This is an incredibly tough category to decide. Every one of these nominees is exceptional. I urge you to follow all of these tweeters.
The 2015 Hasby Award for Best Pro-Israel Tweeter goes to...
Some 1.5 million people, including over 50 world leaders, thronged central Paris Sunday afternoon in a massive and historic show of support against terrorism and to honor 17 victims of a series of attacks that rocked France last week. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, attending the rally, announced that the four Jewish victims of an attack on a kosher market Friday would be buried in Israel. Stay tuned to The Times of Israel liveblog for breaking developments.Douglas Murray and Maajid Nawaz [Big Questions] (best part 16:15)
Bernard-Henri Lévy: France ‘will not be weak anymore’
French-Jewish philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy tells CNN that today’s outpouring of people onto the streets is France’s way of saying that it has failed to stand sufficiently firm in the face of Islamic extremism, and that this is now going to change.
The message of the rally, he says, is that “we will not be weak anymore in the face of this jihadism.”
It seems the drawings in Charlie Hebdo offended some true believers of Islam, but the mere existence of Jews also offends them. So, apparently, does the existence of Christians, Yazidis, Hindus, Ahmadiyyas; anyone considered a "disbeliever," "infidel" or "not Muslim enough;" other Muslims, such as those blown up on the streets of Asia each week or the unfortunate Muslim policeman, Ahmed Merabet, wounded, then slaughtered at point blank range, on the sidewalk for not being "part of the plan."
In reaction to the murders in Paris, the French capital's Grand Synagogue was closed for the first time since World War II. In fact, synagogues all over Paris were closed. There were no Shabbat services this Saturday, the Jewish day of rest. The stores in the Marais, the Jewish section of Paris, were also shuttered. In light of all the expressed concern about possible anti-Muslim incidents, claims on television, such as on CNN, that "Muslims are the most persecuted people," seemed jarring and wrong.
The Grand Mosque in Paris, like mosques all over the capital, was open for business on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer. Moreover, there was little discernible increased security around the Grand Mosque. It seems French security authorities were less worried about attacks directed at Muslim institutions than were America's media commentators. Perhaps they should have spent just a little time reporting on the anti-Jewish rioting that took place in the heavily Muslim neighborhood of Trappes, a suburb of Paris?
Speaking at the same event, Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett slammed Livni, saying she "talked about the occupation and diplomatic isolation, and I wondered why she didn't get on a plane to Paris to solve their problems? Maybe she can run their negotiations, offer them a diplomatic horizon, tell them there's a solution.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is scheduled to take part in a rally in the French capital Sunday against terrorism and in solidarity with the victims of the recent Paris attacks, as well as to stress the peaceful nature of the Islamic faith.for anyone who follows Abbas' statements, this is meaningless. His definition of "terrorism" is quite different from that of any normal human being.
His participation comes a day after he called French President Francois Hollande to express his outrage and condemnation of the attacks, which left 16 civilians dead.
Abbas told Hollande Saturday that the Palestinian people and leadership would remain supportive of France against "this terrorism which has no religion," official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.
Abbas expressed his condemnation and strong opposition to any "terror attack" that hurts innocent citizens, regardless of whether the victims are Christians, Jews, Muslims, or followers of any other religion or creed.
"Human life is sacred and God has created us all," he reportedly said.
(autotranslated) |
Just last week, five terrorists, who in total recently killed 10 Israelis, were included on a list of "Martyrs of 2014" who "ascended" to Heaven, published in the bi-weekly Al-Asima distributed with the official Palestinian Authority daily.
The terrorists on the list, who were called "Shahids" (Martyrs) and thereby achieve the highest status possible in Islam, included the synagogue murderers who recently killed 5, three terrorists who killed 5 by running them over with cars and an excavator and the terrorist who attempted to assassinate Rabbi Yehuda Glick. See descriptions of their attacks below.
Another article described the terrorists as having died while "carrying out Martyrdom-seeking (Istish'had) operations."
As I write a siege is ongoing in a Kosher shop in Paris. In France, Belgium and across Europe in recent years, Jews have repeatedly been the targets of Islamist attack. They always are. Last year saw the largest upsurge of anti-Semitic hate crime on record even in the UK.Ben-Dror Yemini: The forces of darkness are winning
But it is the continent that has seen the worst and growing litany of attacks. In 2012 Mohamed Merah killed three Jewish children and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse. In May last year three people were shot dead by an Islamist gunman at the Jewish museum in Brussels.
During the twentieth century Judaism on the continent of Europe was almost wiped out. In twenty-first century Europe the remaining Jews are once again the target. But from a different type of fascism and from a population who came to Europe since the Holocaust. In the last few years France has seen a larger exodus of Jews moving to Israel than any other country.
There are two questions we really need to consider at such a time. The first is, ‘Why do they always target the Jews?’. In 2008 when Mumbai was attacked, the Islamic terrorists rampaged through that great Indian city. But they specially sought out the tiny Chabad house in Mumbai and there they slaughtered the young rabbi and his wife. It is the same story everywhere. And of course the sort of people who gun down cartoonists for exercising their right to free expression will be the same people who will target Jews.
The second question is this: How dare so many Europeans still wonder why Israel needs to exist. Today Israel is the world’s only really safe haven for Jews who live in a world which cannot keep them safe, even when it wants to.
The City of Light suffered a painful terrorist attack this week. It wasn't just another terror attack; it was a terror attack aimed at the very heart and values of the free world. It was a terror attack on freedom of speech and the status of women. It wasn't a terror attack perpetrated in protest against discrimination.David Brooks: I Am Not Charlie Hebdo
It wasn't a terror attack for the sake of the rights of the Muslims. It wasn't a terror attack against unemployment or alienation. The Jihadists aren't fighting for a better world. They are fighting against anyone and anything different from them. They're fighting to establish a dark Islamic entity.
The problem is the battle is lost. They are winning. Almost a decade and a half ago, the world suffered a jarring experience – the large-scale terror attacks in the United States. There have been other large-scale terror attacks in the West too, in Madrid and London. And what has emerged since? A lot. A whole lot.
The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let’s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds. Student and faculty groups would have accused them of hate speech. The administration would have cut financing and shut them down.Phyllis Chesler: #Je Suis Juif (I am a Jew)
Public reaction to the attack in Paris has revealed that there are a lot of people who are quick to lionize those who offend the views of Islamist terrorists in France but who are a lot less tolerant toward those who offend their own views at home.
Just look at all the people who have overreacted to campus micro-aggressions. The University of Illinois fired a professor who taught the Roman Catholic view on homosexuality. The University of Kansas suspended a professor for writing a harsh tweet against the N.R.A. Vanderbilt University derecognized a Christian group that insisted that it be led by Christians.
Americans may laud Charlie Hebdo for being brave enough to publish cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad, but, if Ayaan Hirsi Ali is invited to campus, there are often calls to deny her a podium.
At least four, possibly five French Jewish hostages, probably women who were shopping for the Sabbath, were killed by Jihadists before the French police stormed the kosher supermarket. The male and female pair of jihadists were demanding the freedom of the Charlie Hebdo jihadists.
Simultaneously, the police also stormed the building in north Paris where the Charlie Hebdo jihadists were holding a hostage; they apparently freed that hostage and killed the terrorists.
I am launching a #Je Suis Juif hashtag, not only in honor of these latest Jewish victims, but in honor of all the Jewish victims whose deaths have met with the hashtag world’s indifference.
Lassana Bathily, a Muslim employee at Paris Kosher grocery store Hyper Cacher, saved several people by hiding them in a walk-in freezer when a gunman laid siege to his workplace on Friday.
Amedy Coulibaly burst into the market and opened fire, killing 4 people. He took several shoppers hostage and threatened to kill them if police stormed the printing shop where Cherif and Said Kouachi, who killed 12 people in an attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo earlier in the week, were holed up in a village to the north.
Bathily, identified by French media as a "Malian Muslim," helped several customers to safety as the chaos unfolded. "I went down to the freezer, I opened the door, there were several people who went in with me. I turned off the light and the freezer," Bathily, 24, told French network BFMTV. "I brought them inside and I told them to stay calm here, I'm going to go out. When they got out, they thanked me."
It's unclear exactly how many people Bathily managed to hide inside the freezer in the store's basement. City councillor Malik Yettou said that six people and a baby escaped the gunman by hiding there, while BFMTV put the number at about 15.
Bathily told BFMTV that he managed to get out of the store through the freight elevator. When he encountered police, they seemed to initially mistake him for one of the terrorists. "They told me, get down on the ground, hands over your head," he said. "They cuffed me and held me for an hour and a half as if I was with them." He said that he then helped police with his knowledge of the floor plan of the store.
The four victims killed in the terror attack on a kosher shop in the French capital were all Jews, the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities said.
CRIF identified the victims of the attack Friday as Yoav Hattab, Philippe Braham, Yohan Cohen and Francois-Michel Saada.
“These French citizens were struck down in a cold-blooded manner and mercilessly because they were Jews,” read the CRIF statement sent out on Saturday.
Hattab, was the son of the chief rabbi of Tunis.
According to testimonies of people who survived the attack on the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket, the four people who were killed during the incident were shot in the early stages of the seven-hour standoff, which ended when police stormed the shop and killed the hostage taker — a 32-year-old man identified as Amedy Coulibaly.
Cohen was the grandson of a famous Jewish-Tunisian singer, Doukha who died last month. His parents, of Algerian and Tunisian descent, immigrated to Sarcells, a Jewish neighborhood of Paris, in the 1960s.
He was a fan of rap music, according to his Facebook page, and had recently published an image bearing the popular “Je Suis Charlie” slogan, in honor of the 12 people massacred on Wednesday at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris by two terrorist brothers who, it later turned out, were working together with the gunman of the market attack.
Cohen is believed to have been the first victim of Coulibaly, who started his siege of the market under a hail of gunfire, according to an account on JSSnews. Reports still differ but it seems Barham and Saada were also shot and killed during the take-over or shortly after the siege began
Saada leaves behind two children, both of whom live in Israel. “He was a remarkable husband and father, a man who lived his life for his family,” an unnamed friend told AFP.
Barham’s children go to a Jewish school, near the site where a policewoman was gunned down by Coulibaly on Thursday.
Hattab, one of seven children to parents living in Tunisia, was a university student living alone in Paris. He is reported to be the son of the chief rabbi of Tunis.
According to reports, Hattab was the market customer who managed to snatch one of Coulibaly’s weapons, turning it on him before realizing it was jammed. Coulibaly then executed him on the spot, according to a witness who spoke to Le Point.
It would be a good idea if the international community and media stopped turning a blind eye to the suffering of Palestinians at the hands of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority [PA].Countering punch-drunk Palestinians
Abbas wants the world to support the creation of a dictatorship where people are arrested and intimidated for expressing their views in public. He is also asking the world to support a Palestinian state where Hamas is torturing Palestinians.
While the PA is accusing Hamas of human rights violations, its security forces in the West Bank continue to crack down on freedom of expression. In recent weeks, Palestinian Authority forces in the West Bank have arrested more than 25 university students on charges of criticizing Palestinian leaders in Ramallah.
"You can still see the bruises on their bodies. They were subjected to harsh torture." — Hisham Sakallah, Palestinian writer, on Hamas interrogators beating Fatah officials with plastic hoses.
The Palestinians have come to believe that they can demand the sky and conduct diplomatic war against Israel with impunity. It’s time to disabuse them of these notions through determined Israeli action. And it’s time to reeducate Palestinian leaders and the global community as to the terms to a negotiated settlement that Israel can live with.Notorious Palestinian plane hijacker to promote BDS in South Africa
You see, the Palestinians long ago took a decision to reject the two-state solution as Israelis and most Western policy-makers envision it.
The Palestinian state that Israelis might be able to support in Judea, Samaria and Gaza cannot threaten Israel’s security – meaning that it must be truly demilitarized, cannot form hostile foreign alliances, will dismantle the Hamas army and hand over its weaponry, agree to Israeli monitors on all its external borders, and accept a permanent Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley to prevent the emergence of another radical Islamic bastion on Israel’s eastern border. (Sinai-stan, Hama-stan, Hezbollah- stan and Syria-stan are already more than enough for Israel to handle.) The Palestinian state that Israelis might be able to support in Judea, Samaria and Gaza must be a reasonable neighbor and willing to compromise – meaning that will not contain any large Israeli settlement blocs, cannot control and destroy Jerusalem, and must share its airspace, natural resources, and historical and religious sites with Israel.
The Palestinian state that Israelis can envision, if at all, in Judea, Samaria and Gaza has to agree to a permanent end to the conflict and all claims on Israel – meaning that it renounces the right of return, inculcates reconciliation and not anti-Semitism on its airwaves and in its schools, recognizes Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish People, and does not seek to criminalize Israeli leaders in international forums.
BUT TODAY’S punch-drunk Palestinian leadership does not want the constricted West Bank state that Israel can countenance.
Infamous Palestinian plane hijacker Leila Khaled will be visiting South Africa next month as a guest of the local chapter of the international Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions movement and Muslim organizations.The “Nonviolence” of the BDS Movement
BDS South Africa is known for its high-profile, anti-Israel stunts. Last November, It was prevented by court order from protesting outside branches of the Woolworths department store chain. In one of the protests, activists from the Congress of South African Students placed a pig's head in the kosher section of a Cape Town branch.
Born in Haifa in 1944, Khaled joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine at a young age and shot to global prominence with a series of hijackings in 1969 and 1970. (h/t Alexi)
However that may be, Khaled reveals to anyone who cares to listen exactly how she understands the role of BDS. BDS “of course, on the international level [is] very effective. But it doesn’t liberate, it doesn’t liberate land. If there’s BDS all over the world, and the people are not resisting, there will be no change.” In apartheid South Africa, she claims, boycotts “helped the people who were holding arms. But if they were not holding arms it may have affected them politically, but it would not have liberated, not on the ground.” BDS is a way of supporting an armed resistance. As Khaled sees it, BDS is the propaganda arm of groups like her own PFLP.
Rather than distancing themselves from Khaled and the terrorist organization for which she continues to labor, the purportedly nonviolent BDS-South Africa celebrates what they plainly regard as her praiseworthy legacy. Rather than denying that they happily march arm in arm with the likes of PFLP, they quote approvingly an unnamed source that calls Khaled the “poster girl of the Palestinian struggle,” and invite us to dine with her.
You might almost think that they are auditioning for the role—of propagandists to ease the way for the people with guns—Khaled has assigned them.
“In the spring of 1945,” says the narrator, over bucolic springtime shots of the German countryside, “the allies advancing into the heart of Germany came to Bergen-Belsen. Neat and tidy orchards, well-stocked farms lined the wayside, and the British soldier did not fail to admire the place and its inhabitants. At least, until he began to feel a smell …”Lustig's theory, if it could be proven, would be a bombshell.
So begins a British film about the Holocaust that was abandoned and shelved for 70 years because it was deemed too politically sensitive. The smell came from the dead, their bodies burned or rotting; or from malnourished, often disease-ridden prisoners in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, near all those thriving German farms.
As allied troops liberated such camps across what had been German-occupied Europe, the British Ministry of Information’s Sidney Bernstein (who later founded Granada Television) was commissioned to make a documentary that would provide incontrovertible evidence of the Nazis’ crimes.
Bernstein assembled a remarkable team, including the future Labour cabinet minister Richard Crossman, who wrote the film’s lyrical script, and Alfred Hitchcock, who flew in from Hollywood to advise Bernstein on its structure. They set to work on a documentary entitled German Concentration Camps Factual Survey. As they worked, reels of film kept arriving, sent by British, American and Soviet combat and newsreel cameramen from 11 camps, including Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. As well as the dead, the footage showed starved survivors and human remains in ovens.
...Now, 70 years on, director and anthropologist André Singer has made a documentary called Night Will Fall, to be screened on Channel 4 later this month, telling the extraordinary story of filming the camps and the fate of Bernstein’s project.
...Singer also interviews another illustrious Holocaust survivor, a Croatian named Branko Lustig. He was a child in Belsen, so sick at the time of liberation that when he heard a strange noise he thought he’d arrived in heaven to a chorus of angels’ trumpets. In reality, they were the bagpipes played by Scottish soldiers.
Many years later, Steven Spielberg chose Lustig, by then a film-maker, to be a producer for Schindler’s List. Lustig has a theory about why British authorities suppressed Bernstein’s film. “At this time, the Brits had enough problems with the Jews.” By that, no doubt, he means that Britain was dealing with Zionists agitating for a Jewish homeland in the British mandate of Palestine – and seeing the full extent of Jewish suffering would only inflame them.
Singer says he’s already had flak for including Lustig’s theory. “Why the film was scuppered is not very well documented,” he says. “But Branko may well have a point.” Singer points out that in 1945, the incoming Labour government’s foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, was anti-Zionist and unsympathetic to the foundation of a Jewish state. But he concedes there is no strong proof. “The only documentary evidence we have is a memo from the Foreign Office saying that screening such an ‘atrocity film’ would not be a good idea.”
France is facing a terrorist onslaught. Two days after gunmen killed 12 in an assault at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the suspects were shot dead by French security forces on Friday afternoon and the hostage they were holding was freed. Security forces almost simultaneously stormed the kosher grocery where another gunmen was holding hostages. Initial reports said he was also killed; the fate of the hostages was not immediately clear. The Times of Israel is liveblogging developments:At least 6 people held captive at kosher market in Paris
18:58 At least 4 hostages dead at kosher market in Paris
At least four hostages at the Kosher supermarket siege in northeastern Paris are dead, a police source tells Reuters.
18:45 ‘Charlie Hebdo suspects came out firing on security forces’
The Kouachi brothers, suspected in the Charlie Hebdo attack that killed 12 people, came out of the printing shop north-east of Paris where they were holding one hostage, guns blazing, a source tells AFP.
French commandos killed the two as they stormed the shop.
18:36 Gunman at kosher market killed in police assault
The gunman at the kosher grocery store in Paris is said to have been killed in a police assault to free the hostages, according to Le Monde.
18:34 Charlie Hebdo terrorist brothers dead, hostage freed
A French police official confirms the two suspects in the Charlie Hebdo massacre have been killed.
The hostage they were holding has been freed, the police also say.
The two brothers, Said and Cherif Kouachi, killed 12 people in an assault on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine on Wednesday, and a massive manhunt had been mounted to catch them.
They were holed up in a building in the Dammartin-en-Goele, north-east of Paris.
Fresh shooting broke out in eastern Paris on Friday, as an armed man took at least six people hostage at a kosher grocery store, among them women and children.Paris shooting: The 12 victims
The gunman has threatened to kill the hostage if French authorities launch an assault on the Charlie Hebdo killers, who were holding at least one person hostage near Paris, police said Friday.
French lawmaker Meyer Habib told Army Radio Friday that the hostages at the grocery store include “a family with kids, there shopping for Shabbat.”
Some reports in the local media indicated earlier that two people were killed in the attack on Hypercacher Alimentation Générale in Paris’s Porte de Vincennes area, but authorities did not confirm the deaths.
The 12 people killed in the terrorist attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo included a prominent economist and some of France’s leading cartoonists. These are the victims:
Stephane Charbonnier, 47, known professionally as Charb
Bernard Maris, 68
Jean Cabut, 76
Georges Wolinski, 80
Cartoonist Bernard Verlhac
Phillipe Honore, or Honore, 73
Michel Renaud, a former journalist who was visiting the office as a guest of Cabut.
Mustapha Ourrad, a copy editor at the magazine.
Elsa Cayat, an analyst and columnist at the magazine.
Frederic Boisseau, a building maintenance worker.
Franck Brinsolaro, a 49-year-old policeman who was head of Charb’s security detail.
Merabet Ahmad, a 42-year-old police officer and French Muslim.
At least two people have been killed in a shooting at a kosher grocery in Porte de Vincennes, eastern Paris according to a police officer at the scene who spoke to the BBC.
However, there were conflicting reports and Bernard Cazeneuve, the French interior minister, has denied that there are any casualties at this stage.
France’s anti-terrorism prosecutor earlier confirmed that an armed man had taken at least five people hostage in the grocery, which is called Hyper Cacher. Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported that police have blocked off the roads near the shop, and have surrounded the building. Nearby schools have been put into lockdown.
Google streetview of Hypercacher supermarket pic.twitter.com/CntRl17Qx0
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) January 9, 2015
. @KenRoth and @HRW call to "guard against backlash against French Muslims." When will they demand protection for French Jews?
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) January 9, 2015
I hope the media doesn't publish photos of kosher food to further inflame the situation @JeffreyGoldberg
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) January 9, 2015
For the security and safety of customers and employees, supermarkets must stop selling kosher food #MediaLogic h/t @TheAnorak
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) January 9, 2015
Will @AliAbunimah say that kugel and challah may have driven Muslims to murder? pic.twitter.com/09ZaA56igz
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) January 9, 2015
@elderofziyon @Yair_Rosenberg:Jews existing and keeping kosher offends the terrorists' sensibilities. They should have been less provocative
— Diana Muir Appelbaum (@DMAppelbaum) January 9, 2015
No, @clancycnn thinks that all news coverage of the hostage situation is "hasbara" @CygnusA81 @TheAnorak
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) January 9, 2015
At least 135 Palestinian prisoners, held in Israeli jails, have been killed since 1967 due to torture or live fire shooting, according to a report published by the Prisoners' Center for Studies, a local group concerned with the issue of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons.While this article in English says that the toothpaste was poisoned, in Arabic it says "explosive toothpaste." I reported on that accusation earlier this week.
Whereas 72 prisoners were killed as a result of extreme torture, 74 others were deliberately shot dead by Israeli live fire after their apprehension, the report uncovered. Seven other prisoners, however, were killed after being treated with excessive force by the Israeli authorities.
Recent reports indicated that the Israel Prison Service had attempted to get rid of two prisoners, identified as Bashir Hroub and Haitham Salhia, by infusing poison into the Hroub's own toothpaste and into a cup of coffee for Salhia.
The center's chairman, Rafat Hamdona, said such attempts, as well as the killing of prisoners, is in contradiction with Article 85 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which stipulates that prisoners' lives are to be protected.
Top PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat has called the ongoing expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank "terrorism," even making comparisons between Israel and the Islamic State militant group in Iraq and Syria.Funny. I don't think there is any difference between Saeb Erekat and Joseph Goebbels.
"There is no difference between the terrorism practiced by the group led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Israel's terrorism," he said, referencing the leader of the IS group during a speech at a festival celebrating the Prophet Muhammad's birthday in Jericho on Monday.
He added that "ending settlement activities is a prerequisite for eliminating terrorism."
Buy EoZ's book, PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
If you want real peace, don't insist on a divided Jerusalem, @USAmbIsrael
The Apartheid charge, the Abraham Accords and the "right side of history"
With Palestinians, there is no need to exaggerate: they really support murdering random Jews
Great news for Yom HaShoah! There are no antisemites!