Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, October 12, 2018

10/12 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: As Haley’s comet passes, UN itself must now be a fallen star; Palestinian baby gets heart transplant from Jewish child in medical first

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: As Haley’s comet passes, UN itself must now be a fallen star

The Trump administration has broken with all that. The US has withdrawn from UNESCO and the UNHRC; Israel is set to withdraw from UNESCO at the end of this year.

This is not enough. The UN itself has to be effectively neutralized, deprived of its power to hurt America and Israel and promote evil in the world.

On the American Thinker website an anonymous army officer outlined how this might be done. The US should steadily withdraw its funding from the UN. It should demand changes to the permanent membership of the Security Council – for example, by getting rid of France, no longer a world power, and bringing in India instead.

In addition, he suggested, the US should clog the schedules of all UN bodies on which it sits with resolutions that would not only divide the membership, but also force them to address awkward questions. For example, resolutions condemning Israeli settlements should be followed up by resolutions on New Zealand’s historically genocidal policies towards the Maoris, Russia’s military adventures in Ukraine and Georgia, Britain’s colonial history, Venezuela’s economic policies and China’s occupation of Tibet.

You get the general idea. Impossible, you think, since the UN is an essential part of the world order? But that world order is bust; and the UN has helped bring it to this pass.

And as for impossible, did anyone ever imagine in their wildest dreams that the president of the United States would be one Donald J. Trump? Desperate times sometimes require desperate measures.

Caroline Glick: Standing up to the elitist mobs

US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s sudden resignation this week distressed a lot of Israelis. On the face of things, the widely felt concern makes little sense. After all, Haley wasn’t a lone wolf in the Trump administration.

Then-president Barack Obama’s anti-Israel UN ambassadors Susan Rice and Samantha Power weren’t free agents when they took hostile actions and made hostile statements about Israel. They were speaking and acting as representatives of their boss, Obama.

Just so, in defending Israel by word and deed, Haley was a loyal representative of the policies of her boss, President Donald Trump.

So why did her decision to resign make so many Israelis anxious?

Because while Haley was a loyal representative of the administration, she was more than a mouthpiece. She was a leader.

Leading in a place like the UN means speaking truth to the most powerful sort of mob – the elite mob.

The UN’s mob mentality doesn’t manifest itself in book burnings and mass rallies. Rather, it expresses itself in a thousand ways – often passive-aggressive – every day in UN institutions.

It isn’t just that Haley was forced to cast the lone nay vote last December, when the other 14 Security Council members (including Britain and France) voted in a favor of a resolution demanding that the US reverse its sovereign decision to move its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and recognize that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital city.

Every day, the UN shows its mob mentality in its obsessive-compulsive bias against the Jewish state.

Nikki Haley triumphed at the UN because she saw through it

Haley, by contrast, may have come in without experience — but that meant she also lacked for illusions. What a difference when someone knows they’re in a viper pit — that the UN is itself the problem.

And has the gumption to say so.

This became apparent the instant Haley opened her first press conference. She had just come from a regularly scheduled Security Council meeting devoted to the Middle East.

It was, Haley noted, her first such meeting. She called it “a bit strange,” given that the parley was supposed to be about how to maintain international peace and security.

Yet instead of being dedicated to, say, Hezbollah’s “illegal buildup of rockets in Lebanon” or Iran’s funding of terrorists or even the slaughter in Syria, it was, she said, “focused on criticizing Israel, the one true democracy in the Middle East.” She confessed she was “new around here,” but she was clearly flabbergasted.

Then the famous words: “I am here to say the United States will not turn a blind eye to this anymore. I am here to underscore the ironclad support of the United States for Israel.”

“I am here,” she promptly added, “to emphasize that the United States is determined to stand up to the UN’s anti-Israel bias.”

It’s hard to think of a single moment quite like it.

Jamal Khashoggi – The Washington Post’s Islamist columnist (Petra Marquardt-Bigman)

By Petra Marquardt-Bigman

When Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi disappeared in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul at the beginning of this month, the media reacted with understandable outrage to the growing evidence that he was likely murdered there. Yet even in this situation, there is no justification for presenting Khashoggi as something he clearly was not.

According to his colleagues at the Washington Post, Khashoggi was a “committed, courageous journalist” who wrote “out of a sense of love for his country [Saudi Arabia] and deep faith in human dignity and freedom.”

Much of the media coverage of the case reflects this glowing assessment.

But a Wall Street Journal reporter noted early on that “Khashoggi was close to several people in the administration of President Erdogan, whom he knew personally and liked,” and apparently, Khashoggi “trusted Turkey even more than the U.S.”

So I started to wonder how a “committed, courageous journalist” with “deep faith in human dignity and freedom” could feel so positive about Turkey’s Islamist regime – after all, Turkey reportedly “has the highest number of journalists in jail worldwide.”

By now it is clear that Khashoggi’s admiration for Erdogan’s Turkey was due to the fact that he himself was an Islamist.

An excellent Spectator piece provides a fascinating report under the fitting title “What the media aren’t telling you about Jamal Khashoggi.”

The report argues that Khashoggi’s case has “provoked global outrage … for all the wrong reasons.”

While much of the media now present Khashoggi as “a liberal, Saudi progressive voice fighting for freedom and democracy,” he apparently “never had much time for western-style pluralistic democracy.”

“In the 1970s he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, which exists to rid the Islamic world of western influence. He was a political Islamist until the end, recently praising the Muslim Brotherhood in the Washington Post. He championed the ‘moderate’ Islamist opposition in Syria, whose crimes against humanity are a matter of record. Khashoggi frequently sugarcoated his Islamist beliefs with constant references to freedom and democracy. But he never hid that he was in favour of a Muslim Brotherhood arc throughout the Middle East. His recurring plea to bin Salman in his columns was to embrace not western-style democracy, but the rise of political Islam […] For Khashoggi, secularism was the enemy.”

A year ago, just when Khashoggi started writing for the Washington Post, he reportedly told Al Jazeera Arabic that “if Saudi Arabia wants to confront Iran, it must re-embrace its proper religious identity as a Wahhabi Islamic revivalist state and build alliances with organisations rooted in political Islam such as the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Is this really a view the Washington Post wanted to amplify when it hired Khashoggi as a regular columnist?

But it’s not only Khashoggi’s Islamist politics that should raise eyebrows about the Washington Post’s decision to provide him a prestigious platform as a columnist.

Khashoggi’s own record of work in the media can also hardly count as a qualification for a columnist in an influential western paper. As noted in the Spectator report, “Before working with a succession of Saudi princes, he edited Saudi newspapers. The exclusive remit a Saudi government–appointed newspaper editor has is to ensure nothing remotely resembling honest journalism makes it into the pages.”

Indeed, Khashoggi was apparently not all that keen on freedom of speech, as illustrated by what he told Al Jazeera last fall:

“Khashoggi, who spoke to Al Jazeera from Washington, DC, expressed hope that Saudi Arabia would go back to assume its leadership of the Arab world and shift its focus to the causes that are very important to the Arabs, mainly to support the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel. He deplored the authorities' decision to allow some in the Saudi news media to express support for Israel against the Palestinians, while journalists and intellectuals known to support the Palestinian cause were put in jail or felt afraid to speak out.”

Khashoggi also asserted in this interview that it’s “not in the Saudis’ interest to have relations with Israel. Israel will neither fight our battles nor attack Iran or Hezbollah for us.”

According to the Islamist website Middle East Monitor, Khashoggi also recently “called on Muslims to visit Jerusalem,” because Muslims “need to remind the Israelis that Jerusalem is ours.”

The Washington Post and many other influential media outlets now try to create pressure in order to force the Trump administration to downgrade relations with Saudi Arabia. In my view, there was plenty of reason for holding Saudi Arabia at arm’s length long before Khashoggi’s disappearance and likely murder – and there was most definitely never a reason to fawn about Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman like Tom Friedman and other influential commentators and public figures.

But if the media want more distance between the US and the Saudis, the Washington Post might have wasted a golden opportunity when they hired Khashoggi as their very own Islamist columnist, but failed to press him on what he knew about 9/11.

As the Spectator report explains, Khashoggi was seen as a threat by Saudi royals not only because he “emerged as a de facto leader of the Saudi [Muslim Brotherhood] branch,” but also because “Khashoggi had dirt on Saudi links to al Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks. He had befriended Osama bin Laden in the 1980s and 1990s in Afghanistan and Sudan while championing his jihad against the Soviets in dispatches. At that same time, he was employed by the Saudi intelligence services to try to persuade bin Laden to make peace with the Saudi royal family. The result? Khashoggi was the only non-royal Saudi who had the beef on the royals’ intimate dealing with al Qaeda in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks.”

What a pity that the Washington Post was content to provide Khashoggi a platform to promote his Islamist agenda, but apparently failed to find out what he knew about al Qaeda.

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10/12 Links Pt1: UN Funding Perpetuates Palestinian Rejectionism; New Series Of Fatah Booklets For Children Glorifies Terrorists; Turkish court releases US pastor Andrew Brunson

From Ian:

UN Funding Perpetuates Palestinian Rejectionism

Over decades, UNRWA has exhorted Palestinians to see Jews and Israel through an anti-Semitic lens, and to believe that all Palestinians will one day "return" to the entirety of what is now Israel. Rather than promoting peace and reconciliation, it has cooperated with terrorist organizations, particularly in Gaza, that seek Israel's destruction.

In New York, the UN has specifically established and funded additional bodies to advance the Palestinian political agenda. The Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP), the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People, and the Division for Palestinian Rights (DPR) exist for the singular purpose of promoting an anti-Israel message worldwide - in the name of the UN.

CEIRPP sponsors conferences and photo exhibitions worldwide, which demean Israel and promote "the return" of all Palestinians.

The purpose of the DPR, housed within the UN Secretariat (the only people to be so recognized), is to engage in the worldwide dissemination of Palestinian anti-Israel propaganda, using the UN's Department of Public Information and its 63 information centers around the world to get its anti-Israel message out.

Nothing would strike a more resounding note for resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than eliminating these centers of rejectionism and hate.

As long as the Palestinians feel they have the international wind at their back - including the use of the UN system as their private public relations mechanism - all talk of a serious "peace process" will continue to fall on deaf ears among Palestinians and their supporters in the international community.

MEMRI: New Series Of Fatah Booklets For Children Glorifies Terrorists Such As Abu Jihad, Dalal Al-Mughrabi

Fatah's Ideological Indoctrination Commission in Gaza has announced the publication of a new series of booklets for children titled "Stories of the Homeland," which glorify Fatah's armed struggle against Israel in the period before the signing of the Oslo Accords. Among the figures featured in the booklets are senior Fatah commanders such as Abu Jihad, who was head of Fatah's military arm and Yasser Arafat's deputy, and was responsible for multiple terrorist attacks in the 1970s and 1980s in which dozens of Israeli civilians were killed, and Dalal Al-Mughrabi, deputy commander of the 1978 Coast Road attack, in which 35 Israelis were killed and 71 were wounded.[1]

Speaking with the e-daily Dunya Al-Watan, Dr. Hussam Abu 'Ajwa, Ideological Indoctrination Commissioner for the West Gaza district, who initiated and oversaw the publication of the series, stated that "this initiative, the first of its kind, uses stories to document the history of the Palestinian people and of the Fatah movement, the largest faction in the PLO." He added that stories are an important part of the Palestinian national heritage, "which has managed to place the Palestinians on the political map by perpetuating the memory of their numerous acts of bravery and sacrifice, as a counterweight to the false Zionist narrative that is trying to eliminate and erase the Palestinian identity and essence."[2]

According to the report on Dunya Al-Watan, the series includes four booklets. The first, titled "The Beginning," deals with "the tragedy of the Palestinian people, its Nakba and its expulsion to refugee camps in the homeland and abroad, and describes the outbreak of the Palestinian revolution and the heroic 'Elaboun operation.[3]

The second book, "The Mermaid," tells of "the martyr Dalal Al-Mughrabi, from Jaffa, the beautiful city by the sea, who grew up in the diaspora and who carried out the quality operation on the Palestinian coast and founded the Palestinian republic by raising its flag."

The third book, "Loving Fingertips," tells of "a boy from [Fatah's] Western District[4] who lost his fingers and Fatah acted to help him. He turns out to be a member of the RPG [unit] that opposed Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. [The story] also tells of the heroic battle of the Beaufort, some of whose heroes are still alive today."

Caroline Glick: Gaza Fuel Deal Cuts Out the Palestinian Authority

This week, an event occurred that has the potential to diminish permanently the lethal potential of the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

On Tuesday, two tanker trucks each carrying 35,000 liters of diesel fuel were delivered to Gaza through Israel’s Kerem Shalom border crossing. Another seven fuel trucks were expected to enter Gaza on Wednesday. According to the Jerusalem Post, within a month, 15 such fuel trucks will enter Gaza every day.

Why does this matter?

Tuesday’s fuel shipments to Gaza were a game-changer because they marked the first time that fuel was delivered to Gaza which wasn’t paid for and authorized by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority (PA) it controls. In fact, the PLO-controlled PA did everything it could to prevent the fuel shipments.

The PA was established in 1994 in the framework of the PLO’s peace process with Israel. Its purpose is to serve as the autonomous Palestinian government in Gaza, and in the Palestinian population centers in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). The PA ruled both areas with an iron fist until June 2007, when the Hamas terror group wrested control over Gaza from the PLO in a violent coup.

To maintain its claim to Gaza after Hamas took over, the PA continued to fund Gaza. All international bodies and foreign governments that wished to donate to Gaza gave their funds to the PA in Ramallah, and the PA decided what to buy, whom to buy it from, and what to transfer to Gaza.

In April 2017, PA President and PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas decided to use his economic control over Gaza to force Hamas to cede power to his PLO forces.

My Twitter rant on the social sciences

Without meaning to, I wrote a thread on Twitter using my last post as a starting point. Here it is:

Seminal academic paper on settler colonialism, used in college courses and referenced over 1500 times, falsely claims (without citation!) Zionist Jews in the 1910s said they wanted the land "goyim-rein."

Social sciences are totally corrupt.

Academic papers falsely claim early Zionists wanted Israel to be "goyim-rein"Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2018/10/academic-papers-falsely-claim-early.html

The more I look at academic papers that purport to describe Zionism, the angrier I get.

The bias and utter disregard for fact checking would make most news editors blush.

One person will make up a theory, and unlike scientific theories, it requires no proof or corroboration. It just needs to appeal to the target audience - of other people in social sciences.

Then, that paper will become one of the sources for many other papers that take the unproven theory as fact, and then extend it into la-la land. The cycle repeats.

Spend a little time tracing the sources and there is no "there" there.

When a "proof" is given, it is usually an anecdote. Counterexamples are suppressed. So you can prove anything as long as you cherry pick your evidence.

Social science papers (at least on Israel in non-Zionist journals)) are the exact opposite of scholarship. It is literally impossible to imagine someone getting a paper published that would say, for example, that Zionism is not colonialist. It goes against political correctness.

The only analogy I can come up with is Arab anti-Israel propaganda: Twist the facts, align the ideas with how that world thinks, and suppress any other way of thinking. And never, ever fact check.

The people reading these papers built on lies are tomorrow's professors - and journalists.

The entire field is corrupt, based on what I see on these papers about Zionism. And I don't see much pushback (outside of the Sokal-type hoaxes which shine a spotlight on the issue for a news cycle.)

People need to realize: Social science isn't science. Citations aren't proof. Big words don't mean it is intellectual. Using the methods that social scientists use in their papers, one can literally "prove" anything no matter how false or outlandish. I've seen it!

This needs to be exposed. Badly. And the only people who can correct the problem are social scientists themselves who actually care about truth. There must be some of them who are disgusted at this state of affairs.

And the pro-Israel community needs to spend as much time shaming the academic journals that publish this garbage as we do exposing media bias. It is no less insidious, and with far more disregard for actual facts or even-handedness.

Only when the editors and professors and writers realize that they must use actual standards for their writings will this change.

It is most upsetting that this has gotten this bad for so long.

If I had time, this could be a book-length critique. And it is well past time that the world insists that social sciences use at least the level of fact checking expected from the hard sciences and even from journalists, who at least have published standards on being fair and unbiased. Social science academics have no such standards, and apparently neither do their journals.

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As I have been looking at the lies published in academic journals about Israel, I saw a heavily referenced paper published in the Journal of Genocide Research in 2006 by Patrick Wolfe, titled "Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native."

It has been referenced over 1500 times in other academic papers, so it is considered a seminal source on the topic of settler colonialism. Universities have this paper in their syllabuses.

The paper assumes, without proof, that Israel is guilty of the crime of settler colonialism, not mentioning that Zionism is actually an indigenous rights movement and is anti-colonialist, as it was not driven by a large nation state as every other example of colonialism in history.

One of the sentences in this paper struck me:

[T]he conquest of labour was central both to the institutional imagining of a goyim-rein (gentile-free) zone and to the continued stigmatization of Jews who remained unredeemed in the galut (diaspora). The positive force that animated the Jewish nation and its individual new-Jewish subjects issued from the negative process of excluding Palestine's Indigenous owners.

Wolfe's use of the term "goyim-rein" as if it is a well-known phrase of Zionists struck me, as it seemed extremely unlikely that Jews would have ever used the term, an obvious pun on the Nazi phrase "Judenrein," or "free of Jews."

I found that the phrase was first mentioned by Moshe Menuhin (1893–1983) , the father of famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin and a rabid anti-Zionist (and apparently Jewish antisemite.) Menuhin was raised in Palestine and attended the Gymnasia Herzlia in Jaffa - Tel Aviv.

In his 1965 book "The decadence of Judaism in our time," later posthumously reprinted under a different title, he claimed:

All through the years of our studies at the Gymnasia, we daily imbibed an endless harangue about our sacred obligations toward Amaynooh, Artzaynooh, Moladtaynooh (our nation, our country, our fatherland). It was drummed into our young hearts that the fatherland must become ours, "goyim rein" (clear of Gentiles—Arabs); that we must dedicate our lives to serving the fatherland and to fighting for it.

Menuhin finished high school around 1910, decades before the Nazis introduced the phrase "judenrein." There is simply no way that Zionist Jews in Palestine would have used that term, even if they had advocated ethnic cleansing of Arabs (which they certainly did not.)

Proof of Menuhin's lies come from his translation of "Moladtaynooh" as "Fatherland." It means "our homeland" or more literally "our birthplace," but Menuhin's anti-Zionism forces him to compare Israel to Nazi Germany and pretend that Jews used the Nazi term "Vaderland" for their land. It is no coincidence that he claims Zionists evoked Nazi terminology twice in one paragraph. It shows that Menuhin is not telling the truth.

There are obviously no corroborating stories from any of the thousands of Jews who attended the Gymnasia that students were given an "endless harangue" on building an Arab-free Jewish state or that the term "goyim-rein" was ever used.

It is a lie.

The "goyim-rein" slander has been published in numerous books and other academic papers, with hundreds of references in Google. It will be mentioned in academic papers and books in ways such as this:

Once one sees a reference, it appears authentic. The fact that the author might have made this up is not even considered; the quote that proves that Zionists are just like Nazis is too deliciously good to doubt. And the lie then gets propagated to the next paper, and the next one, as absolute fact.

This type of sloppy research, and the unquestioning use of previous poor research as a basis for the next paper, is emblematic of the basic problems of the social sciences today.

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A video surfaced on social media showing three young women dancing in a street in Bethlehem. One was wearing a top that revealed cleavage and a small amount of midriff, the others were in short skirts.

Their outfits would not be out of place in any major Western city.

When police found out about this, they arrested the three women for "public indecency."

Police spokesman Col. Louai Arzieqat said that following the publication on social networking sites of three girls dancing "in naked clothes" and acting in a "general disgrace," Bethlehem police arrested one of them and the other two escaped. The Department of Public Investigation tracked them and arrested them in Jericho.

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10/11 Links Pt2: Israel’s DC envoy snubs J Street, other left-wing Jewish groups; Marc Lamont Hill Moves From Justifying Terrorism to Promoting It; Roger Waters Booed At Brazil Concert

From Ian:

Israel’s DC envoy snubs J Street, other left-wing Jewish groups

Since taking his post as Israel’s ambassador to the United States in 2013, Ron Dermer has refused to meet with J Street, a liberal Middle East advocacy group. He has likewise not engaged with other left-leaning Jewish groups often critical of the Netanyahu government.

Liberal Jewish activists told The Times of Israel that the envoy’s unwillingness to speak with them is further evidence of the splintering relations between Jerusalem and the American Diaspora, and the growing partisan divide over Israel in the United States.

“He may deeply disagree with our views, but they are representative of the majority of American Jews on Israel and a viable solution to the conflict,” Jessica Rosenblum, J Street’s senior vice president of public engagement, told the Times of Israel. “And it’s not just a majority of American Jews, but a growing majority.”

Recent polling has shown that Democrats and Republicans are diverging on their views about the seemingly intractable conflict. The Pew Research Center found in January that 79 percent of Republicans “sympathize” more with Israel than the Palestinians, compared to just 27% of Democrats — of whom about an equal percentage supported Palestinians more. In the last election, 71% of US Jews voted Democrat.

Beyond J Street, which has sent multiple written requests for a meeting since Dermer assumed his post six years ago, and for him to address its galas and conferences, the ambassador has not met with other leading left-wing Jewish groups, including the New Israel Fund or Americans for Peace Now, according to sources with knowledge of the situation. Those groups, however, have not sought a meeting in the frequent and persistent way J Street has.

A source with Americans for Peace Now said a meeting was initially scheduled years ago, but Dermer then had to travel out of town. Since then, the organization has not “pursued it diligently,” the source said. But neither was any engagement initiated on the ambassador’s end.

Despite repeated requests, Ambassador Dermer declined to comment for this report. In public comments, Dermer has highlighted the importance of bipartisan support for Israel.

Dermer’s predecessor, Michael Oren, who held the post from 2009 to 2013, regularly met with J Street and other progressive Jewish organizations.

“Generally speaking, every ambassador sees his job in a different way,” Oren told The Times of Israel. “I saw myself very much as the ambassador of the people of Israel to the people of the United States. I don’t want to speak for Ron, but my sense is he’s more sort of the prime minister’s ambassador.”

Marc Lamont Hill Moves From Justifying Terrorism to Promoting It

Several months ago, CAMERA wrote about the self-promoting CNN commentator and Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill, pointing out his bigoted anti-Israel disinformation campaign and defense of Palestinian terrorists.

The Investigative Project on Terrorism provides new evidence that Lamont Hill has progressed from being a radical, anti-Israel propagandist and justifier of terrorism to one who directly promotes Palestinian violence and terrorism against Israelis.

Lamont Hill was one of the advertised speakers at a conference by a leading BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) group that was held on September 28-30, 2018. In an audio recording of Lamont Hill’s remarks there, he can be heard using his anti-Israel propaganda to advocate for violence.

He repeatedly urges his audience not to “romanticize nonviolence, ” and concludes that “we have allowed this nonviolent thing to become so normative that we’re undermining our own ability to resist in real robust ways.”

Lamont Hill previously justified the kidnappings and murders of three Israeli boys in 2012, saying:
This starts with occupation. There’s an apartheid state in Gaza. There’s an apartheid state in the region. That’s what we need to talk about. That’s what starts as resistance. It’s not terrorism.

He bemoaned Israel’s employment of the Iron Dome air defense system to intercept short-range rockets and artillery shells fired into Israel, because, he lamented, “it takes away all of Hamas’s military leverage.”

And he labelled the call for Palestinians to reject hatred and terrorism “offensive and counterproductive.”

Boycott-Israel activists disrupt Holocaust film in Berlin

Two activists from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign disrupted the presentation of an Israeli Holocaust film in Berlin last week, prompting Israeli security officials to evict the protesters as the audience booed the stoppage caused by the BDS people.

Based on video footage of the disruption, The Jerusalem Post was able to identify one of the BDS activists as Ronnie Barkan, an anti-Zionist from Israel, whose conduct Berlin’s intelligence agency classified in an August report as antisemitic.

Barkan did not immediately respond to a Post press query regarding his activity and the name of the second activist. He did, however, acknowledge on Twitter that “In case you were wondering what was being screened while we disrupted the event.” The activists can be seen on a video holding a sign that read, “No culture in whitewashing Apartheid.”

The nearly two-minute video of the disruption by Barkan and his co-activist was posted on YouTube by the pro-Israel Germany-based group Aktionsforum Israel. The group wrote under the video that BDS attempted to sabotage a film about the Holocaust on October 4.

“This recalls the speech from Bjoern Hoecke with the culture of forgetting,” the group wrote. “Both BDS and parts of the Alternative for Germany [AfD party] as well as the NPD [neo-Nazi party] have a problem with this topic.”

Hoecke, an AfD politician, slammed the memorial in Berlin to victims of the Nazi Holocaust as a “monument of shame.”

Pope To Transfer Accused Priests To Afghanistan, Where Western Media Ignore Pedophilia (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Rome, October 11 - The leader of the Roman Catholic Church will soon take drastic steps to address the sexual abuse scandal plaguing the organization, a spokesman announced today, by moving all those who have engaged in such conduct to a country where indigenous culture condones or encourages it, but Western activists and journalists deem it unworthy of sustained attention.

Father Suipette Underuggi told reporters at a Vatican press conference this afternoon that given the dearth of media and NGO protests against rampant pedophilia in Afghan society, and those groups' acceptance of the phenomenon as part of the country's cultural makeup, Pope Francis has decided to move the various clergymen dogged by sexual abuse accusations to the South Asian nation, where they would avoid continued attention to their crimes.

"After extended examination of the available options, the Holy Father has elected to augment the Holy See's presence in Afghanistan by several hundred personnel," announced Father Underuggi. "The Holy Father's chief concern has always been the good name of the Church, and this move, in his divinely-inspired assessment, will go furthest in ensuring that the scandal dies down."

Father Underuggi pointed to the relative paucity of international organizations denouncing, let alone working to reduce or end, pedophilia in rural Afghanistan. "Even the Western military coalition that operates there is careful not to say or do anything to disrupt it," he observed. "their considerations, obviously, are not the same as ours, but what the phenomenon demonstrates is that pedophilia in Afghanistan, especially of the men-on-boys variety that has been getting so much negative attention among Roman Catholic clergy, is generally ignored by the West. We can work with that."

Church officials declined to specify when the program might begin. A Vatican functionary told reporters that numerous bureaucratic and other hurdles remain before the initiative can launch. "For one thing, a robust presence of non-Muslims will hardly be taken lightly there," admitted the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, given the sensitivity of the issue outside Afghanistan. "But I am sure that with tact and flexibility, we can arrive at a mutual understanding with all the necessary parties."

Already, a fact-finding mission to the potential destination by two dozen of the affected clergymen is in the works, with participants expected to pay particular attention to the number and ages of people in the tribal areas where they expect to be posted over the long term.

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Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

I first made aliyah to Israel in 1979, but returned to the US in 1988. During the 26 years between my yerida and my return to Israel in 2014, I became more and more involved in pro-Israel activism, both because I felt that I was more knowledgeable than most Americans about the issues, and because of a nagging feeling that I should never have left.

I wrote, spoke, arranged events, passed out fliers, picketed anti-Israel happenings, and tried to convince my mostly liberal and progressive friends that they should support Israel (see Rob Vincent’s comments about the futility of this enterprise here).

One of the things I did was to become active in the local Jewish Federation. I became a board member and served as treasurer for a number of years. I tried to keep the Federation involved in countering the anti-Israel activity that flowed from local “peace” groups, from activists in the university, and (later) from a growing Muslim community. I tried to influence the Federation to make grants to pro-Israel causes and to invite speakers and present films to correct the misinformation from the media and other sources that was so prevalent.

The Federation always allocated a portion of its grants to “Israel,” which traditionally meant via the national organization, the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA). I had some problems with this. For one thing, JFNA did not support projects across the Green Line. When it made grants to bodies that had projects all over the country, it even audited those bodies and deducted an amount equivalent to the funds spent in Judea/Samaria, the Golan Heights, and (then) Gaza. For another, I didn’t see why we should support the overhead of the JFNA bureaucracy when we could give directly to those causes in Israel that we thought were most effective. Finally, I found their annual meeting extravaganza, the “GA” (General Assembly), an orgy of self-congratulatory posturing, to be distasteful, counter-productive, and wasteful.

This year, JFNA is having its GA in Tel Aviv, for the first time (it is usually held in a major US city, and has been in Jerusalem in the past). There could be technical reasons for this choice, but it seems to me that in the year that the US Embassy is finally established in our capital, it is clear that holding the GA in Israel but not in Jerusalem sends a message – and not a very friendly one. I am sure that JFNA officials do understand this and did it deliberately.

In addition to the choice of venue, the theme of the conference itself shows an insensitivity that borders on insult. “Israel and the diaspora, we need to talk,” it says, and the clear implication is that they need to talk and we need to listen. What chutzpah!

Caroline Glick notes that the homepage of the GA’s website spells out what they think we need to talk about: only 8% of Israelis see themselves as “liberal” (in Israeli terms, on the Left) while 50% of Jewish Americans do; only 43% of Israelis compared to 61% of American Jews think Israel and a Palestinian state could coexist; and only 49% of Israelis compared to a whopping 80% of American Jews think that non-Orthodox rabbis should be able to officiate at Jewish weddings in Israel (my italics).

Obviously what Israel does about a Palestinian state must be entirely up to Israelis. Why would anybody think that the opinion of Americans, thousands of miles away, should be taken into account by Israelis who are next door to the prospective Palestinian state, and who would be the targets of its terrorism? Why should Americans even have an opinion about who can perform a wedding in another country? It is as ridiculous as Israelis complaining about Elvis impersonators performing weddings in Las Vegas. One can see now why “we need to talk” makes Israelis uncomfortable: what is really being questioned is our sovereignty as an independent state.

Glick believes it’s all about punishing Israelis for liking Donald Trump. According to a June 2018 AJC poll only 34% of American Jews approve of how he is handling relations with Israel, compared to 77% of Israelis. And from an Israeli point of view, Trump has been one of the most friendly of American presidents. While his decision to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem got more attention than anything else, it’s possible that his administration’s systematic puncturing of the Palestinian “refugee” myth and ending the policy of financing the endless multiplication of the refugee population via UNRWA will do more to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians than any of his predecessors’ failed initiatives.

American Jews, Glick says, simply can’t get beyond their liberal politics to notice that at least in the case of Israel, Trump is doing the right things. Reform Movement President Rick Jacobs even initially expressed reservations about Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move the US Embassy there. But what can you expect from a Jewish organization that couldn’t even agree to oppose Obama’s Iran deal?

I am sure that Trump is yet another issue that American and Israeli Jews disagree about. But in my opinion, he is not the primary cause of the Federations’ decision to emphasize and magnify the disagreements.

Much of the material in the GA’s breakout sessions seems to be taken directly from the playbook of the Reform Movement, which has so far been unable to gain traction among a significant number of Israelis for issues like religious pluralism, concessions to the Palestinians, support for keeping illegal migrants in Israel, mixed-gender prayer at the Kotel, and so on. For a number of years – long before the advent of Trump – the movement has been working with its partners J Street and the New Israel Fund (both groups in which Jacobs was active before he became URJ President), to assist the forces of the Left in Israel in regaining the political dominance they lost when Menachem Begin became PM in 1977, and the popularity they have continued to lose since then.

Since Benjamin Netanyahu has been PM, one of the strategies that the Israeli Left and its partners in the US has employed has been to cook up “crises” between their American Jewish constituency and the Israeli government. These have included presenting proposed changes in the rules regarding conversion to Judaism in Israel (which have zero effect on American Jews) as “delegitimizing the diaspora”; comparing isolated incidents of ultra-Orthodox harassment of women with the government-sanctioned behavior of white racists in the Jim Crow South; hijacking the Women of the Wall movement; taking up the cause of illegal migrants in Israel; attacking the Nation-State Law; and so on. With each crisis, the spokespeople of the movement blame Netanyahu, and suggest that unless Israel undergoes a change of government, the relationship with American Jews – and hence with America as a whole – will be irreparably damaged.

It’s clear that JFNA, the national organization of Jewish Federations, has adopted the ideology and strategy of the Reform Movement in connection with Israel. This follows the general trend of non-Orthodox Jewish organizations in America moving leftward as older pro-Israel activists die off and younger products of the very biased American university system take their places. It’s happened in university Hillels, the ADL, Hadassah, and in numerous local Jewish organizations.

Their target is much larger than Trump. It is the character of Israel as an ethnic nation-state that the liberal Jewish establishment wishes to change. And why do they want to change it? They don’t really know. Perhaps they are just unfamiliar with it. But in fact their actions make them part of a much larger movement, one that can’t abide a Jewish state, and which would see it destroyed or changed beyond recognition.

Nevertheless, with all their sound and fury, the Jewish Federations no longer do very much for Israel, and they do nothing we cannot do for ourselves. We are not required to defer to them.

Like so many of the disparate concerns surrounding Israel today – the Temple Mount, the Gaza border, the Golan Heights, building across the Green Line, European financing of hostile NGOs – our issues with the American diaspora revolve around sovereignty. We need to defend it wherever it is in danger – even from our friends.

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.

10/11 Links Pt1: Trump Rejects UN and UNESCO’s Fictitious Palestinian State; Abbas’ advisor: Islam’s religious war to destroy Israel has started; Minister seeks posthumous Medal of Valor for terror victim Ari Fuld

From Ian:

David Singer: Trump Rejects UN and UNESCO’s Fictitious Palestinian State

Bolton was unequivocal in his statement:
“Palestine” is not a state… It’s not a state now. It does not meet the customary international law test of statehood. It doesn’t control defined boundaries. It doesn’t fulfill the normal functions of government. There are a whole host of reasons why it’s not a state.”

Article 1 of the 1934 Montevideo Convention completely substantiates Bolton’s claim.
Holding out the carrot after administering the stick – Bolton continued:
“It could become a state, as the president said, but that requires diplomatic negotiations with Israel and others… We have consistently, across Democratic and Republican administrations, opposed the admission of ‘Palestine’ to the UN as a state, because it’s not a state.”

Bolton’s tempting offer may have been made to try and get the PLO to negotiate with Israel on Trump’s soon to–be-released peace plan. It seems certain to fall on deaf ears as the PLO wants nothing to do with Trump’s plan.

The PLO will only be more infuriated at this latest Trump effort to engender some reality into the Arab-Jewish conflict – as happened when Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

UNESCO’s decision to admit “Palestine” as a member in 2011 in clear breach of UNESCO’s own Constitution has come back to bite UNESCO with a vengeance – with America and Israel quitting

UNESCO on 31 December 2018.

UNESCO anti-Israel decisions made since “Palestine” was admitted to UNESCO membership have included:

January 2014 – cancelling an exhibition at its Paris headquarters on the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel

October 2016 – disregarding Jewish ties to the Temple Mount – only referring to it by its Muslim names – then several weeks later – passing a softer version of the resolution that referred to the Western Wall by its Jewish name – though still ignoring Judaism’s ties to the site.

July 2017 – designating Hebron and the two adjoined shrines at its heart — the Jewish Tomb of the Patriarchs and the Muslim Ibrahimi Mosque — as a “Palestinian World Heritage Site in Danger”.

On 29 November 2012, the UN General Assembly granted Palestine“non-member observer state” status.

Pure fiction.

Israel envoy to UNESCO: Do what you want, we’re leaving anyway

Israel’s top UN envoy blasted UNESCO’s attempt to water down its controversial bi-annual Jerusalem resolution, reaffirming that Israel planned to leave the organization at the end of the year.

Danny Danon spoke after the 58 members of UNESCO’s executive board in Paris hid language disavowing Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem in the lengthy annex to an otherwise short benign text called Resolution 28.

The statements in the resolution’s annexes are “further evidence, for anyone who did not understand why the United States and Israel withdrew from UNESCO," Danon said.

The board gave its preliminary approval to that text on Wednesday, with a final vote likely to be held on Monday.

UNESCO’s director-general Audrey Azoulay lauded the use of an annex text to bypass some of the controversy caused by the Jerusalem resolutions in past years.

“I wish to thank those who have worked to achieve this, especially the representatives of the Palestinian, Israeli and Jordanian delegations, and all members of the Executive Board who supported this agreement, as well as the European Union,” Azoulay said.

A similar compromise had been reached at the April Executive Board meeting. At the time, the Israeli and the Palestinian delegations accepted the annex compromise, with Jerusalem welcoming Azoulay’s efforts to downgrade the anti-Israeli tone of the agency.

How Palestinians Lie to Europeans

In the eyes of Hamas and its supporters, it is fine for Palestinians to throw explosive devices and firebombs at soldiers, but it is completely unacceptable for the soldiers to defend themselves. According to the twisted logic of the Palestinian leaders, it all started when Israel fired back.

Those who sent the Palestinians to clash with the Israeli soldiers along the border with the Gaza Strip are the only ones who bear responsibility for killing more than 150 Palestinians and injuring thousands of others.

The goal the Palestinians have in mind is to see Israel gone. All of it. Mahmoud Abbas believes he can achieve this goal by waging a diplomatic war against Israel in the international community -- one aimed at delegitimizing and demonizing Israel and Jews.

The question, again, remains whether the international community will ever wake up to realize that Palestinian leaders are playing them for fools. The European Parliament delegation that visited Ramallah is a good test case: What message will its members convey back at home: the truth about the ruthless and repressive Palestinian Authority, or the lies that were spoon-fed to them by Abbas and his friends?

Palestine Times reports that Hamas leader Ahmed Kurd announced Wednesday morning the disbursement of funds for a number of "martyrs" and wounded from the regular riots on the Gaza border.

The funds will be distributed this morning through Gaza banks.

2000 families will receive between 400 and 600 shekels. Their names will be published through the website of the Ministry of Social Affairs.

The rioters know that they and their families will be supported if they get injured or killed, which is incentive to act more violently in the poverty-stricken area.

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.

For the first time, a member of Congress says Israel practices "apartheid." (Of course, J-Street calls her "pro-Israel.")

From a fundraising email by the US Campaign for Palestinian rights:

Ten days ago, a sitting Member of Congress used the “a” word: apartheid. And she did at our national conference, Together We Rise.

Smack dab in the middle of our three-day conference, where more than 550 people from around the country came together for 40+ workshops, panels, and artistic performances that organized, energized, and amplified the incredible work people like you are doing, history was made. Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) openly, and correctly, named Israel for what it is:

“The world has a name for the form of government that is codified in the Nation State Law — it is called apartheid.”

This. Is. Huge. In that moment, Rep. McCollum became the first elected official in the US to tell it like it is. Of course, this isn't just about one word. But this moment is a benchmark in a narrative shift we have all been working towards for a long time.

There is a video of much of her talk but it cuts out at the time that she says Israel is an apartheid state. Mondoweiss has a transcript.

Naturally, J-Street is an enthusiastic supporter of Betty McCollum, claiming that she "has been a strong ally of the pro-Israel, pro-peace community since her election to Congress."

If this doesn't show what J-Street means when they say they are "pro-Israel," nothing does.

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.