Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, March 18, 2019

03/18 Links Pt1: Father of 12 succumbs to injuries from Sunday terror attack; PA official implicitly endorses terror attack in which 2 Israelis were murdered; Grenell: U.N. Human Rights Council is antisemitic

From Ian:

Father of 12 succumbs to injuries from Sunday terror attack

Rabbi Achiad Ettinger died of his injuries Monday, a day after being shot by a Palestinian terrorist during an attack in the northern West Bank, a family spokesperson said.

Ettinger, 47, was a father of 12 from the settlement of Eli. Doctors had been working to save his life since the attack near Ariel Sunday morning in which a soldier, Gal Keidan, was also killed.

Ettinger was shot in the head and neck as he drove by the Ariel Junction by terror suspect Omar Abu Laila, 19, who had stolen Geidan’s gun and opened fire on passing cars, according to the IDF.

He was rushed to Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva in critical condition and doctors worked for a day to save his life before he succumbed to his injuries, the hospital said.

Relatives of Ettinger told reporters Sunday that despite having been shot and bleeding profusely, he turned his car around and fired four bullets in the direction of the attacker, who managed to escape in a vehicle abandoned by a fleeing driver.

“This self-sacrifice characterized him over the years,” his family said in a statement, noting his decision to live for several years in south Tel Aviv “to strengthen Jewish identity” in the working class neighborhood.

His family asked that his organs be donated, Ettinger’s sister told reporters.

Hundreds mourn terror victim Rabbi Ahiad Ettinger in Eli

Hundreds of mourners came to the funeral of Rabbi Ahiad Ettinger in the settlement of Eli on Monday, as his family and friends tearfully eulogized and praised him for his life’s work and for having attacked the terrorist who took killed IDF soldier Gal Kaidan and the rabbi himself.

Ettinger, the father of 12, was killed in Sunday’s terror attack as he stopped to shoot at the terrorist as he was carrying out his attack, who returned fire and mortally wounded the rabbi.

Speaking at the funeral, Education Minister Naftali Bennett vowed to “cut off the evil” of terrorism and said that the State of Israel needed to take action in order “to win” the battle against its enemies.

“The evil that cuts off the best people must itself be cut off,” said Bennett in front of Ettinger’s family.

“On your grave, I say that the blood of Jews will not be the cheapest thing in the Middle East. We will cut off terror only when we free ourselves from our legal and mental bonds which prevent us from winning,” continued the minister.

Bennett described the rabbi as “a hero in life and hero in death,” and praised both his work in establishing a yeshiva in south Tel Aviv and his heroism in stopping his vehicle to attack the terrorist who was perpetrating a terror attack at that very moment.

“When the murderer stood not far from where we are now Rabbi Ahiad could have done the easiest thing and ignore the attack, say it’s not my problem, but he fired at the murderer and paid for it with his life,” said Bennett.

Netanyahu vows to build new West Bank housing following terror attack

Israel will begin building 840 housing units in the West Bank town of Ariel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday following Sunday's terror attack.

Speaking Monday at a visit to the town near which two people were killed in a terrorist attack the day before, the prime minister said, “These terrorists will not uproot us from here, the total opposite will happen.

“Tomorrow, we will begin building 840 housing units in Ariel in a new neighborhood as was approved two years ago.”

Netanyahu offered his condolences to the families of Rabbi Ahiad Ettinger and Gal Keidan.

Keidan, 19, a soldier guarding Ariel junction was killed at the scene of Sunday’s terror attack. He was buried in his hometown of Beersheba on Monday morning.

Ettinger, 47, succumbed to his wounds Monday morning after doctors at Beilinson hospital fought to save his life for almost 24 hours. Ettinger was the father of 12 and was head of the Oz and Emunah Yeshiva in south Tel Aviv.

“The two people who were killed were wonderful people, I am told,’ said the prime minister. “The hearts of the entire people are with their families.”

On Sunday morning, Israeli police found a small glider made from polystyrene that had an explosive device attached to it that came from Gaza.

The explosive was neutralized.

A similar booby-trapped plane was found last week, that one attached to balloons. My guess is that if the balloons are shot down (with bullets or lasers) or naturally explode when they gain enough height, the plane can glide a long distance before landing, increasing the range of the improvised explosives.

There were some 50 balloons with incendiary devices launched from Gaza on Sunday, perhaps to make up from Hamas canceling the "return march" on Friday.

There is no weapon more indiscriminate that incendiary balloons. Even the most rudimentary rockets can be aimed a little bit, but these balloons can land anywhere.

Which makes the silence of human rights organizations about this clear violation of international law even more egregious.

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.

The new prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Muhammed Shtayyeh, a key member of Fatah's Central Committee, has emphasized that Fatah does not recognize Israel:

The new cabinet and government is made up of only Fatah members, as opposed to the previous one which was nominally independent.

Abbas has dissolved the Palestinian Legislative Council which was led by Hamas members. To do it, he used the Palestinian Constitutional Court, which has mostly Fatah members that Abbas handpicked in 2016.

In other words, every single Palestinian executive, legislative and judicial branch is now headed by Fatah, and Mahmoud Abbas is the head of Fatah besides being president of the Palestinian Authority and the PLO.

Fatah does not recognize Israel, even though the PLO pretends to.

There has been very little discussion in Western media about Abbas' illegal moves to consolidate power, even as there have been hundreds of articles about Israeli internal politics. Similarly, the positions of these new leaders of Palestinian bodies - support for terrorism, being against a two state solution - have been ignored as well.

The lack of interest in how the Palestinian side is acting, combined with the intense interest in finding fault with the most minor of actions or words by Israeli officials, is simply another manifestation of how the media and world governments are biased against Israel - and don't really care about Palestinians.

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.

One fairly consistent feature that can be found among most people is psychological projection, the accusation that your ideological enemies are guilty of your own crimes or less than pristine thoughts.

Arab leaders accuse Jews of ridiculous crimes that invariably are things that they have done themselves, like attacking the enemy's crops or stealing their water.

The progressive Left is at least as guilty of projection. The entire idea that "white people" are invariably racist and that people of color are more righteous because of their skin color is as racist as it gets. No one stereotypes the sins of their ideological enemies more than today's "progressive" Left. And often they accuse white people, even those on the farthest Left, of subconscious racism that is so deeply embedded that it simply cannot ever be truly erased, and therefore all white people must be burdened with the original sin of racism forever.

Often, this projection serves as another psychological tool used by magicians - a means to misdirect people's attention so they don't see what is going on in front of their faces. When you keep the discussion oriented towards the supposed sins of your opponents, you keep the discussion away from people looking at you.

Ilhan Omar pretends to address her critics by misdirecting them in her new Washington Post op-ed:

There’s been so much noise about my views on foreign policy, I decided it needed more than a tweet. https://t.co/ogFqf3X4Dk
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) March 18, 2019

No, the noise isn't about her views of foreign policy, which are pretty much identical to all progressives. The noise is about her latent antisemitic attitudes. But Omar wants to misdirect away from that.

Since I began my first term in Congress, I have sought to speak openly and honestly about the scale of the issues our country faces — whether it is ending the crippling burden of student debt, tackling the existential threat of climate change or making sure no one in one of the richest countries in the world dies from lack of health care.

When she accused Jews of dual loyalty and the Jewish lobby of controlling Congress with its "Benjamins," she was speaking openly and honestly - about her own antisemitic feelings, feelings that are so deep that she does not even recognize them. Her view of US foreign policy is one that is secretly controlled by nefarious Jewish money and influence, that Jews speak with essentially one voice on Israel.

The article pretends to insist on using a single standard based on human rights for all nations, but the logic falls apart when you look past the platitudes:

Our criticisms of oppression and regional instability caused by Iran are not legitimate if we do not hold Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to the same standards.

I was unaware that Egypt, the UAE and Bahrain are controlling and funding terror groups worldwide like Iran is. But let's treat them all the same, based on internal human rights only, and ignore fomenting terror that violates the human rights of people she really doesn't think deserve the same human rights as everyone else!

Even though this op-ed was carefully written to make it appear that Omar is not obsessed with "Palestine," she has to address it and gives it five paragraphs - and her bias shines through even the layers of consultants and ghostwriters that she hired to spin this op-ed to be as liberal and fair as possible:

This vision also applies to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. U.S. support for Israel has a long history. The founding of Israel 70 years ago was built on the Jewish people’s connection to their historical homeland, as well as the urgency of establishing a nation in the wake of the horror of the Holocaust and the centuries of anti-Semitic oppression leading up to it. Many of the founders of Israel were themselves refugees who survived indescribable horrors.

We must acknowledge that this is also the historical homeland of Palestinians. And without a state, the Palestinian people live in a state of permanent refugeehood and displacement. This, too, is a refugee crisis, and they, too, deserve freedom and dignity.

A balanced, inclusive approach to the conflict recognizes the shared desire for security and freedom of both peoples. I support a two-state solution, with internationally recognized borders, which allows for both Israelis and Palestinians to have their own sanctuaries and self-determination. This has been official bipartisan U.S. policy across two decades and has been supported by each of the most recent Israeli and Palestinian leaders, as well as the consensus of the Israeli security establishment. As Jim Mattis, who later was President Trump’s defense secretary, said in 2011 , “The current situation between those two peoples is unsustainable.”

Working toward peace in the region also means holding everyone involved accountable for actions that undermine the path to peace — because without justice, there can never be a lasting peace. When I criticize certain Israeli government actions in Gaza or settlements in the West Bank, it is because I believe these actions not only threaten the possibility of peace in the region — they also threaten the United States’ own national security interests.

My goal in speaking out at all times has been to encourage both sides to move toward a peaceful two-state solution. We need to reinsert this call back into the public debate with urgency. Both parties must come to the table for a final peace deal; violence will not bring us any closer to that day.

Notice that Omar doesn't say a word about Palestinian obligations in human rights, or in bringing peace. Notice that she doesn't say explicitly that the two state solution must include a Jewish state, only an Israeli one. Notice that she only brings specific examples of bad behavior by only one side that must be protested. Notice the absence of the words "terror" or "Hamas."

Notice also that she uses another dog-whistle - "justice" - a word that means, to the far Left, the dismantling of the Jewish political presence in the region, as something that is inherently racist, while another Arab and Muslim state (that the Palestinian constitution says "Palestine" is) is not a violation of "justice." To the far-Left, "justice" means that Palestinians have the right to move to Israel even four generations after they fled. Omar probably agrees with that definition, always intended to destroy the Jewish state. She dances around her real feelings on that critical component of "justice."

Also notice that Omar doesn't address how her supposed care about universal values doesn't square with her support of BDS - of boycotting only one nation in the world. If everyone is to be treated the same, then why such particularity in punishing only one state in the world with boycotts and sanctions? And the founders of the BDS movement are very clear that they are against a two state solution - how can she support Israel's existence, and what form would Israel take?

Finally, notice that Omar's position that Israeli actions "threaten the United States’ own national security interests" means that Omar believes that Palestinians are always going to threaten the world with violence unless they achieve what they consider "justice." They are, according to her logic, an inherently violent people. What other people on the planet are considered a threat to world security if we do not give in to their own definitions of "justice"?

This op-ed is not meant to clear up her position on the conflict. It is meant to obscure it using nice words like "peace" and "justice" and "human rights" and "equality" that do not mean what they normally literally mean when used by the progressive Left and their Arab partners.

The entire article is misdirection away from Ilhan Omar's very problematic biases and positions. If she wants to clear the air, she should speak honestly, and not behind the layers of consultants that wrote and massaged this op-ed to say nothing about her real positions about Jews and Israel.

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.

03/17 Links: Victim of J&S attack id'ed as IDF soldier Gal Keidan, 19; UNHRC to call for Israeli arrests, settlement boycott; PMW: UNHRC should condemn the PA and Hamas for abuse of Palestinian children

From Ian:

Victim of West Bank attack identified as IDF soldier Gal Keidan, 19

The Israel Defense Forces on Sunday identified the victim of a West Bank stabbing and shooting attack earlier in the day as Sgt. Gal Keidan, 19, from the southern city of Beersheba.

Keidan, who served in the IDF’s 334th Artillery Battalion, will be buried in the Beersheba Military Cemetery at 11 a.m. on Monday, the army said.

He will be posthumously promoted to the rank of staff sergeant.

Two other Israelis were critically injured in the attack, which began at around 9:45 a.m. near Ariel Junction.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a statement, conveyed his condolences to Keidan’s family.

US envoy to the Middle East Jason Greenblatt responded to the attack on Twitter, saying his country “condemn[s] today’s brutal attack by a Palestinian terrorist who murdered at least 1 Israeli & injured others near Ariel.”

In a follow up post, Greenblatt said: “Disgustingly, but not surprisingly, Hamas & Palestinian Islamic Jihad welcomed the attack & no doubt the Palestinian Authority will reward the terrorist under its pay for slay policy.”

1 Israeli killed, 2 critically injured in West Bank terror shootings

One Israeli was killed and two were critically injured in a pair of shooting attacks in the northern West Bank on Sunday, the military said.

The attack began at around 9:45 a.m. near the Ariel Junction, where the terrorist assaulted a soldier with a knife and managed to gain control of his weapon, IDF spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said.

The attacker then fired at passing vehicles, hitting a civilian in the first vehicle. A second vehicle was hit, but managed to flee the scene. A third car stopped, and the attacker, whom Conricus said “appears to be a Palestinian,” took it and fled the scene.

“I saw the terrorist. He fired at my vehicle and I ran away while it was still running. The terrorist then stole the car, and I saw him continue driving in the direction of Tel Aviv,” the driver of the third vehicle told the Ynet news site.

Conricus said that the suspect then continued to the nearby Gitai Junction, where he shot at a soldier standing at a hitchhiking post, injuring him.

Netanyahu, Rivlin condemn West Bank terror shootings, vow to apprehend attacker

Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin, condemned the terror attack that took place Sunday morning at a pair of junctions in the northern West Bank in which one Israeli was killed and two were injured.

“We are in the midst of pursuing the terrorists in two locations in the Ariel area,” Netanyahu said at the opening of the weekly cabinet meeting. “I affirm my support for the IDF soldiers, the Shin Bet and the security forces chasing the terrorists. I’m sure they will catch them… as we did in every previous case.”

The IDF said it was not immediately clear whether the shooter had acted alone.

“My thoughts are with the families who are right now coming to terms with the terrible news from the horrific terrorist attack, and with the security forces who are right now in pursuit of the terrorists. The State of Israel will seek out, find and defeat all those who attack us,” Rivlin tweeted.

Several lawmakers used the attack as a platform for political statements over how to best handle Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians.

Culture Minister Miri Regev said the attacks “were a direct result of the rampant incitement on the part of Ahmad Tibi, who on Friday demonstrated that he was not prepared to condemn the murder of an innocent child in her bed and encouraged martyrs simultaneously.”

Hamas and Islamic Jihad praise deadly West Bank terror shootings

The Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror groups praised a pair of shooting attacks in the northern West Bank on Sunday, in which one Israeli was killed and two others were critically wounded, calling them “heroic.”

Early Sunday, close to the Ariel Junction, a terrorist assaulted a soldier with a knife, managed to gain control of his weapon and shot him dead, an IDF spokesman said.

The attacker then fired at multiple passing vehicles, hitting two cars and injuring a civilian, and then took another person’s automobile and fled in it, the spokesman said.

The suspect drove to the nearby Gitai Junction, where he shot at a soldier standing at a hitchhiking post, wounding him, and then continued on to Bruqin, an Palestinian village where Israeli security forces were pursuing him, the spokesman added.

“Hamas praises the heroic Salfit operation that happened this morning, which came in response to the occupation’s crimes,” Hamas said in a statement posted on its official Telegram account, referring to a Palestinian town near Gitai Junction. “This courageous and bold operation affirms that resistance, in all of its forms, is the most powerful and successful option to deter the occupation, foil its plans and protect and defend our people’s rights and holy sites.”

Cartoon of the Day: So much in common

Continuing my re-captioning (and in this case, editing) of single-panel cartoons....

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.

Palestinian paper reveals secrets of Bilderberg group.(Sounds a lot like the Elders of Zion.)

Amad, a Palestinian news site, has an exclusive report of the criteria to join the (real) Bilderberg group and what its agenda is.

The Bilderberg Group is not a secret. It is a bunch of Europeans and American leaders and heads of corporations who meet regularly to discuss Atlanticism.

According to Amad, however, they are all either Jews or Freemasons. Any new member must be either Jewish, Zionist or a globalist.

It runs the world, according to the Arab media. In the West, a ruler does not ascend to power or take office without the approval of this group. Which means they chose Clinton and Obama to be Presdents. (They are strangely silent on Trump.)

The invasion of Iraq was part of the agenda to liquidate the power bases in the Arab region to nationalize the region and to bring it under Israeli control.

Its goals are supposedly a new world government , one army, one currency and one industry. It wants to topple all national identities.It controls human minds through its control of the media, the schools. It manufactures crises and wars.

Of course, the European arm is controlled by the Rothschilds.

Good thing I already run it, or else I'd have to expand a bit.

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.

Islamic Jihad praises "heroic operations" of triple terror attack

Here's what the autotranslated Islamic Jihad news site Palestine Today described this morning's terror attacks:

Nothing thrills these animals more than dead Jews.

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.

The @NYTimes bullied into publishing lie "most Arabs forcibly removed from their homes in Jaffa"

Three days ago, the New York Times published an article entitled "Jaffa Is Tel Aviv’s Unexpected Luxury Hotspot."

Palestinians were outraged because an article about Jaffa in 2019 didn't include their lies about Jaffa in 1948.

They wrote to the New York Times, and unbelievably it issued a correction - assuming their lies about most of Jaffa's Arabs being expelled in 1948 is the truth.

Editors’ Note: March 14, 2019
The original version of this article, in focusing exclusively on the new high-end hotels and other additions, failed to touch on important aspects of Jaffa's makeup and its history — in particular, the history and continuing presence of its Arab population and the expulsion of many residents in 1948. Because of this lapse, the article also did not acknowledge the continuing controversy about new development and its effect on Jaffa. After readers pointed out the problems, editors added some of that background information to this version.

This paragraph was added to the article:

The gentrification hasn’t pleased everyone. Jaffa for centuries has been a stronghold of Arab and Muslim life. In 1948, when the State of Israel was founded, most of Jaffa’s Arab residents were forcibly removed from their homes. Today the district is one of the few areas of the country with a mixed Arab and Jewish population, and as luxury projects have moved in, so have accusations that the city’s Muslim history is being erased.

Most Arabs did not get expelled from Jaffa in 1948. The New York Times was bullied by Arabs into publishing revisionist history.

I have written about Jaffa a number of times. The first residents who were forced from their homes were Jews, in August 1947, from Arab fire - including from the minaret of the Hassan Bek Mosque.

The rich Arabs of Jaffa left quite voluntarily starting when the fighting started in December 1947. They mostly went to Lebanon, where a lot of them had families and where they had similarly fled in 1936 to avoid fighting.

Historian Efraim Karsh writes:

In Jaffa, Palestine’s largest Arab city, the municipality organized the transfer of thousands of residents by land and sea; in Jerusalem, the AHC ordered the transfer of women and children, and local gang leaders pushed out residents of several neighborhoods.

As for the Palestinian Arab leaders themselves, they hastened to get themselves out of Palestine and to stay out at the most critical moment. Taking a cue from these higher-ups, local leaders similarly rushed en masse through the door. High Commissioner Cunningham summarized what was happening with quintessential British understatement:

You should know that the collapsing Arab morale in Palestine is in some measure due to the increasing tendency of those who should be leading them to leave the country. . . . For instance, in Jaffa the mayor went on four-day leave 12 days ago and has not returned, and half the national committee has left. In Haifa the Arab members of the municipality left some time ago; the two leaders of the Arab Liberation Army left actually during the recent battle. Now the chief Arab magistrate has left. In all parts of the country the effendi class has been evacuating in large numbers over a considerable period and the tempo is increasing.

An article in The Nation from 1948 echoed this theme, that Jaffa was evacuated by the Arabs and not the Jews after their leaders fled:

Most of Jaffa was in good shape. The Arab masses, when they fled, took what little they could carry; the wealthy Arabs, who had left during the months before the real fighting began, often salvaged the greater part of their portable possessions.

Not one source from 1948 claimed that Arabs were expelled by Jews.

Petra Marquardt-Bigman uncovered a first hand Arab account as well:

I found an Al-Ahram Special from 1998“commemorating 50 years of Arab dispossession since the creation of the State of Israel.” On pp.91-93 there is an eyewitness account covering the situation in Jaffa between late 1947 to May 1948 under the title “After the matriculation.” The author, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, is a former resident of Jaffa with impeccable anti-Zionist credentials – which is to say he would have described in detail all the horrors if there was any truth to the NYT claim that “most of Jaffa’s Arab residents were forcibly removed from their homes.”

However, recalling his last months in his hometown, Abu-Lughod wrote:

“No sooner had the UN General Assembly passed its partition resolution in November 1947, than Palestine was torn apart by a war waged between its two historically antagonistic communities — Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews. […] The first shots were exchanged between Jaffa and Tel Aviv on the eve of 30 November 1947 during a three-day general protest strike declared by the Arab Higher Committee. […] On the eve of the UN Partition Resolution, Jaffa’s Arab population numbered over 70,000. By and large they supported the traditional Palestinian leadership headed by Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti.”

Understandably, Abu-Lughod, who was by then a professor of political science, didn’t mention the fact that the man who headed the popular “traditional Palestinian leadership” in the second half of the 1940s had spent the first half of the decade in Berlin, where he lived in considerable comfort as a well-paid guest and committed ally of Nazi Germany. Indeed, a 1948 magazine article described Al-Husseini as “Hitler of the Holy Land.”

Abu-Lughod then goes on to note that most Arabs in Jaffa and elsewhere seemed confident that “as the country belonged to the Arabs, they were the ones who would defend their homeland with zeal and patriotism, which the Jews – being of many scattered countries and tongues, and moreover being divided into Ashkenazi and Sephardic – would inevitably lack. In short, there was a belief that the Jews were generally cowards.”

When this belief proved mistaken, people started to leave Jaffa. According to Abu-Lughod, at first mainly the rich left, but as more and more people began to flee the fighting, the “National Committee…decided to levy a tax on every family who insisted on leaving.” Abu-Lughod volunteered to help with collecting this “tax:”

“I worked in a branch of the committee based in the headquarters of the Muslim Youth Association near the port of Jaffa. Our job consisted mainly of harassing people to dissuade them from leaving, and when they insisted, we would begin bargaining over what they should pay, according to how much luggage they were carrying with them and how many members of the family there were. At first we set the taxes high. Then as the situation deteriorated, we reduced the rates, especially when our friends and relatives began to be among those leaving.

We continued collecting this tax until 23 April, when the combined force of the Haganah and the Irgun succeeded in defeating the Arab forces stationed in the Manshiya quarter adjacent to Southern Tel-Aviv. On that day, as we realised that an attack on the centre of Jaffa was imminent, I and my family decided that they had to be evacuated temporarily. We rented a van, into which we crammed all the women and young children and sent them to Nablus.”

Abu-Lughod himself stayed in Jaffa until May 3, when he left by ship together with two friends to make the short trip to Beirut. By July 1948, he was already back with his family in Nablus, from where he soon made his way to the US to study and to build a successful career at Northwestern University. He left there in 1992 to become vice-president of Bir Zeit University in Ramallah.

As Abu-Lughod’s account illustrates, the majority of Jaffa’s Arab residents fled the fighting over a period of several weeks or even months – by land or by sea – while Jaffa’s self-proclaimed defenders tried to exploit those who wanted to leave by demanding a “tax.”

Petra also shows that most of the Jaffa Arabs in 1948 were recent immigrants from other Arab lands, which explains why they were so eager to flee rather than defend homes that they felt few ancestral ties to.

The New York Times' own reporting from 1948 doesn't have a hint of Jews expelling Arabs. The Arabs fled out of fear of war. (And many stayed, including in Jaffa, without any problem.)

The New York Times assumed that the outraged comments were based on the truth. After all, the repeated claims of Jews expelling Arabs from Israel must have some truth to them, right?

But the truth matters. And the New York Times has just proven once again that it prefers a version of history that caters to its biases rather than to facts.

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.

03/16 Links: Nothing happened at Gaza border today, proving Hamas completely controls the ‘Great March of Return’; Germany to deport terrorist Rasmea Odeh at urging of Amb. Grenell; Pro-Israel Lawyers Question Jurisdiction Of ICC

From Ian:

Nothing happened at Gaza border today, proving Hamas completely controls the ‘Great March of Return’

The supposedly civilian and spontaneous border ‘protests’ are a charade, a propaganda event, turned on and off by Hamas like a spigot. It’s deadly Pallywood.

The so-called ‘Great March of Return’ was launched in late March 2018.

Palestinian propagandists and western anti-Israel activists, amplified by the international media, routinely depict the ‘protests’ as a spontaneous civilian uprising caused by Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

But as we have shown in dozens of posts, the protests are violent riots, often under cover of huge clouds of burning tires.

The participants are led by Hamas and Islamic Jihad military operatives. It is no coincidence that at least 80% of the Palestinians killed were terrorist group members.

Joe Truzman has extensively documented both the violence and involvement of terror groups.

Even many of the “children” involved and sometimes killed are teenage terror group members.

So what didn’t happen today that proves our point?

The best proof that the riots are not spontaneous or civilian is that nothing happened today, for the first Friday in almost a year.

Germany to deport Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh at urging of U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell

When Rasmea Odeh was deported to Jordan by the U.S. government for immigration fraud in September 2017, it was uncertain whether we would hear from her again.

Who is Rasmea Odeh?

Odeh was the military member of the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who masterminded and carried out the bombing of the SuperSol Supermarket in Jerusalem in 1969, killing two Hebrew University students. We recently marked the 50th Anniversary of the bombing, In Memory of Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner, murdered 50 years ago in a Jerusalem supermarket bombing.

Odeh was convicted of the bombing after a lengthy trial which even an observer from the International Red Cross said was fair. Odeh served 10 years of her life sentence before being released in a prisoner exchange for an Israeli soldier captured in Lebanon. Odeh then made her way to the U.S. where she lied on her visa and naturalization forms. When her fraud was discovered, she was prosecuted, and then deported in a plea deal by which she escaped a prison term.

Odeh and her supporters concocted a demonstrably false story that she only was convicted in Israel after she falsely confessed after 25 days of sexual torture. In fact, the evidence showed that she confessed after one day, and the additional evidence against her was overwhelming. For a full discussion, see this post, The Lies of Rasmea Odeh and Her Supporters Exposed.

Rasmea became a hero to the anti-Israel movement in the U.S., including now-Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.

Sbarro terrorist wanted in the US

Ahlam al-Tamimi, a Jordanian terrorist who assisted in the 2001 suicide bombing in the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem, responded to a tweet by US Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt, who linked to the State Department’s Rewards for Justice program which offers financial rewards for information on the whereabouts of terrorists, including Tamimi.

Tamimi, who served a prison term for her part in the attack at the Sbarro restaurant and was released as part of an exchange deal with Hamas, said that Greenblatt's remarks showed that he is a "racist figure working for the occupation."

Tamimi, the first woman to join Hamas, was the person who drove the suicide bomber who carried out the Sbarro attack.

In 2017, the FBI placed her on its "Most Wanted Terrorist" list, charging her with "conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction against US nationals outside the US, resulting in death."

15 people, including two American citizens, were killed in the attack. Over 120 others were injured, including four Americans.

03/15 Links Pt2: Judea Pearl: An Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi on Ilhan Omar; J Street’s ‘Birthwrong’ project; Journalism’s Longest War: The New York Times Versus Zionism and Israel

From Ian:

Judea Pearl: An Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi on Ilhan Omar

The following letter is an adaptation of remarks made at the sit-in protest in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office in Washington, DC, on March 14, 2019.

As president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, and a lifelong Democrat, I urge House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to act boldly and decisively on Rep. Ilhan Omar’s antisemitic bigotry.

Our late son, Daniel Pearl, was not an Islamophobe, nor a foreign agent or a trader in “Benjamins.” He was a principled American journalist, a champion of truth, and a relentless peace-seeker, who was murdered for being a Jew and a lover of Israel. I plead with Speaker Pelosi to rid the House of Representative of a new form of bigotry — directed again at Jews and lovers of Israel.

Words matter. And the hateful words pronounced by Rep. Ilhan Omar will continue to haunt and poison the future of American Jewry. However, we are concerned not merely with the harsh consequences of those words, but with the obsessive hatred that produced them, and the ultimate purpose for which they were enunciated — to erode American support for the State of Israel, the miracle that symbolizes Jewish history and Jewish aspirations.

We stand here to remind Speaker Pelosi of words that she has spoken many times in the past — that US support for Israel is not only a matter of mutual interest and shared values, but that American support of a homeland for the Jewish people is a moral imperative — a historical calling that should not be polluted with accusations of dual loyalty or greed.

The resolution passed by the House on March 9 condemns almost every form of hate on earth, except one — the anti-Zionist hatred waged against our brothers and
sisters in Israel. They are six and a half million refugees or descendants of refugees who have been denied normalcy for the past 70 years, besieged by hostile neighbors and confronted by daily existential threats from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.

The anti-Zionist obsession that Rep. Omar now brings to the halls of Congress aims to strip these six and a half million people from sovereignty and abandon them, stateless, to the mercy of genocidal neighbors. Americans cannot allow such moral deformity to stain the halls of their representative government.

‘Stand with Israel’ and ‘Stand with Ilhan' Chants Compete in Nancy Pelosi's Office

Pro-Israel demonstrators poured into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office Thursday, calling on her to condemn Rep. Ilhan Omar and antisemitism. They were interrupted by two pink-clad “Stand with Ilhan” counter-protesters.
Rabbi Aryeh Spero of the National Conference of Jewish Affairs organized the sit-in and from outside Pelosi’s office, went after the speaker’s failure to condemn Rep. Omar’s most recent antisemitic comments or even antisemitism itself.

“She failed us. She had a chance to condemn Omar. She didn’t. She had a chance to condemn standalone, by itself, antisemitism. She didn’t,” said Rabbi Spero. “This was a turning point to stand up and do what was right, what was just, what was fair, and she didn’t.”

After the Rabbi’s comments outside of the office, protesters streamed into Pelosi’s front office.

The group began chanting, “Stand with Israel.”

A pink-clad counter-protester responded with shouts of “Stand with Ilhan” while brandishing a “Stop Islamophobia” sign.

Melanie Phillips: Jewish Book Week, Corbynised Democrats

Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired the latest developments to roil our crazy world. On our agenda this week are what happened when I appeared at Jewish Book Week in London, and the “Corbynisation” of the US Democrats.

I talk about the discussion in which I took part at Jewish Book Week on Brexit, the rough reception given to myself and my fellow Brexiteer Maurice Glasman, and why I think that the majority support by bBritish Jews for remaining in the EU is profoundly and self-destructively wrong.

We go on to discuss the growing feeling among sections of the British Jewish community that it’s “time to leave”. Then we talk about the similarities between the Labour party’s crisis and the growing difficulties of the US Democrats, whose leadership has conspicuously failed to deal with the antisemitism displayed by certain new members of Congress. I make the point that, as has been observed from the French Revolution onwards and as I observed in my Times column, the Democrats are once again proving the truth of the old adage that “the revolution consumes its own”.

The Libertarian PodCast: Anti-Semitism on the Left

Richard Epstein grapples with a new wave of anti-semitism on the left, and explains why progressive notions of ‘tolerance’ often undermine pluralism.

03/15 Links Pt1: After rockets fired at Tel Aviv, IDF hits more than 100 Hamas targets; Palestinian Red Crescent to host BDS conference; Israel condemns ‘depraved and despicable’ mosque massacre in New Zealand

From Ian:

Two rockets fired at Tel Aviv from Gaza for first time since 2014 war

Rocket sirens were triggered Thursday evening in the Tel Aviv area in central Israel, as two rockets from the Gaza Strip were fired at the heart of the country for the first time since the war of 2014, signalling a possible dramatic escalation of violence by terror groups in the Strip just weeks before the Knesset elections.

Residents of Israel’s second-largest city and the surrounding metropolis of Gush Dan rushed to bomb shelters and reported hearing explosions. The rockets both hit open areas, and did not cause casualties. However, five people were treated for shock by paramedics.

Initial reports indicated that the Iron Dome missile defense system was launched to intercept an oncoming rocket. However, the Israel Defense Force said no interception had taken place, and it was not clear whether an interceptor had been launched.

“Two rockets were launched from the Gaza Strip towards Israeli territory. The alert and warning systems operated as required,” the army said. “No interceptions were made by aerial defense systems. No damage or injuries were reported. There are no special instructions for the civilian home front.”

Rockets fired from Gaza to Tel Aviv

IDF hits more than 100 Hamas targets in Gaza after rockets fired at Tel Aviv

Israeli war planes hit over 100 Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip in a night of strikes after two rockets were fired at Tel Aviv for the first time since the 2014 war, the Israel Defense Forces said.

The strikes came after an urgent late night consultation between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense chiefs in Tel Aviv. “Decisions were taken,” an Israeli official said without elaborating.

Shortly after the strikes began, the IDF issued a statement saying the “Hamas terror group carried out the rocket fire.” Hamas has denied it was behind the move.

On Friday morning, IDF spokesman Ronen Manelis said that over 100 Hamas targets were hit in response to the fire on Tel Aviv; air strikes went on throughout the night.

We hit 100 Hamas military targets in Gaza in response to the rockets they fired at Israeli civilians. Among them:
• Underground rocket manufacturing site
• HQ responsible for orchestrating Hamas terrorism in Judea & Samaria
• Hamas center of unmanned aerial aircraft#StopHamas pic.twitter.com/Iy3DwpNpTU
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) March 15, 2019

Iranian fingerprints in Gaza

Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired the missiles at central Israel from Gaza on Thursday night. But Iran, which controls the terrorist group and its leaders and which gives it money and provides it with the type of missiles used in Thursday's attack, is directly responsible. Iran doesn't hide its desire to spark a conflagration in Gaza with the aim of sabotaging and even halting Israel's efforts to dislodge the Islamic republic from Syria. The Iranians also want to embarrass Israel and harm it, by exploiting the fact that this is a sensitive period, ahead of the upcoming April 9 general election.

Hamas, however, is also responsible for the missile attack, because it hasn't taken action against Islamic Jihad and other recalcitrant groups in Gaza, which continue targeting Israel. Hamas lends a hand to the escalation along the border as a matter of routine, hoping to improve its negotiating position with Israel and receive aid dollars from Qatar.

In this regard, the missile attack on Gush Dan indicates the collapse of this conception and essentially the illusion – created by Hamas and Israel alike – that it's possible to control the flames Hamas is fanning along the Gaza border and prevent them from spreading. At the end of the day, those who shoot at Israeli communities near Gaza will also shoot at Tel Aviv.

It is also evident that Hamas isn't omnipotent in Gaza. Just yesterday, even before the missile attack, demonstrations erupted in Gaza against the organization over the grim economic situation there. In light of these protests, Hamas has no interest in even trying to control the rioters on the border with Israel or restraining Islamic Jihad and other like-minded groups.