Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, December 02, 2014

Hezbollah kids' magazine glorifies war and martyrdom; AFP waters it down

AFP gives us an object lesson into how to downplay even the most despicable acts by a terror group.

It’s aimed at children, but instead of princes and princesses, fairies and magicians, the heroes of Lebanon’s “Mahdi” magazine are the “fighters who fell resisting the Israeli enemy.”

Produced by Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement for the last 11 years, Mahdi aims to teach a new generation the militant Shiite group’s ideology of “resistance” to the Jewish state.

Packed full of stories inspired by the lives of Hezbollah militants and terrorists, its cartoons represent bearded fighters and its puzzles teach children how to avoid Israeli landmines.

Critics accuse it of glorifying violence, but its publishers insist the monthly magazine is not about indoctrination or military propaganda.

“What we want to do is teach children the values of the resistance,” the magazine’s general manager Abbas Charara told AFP.

“We don’t encourage carrying of weapons, we’re just making sure they know about the exploits of the resistance,” he added.

Before the readers of this AFP article knows what the magazine includes, they are exposed to Hezbollah's denials that there is anything wrong.

You have to read all the way down to paragraph 15 before reading anything specific about the content, and even further to read what a critic actually says - and that critic is still equivocal.

And AFP does not illustrate the article with a single page image of the magazine,and its examples of what the magazine includes does not include the worst parts.

Here is the reality, from blogger Khaled Alameddine who first exposed the magazine in July. This is the version of the magazine aimed at 4-7 year olds.

A children’s rhyme about defending your land, victory and how the enemy will reap defeat;

Color the weapons inside the big bomb!

Kids love stickers...

Help the bunny cross the minefield, and then count the different kinds of mines it avoided.

The Hezbollah spokesman in the AFP article said “We don’t encourage carrying of weapons," You decide if he is telling the truth. AFP can't figure it out.

There was also a poem addressed to "my father the martyr."

Effectively, a sickening piece of propaganda aimed for kids as young as 4 is being whitewashed because AFP is more interested in being "even-handed" than in showing the truth. Part of the problem seems to be that the AFP reporter was given exclusive access to the magazine editing facilities, and it appears that he or she wants to maintain a good relationship with Hezbollah as a source in the future.

By highlighting the Hezbollah defense of the magazine before mentioning what's wrong with it, and by ignoring the worst parts of the magazine, AFP is effectively being a mouthpiece for Hezbollah indoctrination of children into religion-based terror and hate.

Latest Gaza tally shows 52% militant, 48% civilians killed of those identified

The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center has released (in Hebrew only) part 8 of its series analyzing the people killed in Gaza and (using Palestinian Arabic sources) determining whether they were terrorists or not.

The latest report covers those reported killed between July 25-29.

So far, they have examined 1,165 fatalities. 157 of them are not yet identified as civilian or terrorist. Out of the remaining 1017 names, 528 were terrorists and 480 were civilians, a 52%-48% ratio.

Another interesting statistic comes out from this. Since the center is analyzing the deaths in chronological order, the people that were killed between July 25-29 are found to be 90 terrorists vs. 42 civilians, which is over 68% terrorists. (Many of the terrorists were from bodies found from the earlier battle in Shejaiya.)

Here are a few of the dozens of photos of terrorists that the Meir Amit Center found for this batch, including some "martyr posters" that were released as late as last week, including two that they got from me!

(h/t Yenta Press, Bob Knot)

12/01 Links Pt2: Interview with the Green Prince; Terror linked charities get British millions in Gift Aid

From Ian:

NGO Monitor: Statement on Media Censorship of Criticism of NGOs

In a November 30 article published in The Atlantic (What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel), former AP journalist Matti Friedman states that, during his time at the AP Jerusalem bureau, reporters had explicit orders “to never quote [NGO Monitor] or its director… Gerald Steinberg. In my time as an AP writer moving through the local conflict, with its myriad lunatics, bigots, and killers, the only person I ever saw subjected to an interview ban was this professor.”
“Matti Friedman’s revelations regarding the efforts to censor NGO Monitor and me as its president are not entirely surprising,” said Professor Gerald Steinberg, president and founder of NGO Monitor. “Based on our experience in publishing detailed research on over 150 NGOs claiming to promote human rights and humanitarian objectives, we are aware of the intense efforts to maintain the NGO ‘halo effect’ and prevent critical debate. While the AP censorship was explicit, we have experienced similar silencing from other media platforms.”
Friedman also highlights the “ethical gray zone of ties between reporters and NGOs” in Israel, where journalists socializing in the same circles as NGO officials, seek employment with NGOs, and adapt to a journalistic culture in which NGOs “are to be quoted, not covered.”

Reflections on the UN Partition of Palestine

On November 29, Arab UN delegations called the UN move ‘undemocratic.’ Ambassador Amir Arslan of Syria, proclaimed, “My country will never recognize such a decision,” Jamali of Iraq objected that Resolution 181, “Undermines peace, justice and democracy,” and they and their Arab colleagues abruptly walked out the halls of the UN in Lake Success, New York, in protest. Almost immediately, Arab labor strikes in Palestine were called, and acts of terror were launched against Jews.
In the first month after the UN vote, 118 Jews were killed and 217 were wounded. Civilians were attacked on the streets, and convoys to cities were also attacked as were medical clinics. Violence also extended into the Arab world. In the Yemenite city of Aden, anti-Jewish riots broke out with reports of 76 Jews killed and 74 wounded.
Soon, the Arab Legion of irregular troops led by Nazi trained commandoes Hassam Salameh and Abdul Kader Husseini, nephew of the infamous Mufti, Haj Amin Al Husseini, led the Arab war effort while the surrounding Arab nations preferred to wait until the British evacuation. On February 11, a bombing on Ben Yehudah Street in central Jerusalem killed and wounded hundreds.
The Jewish State, not even officially re-born, was fighting for its existence.

i24news Exclusive Interview with the Green Prince - 25/11/2014 (h/t Yoel)

Hamas/Fatah"unity" is over before it ever started

From Ma'an:

A senior Fatah official on Sunday told Ma'an that there was never any agreement that the Palestinian unity government would last only six months, hours after a Hamas spokesman said the government's term had expired.

Faisal Abu Shahla said that the national consensus government was assigned to carry out a number of tasks, including holding elections, "within at least six months," but that it was never agreed that the government term would end if it did not complete those tasks within that time frame.

"If the Hamas movement has retracted the reconciliation agreement and the termination of rivalry, that is a different case," Abu Shahla said.

The Fatah official added that further reconciliation discussions were pending a response from Hamas regarding the attacks with explosives against Fatah leaders' property in Gaza and the cancellation of a ceremony commemorating the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Gaza City in early November.

Earlier Sunday, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said that the six-month mandate of the national consensus government had ended.

Any decision on whether the government should be disbanded or continued or be reshuffled must be made only through national dialogue and consensus, Abu Zuhri said.

If Hamas declares "unity" to be dead, that pretty much means it is dead.

On a related topic, Hamas and the PA are arguing over payment for fuel for Gaza. Hamas wants a discount and is blaming the PA for not paying fpr enough fuel at a time to ensure the Gaza power plant can run.

More proof that Amnesty's and ICRC's definition of "Gaza occupation" are lies

As I was researching my post this morning, I came across this gem from Amnesty International last summer in a Q&A document they released during the Gaza war that proves, yet again, that Israel cannot be considered to be occupying Gaza.

Tunnels that are being used for civilian purposes (including smuggling civilian goods and supplies into Gaza) are not military objectives and cannot be directly targeted. As the occupying power, Israel may take reasonable and proportionate measures of control or security. This could include preventing unregulated entry and exit of goods, and ensuring that weapons and military equipment are not entering the territory.

An occupying power has the ability to monitor and control the border of the territory being occupied, so it is reasonable to expect that power to be able to prevent unregulated entry of goods and to prevent weapons, by simply adding police to the border areas and enforcing the law.

But for Israel to do what Amnesty says it is allowed to do to prevent illegal smuggling under international law, Israel would have to invade Gaza and take over the entire border area with Egypt. It would have to methodically destroy hundreds of houses in Rafah that are hiding tunnels.

Would Amnesty approve Israel's invading Gaza in order to fulfill its obligations as "occupier"?

The definition of occupation is that the occupying power maintains "effective control." That means that it controls the police, the borders, and the government of the territory under occupation.

Effective control means that the borders can be properly policed. If they cannot be, then there is no effective control, and hence no occupation.

Amnesty (and the ICRC and HRW and UN) must jump through rhetorical hoops in order to pretend that Israel is occupying Gaza. But when you actually read how they try to square that with actual international law, you find that all of them are forced to come up with bizarre arguments that would be laughed out of court if anyone but Israel was involved.

If you want to see an even more egregious example of how the definition of occupation changes when Israel is involved, check out this document that the ICRC wrote in 2002, before Israel withdrew from Gaza, as a study guide to the laws of belligerent occupation:

Anything that the ICRC has written about Gaza being occupied by Israel after 2004 directly contradicts its own definition from 2002.

12/01 Links Pt1: Toameh: Why a Palestinian State Will Become a Source of Instability

From Ian:

Khaled Abu Toameh: Why a Palestinian State Will Become a Source of Instability

This is precisely what Egypt and the rest of the Arab countries want: to turn the Gaza Strip into an Israeli, and not Arab, problem.
There is good reason to believe that the Arabs are not going to change their attitude toward the Palestinians once a Palestinian state is established. The future Palestinian state will have to continue relying on Israeli and Western aid in order to survive.
And if Israel and the West do not come to their assistance, the Palestinians will find themselves begging at the doorsteps of Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic State. Then, the future Palestinian state will be anything but a source of stability in the Middle East.

JCPA: Internal Hamas Debate about Rethinking Policies

The results of the Gaza war have caused Hamas serious distress, something its leadership did not foresee before launching the war with Israel. The movement now appears to be in a process of stocktaking and reassessment in light of its situation, including the difficulties in rehabilitating the Gaza Strip, the bitter rift with the Palestinian Authority, and the deterioration in relations with Egypt. Among other things, Egypt has been constraining Hamas’s ability to arm itself.
To this must be added the effects of the weakening of the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent-movement of Hamas, and of the strengthening of the Islamic State as an organization that, in the name of Islam, has been challenging Arab regimes and Western states as it acts to establish the Islamic Caliphate-the goal to which Hamas also aspires.
A recent conference at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah addressed the issue of “The Political and Strategic Status of the Gaza Strip.” Among the topics discussed were the difficulties Hamas is encountering in the domestic, national, and regional spheres and the need for a thorough rethinking of its tactics and strategy.

A Fantasy-driven Muslim World can Never Become Modern

In the last century those Renaissance and Enlightenment values finally triumphed in China, India, and China.
But not in the Muslim world, which went back on one of its periodic regressions to the fantasy past. The worst thing is that the Islamic Reaction to the past has been supported by Western politicians -- Jimmy Carter did it with the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran; Bill Clinton failed to get Bin Laden at least four different times; and now Obama, worst of all, consistently tries to make “friends” by religious maniacs in Qatar and Turkey, in the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran.
This is crazy, of course. But Obama is also the most mentally stuck person ever to occupy the presidency. He will never change.
The coming presidential election will therefore mean do or die for America and the world. We must find political leaders who are not delusional. It seems like a pretty basic idea, but twice in the last six years Americans have voted for a fantasy-driven person -- supported by a fantasy-driven media.
As the Iranian Bomb will soon teach the world, mass fantasies have a way of cracking under the pressure of facts.
It’s better not to wait for that to happen.

Chris Gunness' main argument against UNRWA school incitement gets demolished

I have spent quite a bit of time documenting that UNRWA schools have been teaching hate and antisemitism, based on their own websites. Also I have shown that UNRWA employs many viciously antisemitic and hateful employees whose opinions they happily publicize go completely against the UN chsrter and human rights standards. Even UNRWA's own photos of their schools show painting of terrorists on the walls.

When a documentary showing UNRWA schools teaching incitement against Israel was shown on TV, UNRWA's Chris Gunness responded on Fox News. First he attempted to trash the documentary and the person behind it, and he claims to have shown some inconsistencies showing that the schools in the film were not UNRWA schools. But finally, he argued that the curricula of UNRWA schools in "east Jerusalem" is exactly the same as those of other Arab schools in Jerusalem, and he sarcastically asked that if the teachers there were teaching anti-Israel and antisemitic incitement, then why is Israel allowing it?

It turns out that this is a very good question, without the sarcasm.

From Palestinian Media Watch:

Official Palestinian Authority television regularly educates children to see the destruction of Israel as a goal and PA leaders often present all of Israel as part of "Palestine," "occupied land" that will be "liberated" or "returned to" Palestinians. This worldview constitutes a basic tenet of Palestinian education and ideology, as documented by Palestinian Media Watch for years. Now, the Chairman of the Jerusalem Teachers' Association, Issa Salman, has stated that this is likewise the educational message in Arab schools in Jerusalem.

Speaking on PA TV, the teacher said:

"In our schools, we teach what our religion and conscience dictate: That Jerusalem is Arab and that Palestine - from north to south, from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea - is Islamic Palestinian Arab, and will remain so in spite of the damned occupier."
[Official PA TV, Nov. 15, 2014

UNRWA's Chris Gunness admitted that UNRWA schools in Jerusalem teach the same material that other Arab schools in Jerusalem do. Arab teachers brag that they teach that Israel must be destroyed.

So Chris Gunness must admit that UNRWA schools are teaching the exact hate that I've already proven they teach.

PA president Mahmoud Abbas has stated that he is fully behind Egypt's actions in the Sinai against "terrorists," including Egypt's shutting down the tunnels to Gaza.

Speaking to Egyptian media, Abbas said, "I cannot ask Egypt to stop the military operation in the region, and we are aware of the nature of the Egyptian national action."

Abbas stressed the need to demolish illegal tunnels between Egypt and Gaza, pointing out that he had called on the Egyptian authorities multiple times to close the tunnels. He added that the tunnels have created 1,800 millionaires in the Gaza Strip through their exploitation of the smuggling.

He claims that he had proposed that Egypt create a 30-meter water-filled trench along its border and to destroy the homes of Rafah residents who hosted tunnels, saying that that "no country in the world suffers from the problem of tunnels, only Egypt and Palestine."

Abbas pointedly didn't mention the tunnels that Hamas constructed to attack Israeli civilians in the Negev, which is a bit worse than the problem of Gazans making millions by importing cars and washing machines. He also did not say a word about tunnels being used to smuggle weapons into Gaza.

Abbas is fully behind Egypt's siege of Gaza, and he fully accepts Egypt's narrative that it is necessary for defense. Yet when Israel is directly targeted by tunnels under its border - not for smuggling but for kidnap and murder - Abbas is against any military action.

Human Rights Watch has called the tunnels a "lifeline" to Gaza's economy. Amnesty International has previously said that Israel has no right to target civilian smuggling tunnels in military operations as Egypt is today.

Luke Baker at Reuters wrote a highly biased article about Israel that nicely illustrates how journalists play games with the facts in order to push an agenda rather than report objectively.

Let's fisk it a bit:

A cartoon in Israel's left-leaning Haaretz newspaper showed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu studying a poster made by his publicity team of Mahmoud Abbas, the mild-mannered, soft-featured Palestinian president.

The poster depicted Abbas looking fierce, with menacing eyes and bloodied fangs. A disappointed-looking Netanyahu turns to his aide and asks: "Can you lengthen his fangs a tad?"

Spot the bias! Abbas is represented in the most positive way even though his speeches are every bit as fiery as any politician's.

The prime minister has lost no time in casting Abbas as the devil in recent months, accusing him of inciting violence in Jerusalem that has lead to the death of 11 Israelis, including four rabbis stabbed and shot by Palestinians in a synagogue. Around a dozen Palestinians have also been killed, including several of those who carried out the attacks.

While the head of Israel's security service says Abbas is not inciting unrest, and centrist politicians have warned Netanyahu against alienating the only partner Israel has in stalled peace negotiations, the prime minister shows no sign of letting up in his criticism of the 79-year-old Palestinian.

The reason, in large part, is politics.

Baker ignores the direct incitement that Abbas has been directing, not to mention the much more disgusting incitement in the media that is under his direct control and in the statements of leaders of his political movement.

Abbas has said that he wants Arabs to defend Al aqsa Mosque 'by all means," which would naturally include killing Jews who are perceived as wanting to visit. Officials have called for religious war against Jews on PA-run TV. PA newspapers call murderers of rabbis "martyrs." Fatah social media is filled with antisemitic articles and cartoons.

That is incitement. And it is not reported by Reuters.

As well as demonizing Abbas, he has pushed a highly contentious bill that would establish Israel as the Jewish nation state, legislation critics say puts religion ahead of democracy and marginalizes the Arab minority.

Can Reuters quote the part of the draft bill passed by the cabinet that puts religion ahead of democracy? No, because it isn't there.

...[T]he upshot is the most hardline government analysts can recall.

"This is the most right-wing government in Israeli history, much further to the right than the Menachem Begin or Ariel Sharon governments," said Menachem Klein, a professor of Israeli politics at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv.

Ah, the old trick of finding "experts" that agree with the reporter's bias. As we have shown, Netanyahu's positions are well to the left of Yitzhak Rabin's, the Nobel Prize winner who never uttered the words "two state solution."

But why look at facts when you can find an "expert" to contradict them?

Combined with the nation-state bill, which would enshrine certain rights for Jews only...

Really? Can you name one? Of course not! Baker is just assuming that what he reads in Haaretz must be true, because he likes its politics.

Most of these aren't direct lies. Reuters editors can self-righteously say that they are merely quoting what some Israelis themselves are saying. But that is sophistry, not reporting. They knew what they wanted to report before a word was written and there was no objectivity - the exact opposite of how reporters are supposed to act.

Matti Friedman has more proof of media bias against Israel

Matti Friedman, former AP reporter who blew the whistle on how Middle East reporters are biased against Israel in two explosive Tablet articles earlier this year, has added more in another must-read article, this time in The Atlantic.

Here are significant excerpts, but still less than half the article:

During the Gaza war this summer, it became clear that one of the most important aspects of the media-saturated conflict between Jews and Arabs is also the least covered: the press itself. The Western press has become less an observer of this conflict than an actor in it, a role with consequences for the millions of people trying to comprehend current events, including policymakers who depend on journalistic accounts to understand a region where they consistently seek, and fail, to productively intervene.

[H]ow precisely does this thought pattern manifest itself in the day-to-day functioning, or malfunctioning, of the press corps? To answer this question, I want to explore the way Western press coverage is shaped by unique circumstances here in Israel and also by flaws affecting the media beyond the confines of this conflict.

I’ll begin with a simple illustration. The above photograph is of a student rally held last November at Al-Quds University, a mainstream Palestinian institution in East Jerusalem. The rally, in support of the armed fundamentalist group Islamic Jihad, featured actors playing dead Israeli soldiers and a row of masked men whose stiff-armed salute was returned by some of the hundreds of students in attendance. Similar rallies have been held periodically at the school.

Such an event at an institution like Al-Quds University, headed at the time by a well-known moderate professor, and with ties to sister institutions in America, indicates something about the winds now blowing in Palestinian society and across the Arab world. The rally is interesting for the visual connection it makes between radical Islam here and elsewhere in the region; a picture like this could help explain why many perfectly rational Israelis fear withdrawing their military from East Jerusalem or the West Bank, even if they loathe the occupation and wish to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbors. The images from the demonstration were, as photo editors like to say, “strong.” The rally had, in other words, all the necessary elements of a powerful news story.

The event took place a short drive from the homes and offices of the hundreds of international journalists who are based in Jerusalem. Journalists were aware of it: The sizable Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, for example, which can produce several stories on an average day, was in possession of photos of the event, including the one above, a day later. (The photographs were taken by someone I know who was on campus that day, and I sent them to the bureau myself.) Jerusalem editors decided that the images, and the rally, were not newsworthy...On the day that the AP decided to ignore the rally, November 6, 2013, the same bureau published a report about a pledge from the U.S. State Department to provide a minor funding increase for the Palestinian Authority; that was newsworthy. This is standard. To offer another illustration, the construction of 100 apartments in a Jewish settlement is always news; the smuggling of 100 rockets into Gaza by Hamas is, with rare exceptions, not news at all.

I mention these instances to demonstrate the kind of decisions made regularly in the bureaus of the foreign press covering Israel and the Palestinian territories, and to show the way in which the pipeline of information from this place is not just rusty and leaking, which is the usual state of affairs in the media, but intentionally plugged.

Journalistic decisions are made by people who exist in a particular social milieu, one which, like most social groups, involves a certain uniformity of attitude, behavior, and even dress (the fashion these days, for those interested, is less vests with unnecessary pockets than shirts with unnecessary buttons). These people know each other, meet regularly, exchange information, and closely watch one another’s work. This helps explain why a reader looking at articles written by the half-dozen biggest news providers in the region on a particular day will find that though the pieces are composed and edited by completely different people and organizations, they tend to tell the same story.

...[I]n Israel and the Palestinian territories, foreign activists are a notable feature of the landscape, and international NGOs and numerous arms of the United Nations are among the most powerful players, wielding billions of dollars and employing many thousands of foreign and local employees. Their SUVs dominate sections of East Jerusalem and their expense accounts keep Ramallah afloat. They provide reporters with social circles, romantic partners, and alternative employment—a fact that is more important to reporters now than it has ever been, given the disintegration of many newspapers and the shoestring nature of their Internet successors.

In my time in the press corps, I learned that our relationship with these groups was not journalistic. My colleagues and I did not, that is, seek to analyze or criticize them. For many foreign journalists, these were not targets but sources and friends—fellow members, in a sense, of an informal alliance. This alliance consists of activists and international staffers from the UN and the NGOs; the Western diplomatic corps, particularly in East Jerusalem; and foreign reporters. ... Mingling occurs at places like the lovely Oriental courtyard of the American Colony hotel in East Jerusalem, or at parties held at the British Consulate’s rooftop pool. The dominant characteristic of nearly all of these people is their transience. They arrive from somewhere, spend a while living in a peculiar subculture of expatriates, and then move on.

In these circles, in my experience, a distaste for Israel has come to be something between an acceptable prejudice and a prerequisite for entry. I don’t mean a critical approach to Israeli policies or to the ham-fisted government currently in charge in this country, but a belief that to some extent the Jews of Israel are a symbol of the world’s ills, particularly those connected to nationalism, militarism, colonialism, and racism—an idea quickly becoming one of the central elements of the “progressive” Western zeitgeist, spreading from the European left to American college campuses and intellectuals, including journalists. In this social group, this sentiment is translated into editorial decisions made by individual reporters and editors covering Israel, and this, in turn, gives such thinking the means of mass self-replication.

Many freshly arrived reporters in Israel undergo a rapid socialization in the circles I mentioned. This provides them not only with sources and friendships but with a ready-made framework for their reporting—the tools to distill and warp complex events into a simple narrative in which there is a bad guy who doesn’t want peace and a good guy who does. This is the “Israel story,” and it has the advantage of being an easy story to report. Everyone here answers their cell phone, and everyone knows what to say. You can put your kids in good schools and dine at good restaurants. It’s fine if you’re gay. Your chances of being beheaded on YouTube are slim. Nearly all of the information you need—that is, in most cases, information critical of Israel—is not only easily accessible but has already been reported for you by Israeli journalists or compiled by NGOs. You can claim to be speaking truth to power, having selected the only “power” in the area that poses no threat to your safety.

Confusion over the role of the press explains one of the strangest aspects of coverage here—namely, that while international organizations are among the most powerful actors in the Israel story, they are almost never reported on. Are they bloated, ineffective, or corrupt? Are they helping, or hurting? We don’t know, because these groups are to be quoted, not covered. Journalists cross from places like the BBC to organizations like Oxfam and back. The current spokesman at the UN agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, for example, is a former BBC man. A Palestinian woman who participated in protests against Israel and tweeted furiously about Israel a few years ago served at the same time as a spokesperson for a UN office, and was close friends with a few reporters I know. And so forth.

In the aftermath of the three-week Gaza war of 2008-2009, not yet quite understanding the way things work, I spent a week or so writing a story about NGOs like Human Rights Watch, whose work on Israel had just been subject to an unusual public lashing in The New York Times by its own founder, Robert Bernstein.

Editors killed the story.

Around this time, a Jerusalem-based group called NGO Monitor was battling the international organizations condemning Israel after the Gaza conflict, and though the group was very much a pro-Israel outfit and by no means an objective observer, it could have offered some partisan counterpoint in our articles to charges by NGOs that Israel had committed “war crimes.” But the bureau’s explicit orders to reporters were to never quote the group or its director, an American-born professor named Gerald Steinberg. In my time as an AP writer moving through the local conflict, with its myriad lunatics, bigots, and killers, the only person I ever saw subjected to an interview ban was this professor.

The radio and print journalist Mark Lavie, who has reported from the region since 1972, was a colleague of mine at the AP, where he was an editor in the Jerusalem bureau and then in Cairo until his retirement last year. Lavie believes that in the last years of his career, the AP’s Israel operation drifted from its traditional role of careful explanation toward a kind of political activism that both contributed to and fed off growing hostility to Israel worldwide. “The AP is extremely important, and when the AP turned, it turned a lot of the world with it,” Lavie said. “That’s when it became harder for any professional journalist to work here, Jewish or not. I reject the idea that my dissatisfaction had to do with being Jewish or Israeli. It had to do with being a journalist.”

When Hamas’s leaders surveyed their assets before this summer’s round of fighting, they knew that among those assets was the international press. The AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right beside their office, endangering reporters and other civilians nearby—and the AP wouldn’t report it, not even in AP articles about Israeli claims that Hamas was launching rockets from residential areas. (This happened.) Hamas fighters would burst into the AP’s Gaza bureau and threaten the staff—and the AP wouldn’t report it. (This also happened.) Cameramen waiting outside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City would film the arrival of civilian casualties and then, at a signal from an official, turn off their cameras when wounded and dead fighters came in, helping Hamas maintain the illusion that only civilians were dying. (This too happened; the information comes from multiple sources with firsthand knowledge of these incidents.)

Colford, the AP spokesman, confirmed that armed militants entered the AP’s Gaza office in the early days of the war to complain about a photo showing the location of a rocket launch, though he said that Hamas claimed that the men “did not represent the group.” The AP “does not report many interactions with militias, armies, thugs or governments,” he wrote. “These incidents are part of the challenge of getting out the news—and not themselves news.”

This summer, with Yazidis, Christians, and Kurds falling back before the forces of radical Islam not far away from here, this ideology’s local franchise launched its latest war against the last thriving minority in the Middle East. The Western press corps showed up en masse to cover it. This conflict included rocket barrages across Israel and was deliberately fought from behind Palestinian civilians, many of whom died as a result. Dulled by years of the “Israel story” and inured to its routine omissions, confused about the role they are meant to play, and co-opted by Hamas, reporters described this war as an Israeli onslaught against innocent people. By doing so, this group of intelligent and generally well-meaning professionals ceased to be reliable observers and became instead an amplifier for the propaganda of one of the most intolerant and aggressive forces on earth. And that, as they say, is the story.

Read the whole thing.

Apparent leftist "price tag" attack against synagogue in Tel Aviv

From Arutz-7:

A Tel Aviv synagogue was vandalized Sunday with graffiti reading, “In a place where the Jewish State Bill will be legislated, books will be burned.”

The vandals left a pile of burned books next to the wall that bore the graffiti. The books are not sacred texts.

The attack took place at the The Tel Aviv International Synagogue where Ariel Konstantyn of the Orthodox Zionist Tzohar Rabbis organization, originally of New York, serves as rabbi. Rabbi Konstantyn says the incident has been referred to the police but he views it as a “clear act of anti-Semitism.” According to the rabbi, the timing of the attack and the explicit graffiti seem to indicate that this was perpetrated by radical left-wing activists.

Rabbi Konstantyn expressed his shock saying “It is ironic and shocking that they targeted a synagogue where every perspective is respected and welcomed and where Jews are taught to love each other regardless of their political views.”

The rabbi pointed out that the founding of the International Synagogue was as initiative of the Tzohar Rabbinical Organization as a hub of inclusive outreach to the greater Tel-Aviv community. Over the past few years the synagogue has hosted Shabbat & holiday programs for thousands of Jews from all walks of life and political backgrounds.

Ah, so they burn books as a preventative measure to stop their opponents from burning books, a threat that only exists in their most antisemitic fantasies.

Got it.

But since they are apparently from the Left, we won't be seeing any Reuters or NYT articles on this house of worship being vandalized. Wwe need to be tolerant of the intolerant leftist haters of Judaism, especially the Jews..

I find it interesting that this attack was so well planned that the arsonists had created a stencil ahead of time to leave their little threat.

The Levy Report, fully translated

I have had the legal arguments of the 2012 Levy Report on the legality of the settlements translated but Regavim translated the entire thing.

The Levy Commission Report on the Legal Status of Building in Judea and Samaria

11/30 Links: Prosor: The UN's theater of the absurd; The lion-killer who became an Israeli hero

From Ian:

Ron Prosor: The UN's theater of the absurd

On Nov. 29, 1947, a Saturday night, the entire Yishuv (the Jewish community of pre-state Israel) held its breath. The tiny voice of Brazilian U.N. General Assembly President Osvaldo Aranha blared from the radios in every home. The agenda for the day: Resolution 181 on the end of the British Mandate and the partition plan of Palestine. Holocaust survivors, Jews who were kicked out of Arab lands, the many waves of immigrants to Israel, the pioneers and those who immigrated illegally all cast their lot with the promising institution that would be a magnificent monument to the triumph of good over evil in World War II.
Sixty-seven years after that historical vote -- the U.N.'s shattered dream lies before us. Over the years, it has gone from a monument of victory to a memorial, a remnant of the hope that has vanished. Although it was designed to prevent the reoccurrence of Nazi crimes, the U.N. has become an international arena for Arab criminal bullying. The Arab world attacked the Yishuv only hours after rejecting the outcome of the vote, and it did not stop even after the thunder of the Napoleon cannons subsided at the end of the War of Independence. The unification of Arab and Muslim countries at the U.N. has created the foundation for a 120-state-strong anti-Israel diplomatic cartel.

Douglas Murray: Baroness Warsi's Obsession

What seems odd is this obsession with Israel, with which she has no ties. Yet this Baroness, who claims to be motivated only by moral outrage, is considerably silent on the far worse moral outrages that go on day in and day out in a country with which she does have ties — of which she made a virtue while in office. Yet Baroness Warsi ignores entirely the horrific and continual human rights abuses in her own family's homeland of Pakistan. Whether it is Christians being burned alive or the practice of "bonded labor" (slavery), Warsi appears utterly unconcerned. At present, a Christian mother of four is due to be hanged for blasphemy.
What is far more important is that the obsessions and blind spots of Baroness Warsi are the obsessions and blind spots being taught to a generation.

Elliott Abrams: Business as usual with UNRWA

The Framework concludes this way:‎
"The United States expects to remain an active participant in UNRWA's Advisory ‎Commission, which meets twice per year, and should endeavor to provide advice and ‎guidance to UNRWA through its engagement at meetings of the Advisory Commission. In ‎‎2015, the United States is expected to serve as Vice Chair of the Subcommittee to the ‎Advisory Commission and endeavors to provide leadership and support to the Subcommittee in its capacity as a technical advisory group to the Advisory Commission. The ‎United States and UNRWA should regularly consult bilaterally on policy and program issues ‎identified in this Framework.‎"
Here are some ideas for those regular bilateral consultations in 2015: No more business as ‎usual. Thorough, independent investigations of each rocket incident. An investigation of the ‎health clinic incident. An investigation of the influence of Hamas on UNRWA staff, and ‎through that staff and its union on UNRWA schools and other facilities.‎
There is no possible claim of ignorance. Last summer's war exposed the UNRWA-Hamas ‎ties yet again. In that context it is shocking that the State Department has signed a Framework that ‎mentions none of this, none at all, and says nothing about curing it and preventing ‎recurrence. Shocking -- but, one has to admit, not particularly surprising.‎

The West Supports Terrorism Against Israel Through UNRWA

In the past several months, the corruption of the UNRWA has become more evident than ever, though most of the mainstream media has kept it under wraps. Over the summer, for example, during Operation Protective Edge when Israel fought back against Hamas in Gaza after the terrorism against Jews had reached a boiling point, it was revealed that Hamas rockets were being stored in UNRWA schools. In one case, the rockets had “mysteriously” gone missing after discovery and in another, the UN returned the rockets to Hamas despite publicly condemning the terror group for using the school as an arsenal.
The schools served another purpose for Hamas as rocket launching sites. At one point during the war, when a UNRWA school was bombed and Israel was blamed, it turned out that Hamas had misfired a rocket, which exploded on its own school. The initial media outrage was aimed at Israel, but the subsequent findings against Hamas were not quite so newsworthy.
More recently, UNRWA educators have been caught supporting terror, but this news, uncovered by the “Elder of Ziyon” blogger, has not made it to the mainstream media. More specifically, the contents of the social media accounts of UNRWA school principals demonstrate blatant anti-Semitism and full support of terror against Israel. As “Elder of Ziyon” writes, “Is it a UN principle for principals to support terror?”

Due to never-ending Arab hostility toward Jews in the Middle East I am reading more and more people talking about the possibility of transference. Mainly in the comments of various pro-Israel blogs and news websites, but among some well respected high-profile analysts, as well, the idea of inducing Israeli-Arabs to move out of the area seems to be growing.

This is a natural response to the efforts of Arabs within Israel to the murder of Jews, up to and including ramming babies with automobiles. My sense is that Jewish people around the world, although particularly in Israel, have about had it. From my perspective, Jewish people have a tendency to be rather passive. As a historically persecuted minority our tendency has been to keep our head down so that others do not take a kick at it, But there must come a point wherein even the most intimidated minority is forced to stand up for itself in order to defend its own survival.

The Arabs have pushed the Jews to the point wherein physical coercion looks more and more likely. We are, after all, directly within the midst of the Third Arab Terror War (Intifada) against the Jews of the Middle East and my suspicion is that however much fun the previous two were, that Israeli Jews may no longer be in the mood to take the abuse and they should not have to.

Thus some people talk about the necessity of financially inducing Arabs to leave the Land of Israel, while others even discuss the possibility of using armed force to push them out of Jewish lives. I just want to take a brief moment in order to suggest what a terrible idea forced transference is and I have to assume that most Jews who care about Israel are in opposition to any such policy. The first reason that such a thing needs to be opposed is because it violates Jewish ethics. Any policy of forced transference would mean that untold numbers of perfectly innocent people would be dragged from their homes and placed within internment camps in preparation for deportation... to G-d Knows Where.

Polling indicates that the Israeli-Arab population despises Jews and looks fondly upon violence toward us. Nonetheless, not all Arabs of Israel hate Jews and not all want to see violence against us. To push such people out of their homes would be highly unethical and therefore entirely unJewish.

To my ear the previous sentence sounds a bit too vacuous, a bit too obvious, but maybe it needs to be said, anyway. While World War II gives us plenty of historical precedents for population transference, any such move would, in truth, be a moral and practical non-starter... if I may steal another man's line.

Also, of course, the rest of the world community might have a thing or two to say about any such operation. Vicious left-wing anti-Semites already tend to think of Jews as Nazis. Can you imagine what people around the world will say once they start processing images of the IDF pushing old Arab women and young children into deportation camps? If you think that they hate us already and it cannot get much worse, I suspect that you should think again.

The western-left despises Jewish self-defense which they interpret as a form of aggression. Prior to the strangely named Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, the Gazans shot thousands of rockets into southern Israel, ruining communities and lives. The rest of the world did not notice, nor did they care. It was only when Israel finally stood up to undermine Hamas's terrorist infrastructure and destroy those Jihadi kidnapping tunnels that people throughout the world leaped out of their chairs and denounced the Jews of Israel for committing a "genocide" against the perfectly innocent, bunny-like "indigenous" population.

If the Jews were to push the Arabs out of Israel, Europe would go entirely nuts. If you think that BDS is an annoyance now wait until the boost it gets from any Israeli policy of forced transference. The Europeans, who are already generally unfriendly toward Israel, would take harsh measures against what would be perceived as a fascistic Israeli policy. Some might think that due to economic reasons, or reasons to do with scientific exchange and trade, that the Europeans and the rest of the world would gripe, but shortly get over it. That might be the case, but I would not count on it and it would make for a terrible gamble.

As a poker player, I would not make that bet.

This, however, does not mean that there are not forceful measures that Israel can take in order make Arab hatred toward Jews unpleasant for the Arabs, themselves.

This is what my friend Caroline Glick has to say:

Rather than destroy their homes, Israel should adopt the US anti-narcotics policy of asset seizure.
All assets directly or indirectly tied to terrorists, including their homes and any other structure where they planned their crimes, and all remittances to them, should be seized and transferred to their victims, to do with what they will.
If Israel hands over the homes of the synagogue butchers to the 24 orphans of Rabbi Moshe Twersky, Rabbi Kalman Levine, Rabbi Aryeh Kupinsky and Rabbi Avraham Goldberg, not only will justice be served. The children’s inheritance of the homes of their fathers’ killers will send a clear and demoralizing message to other would-be killers.
Not only will their atrocities fail to remove the Jews from Israel. Every terrorist will contribute to the Zionist project by donating his home to the Jewish settlement enterprise.

There are any number of creative measures that Israel can take short of housing destruction or forced transference to show the Arabs that the government means business and will simply not allow this kind of violence toward the Jewish people in the Jewish State. Seizing assets is one way of showing Israeli-Arabs that if they seek violence toward Jews their family will pay a major price for it.

Another thing that must be done is liberalizing Israeli policy toward the Temple Mount.

That the Arabs have intimidated the Jews into giving up sovereignty of our holiest site is galling, counterproductive, and should not be tolerated. All people should be allowed free and equal access to the Mount and all people - not just Muslims - should be allowed to pray there. Jews and Christians and Rastafarians and Rosicrucians and Hindus and Buddhists and Taoists and NeoPagans and the Bahai and the Sikhs, and any and all heathens, should all be allowed equal access to the site with Muslims and all must be allowed to pray there.

Anything else represents deference to Arab-Muslim race-hatred toward Jews and others right in the heart of Jerusalem.

And, needless to say, rock throwing and other attempts at murder should be met with ferocity. I may be opposed to home demolitions and forced transference of a hostile population, but I also very much believe in Jewish self-defense.

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.

The misery of Jews of Morocco, 1805

Today is Israel's national day of commemorating Jewish refugees from Arab lands and Iran.

Muslims like to pretend that they treated Jews in their lands well throughout history. As we have shown a number of times, that is not at all true. In some cases the Jews were treated reasonably, in others they were treated horribly.

Ali Bey al Abbasi was a pseudonym of a European traveler who disguised himself as a Muslim prince in order to explore the Muslim world from Morocco to Mecca between 1803 and 1807.

Here is his account of the Jews of Morocco, from Travels of Ali Bey: In Morocco, Tripoli, Cyprus, Egypt, Arabia, Syria and Turkey : Between the Years 1803 and 1807:

THE Jews in Morocco are in the most abject state of slavery; but at Tangier it is remarkable that they live intermingled with the Moors, without having any separate quarter, which is the case in all other places where the Mahometan religion prevails. This distinction occasions perpetual disagreements; it excites disputes, in which, if the Jew is wrong, the Moor takes his own satisfaction; and if the Jew is right, he lodges a complaint with the judge, who always decides in favour of the Mussulman. This shocking partiality in the dispensation of justice between individuals of different sects begins from the cradle; so that a Mussulman child will insult and strike a Jew, whatever be his age and infirmities, without his being allowed to complain, or even to defend himself. This inequality prevails even among the children of these different religions; so that I have seen the Mahometan children amuse themselves with beating little Jews, without these daring to defend themselves.

The Jews are obliged, by order of the Government, to wear a particular dress» composed of large drawers, of a tunic, which descends to their knees, Of a kind of burnous or cloak thrown on one side, slippers, and a very small cap; every part of their dress is black except the shirt, of which the sleeves are extremely wide, open, and hanging down very low.

When a Jew passes before a mosque, he is obliged to take off his slippers, or sandals; he must do the same when he passes before the house of the Kaid, the Kadi, or of any Mussulman of distinction. At Fez ami in some other towns they are obliged to walk barefoot.

When they meet a Mussulman of high rank they are obliged to turn away hastily to a certain distance on the left of the road, to leave their sandals on the ground several paces off, and to put themselves into a most humble posture, their body intirely bent forward, till the Mussulman has passed to a great distance; if they hesitate to do this, or to dismount from their horse when they meet a Mahometan, they are severely punished. I have often been obliged to restrain my soldiers or servants from beating these poor wretches, when they were not active enough in placing themselves in the humble attitude prescribed on them by the Mahometan tyranny.

Notwithstanding these inconveniencies, the Jews carry on a considerable trade at Morocco, and have even several times farmed the custom-house; but it happens almost always that in the end they are plundered by the Moors, or by the Government. On my arrival, I had two Jews amongst my servants: when I saw that they were so ill treated and vexed in different ways, I asked them why they did not go to another country; they answered me, that they could not do so because they were slaves of the sultan.