Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, June 21, 2015

Photos you will NEVER see in the mainstream media

Both these pictures were taken on Friday, showing Israeli police helping elderly Muslims go to the mosque for Ramadan prayers.

Here are IDF Ramadan greetings to the Muslims in the territories.

#Ramadan Kareem from Major General Yoav 'Poli' Mordechai
Posted by COGAT - Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories on Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Credit; Israel News Flash, COGAT

To State Department, graffiti by Jews is equivalent to murders by Arabs

The latest State Department terrorism report for 2014 reveals an obvious bias in choosing which acts qualify as terrorism in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.

Here is what it wrote about attacks in those areas:

Extremist Palestinians and Israeli settlers continued to conduct acts of violence in the West Bank. For the first time since 2008, Palestinians kidnapped and killed Israeli citizens in the West Bank. The UN Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs reported 330 attacks by extremist Israeli settlers that resulted in Palestinian injuries or property damage. In Jerusalem, there was an uptick in violence relative to 2013, including two vehicular attacks against crowds of civilians. Extremist Israeli settlers abducted and murdered a Palestinian teenager in June. A Palestinian stabbed and injured an Israeli in the back in November. In May, in an apparent “price tag” attack, Israeli extremists vandalized the Vatican-owned Notre Dame Center, where they daubed “Death to Arabs and Christians and all those who hate Israel.”

Additional 2014 incidents in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem included:

In January, violent extremist Israeli settlers spray painted “revenge by blood” on and set fire to a mosque in the West Bank.

In January, ISA arrested a group of al-Qa’ida (AQ) sympathizers in East Jerusalem which was allegedly planning several attacks.

In May, St. George Romanian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem was defaced with the expressions “Jesus is Garbage” and “King David for the Jews.” On another street in Jerusalem, authorities found graffiti stating “Death to Arabs.”

In June, two Palestinians kidnapped and killed three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank. During an attempt to apprehend the suspected perpetrators, the IDF shot and killed them. An Israeli court indicted a third individual suspected of planning the attack.

In July, three Israelis kidnapped and killed a Palestinian teenager in Jerusalem. An Israeli court indicted three individuals who confessed to carrying out the attack.

In July, an Israeli settler drove by and fired a gun into a protest near Nablus, killing one Palestinian.

In October, a Palestinian crashed his vehicle into a crowd of people and into a Jerusalem Light Rail train as it was passing a light rail stop, killing an American-citizen infant, a foreign national, and injuring approximately nine others, according to media. The driver, who Israeli authorities suspected of being Hamas-affiliated, died from wounds sustained during Israeli National Police’s (INP) attempt to apprehend him.

In October, a Palestinian critically injured an Israeli-American in Jerusalem while attempting to assassinate him. The INP shot and killed the suspected shooter, a known PIJ associate, during a raid to apprehend him.

In October and December, violent extremists bombed the French Cultural Center in Gaza. There were no reports of injuries in October and there was one injury in December.

In October and November, Israeli security forces arrested five residents of Tulkarem for planning to execute a suicide bombing in the Tel Aviv area as well as several other terror attacks, such as shootings, detonating a bomb in a bus crowded with soldiers, and abducting a soldier.

In November, two Palestinians reportedly affiliated with the PFLP entered a synagogue and attacked Israelis with guns, knives, and axes, killing five people, including three American citizens, and injuring over a dozen. INP shot and killed the perpetrators while the attack was ongoing.

In November, Israeli extremists vandalized and set fire to the Max Rayne Hand-in-Hand School, a bilingual center for Jewish-Arab education. ISA arrested three suspects, who were indicted by Israeli courts in December.

In November, a Palestinian stabbed and killed an Israeli and injured two others near the West Bank settlement of Alon Shvut.

Israeli security agencies reportedly thwarted several additional planned terrorist attacks in the West Bank, including a Hamas plan to launch a rocket-propelled grenade at the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs’ vehicle. Security services also prevented Hamas plans to attack Israeli towns and settlements, and to launch an attack on a stadium in Jerusalem.

In December, a Palestinian threw acid at an Israeli family and another Israeli, injuring six, near a checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. The IDF arrested the attacker.

With two (or three) exceptions, all of the Jewish "terror" attacks were not aimed at people, but buildings. This in no way is meant to minimize the seriousness of anti-Muslim and anti-Christian hate crimes, but it shows that the goalposts are quite different between what is considered to be terrorism for Jews and for Arabs.

One of the two exceptions are the horrific murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, which was universally condemned as terror by Israeli Jews (and only one of whose murderers is a "settler.")

The other exception that the State Department considers terror is outrageous. A woman whose car was being pelted by rocks fired in self-defense, she said into the air, killing Khaled Odeh. To flatly claim that this was a terror attack is a travesty.

The Report also mentions a June abduction and murder of a Palestinian teen by "extremist Israeli settlers" , but I cannot find any report about this. B'Tselem doesn't mention it. It appears that the report is counting the July murder of Abu Khdeir twice.

Contrary to the report's attempts to inflate the number of Jewish terror attacks, the report minimizes Arab terror attacks. According to the Shin Bet, there were well over a hundred terror attacks every month of the year, mostly Molotov cocktails and IEDs, that do not rise to the level of terrorism in the State Department report. Here is the graph from November and December alone:

The bias is even more apparent if you consider that there have been scores of incidents of deliberate attacks against the most important Jewish cemetery in the world, which don't merit a mention, while graffiti by Jews is highlighted

(h/t Gidon Shaviv)

The EU doesn't like when foreign governments fund their NGOs. Really.

From Reuters, May 8:

[Ayelet] Shaked also wants to check the Supreme Court's power and restrict donations from foreign governments to non-governmental organizations in Israel.

For foreign diplomats, that raises as many concerns about the direction Israel is moving in as the expansion of settlements on land the Palestinians seek for a state -- a profound, long-standing bone of contention.

"The red lines for us aren't just about settlements," said the ambassador of one EU member state.

"When you look at some of the legislation being proposed, it is very worrying. It is anti-democratic and looks designed to shut down criticism. It's the sort of thing you normally see coming out of Russia."

Hundreds of millions of euros flow into anti-Israel NGOs.

The EU logic against transparency or limits on donations to NGOs only applies to Israel, as we can see from this resolution from the European Parliament:

The EU must critically re-assess its relations with Russia, which are profoundly damaged by Russia's deliberate violation of democratic principles, fundamental values and international law with its violent action and destabilisation of its neighbours , MEPs said on Wednesday. The EU must now devise a soft-power contingency plan to counter Russia’s aggressive and divisive policies, they said.

“With its aggression against Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, the Russian leadership has put our relations at a crossroads. It is up to the Kremlin to decide now which way it will go – cooperation or deepening alienation,” said the EP rapporteur, Gabrielius Landsbergis (EPP, LT). “I am convinced that the Russian people, as all of us, want peace, not war. A change in Russia can, and will, come from within. Meanwhile we must send a strong message to the Russian leadership that we stand united with the victims of its aggression and those who stand for the values the EU is founded on,” he added.

The resolution he steered through Parliament was passed by 494 votes to 135, with 69 abstentions.

Here is one of the provisions of that resolution:

Put an end to Russia’s interference in EU democracies

MEPs are also alarmed that Russia is positioning itself as a challenger of the international democratic community and its law-based order and is supporting and financing radical and extremist parties in the EU. They call for a coordinated mechanism to be set up by the Commission and EU member states to monitor financial, political or technical assistance provided by Russia to political parties and other organisations in the EU and to assess its influence over political life and public opinion. The Commission should also propose legislation ensuring the full transparency of political funding and financing of political parties in the EU by stakeholders outside it, MEPs say.

It sounds like the EU is concerned that Russia may be funding pro-Russian organizations in the EU. This "transparency" would then turn into bans.

What is the difference, exactly, between the EU's resolution and what Shaked wants to do?

Oh, yes. One of them protects Jews.

(h/t Slava)

An easy UN lie to debunk

The UN Human Rights Council issued a press release on Friday. Here's how it starts:

GENEVA (19 June 2015) – The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Makarim Wibisono, today expressed deep concern about the human rights situation of Palestinians living under the 48-year-long Israeli occupation.

“Accounts show that occupation policies constrain Palestinian life and push Palestinians to leave their land and homes, especially in area C of the West Bank, and East Jerusalem,” said the expert after his second mission to the region.

-
Let's see how effective these supposed policies are.

Here is a graph of the population of Jerusalem, Arab and Jewish, over the past 90 years or so:

Not only has there never been as many Arabs living in Jerusalem as today, but the proportion of Arabs to Jews has been steadily increasing since 1967 from 26% to 36%.

How about Area C? Accurate figures are hard to come by, but let's see how Amira Hass reported it last year in Haaretz:

Some 300,000 Palestinians live in Area C, the part of the West Bank under full Israeli control, according to new data published Tuesday by a UN body. That figure is considerably higher than 150,000 to 180,000 Palestinians said to live in the area, according to a 2008 estimate by the Israeli NGO, Bimkom, Planners for Planning Rights.

The UNHRC is, once again, lying.

Why no one cares that the UN effortlessly lies is an entirely different question.

(h/t Mitchell)

Professor Andew Pessin is a Professor of Philosophy at Connecticut College. He studied at Yale and earned a PhD at Columbia University. He is the author of five books, including most recently Uncommon Sense: The Strangest Ideas From The Smartest Philosophers. He is also friendly to the Jewish State of Israel and in opposition to political Islam for reasons having to do with social justice and human rights.

Professor Rabab Abdulhadi is an Associate Professor of Race and Resistance Studies at the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. She studied at Yale and earned a PhD from that university. She is the author of many papers and a contributor and co-editor to the recent Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging (Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East). She is also unfriendly to the Jewish State of Israel and highly critical of Zionism for reasons having to do with social justice and human rights.

Both of these professors are sometimes thought of as controversial for reasons concerning the Arab-Israel conflict - although one is more the political activist than the other - and both were recently involved in difficulties within their respective universities over that conflict.

The difference is that while SFSU stood behind Professor Abdulhadi, Connecticut College was far less supportive of Professor Pessin.

The question is "why?"

Understanding the answer to that question depends upon not only understanding the specific differences between the two controversies, but also the ideological atmosphere within American academia concerning the Arab-Israel conflict.

The short answer is that Abdulhadi is highly critical of Israel during a period of rising anti-Semitic anti-Zionism in the West and, therefore - given this political moment - receives financial and moral backing in the academe.

Pessin, on the other hand, is highly critical of Hamas, an organization that calls specifically for the genocide of the Jewish people and he is, therefore, reviled as a "racist."

Let's dig into the specifics.

Professor Andrew Pessin

On August 11, 2014, during the midst of the Israeli military push-back, Operation Protective Edge, Pessin posted the following on his Facebook page as part of a larger discussion concerning Hamas and the other genocidally-inclined rocketeers in Gaza who had been giving little Israeli kids post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) over the course of the preceding years.

Pessin compared Hamas to a "rabid pit bull chained in a cage."

For this he was excoriated as a racist not only by hard-left students in organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, but also by faculty.

The fact of the matter is that Pessin was referring to Hamas and other such violent Islamist organizations operating within Gaza.

The ironic thing is that it is not he who is conflating all Gazans with terrorists, but his allegedly "anti-racist" detractors who are doing so.

Pessin's Facebook page, above, needs to be understood within the larger conversation.

He was not referring to Palestinian-Arabs, nor Gazans, in general. He was speaking quite specifically about the kinds of Islamists who call directly for the genocide of the Jews, as Hamas does in its charter, a document that is not quoted nearly enough, but reads in part:

Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts. It is a step that inevitably should be followed by other steps. The Movement is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished and Allah's victory is realised.

As David Bernstein writes in the Washington Post:

I have seen his previous Facebook posts on the Gaza war last Summer, and they are full of criticism of Hamas, and don’t say anything nasty about Palestinians more generally, suggesting that he was, in fact, referring to Hamas.

I have seen those Facebook posts, as well, and concur.

Professor Rabab Abdulhadi

Professor Abdulhadi's circumstances are a tad different and I have previously written about her and my disappointment with San Francisco State University.

Abdulhadi was the faculty adviser to the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS) at a time when the SFSU president of that organization, Mohammed G. Hammad, took to social media in order to threaten violence against Jews.

As he held aloft blade in a "selfie," this is what he wrote:

I'm sitting here looking through pictures of that f—ing scum (name removed to protect the soldier) … Anyone who thinks there can be peace with animals like this is absolutely delusional, and the only ‘peace’ I’m interested in is the head of this f—ing scum on a plate, as well as the heads of all others like her, and all others who support the IDF. The Liberation of Palestine can only come through the destruction and decimation of this Israeli plague and it can’t possibly come soon enough.

It is not Abdulhadi's fault, of course, that some of her students want to kill Jews for political reasons.

She just happened to be standing nearby.

She was also the adviser to GUPS during the celebration of a mural to the late anti-Semitic professor, Edward Said, on that campus, wherein members of GUPS, and other student organizations, held aloft signs reading, "My heroes have always killed colonizers."

Just who these "colonizers" in need of killing are is speculative, but I feel reasonably certain that when students associated with the General Union of Palestine Students hold up little signs calling for the murder of "colonizers" that they are not referring to the Amish.

How Connecticut College Responded to Pessin:

Pessin, as a consequence of opposing Hamas, was subject to a campaign of defamation that became international. He was initially condemned as a "racist" or "Islamophobe" by a former student, Lamiya Khandaker who previously founded a branch of Students for Justice in Palestine at Brooklyn Technical High School and is quoted as saying:

I truly believe that if more American citizens gain more knowledge on this conflict, then we can pressure our government to do something, and if necessary, break our bond with Israel.

Break our bond with Israel.

Other students, following Khandaker's lead, wrote into the school newspaper that “Professor Pessin directly condoned the extermination of a people. A member of our community has called for the systematic abuse, killing, and hate of another people.” As David Bernstein notes, writing in the Washington Post, such a charge is probably libelous. If that is the case, it would also be actionable.

Pessin, however, probably just hoping that the non-controversy would go away so that he could do his actual work in peace, made the mistake of apologizing.

Bernstein tells us:

The result was an international controversy that included threats against Pessin and his family, knee-jerk reactions from academic departments throughout Connecticut College denouncing their colleague’s purported racism, denunciation without investigation by the usual suspects in the world of academic philosophy, and a school-sponsored “community conversation on free speech, equity and inclusion” that was so “inclusive” that the two Jewish students who spoke who criticized the Pessin witchhunt were, depending on the account, either booed or at least “met with derision.”

The Connecticut College history department, not wishing to be outdone by its own students, put out this note as a rebuke to Pessin, which reads in part:

To the Campus Community,

The history department would like to clearly state that we condemn speech filled with bigotry and hate particularly when that speech uses dehumanizing language and incites or celebrates violence and brutality. In response to the many events that transpired on campus prior to and during spring break regarding a Facebook post by a member of our faculty, we join the CCSRE in condemning hate speech.

How SFSU Responded to Abdulhadi:

While many people in the local Jewish community in California, most notably Tammi Benjamin of the AMCHA Initiative and "Dusty" at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers, objected to this outrageous behavior of students under Abdulhadi's authority or tutelage, the university was largely indifferent to such concerns. Even Professor Fred Astren, the head of the Jewish Studies Department, could not rouse himself to condemn much of this in a public manner, although one presumes that he spoke up behind the scenes.

SFSU, nonetheless, funded a trip for Abdulhadi and a few select students to travel to the "Occupied Palestinian Territories" in order to meet with terrorist plane hijacker, Leila Khaled. This visit was not merely an academic exercise for purposes of research. It was a political trip among student activists with a professor who has a serious bone to pick with the Jewish people in the Middle East and who is not the least bit shy about buddying-up with violently inclined racists like Khaled.

In fact, SFSU even went so far as to reward Abdulhadi by agreeing to partner with An-Najah National University in Nablus which is probably the most anti-Israel / anti-Jewish university on the entire planet. It was students at An-Najah who put together a "grotesque shrine" in celebration of the Sbarro pizza parlor massacre and which the Anti-Defamation League has referred to as a "greenhouse for martyrs."

Abdulhadi, in gratitude to the university, wrote this:

Today San Francisco State University's All University Committee on International Programs unanimously voted to recommend that SF State formally collaborate with An-Najah National University in Nablus, Palestine. This is the first time that SFSU will collaborate with any university in a Palestinian, Arab or Muslim community.

I am proud, excited and grateful to my colleagues @ An-Najah. It is my honor to be working with you. Thank you Mira Nabulsi for your amazing help in writing and producing the proposal. Thank you Dean Kenneth Monteiro and the College of Ethnic Studies for your consistent and unwavering support.

At The End of the Day

The essential point is that San Francisco State University is standing behind a professor that normalizes terrorism and, ultimately, hatred toward Jews. Connecticut College, on the other hand, both students and faculty, harassed a Jewish professor who opposes anti-Semitism and the spreading of political Islam.

The reason for this is not because of anything peculiar about either institution.

The real problem is not San Francisco State University, nor Connecticut College. The problem is a rising atmosphere of hatred toward the Jewish State of Israel and, thus inevitably, toward the Jewish people, themselves, not only in Europe, but increasingly within the United States.

What we are witnessing, and what these two cases illustrate, is not merely a new phase of Jewish and Israeli relations to western academia and to western culture and civilization. It is, in fact, a new phase in what it means to be "liberal" in the West today.

The western-left is passing down the toilet the very values of social justice and universal human rights that it claims to ground itself within.

The sympathies of western academia will go wherever the combined sensibilities of the professors and the students take it, but when it favors Hamas over the Jews in that part of the world it has forfeited any right to be considered "liberal."

By accepting political Islam it has also betrayed women in the Middle East, Gay people in the Middle East, and Christians in that part of the world. It even has betrayed Muslims in the Middle East to the extent that Muslims are the primary victims of political Islam.

This little story of two professors in the Age of Obama is a story bigger than San Francisco State University and Connecticut College.

It encapsulates a moment of shifting political sands in which the very notion of universal human rights and social justice are being thrown aside in favor of a failing multicultural ideal.

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.

Sorry, I posted this on the wrong day...

06/20 Links: Oren: Why Obama is wrong about Iran being 'rational' on nukes; The "Snap Back" Delusion

From Ian:

Israeli man killed in West Bank terror attack

An Israeli man who was critically injured Friday afternoon in a shooting attack in the West Bank succumbed to his wounds later Friday. He was named as Danny Gonen, 25, from the central city of Lod.
Gonen was shot in the upper body near the settlement of Dolev, northwest of Jerusalem. He was found unconscious and transferred to Tel Hashomer Hospital by IDF helicopter where he died over an hour after the attack.
Gonen was an electrical engineering student and the eldest of five siblings.
A second man, whose identity was not immediately made public, was moderately hurt in the attack and was being treated at Tel Hashomer.
The two men were traveling in their car after visiting a spring near Dolev, when they were flagged down by a Palestinian man, seemingly asking them for assistance. He then pulled a gun out of a bag he was carrying and opened fire on them at point-blank range, mortally wounding Gonen.
“The Palestinian asked for information regarding a nearby spring moments before drawing a gun and shooting the passengers at close range,” according to a statement released by the IDF.

Michael Oren: Why Obama is wrong about Iran being 'rational' on nukes

Simply put: Those in the “rational” camp see a regime that wants to remain in power and achieve regional hegemony and will therefore cooperate, rather than languish under international sanctions that threaten to deny it both. The other side cannot accept that religious fanatics who deny the Holocaust, blame all evil on the Jews and pledge to annihilate the 6 million of them in Israel can be trusted with a nuclear program capable of producing the world's most destructive weapon in a single year.
The rational/irrational dispute was ever-present in the intimate discussions between the United States and Israel on the Iranian nuclear issue during my term as Israel's ambassador to Washington, from 2009 to the end of 2013. I took part in those talks and was impressed by their candor. Experts assessed the progress in Iran's program: the growing number of centrifuges in its expanding underground facilities, the rising stockpile of enriched uranium that could be used in not one but several bombs, and the time that would be required for Iran to “break out” or “sneak out” from international inspectors and become a nuclear power.
Both nations' technical estimates on Iran largely dovetailed. Where the two sides differed was over the nature of the Islamic Republic. The Americans tended to see Iranian leaders as logical actors who understood that the world would never allow them to attain nuclear weapons and would penalize them mercilessly — even militarily — for any attempt to try.
By contrast, most Israelis viewed the ayatollahs as radical jihadists who claimed they took instructions from the Shiite “Hidden Imam,” tortured homosexuals and executed women accused of adultery, and strove to commit genocide against Jews. Israelis could not rule out the possibility that the Iranians would be willing to sacrifice half of their people as martyrs in a war intended to “wipe Israel off the map.”
The Americans tended to see Iranian leaders as logical actors... By contrast, most Israelis viewed the ayatollahs as radical jihadists. -
As famed Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis once observed, “Mutually assured destruction” for the Iranian regime “is not a deterrent — it's an inducement.”

How Obama Opened His Heart to the ‘Muslim World’

And got it stomped on. Israel’s former ambassador to the United States on the president’s naiveté as peacemaker, blinders to terrorism, and alienation of allies.
Yet, tragically perhaps, Obama — and his outreach to the Muslim world — would not be accepted. With the outbreak of the Arab Spring, the vision of a United States at peace with the Muslim Middle East was supplanted by a patchwork of policies — military intervention in Libya, aerial bombing in Iraq, indifference to Syria, and entanglement with Egypt. Drone strikes, many of them personally approved by the president, killed hundreds of terrorists, but also untold numbers of civilians. Indeed, the killing of a Muslim — Osama bin Laden — rather than reconciling with one, remains one of Obama’s most memorable achievements.
Diplomatically, too, Obama’s outreach to Muslims was largely rebuffed. During his term in office, support for America among the peoples of the Middle East — and especially among Turks and Palestinians — reached an all-time nadir. Back in 2007, President Bush succeeded in convening Israeli and Arab leaders, together with the representatives of some 40 states, at the Annapolis peace conference. In May 2015, Obama had difficulty convincing several Arab leaders to attend a Camp David summit on the Iranian issue. The president who pledged to bring Arabs and Israelis together ultimately did so not through peace, but out of their common anxiety over his support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and his determination to reach a nuclear accord with Iran.
Only Iran, in fact, still holds out the promise of sustaining Obama’s initial hopes for a fresh start with Muslims. “[I]f we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion,” he told the New Yorker, “you could see an equilibrium developing between [it and] Sunni … Gulf states.” The assumption that a nuclear deal with Iran will render it “a very successful regional power” capable of healing, rather than inflaming, historic schisms remained central to Obama’s thinking. That assumption was scarcely shared by Sunni Muslims, many of whom watched with deep concern at what they perceived as an emerging U.S.-Iranian alliance.
Six years after offering to “extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist,” President Obama has seen that hand repeatedly shunned by Muslims. His speeches no longer recall his Muslim family members, and only his detractors now mention his middle name. And yet, to a remarkable extent, his policies remain unchanged. He still argues forcibly for the right of Muslim women to wear — rather than refuse to wear — the veil and insists on calling “violent extremists” those who kill in Islam’s name. “All of us have a responsibility to refute the notion that groups like ISIL somehow represent Islam,” he declared in February, using an acronym for the Islamic State. The term “Muslim world” is still part of his vocabulary.
Historians will likely look back at Obama’s policy toward Islam with a combination of curiosity and incredulousness. While some may credit the president for his good intentions, others might fault him for being naïve and detached from a complex and increasingly lethal reality. For the Middle East continues to fracture and pose multiple threats to America and its allies. Even if he succeeds in concluding a nuclear deal with Iran, the expansion of the Islamic State and other jihadi movements will underscore the failure of Obama’s outreach to Muslims. The need to engage them — militarily, culturally, philanthropically, and even theologically — will meanwhile mount. The president’s successor, whether Democrat or Republican, will have to grapple with that reality from the moment she or he enters the White House. The first decision should be to recognize that those who kill in Islam’s name are not mere violent extremists but fanatics driven by a specific religion’s zeal. And their victims are anything but random.

06/19 Links Pt2: Caroline Glick: Israel’s great opportunity; Husseini's Anti-Semitic Legacy

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Israel’s great opportunity

On the other hand, even in their weakness the Druse present Israel with a great opportunity.
By helping them we can signal to others – for instance the Kurds – that we can be trusted.
Israel can help the Druse without spending too much time coordinating its steps with the US, because the Druse have no great regional significance. Given our own Druse community, our moral duty and national interest in ensuring their survival is self-evident.
Unlike the Druse, the Kurds are viewed as pivotal regional actors for the US and for other regional powers. Today, the greatest obstacle preventing Israel and the Kurds from working in alliance against common foes is the Obama administration. Under the administration, the strategic assumption of US Middle East policy is that the US should strengthen and curry favor with Iran.
Iran fears an independent Kurdistan in Iraq and Syria because of the likely impact such a state will have on Iran’s large Kurdish minority.
Consequently, the US is refusing to directly arm the Kurds in their war against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Yet in spite of America’s denial of support, the Kurds are pushing forward in their campaign against Islamic State. This week they cut off Islamic State’s supply chains from Turkey to the terrorist group’s capital in Raqqa by taking control over Tel Abayid close to the Turkish border.
If a year and a half from now a new administration in Washington changes the US’s regional policy, and if, during this period, Israel manages to form and maintain an alliance with the Druse, the Kurds will recognize that Israel is willing to do the hard work of building and maintaining alliances again.

Hajj Amin Husseini's Anti-Semitic Legacy

The implications of the mufti's claim that the Jews were successful in killing Muhammad despite God's warning imply that Jews possess the power to defy God's will. Such a blasphemous thought would be worse than Christian accusation of deicide. Jesus overcame death, and by his suffering, death and resurrection brought salvation to his community of believers; however, Muhammad not only remained dead but also failed to appoint his successor due to the rapid progression of his illness and his sudden, untimely demise. Consequently, the umma was split by different claimants to authority, and the dispute eventually led to the fiercest internecine strife in the history of early Islam, known as the fitna.
While the mufti's Palestinian successors would not tire of reiterating this story (as late as November 2013, Palestinian Authority minister of religious affairs Mahmoud Habbash claimed that Yasser Arafat was poisoned by the Jews just as they had poisoned the Prophet Muhammad to death), most contemporary Islamic scholars have a different understanding of this hazardous theology; inasmuch, the accusation that the Jews killed the Prophet has largely faded as a theological theme with mainstream Islamic commentary viewing the Jews, along the Qur'anic derision, as "adh-dhilla wa-l-maskan," translated by Yehoshafat Harkabi as "humiliation and wretchedness." Bernard Lewis further explained:
The outstanding characteristic, therefore, of the Jews as seen and as treated in the classical Islamic world is their unimportance. ... For Muslims, he might be hostile, cunning, and vindictive, but he was weak and ineffectual—an object of ridicule, not fear. This image of weakness and insignificance could only be confirmed by the subsequent history of Jewish life in Muslim lands.
Departing from this conventional view, the mufti did not interpret contemporary events as a new historical phenomenon to which Muslims should respond in a new, ad hoc manner. Instead, he traced Jewish accomplishments of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, and the alleged Jewish power and ambitions, to supposed Jewish activities at the time of Muhammad. In doing so, he created a precedent, later followed by prominent Islamic actors in the Middle East and elsewhere, particularly after Israel's stunning military victories over its Arab adversaries. Thus Hamas accuses the Jews of "wiping out the Islamic caliphate" by starting World War I and of starting the French and the communist revolutions, establishing "clandestine organizations" and financial power so as to colonize, exploit, and corrupt countries. Likewise, former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Muhammad accused Jews of ruling the world by proxy. Attributing such gargantuan accomplishments to the Jews, many of them at the expense of Muslims, presents a theological innovation with an immediate political consequence. Linking early Islamic with medieval Christian depictions of Jews results in their portrayal as "a demonic entity," thus making their "extermination legitimate."

Richard Behar: When Hitler Keeps Me Awake

I received a request from an award-winning journalist to connect on LinkedIn. He is Islamabad-based, and he describes himself as South Asian Bureau Chief for the Los Angeles Post, and a contributor for Al Jazeera, Gulf News and Deutsche Welle. He is also, according to a bio, working for a group called the Asian Human Rights Commission in Hong Kong, and he serves as the president of a group called Consortium for Press Freedom (CPF). He defines himself as an expert on Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Naturally, I was curious about his accomplishments as a reporter— they include a prestigious journalism honor in 2012 from Syracuse University called the “Mirror Award”—so I spent a few minutes last night exploring him on the Internet. Wish I hadn’t, because what I found kept me dead-awake for hours ruminating about relatives of mine (including foster grandparents) who were murdered in Nazi death camps.
See, the reporter who wants to LinkIn with me, Malik Ayub Khan Sumbal, tweeted something last summer (August 2nd) that feels to me like a kick in the face—only worse; far, far, far worse: “Let me #‎Salute to #‎Hitler # Gaza #‎jews #‎Israel #‎jewish.” Below it: A poster of Hitler that read “LET ME SALUTE TO HITLER THE GREAT. He said ‘I would have killed all the jews of the world, but I kept some to show the world why I killed them.’”

06/19 Links Pt1: Israeli man killed in West Bank terror attack; Hamas War Crimes in Gaza

From Ian:

Israeli man killed in West Bank terror attack

An Israeli man who was critically injured Friday afternoon in a shooting attack in the West Bank succumbed to his wounds.
The 25-year-old was shot in the upper body near the settlement of Dolev, northwest of Jerusalem. He was found unconscious and transferred to Tel Hashomer Hospital by IDF helicopter where he died over an hour after the attack.
A second man was moderately hurt in the attack and was also being treated at Tel Hashomer.
A large deployment of soldiers aided by Israel Police were currently searching for at least one shooter.
The two men in their mid-20s were traveling in their car after visiting a spring near Dolev, when they were flagged down by a Palestinian man, seemingly asking them for help, and shot at point-blank range.
IDF spokesman Peter Lerner said a “Palestinian approached a vehicle that was in the area and asked them to stop… and shot the two from close range.”

Jordan may not extradite alleged mastermind of ’82 terror attack on Jewish restaurant

France reportedly could have a difficult time extraditing the alleged organizer of a deadly 1982 terrorist attack who was arrested in Jordan earlier this month.
An unidentified Jordanian source “close to the case” told the French news agency AFP on Thursday that his country rarely extradites its citizens, choosing instead to try them in “specialized Jordanian courts.”
Zuhair Mohamad Hassan Khalid al-Abassi, aka “Amjad Atta,” one of three suspects in the attack for whom France issued an international arrest warrant earlier this year, was arrested on June 1. The attack was under the auspices of the Abu Nidal Organization, a Palestinian terrorist group.
Abassi, 62 and of Palestinian origin, is today “an aging man who works in the construction sector,” the Jordanian source told AFP. The source added that al-Abassi appeared in court without a lawyer and was ordered to surrender his passport before being released on bail.
According to AFP, Abassi was detained in the city of Zarqa, 18 miles northeast of Amman, the capital.

Sarah Honig: Mahmoud Abbas’s careless candor

The upshot of the misnamed “Arab Spring” – as some uncool Israelis had the temerity to warn from the outset – is that the bogus nationalities of the Arab sphere disintegrate chaotically before our eyes.
If anyone can lay claim to utmost mastery of the thriving arts of history-forging it’s the Jordanians. Their entire state, nationhood and very identity are a sham. Had the international community not been sympathetically predisposed to lap up the lie, Jordan obviously couldn’t pull it off. Its wholesale deceit hinges on a world contentedly complicit in hoodwinking itself – to no small measure because it’s loath to overcome its congenital Jew-aversion.
So the deceit blithely thrives in a world so eager to be deceived. The recent-vintage Jordanian and Palestinian pseudo-ethnicities are presented as bona fide nationalities. Moreover, it’s brazenly asserted that they are dissimilar and deserve self-determination in separate homelands.
This cock-and-bull contention begat the image of the stateless Palestinians – aggrieved indigenous inhabitants, striving desperately to throw off the yoke of foreign (Jewish) occupation. It serves as the perfect purportedly principled pretext to chop off another chunk of what pitifully remains from the originally designated Jewish homeland.
This is Abbas’s outright aim and he’s on the whole an unquestionably successful liar – not least because the international community is eager to lap up any lie about Jews. The dysfunctional family of nations probably wouldn’t care that he fleetingly forgot to prop up his own gargantuan con. However, we Israelis cannot but care that our purportedly trustworthy peace-partner barely remembers which outrageous lie he told last.
In his own version of Lincoln’s remark, Mark Twain – another American immortal – quipped that “if you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” That means that Abbas has to remember everything, all the time and that’s not easy – as his careless candor shows.

Hamas detains journalists who accidentally saw Hamas kick civilians out of a shelter. Media silent.

Hazem Balousha is a Gaza-based journalist who has written for The Guardian and The Washington Post.

According to the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, on Wednesday Balousha and two other journalists, an Australian and a Brit, were detained by Hamas because they happened to be near a UNRWA school shelter that was being forcibly evacuated by Hamas police (which would be a story itself in any other universe.)

The foreign journalists were released after about an hour but Balousha was transferred to a police station where he remained a bit longer.

The journalists tried to explain that they were trying to film a story about the anniversary of "Israel's aggression" in 2014, not to film the Hamas police forcing out innocent people who have nowhere to live. (UNRWA officially closed the shelters this week.)

The Hamas police insulted the reporters and treated them with contempt.

In fact, one person who was at a UNRWA shelter tried to commit suicide when the apartment his family had been promised was given to another family with better connections at UNRWA.

There has not been a word about this detention of Western reporters in Western media. The Guardian and Washington Post have not covered the story of their own reporter.

So not only does the world media refuse to report on Hamas abuses of Gazans, they even refuse to report when their own journalists are arrested.

The only conclusion one can make is that Hamas controls the media in Gaza with threats.

Every report from Gaza that doesn't mention that the reporters are intimidated by Hamas is a betrayal of journalistic standards.

Michael Oren, in his new book "Ally" (which I hope to read over Shabbat), describes an outrageous anecdote. Mahmoud Abbas wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, where, Oren says, "“Abbas suggested that the Arabs had accepted the U.N.’s Partition Plan in 1947 while Israel rejected it.” He then describes a phone conversation with the opinion editor of the NYT, Andrew Rosenthal:

“When I write for the Times, fact checkers examine every word I write,” I began. “Did anybody check whether Abbas has his facts exactly backward?”
“That’s your opinion,” Rosenthal replied.
“I’m an historian, Andy, and there are opinions and there are facts. That the Arabs rejected partition and the Jews accepted it is an irrefutable fact.”
“In your view.”
“Tell me, on June 6, 1944, did the Allied forces land or did they not land on Normandy Beach.”
Rosenthal, the son of a Pulitzer Prize-winning Times reporter and famed executive editor, replied, “Some might say so.”

But The Forward responds, saying:

There are three big problems with Oren’s account. The first, and most important, is that nowhere in his piece of May 17, 2011 does Abbas assert that “the Arabs had accepted the U.N.’s Partition Plan in 1947 while Israel rejected it.” Check it out yourself at this link.

Michael Oren didn't say that Abbas wrote those words; he says that Abbas suggested it.

The Forward is doing what they accuse Oren of doing - fabricating the facts.

Did Abbas suggest that Arabs accepted the partition? Indirectly, but yes. Here are the paragraphs in question:

It is important to note that the last time the question of Palestinian statehood took center stage at the General Assembly, the question posed to the international community was whether our homeland should be partitioned into two states. In November 1947, the General Assembly made its recommendation and answered in the affirmative. Shortly thereafter, Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsions ensued. ...Minutes after the State of Israel was established on May 14, 1948, the United States granted it recognition. Our Palestinian state, however, remains a promise unfulfilled.

This is about as accurate as an biographical op-ed describing the difficult life of the author, orphaned at an early age, neglecting to mention that he had in fact killed his parents (to paraphrase the old joke.)

Abbas is indeed implying that the only reason there is no Palestinian state is because of actions by Israel and inactions by the West- without mentioning that if the Arab world accepted a Palestinian state, they could have created one in 1949. In fact, you will be hard pressed to find any Palestinian Arabs who ever insisted on Jordan ceding the annexed West Bank to become a separate state. (Egypt created a puppet government with no power for Gaza, but it was a joke. The PLO founding charter explicitly excluded Gaza and the West Bank from any consideration of being part of a Palestinian state, which was meant to be only Israel.)

So the indirect implication is that the Palestinians wanted a state and the world denied them this state. No - the Palestinians wanted Israel destroyed and seethed when they failed at doing so.

Which also happens to be the situation today, although saying that out loud is not acceptable discourse for the New York Times.

Besides the false implications, Abbas also is more directly lying in these paragraphs:

Shortly thereafter, Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs - No, there were no expulsions in the months after the partition plan was voted on. There were numerous terror attacks on Jews starting only hours after the vote. The Haganah stayed on the defensive for months while Arabs attacked Jews.

to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel - There were a few expulsions later on in the war, but not enough to alter the demographic character of Israel. The vast majority of Palestinian Arabs fled and were not forced out (a lie that Abbas repeats in his opening paragraph about his own flight from Safed.)

and Arab armies intervened - No, they attacked to destroy Israel. They didn't give a damn about Palestinian Arabs.

Our Palestinian state, however, remains a promise unfulfilled. - As Abbas himself says, the partition plan rejected by his people was a recommendation, not a promise. There was no promise.

I fisked Abbas' op-ed at the time calling him out on his lies, as did Daled Amos. Jeffrey Goldberg also called out Abbas for his false implications.

Oren's objections were to the ahistoric nature of the op-ed, and moreover, to the double standard of how closely the NYT scrutinizes op-eds by Zionists compared to how much latitude they give to the anti-Israel crowd. I have documented the lack of fact checking enough times here, so in that dimension Oren is 100% correct.

(h/t EBoZ)

UNRWA lies, saying Gaza #3 on number of kids killed in 2014

UNRWA tweeted a lie:

Where did they get this from?

Apparently, they used the recent UN report on "Children in Armed Conflict."

Only one problem: The UN report only includes numbers when they are verified; if they have no idea they won't even bother to give an estimate.

So for example, the UN says about Syria:

197. Indiscriminate attacks launched in civilian populated areas continued to cause widespread killing and maiming. The United Nations verified the killing of 368 children (184 boys, 66 girls, 118 gender unknown) by Syrian Government forces (221), ISIL/ANF (44), FSA-affiliated groups (24), international coalition airstrikes (4) and unknown parties (75). ...Actual numbers are believed to be much higher.

That is an understatement. The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights counted 3,501 children killed in Syria - seven times the number who died in Gaza in 2014. Many of them were, no doubt, of Palestinian ancestry.

UNRWA doesn't care about them.

What about other conflicts? AP counted 5000 civilians killed in the Central African Republic between December 2013 and September 2014. There is no doubt that more than 10% are children as most were killed in vicious massacres of entire villages. Yet the UN doesn't have verified numbers, so they only reported the 146 documented cases, a small fraction of the actual number of deaths. As AP wrote:

Both life and death often go unrecorded in Central African Republic, a country of about 4.6 million that has long teetered on the edge of anarchy. Nobody knows just how many people have died in the grinding ethnic violence, and even the AP tally is almost certainly a fraction of the real toll.

The AP counted bodies and gathered numbers from dozens of survivors, priests, imams, human rights groups and local Red Cross workers, including those in a vast, remote swath of the west that makes up a third of the country. Many deaths here were not officially counted because the region is still dangerous and can barely be reached in torrential rains. Others were left out by overwhelmed aid workers but registered at mosques and at private Christian funerals.

The U.N. is not recording civilian deaths on its own, unlike in Iraq or Afghanistan, for example.

The Boko Haram insurgency killed over 11,000 civilians in 2014, but since there is no specific count of children, the UN doesn't estimate how many are under 18.

In South Sudan, where 50,000 and 100,000 have been killed, but no one is counting:

The International Crisis Group (ICG), a conflict think-tank, estimates at least 50,000 people have already died but it admits the true figure could even be double that. It also says the failure to count the dead is a scandal -- both as a dishonour to the victims and as something that has kept the country's suffering off the international radar.

"It's shocking that in 2014, in a country with one of the largest UN peacekeeping missions in the world, tens of thousands of people can be killed and no one can even begin to confirm the death toll," ICG researcher Casie Copeland told AFP.

"Surely more can be done to understand whether the figure is closer to 50,000 or 100,000?"

Other conflicts which had a higher death toll than Gaza, and probably a higher death toll of children, include Ukraine, Libya and Darfur, and possibly Pakistan.

So, yes, this tweet by a UN agency is a flat-out lie.

It also shows that the UN, by avoiding even giving an estimate of actual numbers of children killed in 2014, is contributing to the problem because they are effectively cheapening the lives of children in areas of the worst conflicts where it is too dangerous for observers to go.

(h/t Judge Dan)

Ma'an claims 1.1 million Gazans were driven out of Israel

Ma'an reports that UNRWA is closing its shelters for displaced Gazans, saying that they can take care of all of them by paying their rent.

It then says, "About 300,000 Palestinians whose homes were destroyed by Israeli forces have been staying temporarily in over 90 sheltering centers run by UNRWA since August 2014."

Did UNRWA find space for 300,000 people? "Have been" means that they are still currently displaced.

The answer is no. UNRWA did house 300,000 at the end of the war, but the number of total displaced has gone down to 100,000 by May.

Ma'an's background lies get much more absurd in the next paragraph:

Prior to the war, UNRWA already struggled to meet the needs of Palestinians living in eight refugee camps throughout the Gaza Strip, where 1.1 million of the 1.5 Palestinian million residents are refugees driven from present-day Israel.

1.1 million Gazans were driven from Israel? That's an amazing fact, since there were barely 1.1 million Arabs in Palestine in 1947 altogether!

This is what happens when you create a new definition of "refugee" that is at odds with reality. Ma'an needs to pretend that they are refugees so therefore it needs to pretend, presumably, that every Gazan "refugee" is over 67 years old.

06/18 Links Pt2: Michael Douglas: BDS is ‘Anti-Peace Movement’; The Terminator voices Waze

From Ian:

For Pro-Israel Advocates, It’s Time to Start Playing Offense

Victories aren’t usually depressing, but recent headlines about Israel include those such as: “Israel Left Off U.N. List of Parties That Kill, Injure Kids,” “Palestinians Abandon Bid to Ban Israel From FIFA,” and a couple of headlines about failed motions for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement on college campuses. Surely all of these “victories” are better than the corresponding defeats. But still, we can and should do better.
The problem with these victories is that they reflect a much deeper problem in the strategy of pro-Israel advocates. We tend to play defense far more than offense. Some psychologists might enjoy explaining just why Jews, in general, might prefer this approach, but it’s something we must overcome. What’s wrong with this strategy was beautifully laid out in Ze’ev Maghen’s famous piece, “How to Fight Anti-Semitism.”
“A man calls you a pig,” he writes. “Do you walk around with a sign explaining that, in fact, you are not a pig? Do you hand out leaflets expostulating… upon the manifold differences between you and a pig?”
Of course not. For to do this is already to cede the crucial first move to your enemy. It’s to allow that your pig-hood is even a legitimate question in the first place.
Playing defense grants the possible legitimacy of the attacks on us.
It’s time for us to go on offense.

The Biggest Mistakes Pro Israel Advocates Make #9: How To Avoid Seeming Holier Than Thou

We need to end religious-based arguments once and for all. Not only are they detrimental, but they are misleading, as the true nature of Zionism is purely secular.
That being said, I think that if you weave in the religious argument with the indigenous argument (i.e. that the Jewish religion arose from the Jewish culture, which had its genesis in the land of Israel) it can bolster it. That being said, arguing entirely from a religious standpoint is, in my opinion, completely futile.
Even if we may believe religious Zionist arguments, we should avoid them at all costs as they convince nobody but those who are already convinced, and they do more harm than no argument at all among secular people.
So what arguments can we use instead?
1) Israel is the indigenous homeland of the Jewish People. Cite archaeology rather than the bible. If archaeology proves the bible, you can use that evidence as the basis for any biblical claims you might make.
2) The Arabs as colonizers (turn their “settler colonialism” argument on its side)
4) Continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel (also the fact that there has only been a Jewish state on that land, everything else was a colony of some larger colonialist entity).

PMW: Antisemitic Sheikh praises PMW for exposure of his hate speech

"Allah puts them [PMW] at our service," says Antisemitic teacher of Islam Sheikh Khaled Al-Mughrabi about Palestinian Media Watch, after PMW subtitled his hate speech and uploaded the videos to YouTube and PMW's website.
"The fact that this group [PMW] chose to come uninvited to our lesson, and follows our lessons and publicizes them all over the world and puts them on its websites in all the countries of the world - since they chose this - first, praise Allah for this, Allah puts them [PMW] at our service... They themselves chose to expose their true self, which Allah exposed." [Al-Msjed Al-Aqsa YouTube channel, June 16, 2015]
Earlier this month, the Sheikh defended his blood libel about Jews using the blood of non-Jewish children for making Passover matzah bread, presenting it as "advice" to Jews and an attempt to "save them from Hell."
Now, too, he explains that his previous teachings are "the truth" about the Jews "as Allah has exposed it." He even explains that he breaks this truth to Jews "gently", whereas to his Muslim audience he speaks "about them as they really are":