Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, October 12, 2014

10/12 Links: Mizrahi Nation; Sweden's unprincipled stance on recognition; The Kobani slaughter

From Ian:

JCPA: The Significance of the First Hizbullah Attack against Israeli Forces since 2006

For the first time since the Second Lebanon War in 2006, Hizbullah claimed responsibility for an attack against Israeli forces in the Shabaa Farms region of the Israeli-Syrian-Lebanese border on October 7 in which two IDF soldiers were wounded.
Hizbullah’s announcement stated that the action was carried out by the military unit named for the Shaheed Hassan Ali Haydar, a Hizbullah demolition expert killed on September 5 when he tried to defuse several explosive devices attached to the Hizbullah telecommunications network near Adloun in southern Lebanon.
With the attack, Hizbullah sought to transmit the message that it placed its improvised explosive devices (IED) in retaliation for the killing of its demolition expert in Adloun, and it would not permit Israel to act freely in Lebanon in the mistaken belief that Hizbullah was preoccupied in Syria and wouldn’t react. Hizbullah wanted to clarify for Israel and, no less important, for its supporters in Lebanon that it could act on two fronts simultaneously and that Jihad against Israel remains its reason d’être.

JPost Editorial: The Kobani slaughter

Although the US, France and UK did begin limited air strikes on Islamic State, the illusion that they would be effective has been burst with the siege of Kobani. Pentagon spokesman R.-Adm. John Kirby told Fox News on September 8 that Kobani was not a priority for air strikes. “ISIS wants this town, they want territory, you need willing partners on the ground,” he said. “We are in discussions the Turks about what they can or may do, we can’t make the decision for them.”
Kirby added: “There is a limit to air power.... IS wants to hold ground.... Everyone is focused on Kobani and we understand, but we are taking away revenue [from Islamic State] and removing command and control nodes.”
This statement illustrates that protecting civilian life is not a real goal of the US administration or its allies. The technical references to preventing revenue from reaching Islamic State shows that stopping ethnic-cleansing and mass murder is not on the international community’s agenda.
The tragedy unfolding in Kobani is unacceptable.
Nations intone “Never again,” but we are watching a human catastrophe happen as Western powers fail to employ their massive resources.
It is time for the world to wake up and do something to aid the Kurds in their battle with Islamic State before it is too late.

Eugene Kontorovich: Sweden's unprincipled stance on recognition

Sweden’s position on Western Sahara also stressed the need that recognition neither proceed nor preempt a process between SADR and Morocco – a process that is not happening, not on the horizon, and has no chance of success given Morocco’s adamant opposition to anything other than a one-state solution.
Thus in recognizing “Palestine,” Sweden violates its own, entirely normal view of international law – that there cannot be recognition before actual independence. On the other hand, perhaps the new government has changed its view on international law, and thinks that recognition as a state no longer requires territorial control by the recognized entity. But in that case, recognizing “Palestine” but not SADR is obviously insincere and hypocritical. Unless the changed policy results in recognizing SADR, it represents nothing but a purely political attack on Israel, rather than an implementation of a coherent policy.
Sweden has framed its recognition move as part of its broader policy of standing up for the underdog, an excuse recently parroted by former MK Rabbi Michael Melchior. But given that the new ruling party has long had a policy of recognizing SADR – and not “Palestine” – the sudden jumping the gun on the other, can only seem to be pandering to faddish European sensibilities, rather than an implementation of their government’s own previously declared sense of justice.
Indeed, the lack of principle gives support to claims that Sweden is primarily motivated by the large number of Arab immigrants rather than high principle. (Presumably, like the Arab League, they would support the Arab regime in Rabat over the self-determination claims of the black African Sawahari.) That is not something that Israel can influence, and thus this would only serve to limit the seriousness with which Swedish positions are taken in Jerusalem.
Of course, if Stockholm were to recognize SADR – or ultimately not recognize “Palestine” – its foreign policy would then satisfy the high pretensions of fairness and integrity to which it strives.

Richard Millett: The blood of Israelis and Palestinians will be on the hands of our politicians.

With the British Parliament due to take up six hours of precious debating time on Monday over whether to recognise a “state of Palestine” Vincent Fean’s article in The Guardian sums of the ignorance of those who will vote for such recognition.
Perhaps the most risible part of Fean’s article is this:
“The United States should guarantee the safety of both peoples with US or Nato troops during the full, phased withdrawal of Israeli forces from Palestine, endorsed in a unanimous security council resolution.”
Really? Fean must have not been near a radio or television for the last three years and so not seen what Assad and Islamic State have been doing to their own people while the US, UN and NATO all watched on. Never again? Don’t believe it.
If Monday’s debate ends with a vote in favour of recognising the “state of Palestine” there will be no change on the ground. Israel won’t suddenly give up its security requirements because of our Parliament. That would be suicide.
The recognition will only ratchet up the expectation of the Palestinians and lead to more bloodshed and violence on both sides. This blood will be on the hands of the likes of Fean and our politicians who vote in favour on Monday.
Our politicians should get back to representing their own constituents instead of desperately trying to buy votes by fleeing to foreign fields.

San Francisco State University is probably not the most Israel-friendly university in the United States.

In truth, I feel quite confident in suggesting that the opposite is true. Among SFSU faculty most hostile to Israel, however, is professor Rabab Abdulhadi of the ethnic studies department.

Back in the 1960s, the University of California in Berkeley had the reputation for being the most radical school on the west coast of the United States. SFSU, however, was always more hard-core. That is part of what I liked about the place when I was there in the late 90s.

A Warning to Parents:

The truth of the matter, unfortunately, is that any Jewish family would be well advised to keep their kids away from San Francisco State; that is unless they wish to expose them to malice, and potential violence, grounded in anti-Semitic anti-Zionism of the type promoted on campus by professor Abdulhadi.

Unless Jewish parents want their kids to be physically confronted over Israel, as were Jewish students when I was there, I very much recommend sending them to universities elsewhere... either that or make sure that they know how to fight. Get them enrolled in Krav Maga classes, perhaps. And make damn sure that they know something about the history of the Jews in the Middle East, and just why a Jewish State is necessary, before trundling them off to campus as idealistic freshmen.

This is the only reasonable conclusion that I can come to given the fact that SFSU funds student organizations, such as Abdulhadi's General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS), that calls for violence against us. The reason that SFSU funds violent hatred toward Jews - which it clearly does when it funds GUPS - is because they believe that Israel may, in fact, be as awful as Abdulhadi claims that it is.

And lest anyone doubt that GUPS does, in fact, call for violence against Jews, this is the image currently at the very top of their Facebook page.

Although the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre was a massacre of Arab Muslims by Lebanese Christians, anti-Semitic anti-Zionists at SFSU always blame the Jews.

The image obviously shows a masked man with a rifle being greeted as something of a hero by a poor Arab woman somewhere either in Gaza or in the disputed territories. The message is clear. GUPS favors organizations devoted to driving out Jewish sovereignty on historically Jewish land.

From my perspective this would be something akin to funding a student Klan organization because maybe the white majority in the nineteenth-century American south had a point. This is a criticism, by the way, coming from GUPS left, not its right. Jewish national liberation is as much a progressive value, or should be, as is Tibetan national liberation or Kurdish national liberation.

SFSU Faculty:

While Professor Fred Astren, the head of the Department of Jewish Studies, is responsible for simply watching too much of this go on during his tenure - although it is unclear to me what he can do to stop it - the main culprit at SFSU is his colleague, professor Abdulhadi of the Department of Ethnic Studies / Race and Resistance Studies and the Senior Scholar of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative, at the College of Ethnic Studies, San Francisco State University.

I kid you not.

Abdulhadi is a "post-colonial" Arab left-feminist academic from Yale who believes that Muslims in the Middle East have every right to murder Jews as a matter of "resistance" and, thus, as a matter of "social justice."

Administrators like Astren put up with this horrendous nonsense presumably due to an ethos of collegiality - or perhaps just due to desensitization over the years - but it is unclear to me why that should inhibit the rest of us from strenuously objecting.

In distinction, Abdulhadi is not the least bit interested in compromise.

There is, after all, no compromise with a bloody fist.

That image is a Palestinian-Arab flag and what it clearly represents, much like a Nazi swastika, is violence against Jews. Ideologues can dress it up in the language of human rights all that they want, but we understand what it means. It means hatred. It is a bloody fist and until quite recently it held a prominent place on a web page associated with Abdulhadi, but she seems to have deleted it. You cannot really blame the woman for removing that image - if she, in fact, did so - because she was also the faculty advisor to GUPS when the student president of that organization, Muhammad Hammad, made a "selfie" with a switch-blade calling for violence against the IDF.

She was also the faculty advisor to GUPS when they held aloft signs in front of SFSU's Malcolm X Plaza reading, "My heroes have always killed colonizers," by whom they meant Jewish people on historically Jewish land. They may have meant that killing white people is joyous, also, but they certainly meant that killing Jews is so.

Subsequently, Tammi Benjamin's AMCHA Initiative, out of UC Santa Cruz, accused Abdulhadi of misuse of university funds during a recent trip to visit a number of terrorists in Gaza and the disputed territories, including the plane hijacker Leila Khaled, on the university's dime. Abdulhadi sold this trip as a scholarly endeavor, but there is no question but that the lines between scholarship and political activism are exceedingly porous for this SFSU professor. She is at least as much an activist as a scholar and, thus, the university essentially purchased the anti-Semitic anti-Zionism that Abdulhadi peddles.

San Francisco State backs Abdulhadi against Benjamin's charges of misuse of funding, having found those charges unwarranted. What the university seems not to understand, however, is that for most of us the problem here is not one of faculty corruption - the problem is not that Abdulhadi is a crook - but of the spreading of hatred and violence toward Jews under guises of academic freedom and "universal human rights."

It is about the perversion of western liberal values in the service of totalitarian regimes and in opposition to the democratic State of Israel.

That is the point and that is the reason why so many of us object to the kind of malice that we saw last year on the SFSU campus. You cannot pay student organizations to spit hatred at Jews and then contemptuously dismiss Jewish people who stand up for themselves.

Or I suppose that you can and certainly SFSU Dean of Ethnic Studies, Kenneth P. Monteiro did in an effort to deflect from the bigger picture. In a rather ugly public letter concerning the AMCHA Initiative's interest in Abdulhadi, Monteiro writes:

The AMCHA Initiative has over many years expressed its support for the policies of the state of Israel and their disagreement with those who do not support those policies. Indeed, I firmly support their right to express their views.

This is false. AMCHA is not about supporting Israeli policies. AMCHA is about keeping an eye on the rise of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism in the academe and making people aware of its corrosive, if not violent, tendencies. (Gil Troy, by the way, has some some words on the matter over at the Jerusalem Post.)

Monteiro writes:

AMCHA has publicly singled out one of our faculty, Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, for uniquely malicious bullying. Therefore I am compelled to repudiate their claims publicly. Make no mistake, Professor Abdulhadi has been and remains a valued colleague, scholar and teacher. She is a locally, nationally and internationally recognized and respected scholar/activist, who is the recipient of awards for the quality of her work. The claims made by AMCHA against her were investigated, as are all claims no matter the source, and those claims have been found false.

So, am I to understand that Monteiro disagrees that Abdulhadi was the advisor to GUPS when both its president and its regular student members called publicly for murder? Because I am pretty sure that this is easily verifiable.

Is he claiming that Abdulhadi did not publish a bloody fist, indicating violence against Jews, on a website associated with her name?

Is he claiming that Abdulhadi did not recently visit with terrorists, including a plane hijacker that is considered a hero to many of Abdulhadi's students?

Is he claiming that Abdulhadi does not support BDS?

Is he claiming that she does not, in fact, spread malice toward Jews through spreading malice toward the Jewish State?

Is all of that false, professor Monteiro?

The Bigger Picture:

I feel reasonably certain that those of us who care about Jewish well-being have not made the mistake to think that SFSU would repudiate Abdulhadi. We do not, you can be sure, expect San Francisco State University to in any way protect its Jewish students from the kinds of scenes of hatred that I was witness to when I was a student there. We understand very well Abdulhadi's ideology and how it relates to the university and we also understand that it is not a matter of this one particular hate-filled academic.

It is, rather, about the rise of the BDS movement and its corrosive influence not only on Arab-Israel discourse, or Muslim-Jewish relations, but on the well-being of Israeli society and the Jewish people, as a whole. Ultimately those who favor the international campaign to single out the Jews in the Middle East for boycott, divestment, and sanction, as Abdulhadi does, are championing a racist movement in direct contradiction to their own alleged values.

Abdulhadi, in a recent "End the Occupation" panel discussion even went so far as to suggest that the Gazan terror tunnels represented a humanitarian effort by Hamas on behalf of their people. She referred to those tunnels into Israel as a "lifeline" for the Gazans. The fact of the matter is, and she knows this, those tunnels were decked out with weaponry and supplies for the purposes of kidnapping and murder, yet Abdulhadi would have people believe that their purposes were bunny-like and benign.

They were not.

It was this bit of public stupidity which, in fact, inclined me to write this piece. Abdulhadi believes that those terror tunnels were essentially good things. She might find it regrettable that they are necessary, but in her unfortunate world-view, necessary they are.

I think that she should tell it to Dana Bar-on who used to live in kibbutz Nir Am in-between S'derot and the Gaza Strip before Abdulhadi's friends came to drag her and her family away.

She was there the night that Hamas fighters leaped out of the ground with rifles, yards from her home and she discusses it toward the end of the video below. The IDF dispatched the Islamist thugs in short order, but if they had not been there who knows what would have happened to those people?

Here is what Dana has to say and I promise you that you cannot understand what is happening in that part of Israel without listening to her all the way through:

The bottom line is that San Francisco State University, much like other schools - throughout Europe - has made a vehicle of itself for a noxious political movement whose ultimate goal is the dissolution of Israel as the national home for the Jewish people. If people like Abdulhadi were to get their way the Jews of the Middle East would, yet again, find themselves an abused minority living as dhimmis under Sharia law just as Jews did for thirteen long centuries.

That was when we were forced to ride donkeys, if we were to ride, and were not allowed to repair synagogues.

But I have a message for professor Abdulhadi.

It is this:

The Day of the Dhimmi is Done.

And for that, at least, we can be very grateful.

Please, by the way, support the AMCHA Initiative. Tammi Benjamin is fighting a lonely fight against hard odds and just as Yale, Abdulhadi's alma mater, killed professor Charles Small's Interdisciplinary Initiative for the Study of anti-Semitism (YIISA), so many in the University of California and California State University systems would love to shut Tammi up.

Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

HRW asks donors to Gaza to pressure Israel, not Hamas

Human Rights Watch just can't stop itself from Israel bashing.

Their latest press release, entitled "Donors, UN Should Press Israel on Blockade," starts off this way:

Donor countries at the October 12, 2014 conference on assistance to Palestine should press Israel to lift sweeping, unjustified restrictions on the movement of people and goods into and out of the Gaza Strip, Human Rights Watch said today.

Throughout the inaccurate piece (they use the word "blockade" incorrectly, for example,) HRW calls on donor countries not to pressure Hamas but to pressure only Israel.

Here's what HRW doesn't demand:

No rebuilding of terror tunnels to kidnap Israelis
Stopping the use of civilian homes and offices as fronts to cover terror activity
Dismantling the Hamas terror infrastructure and replacing it with the PA security forces
Stopping the manufacture of rockets whose sole purpose is to attack Jewish civilians
Unconditional and immediate release of any remains of Israeli soldiers so their families can bury them properly
The immediate dismantling of terror groups like the Islamic Jihad Al Quds Brigades and the Fatah Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades
Demand that Hamas stop booby-trapping civilian homes
Demand that Hamas remove military headquarters from hospitals
Demand that Hamas immediately stop recruiting children for fighting

A donor conference is a unique opportunity to pressure those who are receiving aid to ensure that they use the funds and material properly. Yet HRW only sees it as an opportunity for Israel bashing, including some absurd demands like insisting that Israel import Gaza goods.

Naturally, HRW also lies. The article falsely states that Israel restricts Gazans from food, medicine and medical equipment. It falsely states that Kerem Shalom does not have the capacity to provide for Gaza needs, demanding that the crossing be enlarged even though it has never come close to capacity. It accuses Israel of "apparent Israeli attacks" on the Gaza power plant, which makes no sense since if Israel wanted to keep Gazans without power, it can simply turn off the 60% of power that Gaza gets from Israel directly.

Once again a "human rights" organization lies and exposes its clear anti-Israel bias. The question isn't about how donors to Gaza should act - it is how donors to HRW can stomach empowering its lies and impunity.

(To see more of how HRW exposed its anti-Israel bias during the war, see these posts.)

Arab rumor that ISIS selling children to Israeli mob

Al Mayadeen is reporting that ISIS members are selling children to childless Israeli couples.

The absurd rumor was supposedly taken from a Times of London article, which doesn't exist.

While it is true that ISIS is engaged in human trafficking according to a recent UN report, the wild Jew-hatred in the Arab world has converted this story into one where nefarious Israeli mobsters are buying small children to convert them to Judaism and increase the number of Jews in Israel.

Syria Free Press translates the reports this way:

“Daash sells kidnapped children from Iraq and Syria to Israel,” Arabic sites revealed, adding that the organization’s crime of trafficking in human beings is in coordination with Israeli intermediaries, linked to the international Jewish mafia, who buy babies and sell them to the families, specially inside Israel, who cannot have kids.

The sale of children is taking place in Syria, and after a local agreement with “moderate” terroristic elements, the organization that kidnaped the children deliver them from Syria to Turkey, where the kids are handed over to mediators of Tel Aviv, members of the Jews mafia in Israel.

This is one of the very lucrative business made by the terrorist gangs in Syria, according to sources, helped by an Israeli lawyer in Tel Aviv.

The British newspaper “The Times” revealed that the Daash-ISIL market of human trafficking is between the Tel-Aviv/Jerusalem area and the Iraqi city of Mosul, where the selling of children and women represent a source of income and funding for its mercenaries.

According to the same newspaper, the last market-auction was held in the city of Raqqa, and not only in Mosul, and both the kidnaped sold, children and women, is from the Yazidi communities and others Christian minorities.

The British newspaper revealed also that the price of one-child can be up to ten thousand dollars, while the women are cheaper, to encourage the jihadist mercenaries to buy them and to fight while sexually satisfied, choosing the most beautiful women for better price.

..According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, besides this human trafficking, Daash-ISIL mercenaries are cooperating with Jewish-mafia elements involved in trade of human organs, selling them the bodies of the people wounded or arrested.

Of course, the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights said no such thing.

CNN included this lie among its Arabic news roundup, quoting a version from a Tunisian newspaper. CNN didn't opine on whether the report was true or false.

Al Mayadeen also broadcast this report (no translation, but you can see generic images of religious Jews used to illustrate the story.)

(h/t Bob Knot)

Death toll of Palestinians in Syria is now 2512

Yarmouk

The Action Group for Palestinians in Syria say that the number of Palestinians killed in Syria so far is 2512.

A mortar shell today on a major street in Yarmouk stopped the distribution by UNRWA of food for the besieged group. It is unclear who fired the shell, the Palestinian PFLP-GC group is fighting on the same side as the Syrian regime in the area of the camp.

Another pro-Syrian Army Palestinian group fighting in the cap is called the Al Quds Brigades.

The media seems strangely uninterested in the plight of Palestinians in Syria.

The group also quoted a source as saying that 4,223 Palestinians had managed to be smuggled to Italy in recent months, mostly from Syria and Egypt but also some from Gaza.

10/11 Links: BHL: Today's Anti-Semitism Is a Ticking Time Bomb; Adios, Viva Palestina

From Ian:

Bernard-Henri Levy: Today's Anti-Semitism Is a Ticking Time Bomb

It was Christian during the centuries of the crusades, the Inquisition, the Medieval pogroms, and beyond—when the Jews were blamed for the suffering and death of Jesus Christ.
It was anti-Christian after people—following d’Holbach, Voltaire, the Enlightenment, and Voltaire’s slogan, “Let’s crush the infamous” (by which he meant the intolerance of organized religion)—began to reproach the Jews not for having killed the son of God but for having invented the One God, and thus, in a way, the son.
It was socialist, anticapitalist, and pro-worker at the time of the Dreyfus Affair in Paris and of the anti-bourgeois socialism of the founding fathers of French socialism. The deviation laid at the door of the Jews then became their supposed conspiracy, orchestrated from the heights of “Jewish finance,” to oppress those whom anti-Semitic propagandist Édouard Drumont described as the small and humble.
It became racist as soon as modern biology took its place in the circle of the sciences, bringing with it the fad of categorizing human beings by their physiological characteristics. “We couldn’t care less whether the Jewish people killed or created Christ,” went this new form of anti-Semitism. “We don’t give a damn about the alleged misdeeds of its anti-worker plutocracy. But that the Jews are a race—an inferior one!—that is injecting its venom into races superior and pure, that worries us; that is unforgivable.”
In short, it looks as if the world’s longest-running form of hate has never stopped searching for the right formula.

Palestinian allegedly killed for selling Silwan homes to Jews

A resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan was stabbed to death Thursday evening, with local residents reportedly saying that he was killed in a dispute over selling property to Israeli Jews.
The unnamed man, said to be about 50 years old, was taken to Jerusalem’s al-Maqased Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
According to Silwan residents who spoke to Haaretz, the slain man and his killer were both members of one of the families into whose building seven Israelis recently moved. The argument that prompted the alleged murder had to do with an adjacent apartment block, where units were also sold to Israeli Jews, the report said.

Israeli sappers neutralize bomb planted at bus stop in northern West Bank

Israeli sappers neutralized an explosive device at a bus stop in Samaria on Friday morning.
The incident occurred at Rahelim junction, which lies just south of the Palestinian village of Yasuf.
Police sappers were summoned to the scene after an explosive device which was wired to explode by remote-control detonation was found at a bus stop.
Authorities cordoned off the area and successfully neutralized the device. No injuries or damage resulted from the incident.

Chag sameach!

The holidays just never seem to stop....

Wishing a Chag Kosher V'Sameach to all my Jewish readers.

I will not be blogging from sundown Wednesday until Saturday night.

10/08 Links Pt2: On Campus, Hate is Spelled SJP; At Yale: Embrace Assad But Boycott Israel?

From Ian:

On Many Campuses, Hate is Spelled SJP

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.
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.

Blackballed Jordanian Author: ‘Jews Have a Right to the Land of Israel’

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.
“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.”

Pro-Israel Arab Activist Dragged Off Stage During Silent Protest Against Palestinian Solidarity Movement (VIDEO)

Orim Shimshon is a man with a mission.
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:

Watch how Anti Israel campaigners react to a peaceful silent protest

Who wants to start a religious war?

We saw yesterday that Hanan Ashrawi accused Israel of starting a religious war by considering opening up an additional gate for Temple Mount.

Today Mahmoud Abbas made a similar accusation:

President 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.

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."

Allowing Jews to have access to Jewish holy places is inciting a religious war. Banning Jews from their holy spaces, however, is perfectly fine.

This is how most Muslims think.

Now, if you want to see something that no one at all will be upset at, check this out, seen in Facebook:

Yes, that is the Kotel (Western Wall) that is being overrun by Muslim hordes.

This is hardly an anomalous mindset.

So Arab officials will accuse Israelis of wanting to start a religious war at the drop of a hat.

But good luck finding an Arab who denounces paintings like this one as being against peace.

(h/t YMedad)

10/08 Links Pt1: Obama's unprecedented outburst against Israel; Indyk Bashes Israel on Yom Kippur

From Ian:

Isi Leibler: The Obama administration’s unprecedented outburst against Israel

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.
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.

ISIS: Can the West Win Without a Ground Game?

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.
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.

Who Does Turkey Support?

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.

Google builds a high tech sukkah in New York

From The Jewish Week:

Getting creative with your sukkah decorations this year? You’ve got serious competition—from Google .

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.

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:

She also shows a Chanukah lava-lamp menorah and a Rosh Hashanah Google beehive on her Google Plus page.

A fascinating legend is told in The Maccabæan: A Magazine of Jewish Life and Letters, Volumes 24-25 (January 1914), in an article called Jerusalem: The Ancient, by Dr. Benjamin Gordon:

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.”

If true, this legend shows that Muslims know quite well that this is a Jewish holy site they are usurping.

Gordon goes on to describe his secret visit to the Temple Mount in 1914.

Video of Muslims burning part of their "third holiest site"

Arutz-7 reports:

Masked 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.

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.

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!

And here they are shooting fireworks towards the Israeli police from within the Al Aqsa mosque:

Keep in mind that every August there are scores of articles in the Arab press about how an Australian set fire to the Al Aqsa Mosque in 1969, causing some damage.

Yet here we see Muslims setting fire to, and shooting incendiary weapons from, their own supposedly holy spot, and it is not even being reported!

(h/t YMedad)

Newest Protective Edge stats: 1:1 ratio of civilians to terrorists

The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center has released its sixth analysis of people killed during Protective Edge. Here is their executive summary:

The 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.

As with the previous reports, the Center is researching in blocks of 150 names released by Hamas, this one covering the dates of July 23-26. They found 31 photos of the new batch of terrorists, including these:

(h/t Yenta Press)

10/07 Links Pt2: The Case for Israel Pulling out of the United Nations; Israel bashers’ phony contrition

From Ian:

UNfriend: The Case for Israel Pulling out of the United Nations

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.
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.

Hillel Neuer, Director of UN Watch, Says UN Human Rights Council "Has the Power to Shame Abusers of Human Rights"

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.
“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.”

EU walks out on anti-Israel UN debate * Arab states outraged * Hillel Neuer cheers "act for justice"

Caroline Glick: Israel bashers’ phony contrition

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.”