Students for Justice in Palestine patently fails, in fact refuses, to advocate anything resembling peace or a just solution to the Middle East conflict. It does not advance Palestinian human rights or the human rights of anyone. In fact, it consistently violates the human rights of pro-Israel and Jewish students. It demonizes Israel, often in racist terms, and thus perpetuates division and conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. It opposes any and all cooperation or dialogue with Israelis or indeed anyone who disagrees with its radical ideology. It has shown itself disturbingly undisturbed by terrorism and those who support terrorism. It engages in and propagates anti-Semitic racism. And its members engage in acts of intimidation and physical violence, often with impunity.Blackballed Jordanian Author: ‘Jews Have a Right to the Land of Israel’
Contrary to its own claims, SJP is not a voice for the Palestinians. In fact, through its “anti-normalization” ideology, its goal is to shout down the many Palestinians and Jews who do seek a peaceful future, and instead manipulate the Palestinian cause in order to promote an atmosphere of hatred, intimidation and radicalism on campus. The result is that rather than contributing to debate and dialogue, SJP seeks to destroy these bedrock values of the modern university.
The coming year, therefore, will pose a test for university leaders, both students and administrators: Will they stand for the values of free discussion and open inquiry and fulfill their role as guardians of a safe environment for students, free of bullying and intimidation? Or will they continue to allow an organization that promotes terror to terrorize our campuses under the guise of free speech? The answer they choose will have a huge impact on the nature of our campuses for many years to come.
Despite being arrested, fired from his job, called “crazy” and an “infidel” and being left destitute, Jordanian writer Jihad Ali Alwan, 42, has no intention backing off his full-throated support of Israel, and from every possible platform, Israel’s NRG News reported Monday.Pro-Israel Arab Activist Dragged Off Stage During Silent Protest Against Palestinian Solidarity Movement (VIDEO)
“I don’t care what price I’ll pay. I will not apologize for my beliefs,” Alwan said, writing on his personal blog, “I suggest the Arabs normalize relations with Israel,” he wrote in October of last year.
The striking statements by the married father of four were read by some eight million readers, including the Jordanian Writers Association, who called him in for a clarification.
But after refusing to appear before the committee, the guild revoked Alwan’s membership. Which also prompted an irate blog post by the man known in the Hashemite Kingdom, as “The Normalizer.”
Orim Shimshon is a man with a mission.Watch how Anti Israel campaigners react to a peaceful silent protest
A British citizen of Arab origin, Shimshon says he was born in Baghdad and raised as a Muslim after moving to the UK as a child. Over the last year, he’s become a familiar – and unwelcome – figure at pro-Palestinian events and demonstrations in London.
At a recent rally in solidarity with the Syrian people in central London’s Trafalgar Square, Shimshon turned up waving an Israeli flag and holding a sign thanking Israel for treating victims of the brutal civil war raging throughout the territory of its northern neighbor. When another demonstrator told Shimshon that Israel was an “apartheid state,” Shimshon good-naturedly challenged him, underlining the fact that he is a pro-Israel Arab in the process.
This week, Shimshon was even more daring, attending a pro-Palestinian meeting in north London where he attempted to stage a silent protest. For his pains, he was dragged off the stage and shoved by the organizers of the event. Afterwards, Shimshon explained that he went to the meeting to protest against Jenny Tonge – a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords with a long record of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic statements – although in the end, she didn’t turn up.
Watch Shimshon’s latest encounter with the Palestinian solidarity movement:
Wednesday, October 08, 2014
Elder of ZiyonPresident Mahmoud Abbas warned Israel on Wednesday against turning the Palestinian-Israeli conflict into a religious war, stressing that recent attacks on Muslim worshipers in the Al-Aqsa mosque threatened to nature of the national struggle.Allowing Jews to have access to Jewish holy places is inciting a religious war. Banning Jews from their holy spaces, however, is perfectly fine.
Abbas said in a televised statement from his presidential headquarters in Ramallah that Palestinians and "the world know the dangers of using religion in political conflicts; we must all see what goes around us and Israel must pay attention and understand that such steps are dangerous to both Israel and others."
He added that Israel's attempts to open a second gate for Jews to enter the compound, altering the religious status quo, was a provocation about which Palestinians "could not remain silent."
Abbas also warned that the same kinds of provocations are happening at the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron, where worshipers are prevented from praying inside "as if Israel wants to completely cancel the Islamic existence of the mosque."
The exceptionally vicious US condemnation of Israel with regard to housing construction in the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem is not merely misguided, but also reflects irrational bias.ISIS: Can the West Win Without a Ground Game?
Incidentally, this behavior also has many ominous parallels to the inhumane incarceration of Jonathan Pollard, despite pleas for the commutation of his sentence from all sectors of American society.
The harsh outburst relates to a 2,600-unit housing project planned as an extension of an exclusively Jewish neighborhood adjacent to the suburb of Talpiot and Kibbutz Ramat Rahel, both within the Green Line. It incorporates primarily barren land on which Ethiopian and Russian immigrants had been housed temporarily in mobile homes. Highly significant – but a fact that is ignored – is that nearly half of the construction was designated to provide housing for Arabs. Construction permits were approved two years ago, but it was the far-left group Peace Now that saw fit to highlight the issue in a press release on the eve of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s meeting with US President Barack Obama in a calculated effort to embarrass the prime minister and provoke tension.
The successive statements by both the White House and State Department spokesmen must be considered among the most bitterly prejudiced and unbalanced condemnations of Israel ever expressed by the US. They make a mockery of repeated claims by the Obama administration that it considers Israel to be a close ally.
The United States and its allies have launched a military campaign whose stated goal is, in the words of President Barack Obama, to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State (I.S., also known as ISIS or ISIL) established by Sunni jihadis in a contiguous land area stretching from western Iraq to the Syrian-Turkish border.Who Does Turkey Support?
As the aerial campaign begins in earnest, many observers are wondering what exactly its tactical and strategic objectives are, and how they will be achieved. A number of issues immediately arise.
Any state—even a provisional, slapdash, and fragile one like the jihadi entity now spreading across Iraq and Syria—cannot be “destroyed” from the air. At a certain point, forces on the ground will have to enter and replace the I.S. power. It is not yet clear who is to play this role—especially in the Islamic State’s heartland of Raqqa province in Syria.
In Iraq, the national military and the Kurdish Pesh Merga are now having some successes at chipping away at the Islamic State’s outer holdings. The role of U.S. air support is crucial here. But the center of the Islamic State is not Iraq, and both the Iraqi forces and the Pesh Merga have made clear that they will not cross the border into Syria. This leaves a major question as to who is to perform this task, if the objectives outlined by President Obama are to be achieved.
The Mavi Marmara incident was a wake-up call to Jerusalem, where diplomats had earlier been unrealistically optimistic about building a working relationship with Erdogan despite several other, earlier, warnings, including Erdogan's famous tirade in Davos against (then) Israeli President Shimon Peres that, "You (Jews) know well how to kill!" The Turkish government has since frozen ambassadorial-level diplomatic relations between Turkey and Israel, and Erdogan has increased his calculated explosive rhetoric against Israel.
Erdogan's principal argument was that a foreign military had killed Turkish nationals outside of Turkey; that those who were killed were martyrs; and that he would never allow a foreign military to harm one single Turkish citizen. Once again, he was wrong.
One of the lucky survivors of the Mavi Marmara was Yakup Bulent Alniak, an Islamist activist for the Turkish "humanitarian aid group" IHH which organized the Gaza-bound flotilla. IHH is listed by many Western countries as a terrorist organization; but its members, including Alniak, were simply heroes for Erdogan.
Alniak survived the IDF raid in 2010 but lost his life recently, at the end of September, when a U.S.-Arab coalition struck one of the largest ISIS camps in Syria. A coalition of foreign armies had killed a Turkish citizen whom the Turkish leader had declared a hero, but since then Erdogan has remained mute.
Will Erdogan downgrade Turkey's diplomatic ties with the U.S. and five Muslim nations because their militaries killed a Turkish citizen outside of Turkish territory? No. Probably because, in the pragmatic Islamist thinking, one does not properly qualify as a "martyr" if he gets killed by an army (or armies) other than Israel's.
As of this writing, on the Turkey-Syria border, CNN correspondent Phil Black hourly beams pictures of the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani, with a black ISIS flag atop a building in the eastern part of the city, as Turkish soldiers in tanks lined up along the Turkish border "observe" ISIS troops close in for the approaching massacre.
Washington is expecting Ankara wholeheartedly to fight the rougher boys of the Islamist camp to which it belongs? Good luck.
Wednesday, October 08, 2014Elder of ZiyonGetting creative with your sukkah decorations this year? You’ve got serious competition—from Google .No photos of the Google Sukkah yet, but Carmeli has done this before. Here is the construction of the much lower-tech 2011 Google sukkah, I believe in California, that she was behind as well:
That’s right: The search-engine giant is participating in the Festival of Booths this year, and they’re doing it Google-style. For the first time, two sukkahs, constructed to halachic-perfection, will be built on one of the balconies of Google’s New York headquarters in Chelsea.
Complete with an advanced video conferencing system powered by Google Hangout, android-themed hangings, lava lamps, exercise balls, lego-building stations, a live-cam showing how many people are in the sukkah at any given time and, of course, walls plastered with the Google colors, the Google sukkah promises to speed the ancient hut into the high-tech 21st century.
Though the sukkahs were built with the primary intention of servicing Jewglers (the colloquial term for Google’s Jewish employees), other Googlers (Goiyglers, if you will) are encouraged to drop by. QR codes will be posted around the sukkah, allowing employees to scan for more quick information about the religious history, symbolism and significance and sukkot. A lulav and esrog, the ritual palm branch and citrus fruit shaken on the holiday, will be on hand in both sukkahs for any and all Google employees to partake.
Efforts to make the sukkot holiday come alive at Google were headed by proud Jewgler, Eleanor Carmeli. Carmeli, who worked at Google’s California headquarters for several years before transferring to the New York office this past year, described the sukkah initiative as a “grassroots effort.” She networked with other Jewglers via an email listserv for Jewish employees across Google’s global offices.
“We entered the conversation with a sense of humility, realizing that sukkot is much lesser known than other Jewish holidays,” said Carmeli, referring to the first time she approached management with the request. “There’s not a lot of space in New York City, so we went in with low expectations.”
Not only was the sukkah initiative given two-thumbs up, it sparked a trend across Google offices. This year, Google offices in Pittsburgh, Boston, Argentina, Dublin and the Mountain View global headquarters in California will all be pitching sukkahs, with the New York Jewgler team leading the way. The video-conference call system will allow Jewglers from one Google sukkah to see and talk with Jewglers in another Google sukkah.
“It seems we lit a fire under other Jewglers,” said Carmeli, who mentored Jewglers in other offices about how to navigate limited space in order to procure a sukkah.
Wednesday, October 08, 2014Elder of Ziyon
A prominent Jewish pilgrim, when on his visit to Jerusalem in 1832, asked the Governor why he would not allow him to visit that place [the Temple Mount], the former remarked, “there is one place in the Haram from which prayers are always answered. Should a Jew go there, he would pray that his Messiah should come, and he will surely come and drive the Moslems out.”
Wednesday, October 08, 2014Elder of ZiyonMasked Arab rioters threw fireworks and rocks at security forces on the Temple Mount on Wednesday, in what has become a tradition of riotous violence before the major Jewish holiday of Sukkot.Here is video of part of the riots, where Muslims celebrate setting a fire at the southern wall of the Temple Mount for no apparent reason. There are no police visible anywhere nearby. Allah Hu Akbar!
Riot police pushed the attackers back by setting up roadblocks, but it was not enough to deter the unrest.
The rioters continued to throw stones, bricks and iron bars at police from inside the Al-Aqsa mosque, while shooting fireworks at police and spraying an unidentified flammable liquid on them.
They also threw a Molotov cocktail at police, which ignited, wounded four officers lightly.
The police have restrained the rioters and removed all barriers protecting the entrance to the mosque. The wounded policemen were treated on the spot.
Five Arabs have now been arrested after the eruption, Arutz Sheva has learned.
"We will continue to show zero tolerance for any attempt to violate the public order, and we will arrest them and bring them to justice," a police spokesperson stated Wednesday morning.
Tuesday, October 07, 2014Elder of ZiyonThe number of names of those killed, examined so far by the Information Center, on the basis of lists of the Ministry of Health, is 900, that is - about 42% of the total Palestinians killed (said to be 2157, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health report as of September 14, 2014). A number of the MoH duplicate names were removed and terrorists who do not appear in the lists (both due to technical reasons and because of the policy of concealment and deception of Hamas) were added.
After these adjustments the total number of fatalities investigated so far by the information Center reaches 1,017, or about 47% of the total fatalities.
Adding the current findings with the previous five reports and combining information about the identities of the dead identified indicate the following breakdown of the 1,017 fatalities examined by the Information Center:
- 435 casualties were terrorists.
- 439 casualties were innocent civilians.
- The identity of 143 is unknown at this time. therefore it is not possible to determine whether they are militants or uninvolved civilians.
Of the 874 fatalities that we could identify, terrorist operatives are some 49.8% of the names, uninvolved citizens are about 50.2%. The ratio between them may vary upon Further examination of the names of the dead. At this stage it was not possible to identify 143 deaths, representing approximately 14% of all the names.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the UN General Assembly last week took place in the Western world’s epicenter for the promotion, codification, and implementation of institutional anti-Semitism.Hillel Neuer, Director of UN Watch, Says UN Human Rights Council "Has the Power to Shame Abusers of Human Rights"
After all, it is no coincidence that behind every conflict Israel has ever fought there has been a failed United Nations resolution.
Simply scrape the gloss off the noble sentiments expressed in the Charter of the United Nations and you will discover that the world body’s Near East policy has from its inception fanned the flames of Arab nationalism, perpetuating regional conflicts that have effectively preserved a status quo sympathetic to authoritarian Arab regimes, at the expense of Israeli security and sovereignty.
The die was cast by Great Britain, which had occupied modern-day Israel from the end of the First World War until the 1947 UN partition. The European-based realpolitik that catered to Arab nationalism and authoritarian rule came at the expense of historical Jewish claims and contemporary Jewish interests.
The UN Human Rights Council has been too welcoming to countries that abuse human rights, yet the inter-governmental body still “has the power to shame abusers of human rights,” Hillel C. Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, said in a talk at the University of Michigan Law School.EU walks out on anti-Israel UN debate * Arab states outraged * Hillel Neuer cheers "act for justice"
“I've witnessed some of the most vicious tyrannies using every arrow in their quiver, every tool in their toolbox, to prevent their countries from being named in a resolution, from being targeted in an investigation, even to be so much as named on a watchlist—these countries will pull out all the stops, using all their political, economic, military influence, to ensure that they’re never named at all,” Neuer said in the talk on Oct. 1, presented by Jewish Law Students Association.
“Countries do not want to be shamed on the international stage—even powerful countries like China. … It harms their international prestige, it erodes their international standing, it can have economic and political consequences.”
Dr. Richard Horton, the editor of the English medical journal The Lancet, was not transformed by his visit to Israel last week.
Horton came to Israel last week the guest of Rambam Medical Center in a bid to dig himself out of the hole he dug himself into. On August 19 Horton published a 1,600-word letter criminalizing Israel. In it, Israel was accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. The authors called for a boycott of Israel, including Israeli academia. Since its publication on Lancet’s website, the letter has garnered 20,000 signatures.
The letter made no mention of the fact that the war this summer was initiated by Hamas through its illegal missile, mortar and rocket offensive against Israeli population centers. The esteemed medical professionals who wrote the letter failed to mention that Hamas’s operational headquarters was located in Shifa hospital in Gaza. And of course, they ignored the underlying fact that Hamas’s entire campaign against Israel was a crime against humanity.
Immediately following its publication, Prof. Gerald Steinberg, the head of NGO Monitor, exposed that the letter’s principal authors are frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Semites. Dr. Paola Manduca and Dr. Swee Ang disseminated a video entitled, CNN, Goldman Sachs & the Zio Matrix. It was produced by the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke.
As Britain’s Telegraph reported, in disseminating the video, Ang exhorted her audience to understand that the Jewish threat outlined in the video is a threat to humanity. In her words, it “is not about Palestine – it is about all of us!” For her part, as the Telegraph reported, Manduca has accused Israel of responsibility for the Boston Marathon bombing. And she disseminated an article comparing Israel to a “strangler fig,” which as the Telegraph explained, “grows around other trees and takes their sunlight, often resulting in the deaths of the original trees.”
Tuesday, October 07, 2014Elder of Ziyon
Preoccupied
Tuesday, October 07, 2014Elder of Ziyonmedia bias, NYT
Every human instinct recoils from the killing of children. It recoils even as Israel’s right to defend itself from rockets is clear; and the excruciating difficulty of waging war against an enemy deployed among civilians is acknowledged; and the readiness of Israel’s foes to kill any Jew is confronted. However framed, the death of a single child to an Israeli bullet seems to betoken some failure in the longed-for Jewish state, to say nothing of several hundred. The slaughter elsewhere in the Middle East cannot be an alibi for Jews to avoid this self-scrutiny.Cohen throws in the perfunctory disclaimers, yeah, sure, I know that Hamas hides among civilians, sure I know they target civilians, yeah they aren't wonderful people. But the death of a single Gaza child is a failure in the Zionist project altogether!
Of course, sermons are only part of the story. The High Holy Days are days to look inward, to be still. I found my eyes straying to a passage from Stefan Zweig’s “The World of Yesterday” reprinted in the prayer book. It read:There is indeed something in common between the Jewish experience and the Palestinian Arab experience of diaspora - but it isn't what Cohen thinks.
“Only now, since they were swept up like dirt in the streets and heaped together, the bankers from their Berlin palaces and sextons from the synagogues of Orthodox congregations, the philosophy professors from Paris, and Romanian cabbies, the undertaker’s helpers and Nobel prize winners, the concert singers, and hired mourners, the authors and distillers, the haves and the have-nots, the great and the small, the devout and the liberals, the usurers and the sages, the Zionists and the assimilated, the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim, the just and the unjust besides which the confused horde who thought that they had long since eluded the curse, the baptized and the semi-Jews — only now, for the first time in hundreds of years, the Jews were forced into a community of interest to which they had long ceased to be sensitive, the ever-recurring — since Egypt — community of expulsion. But why this fate for them and always for them alone? What was the reason, the sense, the aim of this senseless persecution? They were driven out of lands but without a land to go to.”
Two phrases leapt out: “community of expulsion,” and “driven out of lands but without a land to go to.” The second embodied the necessity of the Jewish state of Israel. But it was inconceivable, at least to me, without awareness of the first. Palestinians have joined the ever-recurring “community of expulsion.”
Following the summer’s conflict between Israel and Hamas, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has declared, in a wide-ranging interview with The Algemeiner, that his long held position that the Jewish state will not transfer any territory to the Palestinian Authority in the absence of extensive security arrangements has “only become firmer.”2 IDF soldiers injured in explosion on Lebanese border
He also asserted that the possibility that any peace agreement with the PA might unravel is justification for his strong stance on security.
I met Netanyahu last Wednesday evening at an upscale New York City hotel shortly after he reiterated support for “two states for two peoples” in a meeting with President Obama at the White House.
Two IDF soldiers were lightly injured when a Hezbollah bomb went off in their vicinity in the Har Dov region on Tuesday, the IDF Spokesman's Unit said.Ebola and "Palestine" Recognition, Today's Two Most Dangerous International Epidemics
The IDF said it shelled two Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon in response to the border bombing. Some 30 minutes after the incident a second explosion occurred on the border. There were no injuries or damage in the second blast.
The soldiers received initial emergency medical treatment on the spot, before being evacuated away from the Lebanese border to hospital for further treatment.
"The IDF sees this incident as a gross and violent violation of Israeli sovereignty, and sees the Lebanese government and Hezbollah as responsible for any attempt to harm Israeli soldiers or civilians," the military said in a statement. "The IDF reserves the right to act in any way, and at any time, to defend the citizens of the state of Israel."
Hezbollah later claimed responsibility for the blast.
The Jerusalem Post has reported that people who have arrived from the "affected areas" are being searched for to make sure none are carrying the dreaded Ebola virus. Considering the amount of tourism to Israel and the number of illegal workers from Africa, this is a danger. Yes, it's a medical danger.
But there's a different sort of danger encroaching on Israel, and that's the growing de facto if not de jure recognition of "Palestine" as a nation by foreign countries and international bodies/organizations/NGOs.
There are two equally dangerous reasons for this, and by looking at the above map, you can see that although most Israelis try not to pay too much attention, this is no minor phenomena. Most of the world would be perfectly happy for "Palestine" to replace Israel, because the basis for their recognition is that they, and many world leaders, academics and ordinary people even in countries that haven't yet recognized this new Arab country firmly and sincerely believe that Israel/Jews invaded an ancient country called "Palestine" and imposed a "new" Jewish one now called Israel. This very popular and accepted fallacy is the most dangerous "disease" which we in Israel must fight. It's more dangerous than Ebola for sure.
Among the foreign leaders who firmly, religiously believe in the myth of Palestine is United States President Barack Hussein Obama. And unfortunately, Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who support the "two state solution," enabling the establishment of a state called "Palestine" are actually undermining the security and continued existance of the State of Israel. (h/t Bob Knot)
Tuesday, October 07, 2014Elder of Ziyonmedia bias, NYTThe latest speech by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, before the United Nations General Assembly represented a significant departure in his thinking. Until last week, Mr. Abbas had been the firmest believer in and most loyal champion of direct negotiations with Israel under the exclusive sponsorship of the United States. He insisted constantly that these negotiations were the only way to reach a political settlement to the conflict.For the past six years, Abbas has been doing everything possible to avoid direct negotiations with Israel.
Over the years, he was extremely conciliatory toward Israel, and offered up one concession after another on several key issues, presuming that that would enable him to appease Israel and convince it to end its occupation and work with him to achieve a political settlement, which would finally allow for the creation of the long-awaited Palestinian state.Abbas has not made a single public concession to Israel - and he has bragged about his intransigence on multiple occasions.
None of Mr. Abbas’s conciliations or concessions to Israel ever bore fruit. In fact, over time, the country tilted increasingly rightward and its stubbornness and intractability toward the Palestinians grew.Leftist hero Yitzchak Rabin was far more hawkish at the time of his murder than Bibi is today. The only rightward tilt in Israel were as responses to the Palestinian Arab decision to support terrorists in 2001 and in 2014.
Mr. Abbas’s speech before the United Nations was one of his best since he became Palestinian president nine years ago.This is the speech where he said Israel was guilty of "genocide."
Tuesday, October 07, 2014Elder of ZiyonB'tselemInterviewee through translator Abu Roub: ...That you support the Jewish state.Now that we've determined that B'Tselem hires researchers who are quite at ease with lying through their teeth, what does this say about B'Tselem's research methodology?
"Toby": Why? Why do you think so?
Abu Roub: Not you personally.
Interviewee through translator The Germans pay for the Jews, while they say that Hitler killed millions of those Jews.
Interviewee through translator Abu Roub: Because you pay money, you support....
"Toby": Ah, because we are Germans, we support the Jews.
Abu Aroub: Yes.
"Toby": But ask him if he remembers that we also killed them.
Abu Aroub (without asking interviewee): (Laughs) It's a lie. I don't believe it...Sometimes they kill tens of people (unintelligible) - they are resistance. Now there is strong media, and they are lying.
Tuesday, October 07, 2014Elder of Ziyon
Buy EoZ's book, PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
