Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

IDF Bulldozer Demolishes 'Breaking The Silence' Claims Of War Crimes (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Tel Aviv, May 10 - The Israeli military deployed a D-9 armored bulldozer this afternoon to destroy spurious charges leveled by self-proclaimed whistleblower group Breaking the Silence that the Israel Defense Forces have systematically mistreated Palestinians under military rule.

The Caterpillar-produced machine dispatched the flimsy structure within minutes, following a brief confrontation during which a Breaking the Silence activist spouted distortions and falsehoods regarding his behavior toward Palestinians when he served in the IDF.

Armored bulldozers have seen frequent use by the Israeli military, most notably during operations against Palestinian militants, but also when standard heavy equipment proves inadequate or unsafe to deploy during the destruction of convicted terrorists' homes. The use of a D-9 to demolish fabricated claims of Israeli misconduct against Palestinians is less frequent, as under most circumstances the willful distortions collapse under their own weight after a short period.

Engineering unit commander Col. Dahpor Meshurian told reporters that in this case, an armored D-9 was selected for the task even though the claims made against the IDF were no more robust than the usual Breaking the Silence and B'tselem accusations. "Other equipment was busy performing other tasks such as helping to construct an underground barrier to Hamas tunnels from Gaza," he explained. "We had both D-9s and D-10s available, but chose the smaller model because it was overkill already."

Human Rights groups were quick to condemn Israel for the move. "That was a disproportionate response," asserted Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch. "Breaking the Silence have a basic right to their narrative, which is that Israel is an unmitigated evil whose presence in the Middle East must be eliminated because it makes Arabs and Muslims feel inadequate, which is a cardinal sin in human rights. Crushing that narrative with blunt wielding of facts and corroborated eyewitness testimony runs roughshod over the feelings of the patriots who want to compromise their fellow citizens' safety and security in order to make a moral or political point, and of course to feel virtuous and persecuted."

Palestinian diplomats urged their allies in the United Nations to call an emergency session of the Security Council to discuss the latest Israeli violation of international norms with the demolition. The prospects of any resolution condemning Israel appear murky at this stage, given declared US support for Israel and American veto power on the Council. According to aides, US Ambassador Nikki Haley is exploring the possibility of bringing a similar bulldozer to the UN for purposes of demolishing hypocritical anti-Israel measures put forth by UNSC member states

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05/10 Links Pt1: While Abbas met with Trump, Fatah honored 12 terrorists; Zionism: Yielding Territory Since 1919

From Ian:

PMW: While Abbas met with Trump, Fatah honored 12 terrorists responsible for murdering 95 people

As Palestinian Authority and Fatah Chairman Abbas met with President Trump last week, the two institutions he heads were busy glorifying murderers and planners of suicide bombings and shooting attacks in which 95 people were murdered.
Fatah posted the photo above of 12 imprisoned terrorist murderers on Facebook and sent "blessings" to the "heroic prisoners":
Posted text: "All blessings to our heroic prisoners carrying out the [hunger] strike of dignity: Karim Younes, Marwan Barghouti, Nael Barghouti, Ahmad Sa'adat, Abbas Al-Sayid, Hassan Salameh, Zaid Bassisi, Bassem Al-Khandaqji, Wajdi Joudeh, Maher Younes, Fuad Al-Shubaki, Wael Al-Jaghoub."
[Official Fatah Facebook page, May 3, 2017]
These are the crimes of Fatah's "heroes":
Hassan Salameh - Serving 46 life sentences for planning suicide bombings that murdered 46.
Abbas Al-Sayid - Serving 35 life sentences for planning suicide bombings that murdered 35.
Marwan Barghouti - Serving 5 life sentences for planning 3 shooting attacks that murdered murdering 5.
Bassem Al-Khandaqji - Serving 3 life sentences for involvement in a suicide bombing that murdered 3.
Zaid Bassisi - Serving a life sentence plus an additional 55 years for planning a car bombing that wounded 8.
Karim and Maher Younes - Each is serving a 40-year sentence for kidnapping and murdering 1.
Nael and Fakhri Barghouti - Each was serving a life sentence for murdering 1. Both were released in the Shalit prisoner exchange deal. Nael Barghouti was rearrested for violating the terms of his release and is serving a life sentence plus an additional 18 years.
Wael Al-Jaghoub - Serving a life sentence for establishing PFLP terror cells and carrying out terror attacks. PMW was unable to verify the details of his crimes.
Ahmad Sa'adat - Serving a 30 year sentence for heading the PFLP terror organization.
Wajdi Joudeh - Serving a 25 year sentence for involvement in a suicide bombing that murdered 4 and wounded 24.
Fuad Al-Shubaki - Serving a 20 year sentence for planning attempt to smuggle 50 tons of illegal weapons to the Palestinian Authority

MEMRI: The Positions And Statements Of Hamas's New Political Bureau Head Isma'il Haniya

On May 6, 2017, Hamas announced that its senior official Isma'il Haniya had been elected as head of its political bureau, in place of Khaled Mash'al, who had held this position since 1996. Haniya, who had been Khaled's deputy, was elected in a movement-internal procedure that took place simultaneously in Gaza and the West Bank via video conference. Haniya previously served as Hamas's leader and prime minister in Gaza.
Over the years, MEMRI has presented Haniya's views and positions on various issues. In his statements Haniya reiterated his movement's commitment to the values of jihad and martyrdom, stressing that jihad is a religious duty that must never be subject to negotiations and that Palestinians are "a people who love death as much as [their] enemies love life." He emphasized that armed resistance is a Palestinian right and a "strategic option" which Hamas will pursue and intensify until the final liberation of Palestine "from the river to the sea." He also emphasized that Hamas regards it as its mission to develop increasingly sophisticated means of warfare, from rockets to attack tunnels, and to train the next generation of fighters in their effective use. Accordingly, he praised terrorists who had carried out attacks on Israelis, including on civilians, calling them heroes. He also emphasized that Hamas would never recognize Israel, under any circumstances.
Haniya's rhetoric has been consistently anti-American, for instance when he condemned the U.S. for killing "the mujahid" bin Laden, calling this an expression of America's "policy of oppression," and when he hoped that Allah would "declare war" on the U.S.

David Singer: United Nations Web of Deceit snares International Court of Justice

The United Nations publication The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem 1917-1988 (“Study”) has falsely misrepresented that the Mandate for Palestine was a class A Mandate – deceiving the International Court of Justice and many other reputable sources.
The Study has been published by the Division for Palestinian Rights of the United Nations Secretariat for, and under the guidance of, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.
The Study falsely asserts without substantiation:
“All the mandates over Arab countries, including Palestine, were treated as class 'A' Mandates, applicable to territories whose independence had been provisionally recognized in the Covenant of the League of Nations”.
The Study then erroneously concludes:
“Only in the case of Palestine did the Mandate, with its inherent contradictions, lead not to the independence provisionally recognized in the Covenant, but towards conflict that was to continue six decades later.”
However the 1937 Peel Commission Report comprehensively debunks the Study’s concocted claims:

Major Egyptian news site says the Rothschilds are Khazars who control the world to help Israel

Here are the most popular Internet sites in Egypt:

Google (Egyptian and worldwide)
YouTube
Facebook
Youm7 newspaper
Al Bawabh News

Al Bawabh News just published a long article that is a regurgitation of the standard antisemitic slanders, centered around the supposed influence of the Rothschild family who somehow never manage to make it to the top of the list of Forbes richest people.

The first paragraph says it all:

The Rothschild family is the oldest and largest Jewish family of the Jewish Khazars of German origin, owning 80% of the world's wealth. The family is responsible for the creation of all economic crises, as well as political revolutions across the world in collaboration with Rockefeller and Morgan families as it is almost dominated all the central banks of each countries of the world with the exception of a few.

Each paragraph gets more absurd:

These three families have killed a number of American presidents, including President Abraham Lincoln and President William McKinney and President James Garfield and President John F. Kennedy and many members of Congress and the owners of the banks, to the degree that enabled them to provide the largest bribe in history in return for obtaining a sinister promise later named the Balfour Declaration! And all those who stand against these families are killed without pity or mercy.

The video that accompanies the story is narrated in Arabic but it is filled with graphics made by Internet antisemites making up bizarre stories like Adolf Hitler was the grandson of a Rothschild and quotes like this one:

This is what Egyptians are reading every day in their mainstream media.

And there is essentially nothing in their media that ever says otherwise.

But let's talk some more about Islamophobia, because that is more "systemic."

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Eve Spangler is an associate professor of sociology at Boston University. Her "scholarly interests" include "Inequality and Intersectionality; Classical Sociological Theory; Health, Human Rights and Social Justice in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict; Work Organization: Health and Safety in the Global Economy."

Spangler wrote a book called "Understanding Israel/Palestine: Race, Nation, and Human Rights in the Conflict" that purports to make the Palestinian issue easy to understand. She writes that the book "will be useful for classes in Middle East studies, peace and conflict studies, Middle East history, sociology of race, and political science. It can be helpful for church groups, labor groups, or other grass roots organizations committed to social justice, and for all readers who wish to be informed about this important topic."

This supposed academic claims that Israeli settlers raise and release wild pigs just to irritate Palestinians.

But she has a footnote! Where is her scholarly source?

It's Mondoweiss. But Mondoweiss didn't even write the article, it was excerpted from the absurd anti-Israel propaganda site IMEMC.

Palestinian farmers in the Salfit district appealed all to Palestinian and international bodies to stop the continued destruction of their crops, caused by the Israeli pigs in the district.Farmers said, ‘We have encountered heavy losses in our wheat and barley crops, where the pigs destroyed them completely.’

They added, ‘We tried to get rid of the pigs with all available ways but we have failed’, pointing out that the only way is to shoot them; which is difficult due to the miltary’s monitoring towers and checkpoints in the area.

Furthermore, according to Al Ray, Palestinian researcher Khaled Maali explained that the settlers found launching wild pigs toward the Palestinian farmlands was the best effective way to fight the Palestinian farmers without significant cost.

Maali pointed out that the occupation prevents the Palestinians from shooting the pigs, whereas it permits settlers to kill the pigs when they reach their colonial settlements.

Even this story is internally inconsistent, claiming that settlers raise pigs (against Jewish law)for no other reason but to release them in Palestinian farms, yet they also shoot the pigs that somehow make their way back to where they were raised.

And even if the story was true, Spangler should have sourced it correctly instead of referring to a secondary source, showing that even as a lying academic, she fails as an academic.

The idea that Jews raise and release wild boars (which have lived in the region since Biblical times) is laughable to anyone with the ability to think - but not to a Boston University PhD who specializes in "Inequality and Intersectionality".

Oh, Spangler also writes in her book as fact that Israel engages in "pink-washing" - that any human rights it gives to LGBT community is really an attempt to divert attention from its crimes, an equally laughable slander.

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Palestine Today quotes Dr. Munir Bursh, the pharmacy director at the Ministry of Health in Gaza, saying that the Palestinian Authority has stopped supplying medicines and baby formula to Gaza altogether.

"90% of the treatment of cancer patients in the Gaza Strip has stopped due to the lack of the supply of drugs," he said.

Bursh added, "This is reprehensible and very strange, threatening a major health disaster up to the collapse of the health situation in Gaza, because the Ramallah government has been responsible for supplying medicine to Gaza, despite the deficit in the previous years."

"Whoever made this decision is killing the entire people, and punishing the entire people."

He said that the PA supplies the Gaza Strip with medicines every two months, but it did not send any medicines for three months now.

Hospitals in Gaza are also worried about the closure of the Gaza power plant due to the spat between Hamas and Fatah, saying that they cannot desalinate the water needed for every day purposes.

The PA denies the story of stopping medicines to Gaza, although it has publicly threatened to stop pretty much everything they pay for that goes to Gaza in recent weeks in an attempt to get angry Gazans to rise up against Hamas.

Of course, the Western media is all over this story, because the lives and well-being of Gazans are so important to them and the people being blamed for their predicament is not at all a factor in how the story of Gaza suffering gets reported to the world.

Oh, sorry, I was delirious for a minute there. The stories of both how Israel has refused to stop electricity to Gaza despite the PA's refusal to pay, and this story, have been completely ignored by Western media, NGOs and so-called "pro-Palestinian" activists, because if Israel cannot be blamed, the suffering of Gazans is simply not newsworthy.

Which proves yet again that the reporting and NGO reports from Gaza are not motivated by human rights or morality, but a desire by NGOs and reporters to bash Israel.

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05/09 Links Pt2: Hungry Hungry Hypocrite; Ayaan Hirsi Ali: 'Anti-Semitism Is Back. Because Of Islam'

From Ian:

Hungry Hungry Hypocrite

Marwan Barghouti is hungry no more.
Last month, the Palestinian terrorist currently serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison for his role in planning three attacks that claimed the lives of five civilians, took to the pages of The New York Times to tell the world that he will join with many of his fellow incarcerated terrorists and starve himself in protest for what he described as “Israel’s inhumane system of colonial and military occupation.”
Like so much of Palestinian nationalism, however, Barghouti’s protest turned out to be just a piece of bad theater, lacking any candor, courage, and conviction. Yesterday, Israel’s prison authority released videos that clearly show the allegedly suffering Barghouti enjoying cookies and candy bars in the privacy of his own cell. Talk about a hungry, hungry hypocrite: as soon as he’s done wolfing down the treat, Barghouti rushes to the toilet and flushes away the evidence, like a furtive smoker in an airplane bathroom.
Having gone on a prolonged hunger strike myself some decades ago, I know what forgoing food does to your mind and your body. I know how hard it can be, which is why I’m not at all surprised to learn that Barghouti just didn’t have what it takes to transcend. Men who have no qualms about murdering innocents are not and can never be resilient leaders, just as national movements focused on advertising and exaggerating their victimhood are not and can never be committed to true reconciliation. Barghouti, poetically, is the perfect embodiment of Palestinian officialdom: speaking of virtue to a gullible international audience before retiring to a corner and indulging in vice. Bon appetite, Marwan, and if you’d like some more snacks, Israel’s inhumane system of colonial and military occupation will be happy to provide.

Ben-Dror Yemini: It’s Israel’s duty to expose Barghouti as a crook

Perhaps one day, Marwan Barghouti will lead the Palestinians to a historic compromise. In the meantime, however, he is a Hamas collaborator and an enemy of the possibility to renew the peace process. Weakening him, under the current circumstances, is the right thing to do.
We want peace. We fight for peace. But in the meantime we must remember that we are in a state of war. Not one war, but two wars. One is taking place on the battlefield. Hamas drags us there every few years. This war is being waged on a lower key, both through the knifing and stone-throwing terror attacks and through different other measures targeting Israel nonstop.
The second war is a war on the collective consciousness. A war of demonization. A war that seeks to present Israel as a monster. This war has had quite a lot of achievements.
The jailed terrorists, from Fatah and Hamas, have become full partners in both wars. Some of them try to launch and plan terror attacks from prison. Others try to present themselves as martyrs fighting for “an end to the occupation” or for “liberation.” Every other prisoner tries to present himself as a freedom fighter, and every other prisoner is actually Nelson Mandela. It’s true that they murdered civilians and babies and women and elderly people. And it’s true that when they say “an end to the occupation,” they are referring to Tel Aviv as well. And it’s true that their liberation is sort of like the Islamic State is liberating Iraq and Hamas is liberating Gaza. But in the war on the collective consciousness, they are winning.

Gerald M. Steinberg: Media 'misleading' on Palestinian prisoners

Allegations regarding Israeli treatment of Palestinian prisoners- a group that includes many convicted terrorists guilty of murder, bombings of buses and cafes, and other atrocities- gain international visibility through hunger strikes.
The current hunger strike follows in that tradition, with the participation of members of terrorist organizations such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Islamic Jihad, and Fatah terror groups.
As in previous years, a number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) joined the public relations campaign, promoting the hunger strikers while failing to acknowledge the reasons for their jail sentences- conviction for violent crimes.
The NGOs leading this media campaign also support discriminatory BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) against Israel, and have alleged ties to terror groups.

This article from Iran's Abna is notable for its value as short fiction. It certainly fails as propaganda.

It is the trembling curse that hits the Zionist soldiers who are chosen to serve in the occupied Lebanese Kfarshouba Heights and Shebaa Farms.

... Zionist soldiers deployed in the Shebaa Farms live a permanent state of war, considering themselves the loser party at all times due to previous confrontations in the area, which were in favor of the resistance. The Israeli forces know that when resistance fighters decide to attack any post or patrol, or to plant an explosive device anywhere inside the so-called “secure” depth, they succeed most of the times, and the Israeli reaction comes later after counting the casualties and losses.

There is no doubt that such an impression will influence the psychological abilities and the initiative of the occupation forces. Something that the Israeli army has been trying to divert attention from, through raising the dose of its drills, exaggerating the show of force in operating Merkavas and shelling when any doubts emerge that a breach has happened in some place in the occupied farms. Besides, the occupation army has been preceding the shifting and routine movements of its forces by combing the overlooking sites towards the routes that the vehicles shall pass over with medium and heavy submachine guns. This all happens in parallel with unstopping deployment of spy drones and sometimes helicopters, depending on the importance of the moving convoy.

Moreover, Shepherds, who walk with their herds to some areas along the blue line in Shebaa Farms and Kfarshouba Hills, expose a source of concern for the Israeli forces serving in the sites spread along the confrontation line.

The Zionists consider that the shepherds aren’t but monitoring devices for the resistance, no matter whether they are young or old. Therefore, the plan to set ambushes for shepherds is one of the Zionist army’s priorities. And recently the occupation army has intensified its attempts to detain shepherds and kidnap their herds even if this required breaching the blue line, and that what always happens in the Saddaneh, Berket al-Naqqar, Bustra and Jabal al-Shahl. However, the occupation forces often fail to capture the shepherds due to the latter’s experience in escaping after successive Israeli attempts. Occupation soldiers, hence, take revenge by retaining numbers of the cattle to extort the Lebanese side and demand to drive the shepherds away.

As for the dawn and morning fog on the heights and highlands occupied by the Israeli enemy, there is another story. First of which is the nightmare of the resistance men’s ghosts behind the trees and the rocks. The Zionist soldiers protecting their spots chase those ghosts with heavy fire, under a complete curfew all over the occupied territory! Not to mention, they spend hard times with the breakdown of tracking and thermal monitoring devices, as well as lack of vision of cameras, something that prompts the artillery to shell all forests and areas surrounding their spots and military routes until the nightmare is over, to be followed with a nightmare of waiting. It is because the fog would have carried some “undesired guests”!!

The scene repeats almost on a daily basis in the high occupied mountains overlooking the Arkoub villages...

Until the last Zionist soldier is moved out of a land whose people seek to clean it up from the occupation with all possible means, occupation soldiers who desecrate this land will remain a legitimate target, and they will remain terrified, concerned and horrified.

You (Zionist soldiers) shall be waiting for the angels of Rudwan* whenever wind blows… whenever fog reigns… You shall be waiting, until you see their ghosts behind every rock and behind every tree.

*: Rudwan is the nom de guerre of Hezbollah’s senior military commander, Hajj Imad Mughniyeh.

*Who is, of course, dead.

The entire article is a laughable attempt at psy-ops. The only level is succeeds in is how bad it is. Bu tit might be a warning that Hezbollah is up to something.

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A piece of paper with writing on it brought the complexities of my grandfather’s personality, rushing back to me, from beyond the grave. I don’t believe he placed much importance on what he wrote. How could he know that his words, so clearly would make him vivid to me, once more?

I can see him standing, quietly leaning on the window ledge. Looking at his expression, few would be able to conceive the depths of his thoughts. How many.

I always thought of my grandfather, my Saba, as having the soul of a scientist.

Read his words and you will see the soul of a poet.

“From a balcony on the northern edge of Jerusalem, Israel’s Memorial Day begins like many others, the sun splashing on ice-blue sky with improbable color as it thrusts through the haze over the Judean Hills. The traffic in the street below is desultory; today it moves between flag-draped buildings to stop, at a distant signal, for the moment when Israel recalls her dead with quiet mourning and her life with quiet joy.

In the playground of the school across the street the soccer balls and other games are put away for now. A file of children, dressed in their best, unfurl small flags and are marshalled for a ceremony of their own. A loudspeaker reviews the purpose of the day, and the children pace, to music, around the familiar field in unfamiliar dignity.

Fifteen children with fifteen flags:

The moving circle of flags is answer to Hitler, to Mussolini, to Horthy and Petain and Mosley; to all of those who said to their momentary masters, here are the Jews, take them; to the Mufti, Haj Amin el Husseini, to John Glubb’s Arab Legion, and to all the dark legion of others who denied, denied, denied.

Fifteen children with fifteen flags in a very un-military march, circling in the Jerusalem sun: what kind of answer can they be to a world convulsed before they were born? They are an answer, some of them by being born at all, all of them by making their circle where it is, in a world which – too often – still denies them. They are an answer because they are an affirmation.

The children disperse, and now their circle cannot be seen. But it is still there.”

He knew the secret. “It is still there.”

My grandfather was extraordinary. Here was a man who chose the Jewish people - not because he was born into the Nation of Israel, nor out of religious conviction. He did it because he believed in the “American way”. He believed in truth and justice. He believed that the strong should protect the weaker and that freedom means everything.

The conviction that “Jewish blood was worth more than Arab oil” is what brought him to my grandmother and changed his life forever.

He did it for love.

Now it is his “circle” that can no longer been seen. But it is still there.

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05/09 Links Pt1: Jerusalem is holy to Jews, not Muslims; Erdogan calls for Muslims to flood Temple Mount

From Ian:

Jerusalem is holy to Jews, not Muslims

No matter UNESCO, no matter the Islamic world, Jerusalem belongs to the Jewish people.
Jerusalem is the only city in the world in which Jews have formed a majority since the 1880s. Today, Jerusalem, in addition to being home to Judaism’s greatest sanctuaries, is the seat of Israel’s government, the Knesset, the Supreme Court, the National Library and the Hebrew University. Its population is two-thirds Jewish.
It is only under unified Israeli rule since 1967 that the city as a whole has been revitalized, enjoyed stunning growth and also, at last, full freedom of religion for its mosaic of faiths ––precisely what would be threatened by its redivision, as is already obvious in the Christian exodus from Palestinian-controlled Gaza and Bethlehem.
Whatever form a final peace settlement might one day take, there is no morally just or legally sound reason inflate or fabricate Muslim claims while denying Jerusalem’s Jewish primacy and history.
The Trump Administration rightly condemned the UNESCO resolution. It should now defund UN bodies that practice this form of delegitimizing political warfare, starting with UNESCO.
Morton A. Klein is National President of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). Dr. Daniel Mandel is Director of the ZOA’ s Center for Middle East Policy and author of H.V. Evatt & the Establisment of Israel (Routledge, London, 2004).

Reuters chief slams US Ambassador for desecrating 'Nakba Day'

Newly-appointed US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman is set to arrive in Israel next Monday, beginning his service in the Jewish state a week ahead of President Trump’s first visit to Israel since taking office in January.
On Tuesday, a Twitter account in Friedman’s name confirmed that he would be heading to Israel on May 15th.
“I am arriving in Israel on May 15 to represent the United States as Ambassador to Israel. I hope to work out of Jerusalem very soon!”
The post, which was retweeted by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, appears to be fraudulent and the account fake.
The faux Friedman announcement drew consternation, from at least one senior journalist, who criticized the timing of Friedman’s departure for Israel.
Luke Baker, Israel bureau chief for Reuters, expressed disapproval that Friedman would be beginning his service in the US Embassy in Israel on May 15th, coinciding with “Nakba Day”.

Palestinians Use Deception for Greater Acceptance

While the Fatah-affiliated PA likes to present itself as more moderate than Hamas, its rejection of Israel is essentially the same. "The Fatah Movement never demanded that Hamas recognize Israel," said Fatah Central Committee member and Commissioner of Treasury and Economy Muhammad Shtayyeh, on official Palestinian Authority TV last March. "To this moment, Fatah does not recognize Israel. The topic of recognition of Israel has not been raised in any of Fatah's conferences."
Abbas also didn't let truth get in the way of his breathtakingly false statement, made before Trump and the U.S. media, that the Palestinians "are the only remaining people in the world that still live under occupation." The Tibetans, Kurds, and Cypriots are just a few of the many groups who would disagree.
Trump "raised concerns about the payments to Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails who have committed acts of terror," said White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer. But a senior PA official rejected the idea as "insane," claiming that PA payments to imprisoned terrorists are like salaries paid to IDF soldiers. Just days before Abbas met Trump, senior Fatah leader Rawhi Fattouh even argued that donor countries should welcome PA payments to terrorists because this practice promotes peace by keeping the Palestinian terrorists from joining "ISIS or any other extremist party."
A few weeks before the Trump-Abbas meeting, the Palestinian Information Center called Tel-Aviv a "settlement" in a tweet, implying that even Israel's commercial capital – considered well within Israel proper by international consensus – should be part of a future Palestine. Josh Block, head of The Israel Project, uncovered the tweet, which was released on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Palestinian Information Center tweet referred to the "so-called Holocaust."

A few days ago, Noah Pollak wrote that in his meeting with the president Abbas Lies to Trump, Big Time:

There was only one remarkable moment in the otherwise formulaic remarks to the press Wednesday by President Trump and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas: a claim by Abbas so audacious and dishonest that he may have damaged his credibility with the president:

"Mr. President, I affirm to you that we are raising our youth, our children and grandchildren, in a culture of peace."

Abbas and Trump Credit: Whitehouse.gov

Pollak goes on to show that on the contrary, based on his previous statements, Trump is well aware of Abbas's dishonesty.

Let's hope that Trump is also aware of Abbas's deception in rigging negotiations with Israel.

During that same meeting, Abbas Told Trump: Peace Talks Should Resume From Where 2008 Negotiations With Israel Left Off

The Palestinians showed Trump the details of the negotiations with Olmert. “At the time, we presented land swaps of 1.9 percent [of the West Bank] and Olmert offered 6.3 percent, and this is where things ended because Olmert left politics, and we told [Trump] and his staff that the differences are not so great and that is a good starting point for any negotiations on borders, which is a critical issue and which will have implications for all the core issues and the permanent agreement,” said the official.

There are 2 claims made here:

The implied offer to Olmert of land swaps of 1.9% and Olmerts offer of 6.3%.
The breakdown in negotiations was due to Olmert leaving office under scandal

Back in 2011, these same 2 claims were made by Abbas himself, with a slight difference:

Abbas also contended that he and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were "very, very close" to reaching a peace agreement in 2008, before the Israeli leader left office under a cloud of corruption allegations.

"It was a very good opportunity," he said. "If he stayed two, three months, I believe that time we could have concluded an agreement."

He confirmed Olmert's account that the Israeli leader was prepared to withdraw from 93.5 percent of the West Bank. The Palestinians, Abbas added, responded by offering to let Israel retain 1.9 percent of the West Bank.

The difference is that Abbas explicitly states that the Palestinian offer of 1.9% of the land was in response to Olmert's offer, not before.

So on this basis -- Olmert's leaving office early and the Palestinian last counter-offer of 1.9% -- Abbas wants to begin the negotiations on borders from this point and go forward from there.

Abbas, French then-President Sarkozy and Olmert Credit: Israeli Prime Minster's Office

But this suggestion by Abbas is simply not true.

The Abbas version of events is directly contradicted by the Palestine Papers, a collection of confidential documents about the Israeli–Palestinian peace process leaked by Al Jazeera between 23 and 26 January 2011. They were authenticated by Al Jazeera and The Guardian, and a media adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert also affirmed their authenticity.

According to those papers, Abbas never presented Olmert with a counter-offer.

Christians for Fair Witness on the Middle East has carefully reviewed the "Palestine Papers," which Al Jazeera says are Palestinian Authority documents memorializing a decade of Israeli/Palestinian peace talks. If these documents are authentic, they offer significant clues to one reason why the process has thus far failed.

Sr. Ruth Lautt, O.P., Fair Witness National Director, says "What the documents from the post-Annapolis talks reveal is that members of the respective negotiating teams shared pragmatic talk about borders, Jerusalem and refugees. While there was not complete agreement on core issues, there was hope of reaching a compromise. A 'Palestine Paper' dated August 31, 2008, memorializes Israeli Prime Minister Olmert's peace proposal package. But there is no indication that Palestinian President Abbas ever came back with a counteroffer."

The "Palestine Papers" reflect claims about an alleged counteroffer, but no evidence that one was ever relayed to Olmert. A December 14, 2008 memo shows Saeb Erekat telling Israeli negotiator Udi Deckel that the Palestinian counteroffer had been 1.9%. It appears, however, that 1.9% was a number Palestinian negotiators had been discussing with the Israeli negotiators prior to the Olmert offer. And, as Deckel points out, "discussions on territory" between negotiators do not constitute a leader's response to a comprehensive peace offer.

An internal Palestinian document reveals that Abbas never intended to respond to the offer at his September 16, 2008 meeting with Olmert, which he regarded as merely "ceremonial." A memo drafted in preparation for that meeting states:

In order to avoid the blame game, the President [Abbas] today is going with a positive attitude, where he will ask more questions from Olmert on his offer, and he will tell him that the Palestinians will respond later.
There is no record of a subsequent response from Abbas.

Rev. Thomas Prinz, pastor of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, Leesburg, Virginia, notes that "Talk amongst negotiators is very different from an actual peace proposal agreed upon by leaders." [emphasis added]

This version of events, that Abbas did not provide a counter-offer to Olmert is confirmed by none other than Palestinian Chief Negotiator Saeb Erekat himself:

Palestinian Chief Negotiator Saeb Ereqat reveals that PA President Mahmoud 'Abbas refused an offer by the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert to establish an independent Palestinian on an area equal in size to the West Bank and Gaza, with a 6.5% land swap to accommodate the settlement blocs.

Ereqat said that the late Palestinian president Yasser Arafat had instructed him to uphold the Palestinians' full rights, including their right to all the West Bank and Gaza, as well as Jerusalem, 37 kilometers of dead sea coast, 46 kilometers of no man's land between Latrun and Jerusalem, the right of return for the refugees and a safe passage between the West Bank and Gaza. Ereqat added that 'Abbas had given him similar instructions, and emphasized that no Palestinian would give up these rights. If Israel rejects the two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, he concluded, it will be left only with the option of a bi-national state. [emphasis added]

Source: Al-Hayat (London), November 17, 2010

Palestinian Chief Negotiator Saeb Erekat.
Credit: Wiki Commons

Abbas is moving the goal posts by trying to talk Trump into starting the talks from a point in time that never existed. If Abbas really is unable to be an honest negotiator, then Trump will have to either have to find a way to pressure Abbas in order to keep him honest, or admit that peace talks at this time are simply not possible.

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In 2012, I reported that Cloudflare, a company that protects websites from denial of service attacks, was protecting Hamas websitesm which appears to be a violation of the US Patriot Act.

EoZ readers created enough of a stir that Reuters interviewed Cloudflare, where they defended their decision on freedom of speech grounds. Cloudflare's CEO, Matthew Prince, claimed that the company wasn't doing anything wrong: "We're not providing material support for anybody. We're not sending money, or helping people arm themselves."

The words "material support" are important, because that is what is prohibited to give to terrorists under the US Patriot Act. But the Patriot Act itself defines what "material support" is:

The term “material support or resources” means any property, tangible or intangible, or service, including currency or monetary instruments or financial securities, financial services, lodging, training, expert advice or assistance, safehouses, false documentation or identification, communications equipment, facilities, weapons, lethal substances, explosives, personnel (1 or more individuals who may be or include oneself), and transportation, except medicine or religious materials.

The way that Cloudflare works is that all traffic that is meant to go to these websites first goes through Cloudflare servers which decide if it is legitimate or not, and then it gets passed through to the actual website. This means that Cloudflare is providing communications equipment and services, as well as intangible property and facilities in the form of a front end to the target webservers. Their technical support teams may even be considered "personnel" under this definition if they ever work together the webmasters of terrorist organizations.

ProPublica had an article on Cloudflare recently that concentrated on a different topic: Cloudflare would provide personal information of people who complained about various white supremacist organizations to the organizations themselves, which then proceeded to harass the complainants mercilessly.

However, the article also said:

In 2015, the company came under fire from the hacker collective Anonymous for reportedly allowing ISIS propaganda sites on its network. At the time, Prince, the company’s CEO, dismissed the claim as “armchair analysis by kids,” and told Fox Business that the company would not knowingly accept money from a terrorist organization.
[CloudFlare counsel Doug] Kramer, in an interview with ProPublica, reiterated that the company would not accept money from ISIS. But he said that was not for moral or ethical reasons. Rather, he said, Cloudflare did not have dealings with terrorists groups such as ISIS because there are significant and specific laws restricting them from doing so.

The same laws that prohibit Cloudflare from giving services to ISIS are the ones that prohibit it from providing services for Palestinian terror groups.

And Cloudflare protects Hamas website Hamas.ps, the English site of the Al Qassam Brigades as well as the Arabic site, the website of Islamic Jihad's Al Quds Brigades, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine site, and the Nedal Brigades website of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. (Look up the Name Server section of each of the WHOIS links provided to see for yourself that CloudFlare protects these sites.)

All of these are designated foreign terrorist organizations by the US State Department.

The penalty is $50,000 per violation, and arguably every single time someone surfs to a terrorist website and Cloudflare intercepts and inspects the traffic it is a separate violation (a "service") - which would be billions of dollars in fines.

So why has Cloudflare not been fined by the US for what appears to be clear violations of the Patriot Act?

(h/t Ben)

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Pro-Hamas "rabbi" seemingly trying to sneak into Israel from Egypt

David Mivasair is the "rabbi" of a synagogue in Vancouver named Ahavat Olam. Judging from its website, the synagogue has no address outside a post office box and has not planned any events since announcing services last Rosh Hashanah which may or may have not actually occurred. Mivasair seems to make his living doing weddings and teaching kids their bar/bat mitzvah portions.

At one point he was on J-Street's rabbinic council, although I'm not sure he still is. He is active in Jewish Voice for Peace.

He is on the record supporting Hamas rockets to Sderot.

Whenever we read about … I have to say about a puny, ineffective rocket fired into some place like Sderot, something to think about is very likely that very likely the people firing it are the children or grandchildren of people who perhaps once lived in Sderot. But it wasn’t Sderot, it was a Palestinian village that had existed there for centuries that had several hundred people who were forcibly expelled at gunpoint and when the place was empty, then Jews moved in and built a town…

Mivasair also implicitly justified 9/11 by saying that Israel and the US are to blame for radical Islam in critiquing a sermon by another rabbi:

The sermon identifies radical Islam as “the enemy” of our time just as Nazism was so disastrously the enemy three-quarters of a century ago. Further, it says that for Jews not to recognize this today is parallel to Jews in Europe in the 1930's not accepting the reality of the threat posed by the Nazis in their time – which only makes the threat of radical Islam more threatening and largely the fault of those Jews who don't think so.
The writer avoids any mention that both the US and Israel might have done something to elicit such enmity. It is as if it arose spontaneously, a completely irrational aberration in human thinking, with no relationship whatsoever to anything that the USA and Israel have ever done.
On Rosh ha-Shanah, of all days, we need to look at our own failures and misdeeds. ...
... It is not Israel’s mere existence which has led to growing enmity but rather Israel's actions. Similarly, the reader is expected to forget current US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and decades of history, for instance, that the dictatorial regime in Saudi Arabia which produces Wahabi extremists and exports “radical Islam” is itself a direct creation British imperialism at the end of World War I and would not have survived without United States support.

This year, Mivasiair hosted a seder themed around Deir Yassin in a church.

In other words, Mivasair is a disgusting excuse for a human, let alone a Jew or a "rabbi."

Mivasair created a GoFundMe page to raise funds to go to "Palestine" this month, joining a group of Israel-haters in Hebron to protest "50 years of Occupation" with the anti-Israel group called the Center for Jewish Nonviolence whose activities are planned for May 14 – 22.

Yesterday, a week before the "direct actions" in the territories, he flew to the Middle East - but not to Israel.

On his Facebook page he wrote:

In my seat in Egypt Air 996 to Cairo. Announcer welcomes us "as-Salaam aleikum wa-rahmat-Allah wa-birkathu" -- peace be upon you and God's mercy and blessing. We will be in Cairo in 11 hours inshaAllah -- if God wills it.

It appears that Mivasair knows that Israel is cracking down on anti-Israel activists at the airport and is trying to sneak into Israel through the Taba crossing in Egypt instead, hoping that the Israelis aren't looking as hard at that crossing.

I doubt he came up with this idea himself, chances are that many of the planned protesters have come up with this way to sneak in as well.

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