but then I’d have to mention my favorite, America’s National Public Radio.

Don’t forget the NGOs, both the international ones like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and the Israeli ones like B’tselem, Breaking the Silence, ad infinitum. All of them get much of their money – millions of dollars annually – from entities hostile to Israel, and the funders get what they pay for: countless reports and testimonies accusing Israel of war crimes and oppression of Palestinian Arabs.

What can we do? There are just a few million of us, and there are more than a billion of them. How can we possibly keep up with and counteract the flow of words, memes, columns, Facebook posts, movies and TV programs, and every other imaginable expression of the simple idea that motivates them: Jews out!

Perhaps we don’t need to. All human understanding requires discrimination. We receive a flood of data through our senses, some of it relevant to our survival, some of it interesting in some way, and some of it worthless. Our job is to pick out the important stuff, the “signal,” and reject the “noise.” If we can’t do that, we flail around, unable to take the actions necessary for our survival. What applies to individuals also applies to states. I’ve been saying for years that we have to fight harder to win the information war, but maybe I’ve been wrong all along. Maybe the object of the campaign against us is to upset us, to distract us – to hide the signal in a plethora of noise. If that is true, then the less we play this game, the less damage it will do.

Here are some ideas:

Let’s start by kicking the UN out of Jerusalem, as Minister of Culture and Sport Miri Regev suggested yesterday. The UN has been squatting in Jerusalem’s Armon Hanatziv neighborhood since 1967, engaging in illegal construction and anti-Israel activities. This is a perfect time to teach the UN who is actually sovereign in Jerusalem (hint: it isn’t them and it isn’t the non-state of “Palestine”). The less we have to do with the UN, the less noise they introduce into our channel.

Then we can continue by modifying the NGO Transparency Law to give it some real teeth. An NGO that violates the law is fined a measly $7,500, a drop in the bucket for an organization like Breaking the Silence with an annual income (2015) of $1.3 million. Personally, I would like to see all foreign funding of political organizations banned, period. If an Israeli NGO can’t survive on Israeli contributions, then maybe it doesn’t need to survive. Shut down their noise output!

Israel worries too much about all these words on all this paper. There is a serious lack of housing in and around Jerusalem. That’s the signal. We should ignore the noise and build some more. The UN will condemn Israel, the NGOs will have fits, the NY Times will write a critical editorial, but what else will be new? We could even use some of that land the UN is squatting on.

Israel must control the land area of Judea and Samaria and its airspace for simple geographic reasons. Any “solution” needs to be one that recognizes this. Another signal. Why do we waste time and energy and make dangerous concessions like freeing prisoners for the sake of an agreement to give up control of this land? Why do we let the noise obscure the signal?

Some decades ago I believed that we were headed toward world government. Like it did in Blackhawk Comics, the UN would police the world, and international forces would crush evildoers before they got started. Nations would wither away (well, maybe not the USA!), and the great systems of capitalism and communism would evolve toward each other, ultimately to reconcile. Nationalism, being irrational, would also die out (it didn’t occur to me to wonder about the Zionism I strongly supported), to be replaced with peaceful coexistence.

In hindsight, it’s obvious that this vision ignores basic facts about human nature which (thank goodness) prevented it from coming to pass. Today the Soviet Union is gone and the US is struggling to survive, perhaps as divided as it was prior to the Civil War. The international institutions that were to have given rise to the utopian world government are dying. The EU is on its last legs and the UN has passed from marginal usefulness to almost total parasitism, a parasite that its hosts can’t bring themselves to kill. The Blackhawk Squadron will not take off again to save the world.

The world is changing, getting less rational, more dangerous and more fragmented. Nobody will give artificial respiration to weak nations in a world dominated by Putins, Xi Jinpings and (maybe) Trumps. Israel won’t be protected by international organizations or laws, even if they were not subverted politically and turned against us. And it can’t depend on the US, which has its own problems that will only get worse.

What will matter in the future, and already matter today, are facts on the ground and the ability to deter aggression. This is the real “signal.” The posturing of international diplomacy is just part of the noise that is intended to obscure it.

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

05/04 Links Pt1: PA education to violence; Do Palestinian Arabs Want a Peaceful State Alongside Israel?

From Ian:

MEMRI: PA education to violence

'Abbas Tells Trump 'We Are Raising Our Youth, Our Children, Our Grandchildren On A Culture Of Peace' – But The Facts On The Ground Are That PA Is Educating Children To Violence Against Israel
During his May 3, 2017 meeting with U.S. President Trump, PA President Mahmoud 'Abbas said:"Mr. President, I affirm to you that we are raising our youth, our children, our grandchildren on a culture of peace." The following are excerpts from reports published by MEMRI in recent years reflecting the indoctrination of children by the Palestinian Authority and Fatah to armed resistance, jihad and martyrdom. This includes glorification of terrorists, and the promotion of the refugees' right of return to their original homes in Israel "under the banner of glory, jihad and struggle."
'Abbas Meets 14-Year-Old Who Attempted To Stab Civilians
On March 8, 2017, MEMRI reported that Mahmoud 'Abbas had met with Palestinians who carried out terrorist attacks as part of the wave of Palestinian terror that took place between October, 2015 and mid-2016, and which included many attacks carried out by teenagers. Among those he met was 14-year-old Osama Zaidat, who was shot while attempting to stab civilians in Kiryat Arba on September 20, 2016. Below is a photo of the meeting posted on 'Abbas's Facebook page:
Children March With Mock RPG Rockets, Suicide Belts In Fatah Day Parade
On January 11, 2016, MEMRI reported on PA events marking Fatah Day, the 51st anniversary of the Fatah movement's establishment in January 1, 1965, which took place that year under the impact of the 2015-2016 Palestinian terror wave. The Fatah Day events included a parade in the Deheishe refugee camp, attended by senior PA and Fatah officials, featuring children armed with mock RPG rockets and suicide belts.
Girl Scouts Participate In Fatah Ceremony In Memory Of Female Terrorist Dalal Al-Mughrabi
On March 17, 2016, MEMRI reported on a Fatah ceremony in Ramallah in memory of female terrorist Dalal Al-Mughrabi. Al-Mughrabi was deputy commander of Fatah's March 1978 Coastal Road terror attack, in which 35 Israeli civilians, among them 13 children, were killed. During the artistic part of the ceremony, a little girl named Majd Abu Rmeileh recited a poem, and a Scout troop gave a musical performance.

Congress to Trump Admin: Recognize Jerusalem as Being Part of Israel

A delegation of more than 50 members of Congress is calling on the Trump administration to reverse a longstanding policy that prohibits Americans born in Jerusalem from listing Israel as their birthplace on official documents, according to a letter sent to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Congress has been working for more than 15 years to reverse the policy, which former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama followed, citing the possibility that a recognition of Jerusalem as being part of Israel would interfere with the United States's ability to be an honest broker in the Middle East peace process.
With Trump just crossing his first 100 days in office, Congress is calling on him to reverse the contested policy, which was challenged in the Supreme Court in 2015 by an American family whose child was born in Jerusalem. At that time, the Obama State Department refused to comply with their request to list "Jerusalem, Israel" as the child's birthplace.
Given Trump's call to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—a move that would see the United States formally recognizing the city as Israel's capital city—Congress believes the president may nix the policy and comply with a 2002 congressional mandate on the issue.
"We write to urge you to revise the State Department's policy regarding the birthplace designation on passports and consular reports of birth abroad for American citizens born in Jerusalem," a delegation of 52 lawmakers led by Rep. Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.) wrote to Tillerson late Wednesday, according to a copy of the letter obtained by the Free Beacon.
"Under the current policy, Americans born in Jerusalem have no country of birth listed on these documents; they are identified only as having been born in Jerusalem," the lawmakers wrote. "We ask that you change the policy to permit Jerusalem-born Americans to have ‘Israel' listed as their birthplace."