Gaza hospital not paying food bill. Let's blame Israel!

From Ma'an:

Companies in Gaza have stopped providing the al-Shifa hospital with food for meals in protest against not being paid for five months, a hospital official said Saturday.

Nasr al-Tatar, the general director of al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, told Ma'an the move was dangerous as it impacts both patients and medical workers.

The hospital owes 800,000 shekels (approximately $211,000) to the companies for food.

You would think that Hamas might want to help out, offering some appreciation for having Shifa Hospital doctors and patients act as human shields for the Al Qassam Brigades and other terrorists who used it as headquarters during the summer war.

I guess genocidal jihadists aren't that nice.

I find it interesting that given all the billions of dollars being raised for Gaza in the enlightened West, both privately and from governments, no one has felt that a hospital food bills of a relatively paltry couple hundred thousand dollars is worth sending money to. If all this Western money isn't going to hospitals and the like, then what is it being used for?

Yes, that's a rhetorical question.

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Supreme Court to hear Zivotofsky case today on the status of Jerusalem

From NPR:

The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments Monday for a second time in a case that combines Middle East policy with the dueling foreign policy roles of the president and Congress. It's a political hot potato that asks what U.S. passports should say about the birthplace of American citizens born in Jerusalem.

Ever since the founding of Israel in 1948, the U.S. has taken the position that no country has sovereignty over Jerusalem until its status is negotiated in a Middle East peace deal. Israel's supporters in Congress, however, have tried to force a different policy, passing legislation that would move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and require the State Department to allow U.S. citizens born in Jerusalem to list Israel as their place of birth on their passports.

The Bush administration and the Obama administration both refused to do so, contending that the passport mandate unconstitutionally infringes on the president's foreign policy powers.

Enter Menachem Zivotofsky, born in Jerusalem 12 years ago to American parents who emigrated to Israel and now maintain dual citizenship. The Zivotofskys want their son's place of birth on his passport to say Israel — not just Jerusalem. So they sued to force the State Department to let them do that.

Three years ago, when the case first went to the Supreme Court, the justices did not issue a definitive ruling, instead opting to send the case back to the lower court for further action. But now, the case is back. And a look back at the 2011 argument gives some clues about the justices' thinking.

A look at the questions raised in 2011 seems to indicate that the Supreme Court may be more inclined to back the President's opinion on the status of Jerusalem over that of Congress, meaning that the Zivotofsky lawyer has an uphill battle.

Back in 2011, a couple of months ahead of the SCOTUS ruling to send the case back to a lower court, a Weekly Standard article noted that the White House website itself referred to Jerusalem as being in Israel:

A couple of hours after that article was posted, the White House webmaster methodically went through the entire website and scrubbed nearly all mentions of "Jerusalem, Israel:" (with one example overlooked):

I just looked at the site again, and the webmaster seems to have only overlooked one additional mention of the term since then:

S. Fitzgerald Haney is Director of Business Development and Client Services at Pzena Investment Management, a position he has held since 2007. From 2002 to 2007, he was Director for Strategic Planning and New Business at the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation. From 1999 to 2001, Mr. Haney was a senior associate at Israel Seed Partners, a venture capital firm in Jerusalem, Israel.

But you can't erase statements made by the President or Vice President themselves.

In 2010, Vice President Joe Biden released a statement datelined in Jerusalem slamming Israel's announcement of new building, but he clearly indicated that he was in Israel at the time:
"I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem. The substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of proximity talks, is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I’ve had here in Israel."

Similarly, President Obama said that he was "here in Israel" when speaking from Jerusalem a number of times on his most recent trip to Israel in March 2013: at the Prime Minister's residence, Yad Vashem and twice at the Jerusalem Convention Center.

State Department officials also often acknowledge that they are in Israel when they speak in Jerusalem. For example, Undersecretary of State Wendy Marshall earlier this year said,"It’s wonderful to be here in Israel, to be here in Jerusalem." John Kerry has said similar things at least once. Previous Secretaries of State have also: Albright, Clinton, Rice.

The President and the State Department know quite well that Jerusalem is in Israel. But they want to hang onto this old relic of a never-implemented UN decision to recognize Jerusalem as a "corpus separatum" in 1947 as having legal validity. It is sort of pathetic, actually.

Interestingly, US officials stationed in Jerusalem as late as 1962 had the phrase "Jerusalem, Palestine" used on their passports, and this practice was protested by Israeli officials. I'm not sure exactly what date that practice was dropped. The State Department rationale at the time was:

On February 15, Crawford reported to Bar-Haim that in response to Israel's request he had checked as to whether the Department of State might stop using the term, "Jerusalem, Palestine" in the passports of U.S. Consular Officers assigned to that city. The answer was that the U.S. current practice was consistent with U.S. policy on Jerusalem and that Jerusalem, part of the former state of Palestine, had not since passed under the sovereignty of any other state in a de jure sense.

Of course, by my mentioning this here the anti-Israel idiots will be most happy, since they like to pretend that the "Palestine" of 1947 - a government that was run by Zionists - is the same "Palestine" that they pretend exists today. This is why they come up with stupid arguments based on currency and stamps and sports teams of the 1930s and 1940s that were run by Palestinian Jews as being proof of a previous state of "Palestine" - even though the Palestinian Arabs were against the use of "Palestine" currency, for example, currency that in Hebrew gave the initials of Eretz Yisrael.

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Ha'aretz op-ed argues against civil rights for Jews

Ha'aretz' Nir Hasson is clearly upset that the major argument for giving Jews free access to the Temple Mount is a liberal one:

The success of right-wing activist Yehuda Glick and the Temple Mount movement in recent years stems in part from the change Glick led in the discourse about the Mount. Instead of fiery threats to blow up the mosques and build the Temple, Glick argued the right to worship as a human right. His main point: It is inconceivable for a Jew not to be able to pray at the site most sacred of all to Jews, and that Jews who visit the Temple Mount are considered unwanted guests and are closely scrutinized, prohibited from conduct considered provocative, and first and foremost prohibited from praying.

Glick was wise enough to uncover the absurdity created at the Temple Mount, where people are arrested because they mumbled a prayer, moved to the rhythm of prayer or, perish the thought, knelt at the holy place. Raised awareness of the status quo and Glick’s argument placed no small challenge on the doorstep of spokespeople of the left, who were forced to defend a policy on the Mount that discriminates against people because of their religion – in this case, Jews.

This is terrible! An argument that Jews have rights could undermine everything Ha'aretz stands for!

Naturally, it is incumbent for Ha'aretz readers to know how to counter the argument that Jews have equal rights, and by golly, Hasson will give it his best shot. He enumerates a series of four "talking points" to counter Jewish religious, cultural, civil and human rights:

But a number of counter-arguments can be made. The first and most common is the danger of changing the status quo. History has repeatedly shown, from 1929 through 1996 and 2000, that the Temple Mount is an incendiary focal point and that the Al-Aqsa Mosque is a unifier of the secular and the religious, the right and the left, in Palestinian, Arab and Muslim politics. While there is demagoguery and incitement in some Palestinian discourse surrounding the Mount, which Muslims worship as the Noble Sanctuary, it does not change the fact that any attempt to alter the status quo will almost certainly lead to bloodshed and a diplomatic debacle with the Muslim countries and the rest of the world.

1929? The murderous 1929 riots started over false Arab rumors fueled by the virulently antisemitic Mufti of Jerusalem that Jews were planning to take over the Temple Mount. By recalling 1929 as a reason to support the status quo,  Hasson is saying that Arab threats and violence trump Jewish human rights. This is a curious position for an avowed defender of human rights.

His other arguments against Jewish rights are even more absurd.

One can claim that framing the Temple Mount as the object of Zionism’s desire is a distortion of Zionism’s values. From Herzl, who preferred Haifa over Jerusalem, to Moshe Dayan, who gave the keys to the Temple Mount to the Waqf, the leaders of Zionism preferred to keep the Temple Mount outside national aspirations.

So because early anti-religious Zionist leaders felt nothing for Jerusalem, Jews who pray daily for the city are irrelevant? How on Earth is this an argument against Jewish rights to an unquestionably Jewish holy spot?

The third argument involves Judaism. Contemporary Judaism is a religion that developed over the past 2,000 years, and is based on the absence of a Temple. This is not an edict of fate that Judaism learned to live with; the absence of a Temple is in many ways the backbone of rabbinic Judaism, which is an entirely different religion than priestly Judaism, from Second Temple times. In his book “The End of Sacrifice,” Guy G. Stroumsa shows how around the first century C.E., the custom of offering animal sacrifices at the altar ended, not only among the Jews but also in the Roman creed and in the new religion, Christianity. A return to this custom would be a cultural and religious step backward 2,000 years – before halakha (Jewish religious law), the rabbis, the Mishna and the Talmud.

This is a straw man argument - an argument against the rebuilding of the Temple today, not an argument against Jewish prayer on the Mount. Hasson is floundering.

The fourth argument, and in my opinion the strongest, is that the Temple Mount must once again be connected to its surroundings. To hear the Israeli debate, one might think the Temple Mount is located in outer space, or at the very least in West Jerusalem, over which no one challenges Israel’s sovereignty. But the Temple Mount is a real place, located between the village of Silwan and the Old City’s Muslim and Jewish quarters. Annexing the Temple Mount and East Jerusalem to the State of Israel is not a fait accompli, as one might suppose listening to the Israeli media. And although there are many who recognize the Jewish relationship to the Temple Mount, there is not one country that recognizes Israel’s right to sovereignty over it.

That is also the case with regard to the vast majority of those who go to visit the Mount and those who live in the neighborhoods nearby. Thus any step to change the status quo on the Temple Mount must, in terms of international law and morality, be part of a dialogue with the Palestinians, that very dialogue that the prime minister has been avoiding for many years.

In other words, "occupation" is the keyword needed to stifle any discussion of human rights for Jews. It is just as ridiculous an argument as any other - Palestinian Arabs would never, ever agree to give Jews any religious rights in what they consider their land.

It is supremely ironic that Hasson is now saying that dialogue must precede any Jewish assertion of universal human rights. Anyone arguing that Palestinian Arab rights must be negotiated before they are granted would be vilified by Hasson's left wing friends. Sure, they'll pretend to admit, Jews have rights - but Arabs have veto power over those rights.

Which means that to Hasson and the crowd that he is addressing in this piece, Jews really do not have human rights to begin with.

As we've seen, Hasson's  specific arguments have no merit. But the fact that he feels compelled to create arguments against Jewish civil, religious and human rights is most telling.

This article shows, beyond any doubt, in intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the Ha'aretz ultra-left crowd. Their anti-Zionism and (in this case) anti-semitism are not based on any lofty ideals of international law or human rights or universal principles. When faced with a clear situation of a violation of Jewish human rights, instead of defending those rights they choose to create "talking points" to counter them. Resorting to absurd "talking points" to oppose Jewish human rights shows that for people like Hasson, the rights themselves are meaningless, and invoking "rights" is merely an excuse to arrive at their pre-determined positions. When a person who pretends to advocate human rights is willing to so strenuously argue against them, then that person is really against human rights. 

This conflict is indeed about rights, and too many people think that Jews have none.  For hypocritical Ha'aretz writers like Hasson, human rights are not absolute: the only absolute is the minimization of Jewish national and religious rights. Ultimately, that is the crux of the entire anti-Israel argument, that Arab rights are sacred and competing Jewish rights are non-existent in comparison.

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Why peace is impossible, reason #8249

From Times of Israel:

A young Bedouin man from the Negev was fined NIS 1.2 million ($316 000) by a religious court for sharing a video of a sheikh dancing at an ultra-Orthodox wedding, thus humiliating him, Channel 2 reported.

The story reportedly began when the man, identified only as “A,” shared a video on Facebook which had been circulating for some time on social networks, in which Sheik al-Atrash was seen dancing at the wedding of ZAKA (an emergency response organization) volunteer Berale Yaakovovitch. He also gave a speech at the event in which he blessed the bride and groom on their path together.

The groom confirmed that the sheikh danced at the wedding and said he didn’t understand what the commotion was about. He added that he was happy to have the sheikh there.

But A’s post apparently led to many negative and disparaging comments against the sheikh from across the Arab world, some of which reached the man himself. Al-Atrash turned to the traditional Bedouin religious court, the “Haq al-Arab,” and sued “A” for dishonoring him.

So may people visit Arab areas and are told how warm and friendly they are. And I don't doubt it. This sheikh was clearly very friendly and quite happy to give blessings to his religious Jewish friends.

But in the wider Arab world, an Arab who is friends with Jews is anathema, so much so that the sheikh had to go to court to defend his honor for being "outed" as a Judeophile.

The amount awarded is much higher than the amount of money that is fined in Muslim courts in murder cases!

The court slapped “A” with an NIS 1.2 million fine for allegedly hurting the sheikh’s honor, leaving him thunderstruck.

“How can it be that [for example] for a man who commits murder, the judges impose a NIS 250,000 fine, and for me the fine was like I murdered five people. I’m in shock, ” he said.

“It’s a clip that was on the web for a long time so I just shared it,” ‘A’ told Channel 2. “I didn’t think that it would cause such an uproar or that my life would be in danger.”

When being friendly with Jews is far more dishonorable than being a murderer, the prospects for real peace between Jews and Arabs is less than zero.

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The Forward's moral equivalence between 3-month old terror victim and a stone thrower

The worst kind of moral equivalence can be seen in The Forward as they juxtapose the coldblooded  murder of a three month old baby and the killing of an Arab stone thrower.

The title? "A Tale of Two American Tragedies."

In October, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed two American citizens over just three days. Three-month-old Chaya Zissel Braun and 14-year-old Orwa Hammad were born in Jerusalem and Ramallah, respectively, but both held citizenship in the United States.

Chaya’s parents were American Jews who immigrated to Israel. Orwa’s parents were Palestinian Muslims who immigrated to the United States and then returned to the Israeli-occupied West Bank to raise their children. Both families’ migrations reflected their desire to live lives steeped in their religious heritage. They then found themselves the inheritors of the conflict.

The Forward goes on to mention that Hammad was accused of preparing to throw a Molotov cocktail. It does note he was among a group of Arabs throwing stones at Israeli cars "at Highway 60, a West Bank thoroughfare used by settlers" - well, that's an extenuating circumstance, isn't it? It also mentions that Hammad had pro-terror photos on his Facebook page.

That same Highway 60 has been the scene of hundreds of terror attacks, including the shooting deaths of four Israelis - including a pregnant woman - in 2010.

But to The Forward, both deaths are "tragedies". One person was a victim and one was an attacker; one was an innocent and one was a youthful criminal. But, hey, they are both American citizens, and their families are both sad, so that makes the terrorist-in-training and the terror victim part of the same moral universe - when your point of view is as skewed as that of The Forward.

We've seen this kind of lazy journalism before, this past summer in The New York Times and in an infamous Newsweek cover story that spawned an attempt to make a film juxtaposing the grieving parents of both the terrorist and the victim. Last week CNN made a similar equivalence between Chaya Zissel Braun and a Palestinian child killed by accident by a Jewish driver.

There is such a desire on the part of the media to turn the conflict into a "cycle of violence" where both sides have equivalent grievances. Yet scratching the surface only a little bit shows that one society raises their children to hate and to praise the murderers while the other one tries mightily to just live in peace.

These reporters, however, don't want to show the reality. They want to create a shorthand for readers to agree with their own biases, and the "moral equivalence" meme is an easy, lazy way to get their point across without making readers think that maybe, just maybe, one side is right and the other side wrong.

(h/t EBoZ)

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11/02 Links: Deal with the devil: When aid supports terrorists; Hundreds Pray for Yehuda Glick

From Ian:

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NGO Monitor: A deal with the devil: When aid supports terror groups

Two weeks ago, under the headline “US Humanitarian Aid Going to ISIS,” a Daily Beast exposé described how non-governmental organizations (NGOs), funded by the United States and European governments, were paying bribes “disguised and itemized as transportation costs” to gain access to areas of Syria controlled by Islamic State (IS or ISIS).
In addition to monetary contributions to IS, the article noted “fears [that] the aid itself isn’t carefully monitored enough, with some sold off on the black market or used by [IS] to win hearts and minds by feeding its fighters and its subjects.”
In other words, NGOs, ostensibly committed to human rights and guided by humanitarian values, have been supporting IS on multiple levels.
Similar challenges of delivering aid to areas controlled by violent, repressive terrorist groups also exist in another conflict zone in the Middle East: the Gaza Strip. Hamas, recognized as a terrorist organization by the US, EU and Canada, is the de facto ruling body in Gaza.
As became all too evident during this summer’s war, Hamas has been systematically weaponizing construction materials intended as assistance for the people of Gaza. Concrete, metal piping and electrical wiring have been diverted to build tunnels and rockets.
In the aftermath, NGOs and other international political actors are moving to rebuild the areas of Gaza devastated by Hamas’ tactic of conducting military operations from civilian areas. Preventing the exploitation of aid is paramount. Bribing IS or collaborating with Hamas poses a thorny moral quandary.

EU tantrums hurt Palestinians more than Israel

Today, it is estimated that up to 70 percent of Palestinians in the disputed territories financially depend in some way or other on agriculture, either by working in settlements or farming their own land.
It should be noted that poultry and their related products from settlements account for under 5% of all such products in Israel. That’s not to diminish the impact it will have on settlers, but the new European rules will not have much practical impact from an economic standpoint on Israeli agriculture as a whole.
Who it will undoubtedly hurt are the many thousands of Palestinian workers on settlement farms, as well as the thousands of freehold farmers in the territories who needed the ministry certification to export their goods.
So, just as the BDS managed to ensure that 900 Palestinians lost their job at Sodastream, the EU, in a fit of pique, is making the same mistake on a much, much bigger scale.
Sometimes during a tantrum, the child ends up hurting themselves. The EU is hurting its own credibility, and its standing internationally, by such pointless partisan actions.
It needs to grow up. And fast.

November 2, 1917: The Balfour Declaration

Among the speakers was the eminent Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook from the city of Jaffa who due to circumstances related to the war was in London at the time. Rabbi Kook’s message was quite different, “I have not come here to thank the British nation, but even more, to congratulate it for the privilege of making this declaration. The Jewish nation is the ‘scholar’ among the nations, the ‘people of the book,’ a nation of prophets; and it is a great honor for any nation to aid it. I bless the British nation for having extended such honorable aid to the people of the Torah, so that they may return to their land and renew their homeland.”
Rabbi Kook offered recognition to the British but not thanks. If Britain offered the pledge, then it fulfilled a role for which it was destined.
He believed the British need not be thanked for giving the Jews what has been rightfully theirs for over three thousand years, or for offering the Jews the land which was taken from them by Roman conquerors 1800 years earlier.
Furthermore, the British issued the declaration, but they had not yet delivered on its promises of Jewish Statehood. Despite the euphoria, Britain would soon abandon its promises.
By 1919, members of the Jewish Legion who fought valiantly with the British to expel the Turks from Palestine in 1918 were prohibited from entering Jerusalem on Passover. One year later, during Passover, an Arab pogrom broke out in Jerusalem. Five Jews were murdered and hundreds were wounded, eighteen of them critically. Synagogues were desecrated, shops were looted, and homes were ransacked.
The British military authorities rejected the Jews’ demands to dismiss the Arab police who participated in the pogrom. The Jews as a whole condemned the response by the British, and accused them of complicity in the pogrom. Accusations were also subsequently leveled that the British incited the violence.

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The Children's Intifada (Mike Lumish)

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The Elder has a recent piece entitled, Aw, what a cute little stone thrower, which highlights the work of Reuters' photographer Abed Omar Qusini.

These examples of Qusini's work project the image of a cute, sympathetic and innocent Palestinian-Arab "David" slinging rocks with his little slingshot at... something... with the world blowing up behind him.  What that "something" might be is open to question.  It could be an image of Leon Klinghoffer with a bullseye on the back of his head or it could be a squadron of Kosher Klingon Storm-Troopers preparing to destroy an indigenous village filled with bunny-rabbits strictly for the fun of it... but whatever the child is flinging hatred at, it is Jewish.

Of that much, you can be certain.

This kind of material has at least two effects.  It inspires young Arabs to hate Jews and it inspires young western progressives to sympathize with young Arabs who hate Jews.

The eternal enemy of Jews - in the eyes of Palestinian-Arab anti-Semitic anti-Zionists such as Mr. Qusini - always seems to be innocent children.  This is what Europeans often told one another during the Middle Ages and this is what even allegedly sophisticated westerners sometimes tell one another today.

Jewish Militarist Fascistic Monsters with American-Made Heavy Weaponry versus innocent, thumb-sucking indigenous children with sling-shots.

This is what Abed Omar Qusini peddles to Reuters and what Reuters peddles to consumers of news throughout the world.  If you were an average news consumer - you're not, are you? - you might come to think that the Israeli Occupying Power is murdering perfectly innocent native children who are standing up for their family, friends, and village.

The artist is giving you an emotional choice.  You can relate to Jewish Zombie Nazi Murderers or to little, doe-eyed "Palestinian" Davids with a slingshots.

You get to choose whether you want to be a good person or a bad person.

If you are a good person you side with the child against the Machine.  If you are a bad person - such as myself, apparently - you side with the Machine against the child.

It is for this reason that, after decades of this kind of stuff, we see pieces in "liberal" venues with titles like Israeli Army Shoot Dead Another Child, This Time A 14 Year-Old US Citizen, with the clear and obvious implication that Jewish Israelis shoot Palestinian-Arab children like they are ducks in an arcade and that this needs to anger Americans against those heinous and cruel Jews, with significant consequences.

It is also for this reason that Hamas and Fatah have launched the Children's Intifada.

Essentially what we are witnessing is the manufacture of hatred, via the blood-libel, just as we see every generation.  Every generation they tell us just why we need a good beating before they go forth to deliver.  In previous generations we allegedly killed Jesus and "the prophets."  We were also apparently greedy and thus invented capitalism, which got us into trouble with a bunch of people who used the fact of capitalism as a reason for murderous rage toward us.  We also invented socialism, apparently, and were therefore responsible for whatever miseries, great and small, that came from that particular economic system.  We were also, of course, condemned for being a rat-like inferior race that feeds off of the blood of the children of the clean, dominant Aryan majority in northern Europe.

What fascinates me is that most western-progressives would agree that previous persecutions of the Jewish minority were unjust... but this time, or so they seem to think, we honestly do have it coming.

It just so happens that while previous generations of Jews were largely innocent and did not deserve the pogroms and expulsions and defenestrations and the throwing of Jews down of wells, but - Ta Da! - this generation we honestly do deserve it for being mean to our former Arab and Muslim masters.

If you follow the link at the top of the piece you will see that it goes to Qusini's Facebook page.

Reuters pays this man.

I wonder what they pay him to do?

Well, Qusini could hardly be more open about what he does because he has it splashed directly on the top of the page:


The man, whatever else he might be, is a "Pallywood" photographer who is so utterly comfortable in his role that he even indicates it on his Facebook page and, yet, is still employed by Reuters.  After all, if you click through to that page - the page through which he promotes his work - the image above is front and center.  The clear and obvious indication is that the photographer is filming a staged rock-throwing incident by a young, righteous Palestinian-Arab child against the vicious Jews who make his mother sad... because they are mean to her.

Here is a little more of his stuff.  It might even be the same kid from the clearly staged shot directly above.  Notice also the photographer in the background snapping photos of the cute, little murderous waif.

{I have to say, there is just nothing in this world like Palestinian-Arab Murderous Cute.  It is an entirely other genre of cute that the makers of Hello Kitty would never have conceived of.  It would be as if during World War II the Japanese turned Hello Kitty into an adorable Kamikaze Kitty.}

And we are supposed to believe that this was a spontaneous act of brave and righteous push-back against an occupying power by an "indigenous" youth?

Is not violence against Jews fun?  It's good to get them into practice at an early age, that way when they are full grown anti-Semites they'll just be so much better at it and, thus, make even greater incitement, greater violence, and greater profits for whatever replaces Hamas in the next generation.

When I was a child we played baseball and sometimes we even played "war" wherein the neighborhood boys would chase one another around with long sticks yelling "BANG!  BANG!"

Of course, we never singled out minorities for pelting with rocks... otherwise I would have been pelted, as would have my old friend Wesley Chang.  It's just not the way that we were raised in good old New England, neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Muslim, nor anybody else.  And, needless to say, if the Palestinian-Arabs want the "occupation" to end the only real thing that they need to do is tell their children that hatred toward Jews is wrong and tell Israel that what they mainly want is trade because what they desire is peace and prosperity for their children and grandchildren.

And voila, I promise you, conflict over.

That is all it would require for a two-state solution to honestly emerge or even an amicable single-state solution.

Sadly that is not what they want and, in truth, it is not up to us.  It is up to them.  What they want is Jews off of Jewish land because they think it violates the Koran and because they think that they have been historically wronged.  They honestly believe that they have been robbed of their heritage and their land because the Palestinian Authority and the PLO and Hamas and the Soviet Union and various Swedes told them this - decade upon decade - and now we have western "liberals" believing it and the facts of history be damned.

What they want therefore is to make life so uncomfortable for the Jewish minority in the Middle East that they simply give up on our ancestral home and once again we all live or die according to the whims of non-Jewish majority populations... who have shown themselves to be just so accommodating throughout the centuries.

Kerry and Obama and the EU and the UN can harass the Jews in the Middle East day and night and it will not make a wit of difference.  The reason for this is because the problem here is not the Jewish presence or behavior on Jewish land.  The real problem is highly racist Arab political and religious cultures that too often, for centuries, taught their children to despise Jews and a western media that helps them to spread those messages of hatred for ideological reasons.

It is this that Mr. Qusini does for a living, at least in part, on Reuters' dime.


It becomes difficult, therefore, to consider prominent left notions of "social justice" seriously when so many of the left insist on harping on Israel while almost entirely ignoring the 5.5 million dead in the Congo or the ongoing atrocities in Darfur, not to mention the howling-at-the-moon head-choppers of the Islamic State rampaging throughout Syria and Iraq.

Muslims are killing Muslims throughout the world like its a video game.  Call it Muhammad's Revenge, or something along those lines, and then X-BOX or Playstation can come out with a cool new title for their current platforms.

The contemporary Arab and Muslim war against the Jews, from the middle of the twentieth-century until now, has resulted in around 50,000 dead.  Heck, current Muslim-on-Muslim violence in western Asia and Africa can probably reach that number by a quarter past next Tuesday.  When it comes to war and violence the Jews are absolutely pikers compared to their more excitable neighbors.

Also that whole head-chopping thing never became much of a fad for us.

My friends and I considered giving it a whirl when we were kids, but then along came spring-time and baseball, so we went outside and threw the ball around instead.

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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.

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It's only bad when Israel does it (ElderToon)

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The hypocrisy of Rula Jebreal

Rula Jebreal appeared on Bill Maher's TV show on Friday night where she called him a bigot and criticized his views on Islam. Here is the discussion after Maher explained why he will be giving a commencement speech at Berkeley despite protests at his opinions of Islam (which would not be  a topic in his address):

JEBREAL: ...These same students feel offended that your views of Islam -- the generalization, and they said it clearly in their declaration, they said the generalization perpetrates bigotry. This is what they said.

...Listen, would you accept an openly anti-Semitic person to give a commencement speech to Jewish students? I actually would not accept that.

MAHER: As I just said, even Reza Aslan says I'm not a bigot. So I rather resent the idea that I'm comparable to an anti-Semite. All I've ever done was basically read facts.

JEBREAL: What facts did you read? I'm sorry, you are comparing jihadists, Salafists, Sunni, you don't know the difference. You are comparing all Muslims in one part --

MAHER: You are Palestinian?

JEBREAL: I am actually a secular Muslim. And when you talking about Islam in a certain way, I have to tell you, it's offensive sometimes.

KING: But it's okay to be offensive. That's what free speech is all about. If free speech is only speech you like, it's not free speech.

...JEBREAL: And I'm happy that he's been here and I'm here and I'm so happy to be invited here. However, if you want to have a serious conversation about Islam, and I'm sorry to say this Bill --

MAHER: Every time I tell you something you don't like it's not a serious conversation or I'm a bigot. I'm sorry, in your world either I say exactly what you want me to say or else I'm a bigot. It doesn't work that way.

JEBREAL: Look, if you're -- you don't have to say what I want because what I want is not a war on Islam. I want to win the war on terror. When you are repeating the same things that actual al Qaeda says, the same thing, you are doing the work for them. al-Zawahiri used to say, bin Laden used to say this is not a war on terror, this is a war on Islam. My father was Muslim, he was Sufi. Guess what, let me tell you something. You don't even know the difference between Sufi, Sunni, Sunni Shafi'i, Sunni Hanbali.

MAHER: Yeah, I do.

Jebreal says, twice, that Maher doesn't know the difference between different strains of Islam, and that he generalizes from one to the other, and therefore he is a bigot (more specifically, she compared him to an anti-semite and quoted the Berkeley students who said that he perpetuates bigotry. But she doesn't deny it when Maher says she believes he is a bigot.)

Guess what? By her own definition, Rula Jebreal is a bigot!

As I noted last week in my post showing the many untruths in her op-ed in the New York Times, Jebreal doesn't know the difference between religious Zionists and ultra-Orthodox (more properly, haredi) Jews:

Israel is increasingly becoming a project of ethno-religious purity and exclusion. Religious Zionist and ultra-Orthodox parties occupy 30 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, and are part of the coalition government (No ultra-orthodox parties are in the governing coalition, the NYT later corrected that.)

...Historically, ultra-Orthodox Jews did not serve in the armed forces. Today, they do — and serve in every capacity, including in the most important elite Israeli army units, such as the Sayeret Matkal special forces and Unit 8200, whose responsibilities include gathering intelligence on any Palestinian they deem a “security threat.” ("Ultra-Orthodox Jews" serve in only very specific parts of the IDF.)

And then she revealed her bigotry:

Unlike every former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent of the F.B.I., Yoram Cohen, who today heads the agency, is a religious Jew. That change is typical of Israeli society. The greater integration of ultra-Orthodox Jews clearly offers benefits to Jewish Israelis, but for Palestinian Israeli citizens, it has meant a new, religiously inspired racism, on top of the old secular discrimination.

Jebreal is saying that all religious Jews are "racist" and she damns the head of the Shin Bet based purely on his religiosity, not his actions. The (false!) example she gives to prove Israeli bigotry immediately following this section refers to Avigdor Lieberman, who is not religious at all!

So by Jebreal's own yardstick, she is a bigot. She cannot distinguish between haredim, religious Zionists and secular Jews, calling them all "racists." She generalizes large groups of people based on her perception of the actions of a few.

Too bad Maher didn't call her on this. Maybe he'll invite her back.

(h/t RCP)

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BREAKING: Israeli police DON'T arrest two children

Ma'an breathlessly reports:

Israeli forces in occupied East Jerusalem on Friday attempted to detain two Palestinian children, a two-year-old and a nine-year old, on suspicion of throwing rocks.

Israeli soldiers were conducting a raid on the home of the Jaber family in the Silwan neighborhood in order to search for an individual suspected of throwing rocks at them from the roof, the family told Ma'an.

When the soldiers ascended to the roof to detain the alleged culprit, however, they found a two-year-old named Mimati Asaad Jaber who was playing with his mother. While they were playing, apparently, a rock had fallen into the street below.

The boy's grandfather, who was in the house during the raid, said that the boy was only playing and that he did not know there were soldiers in the street below the building when he tossed the stone.

Upon seeing the two-year-old with his mother, however, the Israeli soldiers shifted their attention to a nine-year-old member of the family nearby.

Members of the Jaber family told Ma'an that once Israeli soldiers found out the nine-year-old boy's name -- Izz al-Din al-Qassam, also the name of a famous Palestinian national hero and used by Hamas as the name for its military brigades -- they began questioning him.

The Israeli soldiers attempted to detain the nine-year-old boy based on the fact that he had "colored rocks" in his pockets, presumably to throw at soldiers, but when they searched the child they found that the "rocks" were in fact candy.

In short, someone threw or dropped stones from a roof, police investigated, found nothing and left. There is not a word about abuse, violence or insults. A couple of cops checked something out and nothing happened. The family pretended to be traumatized but they couldn't actually point out anything the Israeli police did that was inappropriate or wrong..

Stop the presses!

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Bartenura kosher wine going mainstream

I have never seen a kosher wine being advertised to the general public before.

I noted three years ago that Bartenura was featured in a hip-hop video by DJ Khaled, who is in fact of Palestinian Arab descent!

And two years ago Bartenura made this TV commercial:



I don't think that the target audience for these ad campaigns are going to be interested in knowing that the wine is named after a rabbi.

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11/01 Links: Melanie Phillips - Anti-Semitism on the rise in Europe; The Palestinians’ genocidal logo

From Ian:

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Ezra Levant with Melanie Phillips - Anti-Semitism on the rise in Europe


Chloé Valdary: Pride & Privilege

At that moment, I understood what was really meant in academic circles by the concept of “privilege.”
There is a type of Palestinian-Arab privilege which exists today that makes anti-Semitism "okay," acceptable in academic discourse, and even politically correct. It enables college students of the anti-Israel persuasion to question a Jew’s very identity, to reduce him or her to a monolithic creature which exists solely for the purpose of living in a dejected, victimized, dehumanized state. It divorces them from their past in their native land, and thus strips them of their history, and therefore allows them no future.
This type of prejudice must be fought against. It is not enough to fight lies and slanders in the media if we do not understand that these are variations of the old European libels that manifested themselves in racist anti-Jewish laws for centuries in Western Europe, and which culminated in the Holocaust. They undermine a people’s dignity and sense of belonging. Our endeavor to educate others must be coupled with one crucial element, one which speaks to not only the logic and rational basis of a movement, but the heart and soul of a people: Pride.

The Palestinians’ genocidal logo

There is something particularly revolting about ostensibly civilized, modern nations giving both official recognition and massive funding to terrorist organizations with a clearly expressed genocidal goal.
Sweden is the latest country to officially recognize “the state of Palestine”.
But to put Sweden’s embarrassingly amateurish, vote-grabbing domestic politicking move into a proper international perspective, one has only got to look at the Palestinian Arabs’ national symbols. Just to see how “peace-loving” they really are.
But here’s the salient point: We must all – bloggers, the media, local politicians, national politicians, the diplomatic corps, the EU, the UN – insist that both Fatah and Hamas change their official logos (which show their wished-for state of Palestine as replacing ALL of Israel). Their “national symbol” actually predicates the destruction of UN member state Israel.
And in case the map itself is not enough, there are also swords in the official “national logo” of Hamas to drive home just how this Palestinian coalition government partner intends to destroy Israel and replace it with Palestine.

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10/31 Links Pt2: The academic intifada; Starvation in Gaza? No, Obesity in Gaza; Rafael unveils C-Dome

From Ian:

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Alan Dershowitz: A Challenge to Ed Miliband: Would You Protect Great Britain Against Terrorism?

My challenge to Ed Miliband: What would you have done if you were the Prime Minister of a country that faced comparable threats? It is easy to criticize the British Prime Minister for not having opposed Israel’s incursion into Gaza but, as the New York Times reported, (10/23/14) Miliband “did not outline an alternative security response.” Now he must. Would he have waited for dozens of death squads with hundreds of terrorists to enter Israel and wreak havoc on cities, towns and kibbutzim near the Gaza border? Would he have tried to attack the tunnel entrances from the air, despite the fact that many of them were located in mosques, schools, hospitals, private homes and densely populated civilian areas?
The question British voters should ask is: What would Prime Minister Ed Miliband have done? What would he do if Britain were faced with comparable threats? His country, unlike tiny Israel, is an island separated from its traditional enemies by bodies of water. But one can imagine Scottish independent radicals digging tunnels into northeastern England. Or Irish radicals firing rockets into English cities on the West Coast? As opposition leader would Miliband criticize the current prime minister for trying to stop these attacks against British civilians? As Prime Minister would he do nothing and simply call for a cease fire and the resumption of talks, as he did with regard to the Israeli-Hamas conflict?
Miliband also rebuked Cameron for his “silence on the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians caused by Israel’s military action.” But Miliband himself has remained silent on Hamas’ deliberate use of human shields that has been the main cause for why Palestinian civilians were killed. As British military expert Richard Kemp said,
“No army in the world acts with as much discretion and great care as the IDF in order to minimize damage. The U.S. and the UK are careful, but not as much as Israel.”

Melanie Phillips: The academic intifada

The supposed crucible of knowledge, reason and enlightenment has turned into an incubator of hatred and bigotry, falsehoods and incitement, intellectual terrorism and physical violence. What we are seeing is an academic intifada. Yet in the face of this monstrous onslaught on Jewish students and perversion of scholarship to poison young minds against Israel, the leadership of Diaspora Jewry has done precious little.
Campaigners like Benjamin or groups such as Stand- WithUs (at whose meeting I spoke in Toronto this week) have been doing invaluable work countering the lies and helping support the beleaguered Jewish students. But they are doing it virtually alone and unaided. Given the nature and scale of what is going on, the silence from the Jewish community as a whole is quite astonishing.
Jewish leaders should be shouting from the rafters about what is happening on campus. They should be naming and shaming these bigoted lecturers for the hatred and lies they are spreading. They should be calling to account the university vice chancellors for failing to protect their Jewish students. They should be taking legal action against them for betraying their duty of care or allowing incitement of hatred, intimidation and discrimination on their watch. They should be jumping up and down over the way states such as Qatar or Saudi Arabia have twisted university curricula into hate-fueled or extremist propaganda outlets by pouring funds into university coffers.
But Jewish leaders aren’t doing any of this. Too timid to rock the boat, or maybe because they themselves don’t know enough to realize just how heinous are the lies being told about Israel, their instinct is instead often to try to marginalize, isolate or shut down some of these heroic folk trying to combat the falsehoods and intimidation on campus. This is shameful. A huge effort is needed to counter this evil with the hardest of home truths. Time our leaders woke up and smelled the coffee.

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Saudi cleric says Jews are cowards

Prominent Saudi scholar Abdul Aziz al-Tarifi tweeted this yesterday:

The Umma (the Islamic nation) will not be victorious as long as it is afraid of the Jews, because Allah described them (i.e. the Jews) as cowards, and whoever is afraid of them (of the Jews) is even more afraid of others. [As the Quran says]: "They will not fight you all except within fortified cities or from behind walls."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think he is talking about "Zionists."

So the entire Muslim world is preparing for a religious war against Jews. Sounds like a useful thing to know.

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

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Here's the difference between "moderate Arabs" and "radical right wing Zionists"

The supposedly moderate Fatah party headed by that man of peace Mahmoud Abbas called for a "day of rage" on Friday. It appears that this specific one mostly fizzled out, probably because of rain, but here is what Abbas was inciting his people to do:

Saturday night a rally is being called by those "right wing Jewish extremists" in Jerusalem calling for prayers for the recovery of Rabbi Yehufda Glick:

No rock throwing, no Molotov cocktails, no burning tires, no calls for Jews to riot in Arab neighborhoods, no attempts at forcibly entering the Temple Mount.

Maybe those radical Jews should become more "moderate" in order for people to take them as seriously as they take the Arabs.

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