Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, March 08, 2015

ISIS Unveiled (Mike Lumish)

In an important conversation concerning the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), between Atlantic journalist, Graeme Wood, and public intellectual, Sam Harris, we read the following exchange:

Harris: Have you watched any of the Islamic State’s execution videos?

Wood: I’ve watched many of them.

Harris: I haven’t, and I’m a little surprised by that. At one point, I think I just decided that the trade-off between their information value and emotional toxicity didn’t seem worth it. From your perspective as a journalist, what is the value in watching those videos?

Wood: I would start by describing not the value but the cost. It’s a terrible thing. I feel diminished, permanently, by having watched them.

My inclination, much like Harris', has been to avoid the more graphic material that ISIS vomits into the public sphere.

Wood argues that there is much to be learned, and I do not doubt him, but I simply have not the heart for too much of this material. I saw one video that will stay with me for the rest of my life, however. It showed an ISIS fighter standing in a pool of blood by the edge of cliff with a handgun. Another man ran off camera, returned dragging a person, sometimes a child, which the first man shot directly in the head prompting the second man to throw the body off of the cliff and then run off for another victim.

I stopped watching after maybe the third or fourth heinous murder because, you can be sure, a little of this goes an awful long way.

But, however the West ends up dealing with these gentlemen, it is probably best, unfortunately, that we continue to get to know who they are and what they want. In the very same interview or discussion entitled, The True Believers (a hat-tip to JayinPhiladelphia, by the way) they reference a VICE News piece of investigative journalism from last year entitled, The Spread of the Caliphate : The Islamic State, which draws a portrait of the organization that is consistent with what we have learned about it so far.

Let's give fifteen minutes, or so, for part one of five and see what it tells us.

Don't they look dashing?

They are, in fact, entirely brutal, although seemingly without being crude. They are deeply religious, after all, and see themselves not only as moral, but as quintessentially moral in the eyes of Allah. If you think that they generally feel guilty for their bloody behavior, they do not. On the contrary, they think that YOU are highly immoral. You, in fact, are so immoral that your average ISIS fighter would kill you as soon as look at you.

They are also, it should be noted, often very well-educated and sincere about the intensity of their religious ideology and faith. As has been repeatedly shown, they are not motivated out of material concerns, but out of an intense religious ideology which give their lives meaning and which allows them to feel part of something both larger than themselves and historical in the making.

They tend to focus on the indoctrination of children, as perhaps we'll discuss next week, and honestly want to defeat the forces of "Rome," for hadithian reasons, in the fields outside of Dabiq in Syria. In the cities and townships under their control the "morality police" keep the population in line through intimidation and the kinds of violence (whippings, stonings, beheadings, etc) required by al-Sharia.

This map, directly from the film, shows the swaths of land that the Islamic State currently holds in Iraq and Syria. They are just outside of Baghdad and control Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq.

The film, however, focuses on the Islamic State's presence in Raqqa. in northern Syria. Here we meet now deceased Islamic State Press Officer, Abu Mosa, who took VICE News people to the front lines where ISIS was facing off against Assad's 17th Army Division. The Fighting 17th, however, represented the last of Assad's forces in that part of the country and were run out of the area entirely, although the Syrian army gunned-down Mosa, himself.

During the fighting ISIS killed at least 50 Syrian soldiers and later posted their heads on fence posts in Raqqa in order to, apparently, encourage the ongoing cordiality of the townspeople.

Part one of the film focuses on ISIS as a successful military operation in service of the Caliphate and in service of Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the supreme leader of the organization who now formally demands the allegiance of Muslims throughout the world.

He does not get it, of course, but this does not stop him from requiring it.

The fact of the matter is that the great majority of Muslims, everywhere, want nothing to do with this guy, nor his horrendously vicious theo-fascist organization rampaging through the Middle East - perilously close to Israel, by the way - and killing people left and right. It is not hard to understand why Barack Obama, a man with some Islamic background and family, would be protective of the small Muslim minority in the United States and seek to shield it from any association with these bloodthirsty Islamist theologians and their sadistic fighters.

Since 9/11, there has been particular concern, among many in government and the academe, that Americans not persecute, or retaliate against, the innocent Muslim minority in the United States for the behavior of their overseas Jihadi cousins. Americans, much to their credit, have been gracious toward their Muslim friends and neighbors and have not blamed them for the destruction of the Twin Towers, nor the loss of 3,000 souls.

In fact, Hate Crime statistics clearly show that it is the Jewish community in the United States, not the Muslim community, that is particularly singled out for violence and abuse in proportions well above our numbers. According to FBI Hate Crime statistics from 2013, by religion, 60.3 percent of American hate crimes were of an anti-Jewish nature, despite the fact that we only represent about 2 percent of the population, while only 13.7 percent were anti-Islamic.

Nonetheless, if this documentary is drawing an accurate picture of ISIS then, clearly, we are dealing with believers who are not only Islamic, but "very Islamic" as Graeme Wood put it in his piece for the The Atlantic, What ISIS Really Wants. These guys are urber-Islamic-fundamentalists.

They make Evangelical Christian housewives in Tennessee look like a bunch of syphiltic Hollywood gay porn stars on the Sunset Strip.

What the Islamic State, following Mohammad, demands, not surprisingly, is submission. They are definitely sincere and have shown themselves to be exceedingly direct in demonstrating that sincerity. Nothing gets right to the point so much as crucifying people or burying children alive. This will definitely tend to get the attention of others, which is very much a part of the Islamic State's modus operandi.

They honestly believe that torturing people, burning them alive, chopping off their heads and putting it on video to music is a good thing, because it is what Allah wants of them. It is so good, in fact, that such videos serve as a recruiting tool for others, all throughout the world. This obviously flies in the face of normative western (and Jewish) values that tend to view unnecessary cruelty as horrible, even unholy. Nonetheless, different cultures are different and it is only western arrogance that inclines many of us to see all cultures as reasonable, as rational, and as fundamentally like our own. Not all peoples or cultures are alike, however, and if anyone doubts the truth of this observation, I simply invite you to watch the video above.

Mosa, cradling his automatic weapon shortly before martyred in the name of Allah by Assad's forces, tells us this:

I say to America, that the Islamic Caliphate has been established and we will not stop. Don't be cowards and attack us with drones. Instead, send your soldiers, the ones we humiliated in Iraq. We will humiliate them everywhere, God willing, and we will raise the flag of Allah over the White House.

This organization is getting quite large, now, and while it has earned our horror and disgust, it has also earned our respect in the sense that more and more westerners are coming to understand that these Jihadi enthusiasts will need to be dealt with... one way or the other.

Wood, by the way, opposes direct military intervention. He believes that putting western troops on the ground would validate the Islamic State's narrative and, thereby, serve to recruit others. It would in this way be counterproductive.

Harris seems a bit more open to the idea of direct, large-scale, military confrontation, although he stops short of an open declaration of support for such an effort. Harris, like many of us, is simply weighing options in his mind and sees very little to draw comfort from.

No one - Jihadis aside - wants war and that goes double for the President of the United States.

Obama - always at heart the community organizing intellectual - seems to think that the proper approach to ISIS is a good jobs program in Europe. In fact, according to "The White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism," one of the approaches the federal government intends to take on this problem is a "workshop with the creative arts community and community leaders in Los Angeles to develop innovative, scalable and implementable programs and tools to counter violent extremism."

A nice anti-racist mural under a highway overpass somewhere in Los Angeles should get the boys in Raqqa to turn in their arms.

Don't you think?

Finally, the meaning of the single digit salute is clear. It refers to tawhid, the belief in the oneness of Allah.

The Umma is also one in worship of Allah through the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace be unto him). And the Caliphate is the lone, overriding political expression of Allah's will manifested on Earth.

{Next week, I suppose, we'll discuss part 2 of the VICE News documentary, which is concerned with the recruitment of children into the organization.}

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.

Another attempt to fake early Palestinian nationalism

Here is the first paragraph of an essay by John Bell, published in Al Jazeera last week:

In 1905, a Lebanese named Najib Azuri wrote: "These two movements [Zionism and Palestinian nationalism] are doomed to constant struggle, until one overwhelms the other. The fate of the entire world depends on the outcome of this struggle ... which represents two opposing principles." One hundred and ten years later, the two nations are still opposed but does the fate of the world depend on it?

I looked up the quote, from the original French in Najib Azuri's book "Le réveil de la nation arabe..."

'- Deux phénomènes importants, de même nature et pourtant opposés, qui n'ont encore attiré l'attention de personne, se manifestent en ce moment dans là Turquie d'Asie : ce sont, le réveil de la nation arabe et l'effort latent des Juifs pour reconstituer sur une très large échelle l'ancienne monarchie d'Israël; Ces deux mouvements sont destinés à se combattre continuellement, jusqu'à ce que l'un d'eux l'emporte sur l'autre. Du résultat final de cette lutte entre ces deux peuples représentant deux principes contraires, dépendra le sort du monde entier.;

Nothing about "Palestinian nationalism." He was talking about Arab nationalism altogether, which in 1905 did not include anything about a separate Palestinian state.

There was no Palestinian nationalist movement in 1905. Period. It was a Zionist/Arab conflict then - and it still is.

John Bell is "director of the Middle East Programme at the Toledo International Centre for Peace in Madrid. He is a former UN and Canadian diplomat, and served as political adviser to the Personal Representative of the UN Secretary-General for southern Lebanon and adviser to the Canadian government."

It would be nice if he wouldn't push his own political agenda onto history.

The Al Aqsa Heritage Foundation claims the guards of the Al Aqsa mosque "foiled an infiltration attempt" by "settlers" who dressed in "legitimate Islamic attire and tried to enter one of the doors."

According to the story, the guards noticed them and prevented them from entering.

They claim that "settlers" have repeatedly attempted to sneak in to the Temple Mount in recent years, particularly in times of Islamic prayer when it is crowded with worshipers.

I have no idea if any of this is true. The closest story I was able to find was this one from last year, and the Jews were secular:

Two Jewish youths were taken in for questioning by Jerusalem police after attempting to enter the Temple Mount dressed as Muslim worshippers.

According to initial reports the pair are "secular Jews" who were touring Jerusalem together and wanted to include the Temple Mount on their trip; it is not clear why they chose to disguise themselves.

UPDATE: It seems possible that the Al Aqsa Heritage Foundation fell for a Purim joke from Arutz-7:

A group of Temple Mount activists were spotted dressed up as Arabs on Friday in order to be able to enter the compound.

The Jewish activists did not do this in the spirit of Purim, which was celebrated in the capital on Friday. They did it in order to get around a ban on Jewish prayer which was imposed by the police.

Despite a court ruling earlier this week which said that police “must make sure that Jews are able to pray on the Temple Mount”, officers have been restricting Jewish prayer at the compound since Wednesday, telling worshippers that the restrictions are in accordance with a decision by the political leadership following pressure from Jordan.

On Friday, Jews who wanted to visit the Temple Mount were told by officers that on Fridays the Temple Mount must be free of Jews regularly, even on Purim.

The worshippers who were forced to dress up as Arabs said, "It is inconceivable that we cannot be on the Temple Mount on a day like today.”

Cash strapped PA still prioritizes paying terrorists and their families

Ma'an reported last Wednesday:

For the third month in a row, the Palestinian Authority will pay its civil servants only 60 percent of their monthly wages, as a result of Israel withholding tax revenues.

Money woes have also caused problems with paying for fuel for Gaza's power plant.

One sector of Palestinian Arab society doesn;'t have to worry about their paychecks, though: terrorists and their families.

The Palestinian Authority Ministry of Finance announced on Saturday evening its intention to pay the families of martyrs and wounded 100% of their monthly stipends, despite the financial hardship experienced by the PA.

Finance Minister Shukri Bishara said in a press release that he agreed to give the full allowances to families of martyrs and wounded during the next two days.

This is the priority of the "peaceful" Palestinian Authority: paying the families of those who kill Jews is more important than paying their regular workers.

03/07 Links: Time to Reconsider U.S. Support of UNRWA; Schabas keeps demonizing Israel

From Ian:

Time to Reconsider U.S. Support of UNRWA

The Palestinian Authority (PA), which was created by the Oslo peace process, has turned its back on negotiations with Israel and sought to pressure and delegitimize the Jewish state through the United Nations. Palestinian efforts to secure a one-sided Security Council resolution calling for an Israeli withdrawal to the borders that existed before the 1967 Arab–Israeli War are opposed by the United States, which correctly sees them as incompatible and harmful to negotiating a peace accord.
The Obama Administration should not only block efforts to bypass direct Israeli–Palestinian negotiations, the only genuine path to peace, but also seek to prevent the United Nations from being exploited to advance these efforts. One egregious example is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), whose facilities were used by Hamas in 2014 to house missiles—Hamas has launched thousands of rockets against Israeli civilians—and tunnels that were used to launch strikes into Israeli territory.
UNRWA has existed for more than 60 years as a temporary initiative to address the needs of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Israeli–Arab conflict and to facilitate their resettlement and/or repatriation. It has evolved into a permanent institution providing services to multiple generations of Palestinian “refugees,” of whom a large majority live outside refugee camps, enjoy citizenship in other countries, or reside in the Palestinian-governed West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The reality is that UNRWA obstructs its original mission of resolving the Palestinian refugee problem. Worse, by encouraging the Palestinian fixation on their “right to return” to Israel, UNRWA impedes negotiations for a permanent peace agreement. The U.S. should withhold its contributions until UNRWA implements critical reforms. The medium-term U.S. goal should be to eliminate the organization and shift responsibility for actual Palestinian refugees to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Schabas keeps demonizing Israel, despite ethics violations

When Canadian law professor William Schabas was exposed as having omitted a blatant conflict of interest in applying for a UN position, he abruptly resigned as head of the latest commission investigating Israeli “war crimes.” However, he did not slink away quietly in embarrassment, or apologize and ask for forgiveness.
Instead, as a political warrior, his strategy has been to counterattack and spin the discussion in a way that his image is changed from attacker to victim. Schabas is an intense ideologue, dedicated to radical causes in which hostility toward Israel is at the top of the agenda. For many years, he has used his status as a professor of international law to advance this form of warfare, including serving as a PLO adviser. (This was the “minor point” he omitted in a UN application form.) His appointment as head of a high-profile UN investigation was a major achievement, and his removal a greater defeat.
To divert attention from his ethical violations, Schabas’ primary response is to dress himself in the clothes of the victim of an Israeli-led conspiracy. In a sympathetic article published in the New York Times, he complained of being targeted in “a stream of vulgar and violent emails and several death threats.”
Schabas has also tried to use his Canadian link to present his spin. In an interview last month with The CJN, he made the Pinocchio-like claim that there was “no evidence I’m biased against Israel.” But the article provided plenty of evidence. For example, the interviewer (reporter Paul Lungen) asked about a 2011 public declaration that Netanyahu “should be in the dock of an international court.” Schabas awkwardly sidestepped the specifics, instead presenting a convoluted attempt to redefine bias.

Michael Lumish: The Big Lie and "Palestinian" Jew-Rammin' Fun

"Five people were injured Friday morning in a car-ramming terror attack near a Jerusalem Light Rail station in the north of the city. Four of the wounded were young border policewomen, in their twenties, and the fifth was a civilian bicycle rider in his fifties
A Palestinian man in a private vehicle hit the five as they stood on a sidewalk. He was identified as Mohammad Salima, 21, from east Jerusalem’s Ras al-Amud. After the car attack, he then emerged from the vehicle with a butcher’s knife and attempted to stab passersby, but was swiftly shot and incapacitated by a Border Policeman and a Light Rail security guard at the scene."
We need to remember that our alleged allies on the Left literally believe that "Palestinians" have every right to murder Jews, or attempt to murder Jews, because of the so-called "Occupation of Palestinian Territories."
They would rarely put it in such blunt terms, of course. Instead, with a shrug of the shoulders, they wave away any Arab responsibility for attempts to murder Jews by portraying those attempts as perfectly reasonable responses to Israeli Jewish bad behavior.
Of course, the only way that they can get away with this is through ignoring thirteen hundred years of Jewish (and Christian) persecution under the heel of Islamic-Arab imperial aggression and the fact that it is not an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because the Arabs involved include pretty much every Arab government on the planet, to greater and lesser degrees.
It is, in fact, a Koranically-based ongoing Arab war against the Jews.

Israel opens Kerem Shalom to help give Gazans electric power

From Ma'an:

The only power plant in the Gaza Strip is set to resume operations after a fuel delivery on Friday, Palestinian officials said.

The Kerem Shalom crossing will be opened as an exception to allow 40,000 liters of fuel to reach the power plant, the Palestinian Authority's director of border crossings Nathmi Mhannad told Ma'an.

Gaza's sole power plant was shut down Wednesday evening as funds from Qatari donations for fuel costs ran out. Cash-strapped Hamas pays the PA for fuel imported to besieged Gaza, and had been unable to cover the additional tax costs.

It is unclear on where the money for the fuel came from. The power plant was closed on Thursday for lack of fuel because the money from Qatar to cover expenses ran out.

Kerem Shalom is normally closed on Fridays. This week it was closed on Thursday for Purim.

Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza instantly showed their appreciation:

The Popular Resistance movement in Palestine praised Friday morning's car attack, which left four Israeli border police and one civilian injured in East Jerusalem.

"The attack comes as a response to Israeli crimes," Hassan al-Zaalan, an official at the Popular Resistance movement said following the incident.

The Hamas movement also remarked on the "heroic" car attack in East Jerusalem, describing the man's actions as a "natural response" to Israeli crimes.

Spokesperson of the movement, Fawzi Barhoum, added that the "extremist" Israeli government is responsible for the Jerusalem situation.

When AFP reported on the power plant closing, it showed some characteristic bias:

Gaza is blockaded and controlled by Israel on two of its crossings, and isolated by Egyptian closure of a third.

Israel's allowing food and fuel and construction material through its territory is "blockading and controlling." Egypt besiging Gaza is merely "isolating."

03/06 Links Pt2: The Leader of the Free World isn't Obama; Remembering those who stand outside

From Ian:

The Leader of the Free World isn't Obama

He’s the Leader of the Free World, elected by a civilized nation: militarily powerful because of, and not in spite of, it’s cultural commitment to science and art and medicine.
Although he spent much of his early life overseas, the Leader of the Free World grew up in the Northeast, and graduated from Harvard University. That he has a deep and abiding love for America is self-evident: he admires our energy, our inventiveness; our decency and kindness; our innate friendliness and charity. He loves our culture; he admires our private sector which generates so much innovation. And the Leader of the Free World admires and respects our vast military power, and the restraint which it is used – to him, it is indeed the Arsenal of Democracy.
And even though he has grown up the victim of bigotry and hatred, the Leader of the Free World loves America, even though slurs are applied to him still today. In spite of all that, he loves everything she stands for.
And there he stood, backed by American flags and framed in American glory – on the floor of the House of Representatives; where his predecessors made the case to fight against the great evils in the world: slavery. Nazism. Japanese Imperialism. Communism.

Alan Johnson: Bowen’s shame over Holocaust remark

On Tuesday, with the Israeli Prime Minister still on his feet addressing a joint session of Congress, the BBC’s Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen, lip curled, tweeted “#NetanyahuSpeech He acknowledges Elie Wiesel in audience. Once again Netanyahu plays the Holocaust card. Don’t repeat mistakes of the past”.
Mr Bowen’s idea is that when an Israeli leader mentions the Holocaust he is being tricksy, manipulative, acting in bad faith, “playing a card” to get narrow advantage in contemporary politics, not really expressing a genuine thought about the Holocaust itself or a genuine fear about a second, nuclear, Holocaust.
And that idea, of the Bad Faith Jew, is unmistakably dripping in the assumptions and myths of classic antisemitism.
Mr Bowen did what only the antisemitic extremists used to do, reduce the invocation of the Holocaust to a common sense indicator of ‘Zionist’ bad faith and something to disdain.
Well, the Holocaust happened. It happened to the Jews. And now the Jews are threatened again by a genocidal regime. These are facts.

NYTs: In U.C.L.A. Debate Over Jewish Student, Echoes on Campus of Old Biases

It seemed like routine business for the student council at the University of California, Los Angeles: confirming the nomination of Rachel Beyda, a second-year economics major who wants to be a lawyer someday, to the council’s Judicial Board.
Until it came time for questions.
“Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community,” Fabienne Roth, a member of the Undergraduate Students Association Council, began, looking at Ms. Beyda at the other end of the room, “how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?”
For the next 40 minutes, after Ms. Beyda was dispatched from the room, the council tangled in a debate about whether her faith and affiliation with Jewish organizations, including her sorority and Hillel, a popular student group, meant she would be biased in dealing with sensitive governance questions that come before the board, which is the campus equivalent of the Supreme Court.
The discussion, recorded in written minutes and captured on video, seemed to echo the kind of questions, prejudices and tropes — particularly about divided loyalties — that have plagued Jews across the globe for centuries, students and Jewish leaders said.

Remembering those who stand silently outside

The killing of a Danish volunteer standing guard outside a Copenhagen synagogue by a terrorist gunman of Palestinian Arab "origin" who, in the opaque language favoured by many news editors, had become "radicalized" while serving prison time for stabbing someone, has thrown some light on the phenomenon of Jewish communities more and more required - and determined - to protect their lives from similar malevolents.
Dan Uzan's murder on the night of February 14-15, 2015 came as he patrolled a Jewish facility in sub-freezing temperatures while a family celebration - a bat mitzvah with dozens of children taking part - was happening inside. Finn Norgaard, a 55-year-old Danish documentary maker, was shot dead and three police officers were wounded in a nearby attack some hours earlier executed by the same perpetrator.
Volunteer security people, like Dan Uzan (and like groups in Melbourne, Sydney, Brooklyn, Southern California, throughout the United Kingdom and many other places), are part of the answer, and regularly place their lives and well-being at risk in Jewish communities throughout the world today. The reasons why are sadly obvious to anyone alert to the rising threats.

Based on this earlier post and a comment by Dabney.

03/06 Links Pt1: Glick: Life under the US umbrella; Purim lessons; Netanyahu’s Churchillian warning

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Life under the US umbrella

South Korea lives under a US security umbrella. Both on a conventional and nuclear level, South Koreans are dependent on the US to deter North Korea from attacking them and overrunning their country.
Last Friday, US Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman scolded South Koreans for being too nationalist. In her words, “Nationalist feelings can still be exploited, and it’s not hard for a political leader anywhere to earn cheap applause by vilifying a former enemy.”
The South Koreans interpreted her remarks as criticism of their President Park Geun-hye for her refusal to reinstate reunification talks with North Korea due to Pyongyang’s refusal to discuss the dismantlement of its nuclear program.
Sherman negotiated the US’s nuclear pact with North Korea in the 1990s. The North Koreans used the deal as a smokescreen behind which they developed nuclear weapons while receiving financial assistance from the US which paid off the regime for signing the deal.
Once Pyongyang was ready to come out as a nuclear power, it threw out the nuclear inspectors, opened the sealed nuclear sites, vacated its signature on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and began testing nuclear bombs.
Sherman is now the US’s chief negotiator in the P5+1 nuclear talks with Iran.

JPost Editorial: Purim lessons

Another thing has changed since the days of Mordechai and Esther. The Jewish people is no longer dependent on the goodwill of others when it comes to its defense. The Book of Esther takes place at a time when the Jews were just beginning to restore their sovereignty in their homeland after the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE. Mordechai and Esther lived in exile in Persia as the return to Zion began.
Today the Jews have restored their sovereignty.
They have created one of the most dynamic and innovative societies in the world. Out of necessity, they have built one of the most powerful militaries in the world. They have the ability to defend themselves against their enemies.
No country has a bigger stake in seeing a peaceful resolution to the conflict with Iran over its nuclear arms program. Through Iran’s proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, Israel can be targeted. Destabilization in the region would have direct implications for Israel.
But Iran’s expansionist aggression makes a peaceful resolution difficult, if not impossible, to attain.
Perhaps after another round of sanctions with the added impact of falling oil prices, the Iranians can be convinced to abandon their designs for nuclear weapons. Perhaps not.
Either way, the days are over when the Jewish people remained passive in the face of genocidal enemies.

Charles Krauthammer: Netanyahu’s Churchillian warning

In its near-70 year history, Israel has never once asked America to fight for it. Not in 1948 when 650,000 Jews faced 40 million Arabs. Not in 1967 when Israel was being encircled and strangled by three Arab armies. Not in 1973 when Israel was on the brink of destruction. Not in the three Gaza wars or the two Lebanon wars.
Compare that to a very partial list of nations for which America has fought and for which so many Americans have fallen: Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Vietnam, Korea, and every West European country beginning with France (twice).
Change the deal, strengthen the sanctions, give Israel a free hand. Netanyahu offered a different path in his clear, bold and often moving address, Churchillian in its appeal to resist appeasement. This was not Churchill of the 1940s, but Churchill of the 1930s, the wilderness prophet. Which is why for all its sonorous strength, Netanyahu’s speech had a terrible poignancy. After all, Churchill was ignored.

On Monday, I was the first (as far as I know) to report on the new "Gaza Man" video game in English.

There is now an update, from the pro-Hamas Middle East Monitor:

In response to Israeli pressure Google Play has removed the Gaza Man game.

Yesterday afternoon, Gaza's children found themselves unable to find the link to download the game on Google Play.

"It is new, but it became my favourite game," Sally Haddad, 12, from Gaza told Days of Palestine.

"I had played the game on my father's mobile for three days. On the fourth day, he bought me a new mobile to download the game and play it myself, but unfortunately, I did not find it," Haddad said.

Gaza Man is a Palestinian game simulating a battle between a Palestinian fighter covering his face with the Palestinian Kuffiyeh (scarf) and aggressive forces using automatic rifles, tanks, drones, fighter jets, etc...

The game starts, as it is clear in the game trailer, as the aggressive forces kidnap a boy playing football and harass his mother. Then, the fighter appears targeting these forces and causing them severe losses.

Those poor Gaza children! The media and NGOs say that they have no food, no water, no shelter - and now the starving, homeless tykes can't even play a violent anti-Israel video games on Android phones that their fathers buy them!

From The Daily Mail:

British journalist Jonathan Kalmus decided to test the levels of prejudice in two British cities with shocking results.

'You Jew' was the anti-Semitic scream which came from a passing car. My shaken wife tried to explain it away to my seven-year-old daughter as a very large sneeze. They were simply playing in a local park in Manchester a few weeks ago when the incident ripped through what should have been a peaceful and wholesome time for any mother and child.

'Fight the Jewish scum' and 'Jew, Jew, Jew... Run', were the more vicious threats hurled at me in the past few days, however, when I decided to secretly film and find out whether 'Jew-hatred' really is alive and kicking on British streets.

The answer to that question is a resounding and heart-sinking yes.

I took the inspiration from the viral videos of Israeli journalist Zvika Klein, who filmed himself being threatened on the streets of Paris, and Muslim Hamdy Mahisen, who filmed himself getting abuse in Milan.
Zvika walked in Paris for 10 hours, Hamdy in Milan for five. It took me just one minute. One minute of walking one single, busy major street in Manchester before abuse was flung at me.

In 25 minutes on that one single street in Longsight, I was spat at by one man and called 'a Jew' multiple times by passers by, even by a young boy walking with his father.

I was just walking in the street testing the effect of being clearly identifiable as a Jew by wearing a small traditional Jewish head covering called a kippah.

In Bradford the situation was more shameful. It took 13 minutes, during which I was stalked by a man who repeatedly took pictures of me. He followed me on foot for five minutes and thirty seconds according to my footage.

There was a shout of 'you Jew' at me as I crossed the road to Bradford City Park. Minutes later a man turned his head and yelled 'fight the Jewish scum' just behind my back.
Some time later three youths shouted at me across a street repeatedly, 'You're a Jew, not a Muslim...Jew, Jew, Jew run!'

I was prepared to walk for hours and expected to get nothing on camera. On Manchester's curry mile, a haven of mixed cultures and skin colour, it took two-and-half-minutes for a young lad on a bike to ride up to me and shout, 'You're a Jew' in my face. I was left speechless that anti-Semitism is so obvious.

In total, between the two cities I suffered a series of anti-Semitic hate incidents, two more than those in Zvika Klein's video and achieved in one-tenth of the time here in Britain. What a horrible reality.

Why did I pick Bradford? For a simple reason. Last summer during the height of another Gaza conflict between Israel and Palestinians, 5,000 people, predominantly young Muslim men, gathered for a mass rally in Bradford City Park. The city's MP, George Galloway, spoke while flanked by two butch men wearing T-shirts emblazoned 'Palestine's army you are not alone'.

Mr Galloway has repeated on many, many occasions that his message and political struggle is with Israel and Israelis, not Jews. Despite that, statistics show that bringing the Middle East's struggles onto the streets of Britain has a direct effect on how people treat Jews.

No one could accuse me of targeting Muslim neighbourhoods to provoke a reaction. This was the centre of an ordinary English city and I was minding my own business.

No one could accuse me of wearing something provocative or political. A Jewish person or any peaceful person walking in a British street anywhere, let alone a city centre, should be welcome.

But it is no surprise. The latest statistics from the Jewish Community Security Trust show 2014 was the most anti-Semitic year in Britain on record. 1,168 anti-Semitic incidents in 2014 - that is 37 per cent higher than all the attacks in France in the same year. Anti-Semitism in Britain is growing fast. Incident rates have doubled from 2013 to 2014.

It is completely understandable that anyone who does not feel the threat would not realise the extent of anti-Semitism, how common it is and how it effects Jews in our country every day.

But anti-Semitic attacks and verbal abuse are everyday concerns for British Jews.

As I encountered anti-Semitism for nothing but walking in a street, many other people walked past me and did nothing. They heard the comments, and were caught on camera turning back and looking as others hurled abuse. When someone spat on my back no one stopped to intervene.

His experiences in other European cities are interesting as well.

On a related note, Ben Judah in Tablet is in the middle of a series of articles about anti-semitism in the UK. In his latest article he visits Bradford, the home of anti-Israel politicians George Galloway and David Ward.

While Galloway had no interest in speaking to him, Ward did - and his description of the interview reveals quite a bit:

David Ward, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bradford East, is also widely believed to be anti-Semitic by British Jews for his stridently anti-Israeli remarks, which often accuse the Israeli government of intentional mass murders and other supposed crimes, which British “Zionists” seek to cover up through their supposedly powerful institutions. On Holocaust Memorial Day this year, Ward said that Israel had committed “genocide” in Palestine, and he has mockingly attacked the oldest representative body of British Jews, the Board of Deputies, Tweeting—“What a shame there isn’t a powerful, well-funded Board of Deputies for #Roma.”

...Ward agreed to meet me in his office in Bradford, festooned with the yellow campaigning colors of his party. But he was nervous and jittery, recording the conversation and backing away from some of his statements without renouncing them completely. Cross-examining the distressed politician makes it clear to me that what Jews find anti-Semitic about this man is a question of rhetoric, not considered views. Under pressure he seemed to have relatively few of these: He admitted that he did not challenge the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East as he is “a firm believer in the United Nations” and accepts the 1947 partition resolution. Ward strongly denied that he is attacking Israel to appeal to the Muslim vote, claiming that when he walks around Bradford, those who come up to congratulate him on his anti-Zionist stance are “mostly from the Church groups.”

The MP for Bradford East said he rejected out of hand Galloway’s declaration of Bradford as an “Israel-free zone” and “absolutely” understands why European Jews wanted to makealiyah after the Holocaust and is merely opposed to the fact that the United Nations resolutions calling for a Palestinian state alongside Israel have not been honored.

But does he stand by his characterization of Israel’s actions as genocide? He could neither hold my eye nor respond to this question, insisting that he had been referring to the U.N. definition of genocide and attempting to move on. When I produced a print-out of the U.N. definition of genocide he seemed at some points to look a little scared and began talking about Israeli acts of ethnic cleansing in 1947. “That’s pretty serious stuff,” he said, “and amounts to the United Nations definition of genocide. I think the harm that’s been done to the people of Gaza comes under that definition as well.” Since Ward clearly believes acts of massacre or ethnic cleansing count as genocide, had he heard of the expulsion of Jews from Arab lands, I asked. His face betrayed he had not. Asked whether the termination of Jewish life in Arab states are also genocide, he seemed confused, then lost, before admitting—“it sounds like it was.”

Just like Galloway, he is at pains to emphasize that he is not anti-Semitic. But equally it is clear that he has not considered, or is not willing to consider what drives the intensity of his Israel-hatred. When I pressed Ward on the fact that British Jews advise each other not to wear kippot in Bradford, he seemed surprised. With a Jewish community in the dozens—it seemed the MP had never bothered to consider this fact. Shouldn’t a member of parliament be better-informed and more aware of the potential impact of his rhetoric? “Never overlook the stupidity of people,” said Anthony Julius, author of Trials of the Diaspora and a leading thinker on anti-Semitism in Britain. “Stupidity is a necessary element in understanding political life. The willful refusal to engage with the complexity of political phenomena, in the face of the burgeoning, intrusive, complexity is a fact of contemporary life. It’s a kind of willful self-blinding.”

“With David Ward,” he explained, “it’s a case of I’ve got my prejudices, do not confuse me with the facts. I don’t think he cares what he said, providing it plays well with the constituency he wants to appeal to.”

The entire article is excellent, documenting today's antisemitism in Bradford, and it ends off with this sobering anecdote:

[O]ne of the last occasions the Jews gathered visibly in the street outside the synagogue for a funeral something went terribly wrong. The hearse carrying the remains of the son of one the founding rabbis of the synagogue was trying to reach the synagogue, but both ends of the street were mysteriously blocked with traffic. Rudi says then Asian youths burst out and began shaking the hearse. Others saw them fly a Palestinian flag.

Mahmoud Abbas has threatened for years to stop security coordination with Israel, similar to his perennial threats to resign or to dissolve the PA.

Which makes this story interesting:

The leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organisation has voted to suspend all security co-operation with Israel, insisting that Israel – as occupying power – should assume all responsibilities for the Palestinian territories under international law.

A statement issued by the PLO’s central committee on Thursday night announced it was calling for the suspension of “all forms of security coordination given Israel’s systematic and ongoing non-compliance with its obligations under signed agreements, including its daily military raids throughout the State of Palestine, attacks against our civilians and properties.”

Although the final decision to implement the council’s decision rests with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, well-informed sources told the Guardian that Abbas supported the decision.

The move, which came after two days of talks by the PLO’s central council, comes in the midst of a close-run Israeli election campaign and is certain to escalate tension between Palestinians and Israelis.

The PLO’s central council is the second highest decision-making body. Significantly, it takes the threat to end cooperation beyond rhetorical statements to mandate action on the issue.

The statement added: “Israel, the occupying power in Palestine, must assume all its responsibilities in accordance with its obligations under international law.”

It called for a boycott of all Israeli products and not only those coming from Israeli settlements, adding: “Israel must pay the price for its refusal to assume its responsibilities under international law, including the systematic denial of the Palestinian right to self-determination.”

Although the Guardian understands that the end of security cooperation will not be immediate, the decision by the PLO is regarded as binding on the Palestinian Authority and Abbas.

The Palestinian security forces report to the PA, not the PLO. But the PA itself reports to the PLO.

PLO members are not elected, and the supposedly democratic PA is subservient to the self-selected leaders of the PLO.

The PLO of course is dominated by Fatah.

And the PLO, Fatah and PA are all headed by the same person:

While The Guardian assumes that there is some sort of formalized process going on here where an independent PLO Central Committee voted for this decision, everything is up to (and orchestrated by) Abbas - including implementation of the decision.

Ha'aretz disagrees with the Guardian:

Instead of implementing the decision immediately, however, Abbas is expected to try to use the threat of its implementation to push the United States and the European Union to pressure Israel to halt construction in the settlements and release Palestinian prisoners as conditions for restarting diplomatic negotiations. In his speech to the council on Wednesday, Abbas said explicitly that he would be willing to resume negotiations if those two conditions were fulfilled.

The council’s decision to suspend security coordination indicates that its members are seeking to keep the PLO, and themselves, relevant among the Palestinian public by taking aggressive positions in response to what they view as Israel’s peace rejectionism.

The entire thing is theatre. Abbas used the committee to pretend that he will do something he has no desire or interest in doing, but it is meant to scare the West, just as his previous threats spook Western nations into pressuring Israel.

The Guardian is playing its role, by gravely informing its readers that this is serious.

It's not. It's the political Pallywood. As usual, it will work to add pressure to Israel, which is the real point of this farce.

Ha'aretz is probably wrong in the goal being to release prisoners or stop settlement activities, although that will be part of conversations with the West. The goal will be to have Israel release the tax revenues that it has been withholding from the PA after its decision to go to the ICC to charge Israel with war crimes.

Questions NBC's Ann Curry should have asked Zarif

NBC's Ann Curry's interview with Iran's foreign minister Mohammad Jaraf Zarif was interesting, but she could have done a much better job. Here are some questions she should have asked:

When he said:

Well, it is unfortunate that Mr. Netanyahu now totally-- distorts realities of today. He even distorts his own-- scripture. If-- if you read the book of Esther, you will see that it was the Iranian king who saved the Jews. If you read-- the-- the Old Testament, you will see that it was an Iranian king who saved the Jews from Babylon. Esther has a town in Iran where-- where our Jewish population, which is the largest in the Middle East-- visit on-- on a regular basis. It is-- it is truly, truly regrettable that bigotry gets to the point of making allegations against an entire nation which has saved Jews three times in its history: Once during that time of-- of a prime minister who was trying to kill the Jews, and the king saved the Jews,...

She could have asked "But didn't that king support the annihilation of the Jews - men, women and children - to begin with before his wife Esther revealed that she was Jewish?"

When he said, "This is about nuclear technology, this is about scientific advancement, this is about pride of the Iranian people" she could have asked exactly what scientific advances Iran can do with 6000 centrifuges that it cannot do with 100. Because the only real use for 6000 centrifuges is to build a bomb.

Why has Iran consistently denied inspections, and indeed tried to hide from satellite images, the activities at the Parchin complex? And what exactly happened at the huge explosion there last year?

If you are not interested in nuclear weapons, why did you hide your involvement with the secret Syrian nuclear weapons site that Israel bombed in 2007?

Your regime doesn't only constantly talk about annihilating Israel, but also the United States. State-run demonstrations routinely say "Death to America." Can you elaborate? Who exactly should be killed?

What is your vision of the Middle East? Do you want Iran to be a superpower? Do you want Shiites to govern the majority Sunnis?

There are lots more she could have asked. It is a shame that reporters don't do the proper research before such important interviews.

03/05 Links Pt2: The World Needs a Muslim Martin Luther; Jihad John to head UN Human Rights Council

From Ian:

Dr. Mordechai Kedar: The World Needs a Muslim Martin Luther

The problem with these conferences is that they never have even one person who is prepared to state the painful truth: the Quran, the Hadith, the history and biography of our prophet are filled with ideas, commandments, precedents that push our youth to terror, just as they motivated our forefathers to conquer most of the known seventh century world. The concept of conquering strange lands, the rule of Islam through terrible violence is what got Islam out of the Arabian peninsula to conquer the region from Indonesia in the east to Spain and Morocco in the west, and it is this that pushes our young men and women to join jihad and continue subjugation of the rest of the world.
True, there are other factors - political, social and economic - that help promote terror, but the main, basic reason is the ideas and precedents in islam's holy works, and until real reformers arise and insert significant changes into these writings, instead of holding meaningless conferences like the recent Saudi one, Muslims will continue to hide their heads in the sand, and the world will continue to think that Islam is a religion of peace, because that is what the distinguished speakers at these conferences say. Denial of the real problem will perpetuate the problems derived from it.
We need a Muslim Martin Luther, who will ask the right questions, start an Islamic reformation, one that will quarantine all the notions of subjugation, violence, hatred and repulsion, changing Allah's religion into something that will bring the cycle of violence and death to an end, giving life to Muslims and others. Until that reformer is born, the Islamic world will continue shedding its own blood and that of others into the bloody swamp, fire and tears called Islamic state whose methods are exported from the depths of the seventh century to today's entire world.

Douglas Murray: Hate Crimes: US Lynches the Facts

Since the beginning of this year, we have had, alongside the usual violence aimed at the Jewish state, the targeting of Jews in Brussels, Paris and Copenhagen. In all instances, the sites were targeted because they were likely to have Jews.
Unfortunately, the leader of the free world, U.S. President Barack Obama, among others, seems loath to acknowledge this fact. Just recently, he described the Paris terrorists as "a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris." There are not many ways in which it is possible to see the targeting of a kosher store in Paris as "random." But with U.S. administration spokesmen trying to pretend that the victims in that shop were not likely to be Jews, it would be surprising if they simply lacked the information. It was, in fact, a heroic Muslim worker, Lassana Bathily, who risked his life to save the lives of several Jews by hiding them in the basement freezer, which he shut off before going back upstairs.
It is probably not out of ignorance that the administration tries not to focus on the religious dimension of the recent terrorist attacks -- which also include members of ISIS in Libya slitting the throats of 21 Egyptian Christians because, the ISIS members said, the kidnapped men were Christians -- but rather for fear of what the general public might do with this information.
Because if you view your public as a lynch-mob-in-waiting, as so many Western leaders seem to do, then you assume you must do everything you can to restrain them from perpetrating constant acts of violence against Muslims.
If that is your view of your public, then talking about "random" folks being shot is the sort of circumlocution you will select.
Should you wish to address the problem, you might call together a summit aimed at tackling "violent extremism." But the whole exercise must continuously be directed away from identifying the problem. The Jews cannot have been targeted because they were Jews, because if they were, then you may find yourself having to explain the ideology that propels the killers.

Israel Agrees To All BDS Terms (satire)

The BDS Movement has won a landmark victory in what is called a historic decision in which the Israeli Government has unanimously voted in favour of agreeing to all BDS terms.
When the bill was introduced by MK Hanin Zoabi, most Knesset members were quick to jump on board.
“I believe the major turning point was when Sinead O’Conner cancelled her show in Israel in support of the boycott movement.” said Ayelet Shaked, a member of the formerly right wing Beit HaYehudi party.
“When Sinead cancelled, it created a shockwave through Knesset that really had us re-examining ourselves.”
Implementation of the new law will involve dismantling the protective barrier that has completely halted suicide bombings, awarding the Palestinians with a state with all of Jerusalem as a capital, a Gaza seaport for uninterrupted Iranian missile import and full right of return for all 6 generations of descendants of Arabs who left their homes so that Israel can be destroyed unhindered.

Purim joke 6: Man of the House

A husband, having just finished reading the book, 'Man of the House,' strode into the kitchen and up to his wife.

Pointing a finger in her face, he said: "From now on, I want you to know that I am the man of this house, and my word is law! I want you to prepare me a gourmet meal tonight, and when I'm finished I expect a sumptuous dessert.

"Then, after dinner, you are going to draw me my bath so I can relax.

"And when I'm finished with my bath, guess who's going to dress me and comb my hair??"

His wife replied, "The Chevra Kadisha?"

(joke explanation after the jump)