Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, October 12, 2015

The sweet young terrorist in the Independent and the media's refusal to report on incitement

Fatah poster praising Badran for his act

Sure, he tried to stab some Israelis. But he was such a sweet child!

Disgusting reporting from The Independent (UK):

Ishaq Badran was described simply as a “terrorist” after stabbing an Israeli near the Damascus Gate in occupied East Jerusalem on Saturday.

But in the mourners’ circle at his home in the city’s Kufr Aqab area, a more complex picture emerged of the 16-year-old, and what has caused others to take part in a wave of stabbings that has shaken Israel and threatens to turn into an all-out Palestinian uprising.

Ishaq, a student at an Israeli vocational school who was shot dead by Israeli police, was lauded as a “hero” and “martyr” by the mourners. He was, said those gathered at his home, simply acting to defend Islam’s third holiest site, the Aqsa mosque, situated on an area revered by Jews as the Temple Mount.

As dates, a traditional mourning food, were passed around, Ishaq’s close friends described him as an introverted, polite teen who liked weight-lifting and swimming. The oldest of six children, he prayed regularly and encouraged his friends to join him, friends said. He was not affiliated with any Palestinian faction or organisation, something he had in common with other Palestinians carrying out recent attacks seemingly of their own free will.

“I was surprised. I did not expect it,” said his father, Qassim Badran. “My son always obeyed me. Every time I’d say don’t go to any areas of trouble he would say: ‘Yes.’”

Mr Badran said that his son had been deeply upset by reports that a settler had stripped the hijab off a Muslim woman in the Old City of Jerusalem last Wednesday. The reports, which could not be independently confirmed, soon spread on Palestinian social media. “He spoke to his mother about this and cried,” Mr Badran told The Independent. “He was crying, saying: ‘No one is defending these women’.” The woman was shot as she tried to stab an Israeli man, according to Israeli police.

A friend of Ishaq’s, aged 13, said he was “extremely upset” when he saw him on Thursday and Friday last week. “We were looking at pictures of martyrs. He said that Fadi Aloun was killed in cold blood,” he said, referring to a Palestinian shot by Israeli police on 3 October for what Palestinians believe was no reason. Israeli police say he was killed after he stabbed an Israeli.

They also looked at phone pictures of Mohanad Halabi, a 19-year-old who killed two Israelis in a separate stabbing attack on 3 October. “Both of us were talking of what a heroic act Mohanad did. Ishaq mentioned what happened to the woman with the hijab and said that had we done this to a Jewish lady they would have killed us.”

What is the "more complex picture" that has emerged from this "reporting" that indicates that Badran was not a terrorist?

A young man decided "seemingly of his own free will" to murder Jews.

Which means that, yes, he is a terrorist.

He is a terrorist even though he lifted weights.

He is a terrorist even though he liked to swim.

He is a terrorist even though he liked to pray.

He is a terrorist even though he was respectful to his parents.

None of those other facts makes his actions any less heinous. Every would-be murderer in the world has other interests and hobbies, every serial killer had a mother and father, every depraved criminal had a side of himself that loved children or animals or collecting stamps. It does not excuse their actions - except for Palestinian Arab terrorists whose attempts to murder Jews must be placed into "context."

There is one other thing that we learn from this article - that incitement is deadly.

It wasn't only social media that reported that a woman stabber last week had her hijab removed by a "settler." It was the mainstream Arab press, as I reported at the time.

There are literally no journalistic standards in Palestinian Arab media. Multiply this by the thousands of bigots and haters on social media, the rumors that have swirled after every attack become "facts" in the minds of young people who feel they must avenge the baseless lies.

Arab incitement is what ended up killing Ishaq Badran. And Arab incitement is the least-reported story - one ignored by not only the media but by politicians and so-called "human rights" organizations.

Their refusal to mention the incitement results in more deaths.

Lies about the Temple Mount, lies about Israeli defensive actions, lies about the Jewish communities across the Green Line, antisemitic lies, and hundreds of lies that are promulgated every day in Arab media and Palestinian officials, are the engine of the violence. Combined with the honor/shame dynamic of Arab society and you have a surefire recipe for terror attacks. How can self-respecting people act otherwise when they are brainwashed by a daily avalanche of incitement and hate and lies?

But the Independent will not cover that story. The Independent, and virtually all Western media, will not accept the notion that their compatriots in Arab media are not only willing but anxious to make up facts - like the "ripping off hijab" lie or the "she only had an electrical fire in her car" lie or the ever popular "they opened fire for no reason" lie.

Westerners cannot wrap their heads around an entire society that was built on myths and lies combined with honoring murderers. The media cannot be bothered to research the facts for themselves, thinking that both sides must have some basis for their claims and the truth must be somewhere in between.

Media like The Independent are partially responsible by giving credence to the lies, and by not reporting on the fact that one side's claims are so often spurious that each one should be reported only with a disclaimer. Articles like this feed into the myth of Ishaq Badran's heroism, not his terrorism.

The Arab media lies. The Western media abets the lies by reporting the ones they want to believe and ignoring the ones that are too over the top for any sane person to swallow.

These lies have consequences - and often, the consequences are fatal.

Palestinian Arab media are happily pushing for a violent intifada in Arabic - but in English they are pretending that there are no attacks, and that Israelis are attacking them without any provocation.

The latest example comes from this morning's attack near Lion's Gate, as reported in TOI:

A man attempted to stab a police officer and was shot and killed in Jerusalem’s Old City Monday morning, the latest incident in a spate of terror attacks that have rocked the capital and the rest of Israel over the last two weeks.

Police said there were no injuries in the attempted attack and the attacker was pronounced dead at the scene.

The incident occurred near the Lions’ Gate entrance to the Old City, the site of two previous stabbing attacks, including one that left two people dead over a week ago.

A police spokesperson said the attacker, an Arab man, approached the area from a cemetery to the north and was asked to take his hands out of his pockets by police, who suspected something was amiss.

The man then took a knife out of his pocket and tried to stab a police officer. The officer was wearing a protective vest and was not injured.

“The officers quickly shot the attacker,” the spokesperson said.

Palestine News Network denies everything, using those famous anonymous "eyewitnesses" whose credibilty is nearly always close to zero:

A Palestinian youth on Monday morning has been executed by Israeli occupation police forces, under claims that he tried to initiate a stab operative near Lion’s Gate (Bab Al-Asbat) in the old city of Jerusalem.

Eyewitnesses at the scene confirmed that the man did not initiate any stabbing attempts, saying that he was passing in his vehicle through the old city’s narrow street, when the police stopped him, and opened fire on him for no apparent reason.

Other eyewitnesses said that he was taking out his mobile phone from his pocket, when IOF shot him.

In Arabic, however, PNN highlights photos of Arab women bravely brandishing knives.

Meanwhile, video was released showing an Arab stabbing Israeli police on Saturday, another event that PNN had tried to cast doubt on:

Amnesty International would say that the officers were "heavily protected" and had nothing to fear from a man stabbing them in the head. Perhaps they should have called up Amnesty during the attack to ask advice on the optimal method to save the life of a man desperately trying to kill them.

Muslims upset that Wikipedia has a "Temple Mount" entry in English

There have been a few articles this weekend from angry Muslims who realized that the non-Arabic Wikipedia entries on The Temple Mount are called "The Temple Mount" - and that it mentions anything besides Islamic legends about the area.

Someone seems to have started a rumor that the page has only recently been renamed "Temple Mount" and that it was formerly entitled The Noble Sanctuary or Al Haram al Sharif. The Jews, of course, are the culprits.

Dr. Aida Al-Najjar of Jordan swallowed this rumor whole, and rails againat those Jews, saying "Not only did the Zionists to kill all the Palestinians in cold blood, they also reinforce what they are doing by feigning objectivity and science concerning the conflict over al-Aqsa mosque....Wikipedia's information is based on incorrect and unscientific and inaccurate Jewish myths for distribution in foreign languages. As can be seen, Zionism replaced "the Haram al-Sharif" with "the Temple Mount." This indicates that [Wikipedia] is working in order to please the Jews who rely on their networks and contribute to change the facts.

Other articles say that the Wikipedia entry in English only refers to the sanctity of the place from the Jewish perspective while the text does not mention its religious significance for Muslims, except for one sentence that says that Jerusalem is the third holiest site in Islam, and it was the site of Mohammed's trip to heaven.

A quick perusal of the actual Wikipedia entry on the Temple Mount shows that this is quite a lie.

The discussions behind the page show some pathetic attempts by Muslims to erase history. For example, it indicates that many people tried to change the name of the article. Here is one comment:

"please change Temple Mount to AL-aksa mosque because its disrespectful to the feelings of one billion muslims in the whole world, and tha Temple Mount is just a myth in the heads of zionests "

Another would-be editor referenced the absurd NYT article from last week as evidence that no Temple ever existed:

The article discusses the religious presumption of the existence of the first and second temples on the Temple Mount as a given and a considerable amount of space is dedicated to discussing the numerous archeological digs which have taken place in order to try to locate some evidence of the existence of the temples on the Mount, however, the article does not state that so far no compelling evidence has been located to prove that the Temple Mount is the actual location of the destroyed temples, assuming that they ever actually existed, since we are talking about something that has disappeared more than 2000 years ago. There is ample independent reporting of the lack of concrete evidence of the existence of remains of the temple on the Temple Mount, see for example http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/world/middleeast/historical-certainty-proves-elusive-at-jerusalems-holiest-place.html?_r=0 and http://www.haaretz.com/life/archaeology/.premium-1.627324

The Arabic entry for Al Haram al Qudsi a-Sharif has no such issues. It doesn't mention the Temples, or even Judaism. There is no controversy in its pages. The entire entry is a straight reading of the myth of Mohammed and his flying donkey, and then goes in detail on the various structures there today.

The thing is, in a few years the French Wikipedia entry will likely resemble the Arabic one, and the English one may follow soon after.

.@UNRWA teacher celebrates the music of stabbing Jews (update)

This cartoon gained some notoriety over the weekend for its romanticizing the wave of stabbings by Arabs of Jews in Israel recently:

UNRWA teacher Hiba Miari of Lebanon wasted no time to make this "artwork" her Facebook profile image.

Will UNRWA discipline her, as they promise to for the many cases like these that I uncover, or will they just silently have the pages removed and cover up the incident, as they have been?

One thing is for sure: UNRWA is reading this blog and often acting on what I find. They know that they condone this kind of incitement and only reactive to my research, rather than pro-actively working to root out the problem themselves.

Did they send a memo to their staff warning them on how to conduct themselves on Facebook? Did they discipline any of the other teachers or schools that I showed were pushing the worst kinds of terror apologetics and antisemitism?

I have plenty more examples in the queue, and I'm finding more all the time. If UNRWA really cared, they could find them before I do.

But they don't care.

UPDATE: Another UNRWA teacher from Khan Younis also uses this as her profile picture.

10/11 Links: Abbas justifies murder as protection of holy sites; Jeremiah Wright: Jesus was a Palestinian

From Ian:

PMW: Abbas justifies violence and murder as “protection of holy sites”‎

After ongoing Palestinian riots, which have including shootings, stabbings, and rock and Molotov cocktail throwing - as well as the murder of 4 Israeli civilians - Abbas last week justified it all as legitimate defense of holy sites:
"The Palestinian side did not attack and did not do anything against the Israelis. If they [Israelis] think that the [Palestinian] people in Jerusalem are protecting themselves, that is our right. We have to protect our holy sites." [Official PA TV, Oct. 6, 2015 and Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Oct. 7, 2015]
Abbas then attacked Israel's defense measures against Palestinian terror:
"The Israeli government is escalating its strong offensive against the Palestinian people everywhere... Honestly, we do not know what the reason is for this."

After Palestinians murder 4 Israelis Abbas says “the Palestinian side did not attack”

MUST WATCH: This Is how the Palestinians Raise their Children (h/t Yoel)

In the past weeks, Israelis suffer from hundreds of terror attacks: stab attacks, firebombs, rock-throwing - all as the outcome of ongoing Palestinian incitement on social media and TV. Imagine if this was you. Imagine if this was happening somewhere else. IMAGINE.
SHARE THIS VIDEO. SPREAD THE WORD. SAY 'NO' TO HATE.

Jeremiah Wright: 'Jesus was a Palestinian'

The controversial religious leader Jeremiah Wright compared Native Americans to Palestinians at the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March on the National Mall on Saturday, going so far as to assert that “Jesus was a Palestinian."
Wright, who once served as pastor to President Obama, was one of several hours' worth of speakers in Washington, D.C., for an event called “Justice or Else!” that sought to channel the energy of the Black Lives Matter movement. Wright placed the event in historical context.
“The same issue is being fought today and has been fought since 1948, and historians are carried back to the 19th century… when the original people, the Palestinians — and please remember, Jesus was a Palestinian — the Palestinian people had the Europeans come and take their country,” Wright said.
He said African-Americans in the United States have much in common with Palestinians in Israel.
“The youth in Ferguson and the youth in Palestine have united together to remind us that the dots need to be connected,” Wright said. “And what Dr. King said, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, has implications for us as we stand beside our Palestinian brothers and sisters, who have been done one of the most egregious injustices in the 20th and 21st centuries.”
Wright, who was the reverend of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, which the president attended intermittently from 1988 to 2008, also accused Israel of being an apartheid state. (h/t Jewess)

Throughout the twentieth-century the New York Times was never a friend or ally to the Jewish people, nor is it a friend or ally to the Jewish people today.

During World War II, the Times buried the Holocaust deep within its pages and, as far as I am concerned, it will never live down that criminal negligence, that crime against the six million dead, and neither will its owner and publisher, at the time, Arthur Hays Sulzberger.

Severin Hochberg, in a 2006 review of Laurel Leff's Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper, for the Oxford University journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, tells us:

"Leff's grim conclusion is that the mass murder of the Jews was simply not an important enough story for the New York Times. This, in turn, was partly because it was not an important enough story for the Allied governments or the Western public. Another crucial factor in the decision to minimize the plight of the Jews, according to Leff, was the personal influence of the New York Times' publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Sulzberger believed that the Jews were not a "people," much less a race, and that they should not be treated differently from anybody else, even when clearly targeted for annihilation. His obsessive need to deflect accusations that the Times was a "Jewish" newspaper influenced coverage of Jewish persecution and ultimately mass murder." (My emphasis.)

Little seems to have changed over at the Gray Lady or "the newspaper of record."

Many of you will recall that the Times recently published a "Jew Tracker" showing which Jewish politicians did, and which did not, support Obama's Iran non-treaty that gives that government - a government that perpetually calls for the murder of Israeli-Jews and all Americans -150 billion dollars and the ability to shortly gain nuclear weaponry.

To my astonishment the conservative Washington Free Beacon, under the byline of Adam Kredo, claims to have attained emails between senior New York Times editor, Greg Brock, and a pro-Jewish reader and critic who slammed the paper for running this vile material before public pressure forced them to remove it.

{This fiasco by the Times, by the way, raises the odor of the Rototom Sunsplash festival in Spain where public pressure likewise forced the Reggae event to accept Matisyahu simply as a performer, not a Jewish performer under some enforced BDS obligation to answer for the alleged crimes of the Jewish state.}

According to the Washington Free Beacon a reader / critic of the Times wrote editor Brock the following and called the inclusion of the Jewish list "stupid":

Are you so ignorant that you don’t understand the historical significance of what you’re doing? Are you so tone deaf? Why don’t you include addresses so that people’s homes can be attacked?...

My parents were Holocaust survivors and the first thing the Nazis wanted to know is: where are the Jews? This merely furthers the classic anti-Semitic trope of dual loyalty.

Greg Brock fired back with:

But it would be helpful if you did your homework. You’ll find that we are in excellent journalistic company. I just wish the Times had thought of it sooner so we do not appear to be copying others.

Do you ever read the Jewish press—some of the finest journalism around, in my humble opinion. If you search online right now, you will see that these publications have been keeping a running count of the voting position of Jewish senators and representatives for weeks.

To which the reader / critic responded:

Do you understand that dual loyalty is a classic anti-Semitic trope? Do you understand that the accusation that Jews are voting against their national interests and for their faith-based communal interest is a call to violence? Somehow, the sensitivity you show to racial issues is lost when your target is Jewish.

Do you understand that you’re creating a hostile environment for Jews whether they agree with the NYTimes editorial position or not?” asked the reader, who further described the post as “stupid” and offensive.

It is difficult to fathom the kind of outrageous stupidity that it takes to single out Jewish politicians for public derogation when no other ethnic group is treated with such malice. It was not so long ago that the New York Times was, in fact, considered the paper of record. When I was kid we received it in our box on a daily basis and my father would spend half of Sunday perusing the massive tome that they put out every weekend.

But those days are long dead.

The Times, it should be noted, was not the only significant publication that believed that singling out Jewish politicians for disgust was reasonable. Joshua Keating over at Slate liked the idea, although he acknowledged the crudity of it. He wrote:

It seems willfully obtuse to pretend that the position of the Israeli government and the views of at least a prominent faction of the American Jewish community aren’t a factor in this debate.

That does not sound entirely unreasonable, now does it?

However, I will look forward to the day when the New York Times tracks black politicians, as black people, or Latino politicians, as Latinos, or Gays as Gays, as they do Jews as Jews.

Until we begin to see that perhaps Greg Brock might consider not bickering with thoughtful readers over a prejudicial, bigoted, and yes, stupid, NYT policy.

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.

Biased @Amnesty report says IDF soldiers aren't in real danger from firebombs and boulders

Amnesty International issued a report on the situation in Israel. 6 paragraphs mentioned attacks on Israelis - and 21 paragraphs attacked Israel for defending its citizens from those attacks.

This section of the report was particularly absurd:

While Palestinian demonstrators have thrown rocks and firebombs towards Israeli forces in many demonstrations, and there are reports that Palestinians have shot at Israeli forces in isolated cases, Israeli military and police forces are heavily protected and must ensure that all use of force is strictly necessary and proportionate, and that firearms must only be used to protect against the imminent threat of death or serious injury.

The rest of the report shows that Amnesty does not consider a single case of Israeli use of force to be justified. Because the Israeli forces have magic "protection" that stop firebombs and knives and stones and sometimes bullets from being dangerous.

For example:

The Israeli military said that there had been a violent demonstration in which rocks and firebombs were thrown at Israeli forces, and that troops had used riot dispersal means before opening fire at three Palestinians who were throwing firebombs, but did not release information to suggest that the lives of Israeli troops had been in danger.

Yes, Amnesty really said that even though the IDF explained in detail that the terrorists had not responded to the exact kind of non-lethal weapons that Amnesty insists the IDF use, and they were still throwing firebombs at them, that is not enough information for Amnesty to decide that the IDF acted properly.

One wonders what else the IDF could do to prove it acted properly, and one immediately knows the answer - nothing. Amnesty is looking for evidence of guilt, not fact-finding.

Besides this, the report shows the usual extreme anti-Israel bias. It makes numerous specific demands from Israeli authorities. Just a few of the many examples:

Israeli actions to apprehend and bring to justice those responsible for such attacks must comply with international law; there is no justification for arbitrary arrests, or for torture or other ill-treatment during arrest or detention.

Amnesty International calls on the Israeli authorities to publicly disclose the current openfire regulations for Israeli police and military forces, including those being applied in East Jerusalem. The Israeli authorities must urgently issue directives clarifying that Israeli army and police personnel can only use live fire, including .22 ammunition, when strictly unavoidable to protect against the imminent threat of death or serious injury, and that all use of force must be absolutely necessary, strictly proportionate to a legitimate aim, and in full compliance with international human rights standards.

As the occupying power, Israel is also bound by the Fourth Geneva Convention, and is prohibited from imposing measures in the name of security – including restrictions on the movement of Palestinians in the OPT – that are arbitrary, discriminatory or amount to collective punishment.

Israeli forces must protect Palestinian civilians and their property from settler attacks, and end the impunity for such attacks by addressing the systematic failures in investigating them.

But the report does not ask Fatah or Hamas to do a single thing to stop terror or incitement. There are no demands. The word "must":, used liberally when insisting on what Israel must do, is completely absent in regard to the PA.

Even though Amnesty reported that a Fatah-linked group took responsibility for the murder of the Henkins, it doesn't ask Fatah's leader Mahmoud Abbas to lift a finger to stop terror.

It gives specific numbers of alleged attacks by Israel reported by biased sources, but it doesn't mention that far moreattacks on Israelis have been recorded - 440 as of Friday. No indication is given that Amnesty even tried to find such a statistic..

The real purpose of the report is to slam Israel yet again. Listing a few attacks on Jews is a fig-leaf to put on top of another hit-job.

Not putting any responsibility on the PA and Hamas shows that Amnesty really has no problem with how they encourage terrorism against Jews.

TOI reports:

A policeman was lightly injured Sunday morning when a Palestinian woman detonated explosives in her car near Ma’ale Adumim, east of Jerusalem.

The attacker was severely injured by the explosion and was evacuated to Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem neighborhood for treatment.

Police said officers noticed a “suspicious vehicle” driven by a woman toward a checkpoint en route to Jerusalem and signaled to her to stop. The woman then yelled “Allahu Akbar” and detonated a bomb in her car, a police statement said.

Army Radio reported the wounded officer is a traffic policeman who pulled over the bomber in her car for driving in a lane specified for public transport and carpooling.

The car was was bearing Israeli, rather than Palestinian, license plates, the report said. Police found a gas canister in the vehicle and said that the woman had intended to carry out a bombing in Jerusalem.

Initial reports pointed to a possible suicide bombing, saying that the woman had died in the attack. Police later said the woman exited her car just before the bomb went off, indicating that it may not have been a suicide bombing attempt.

JPost adds:

"It is feared that a terror cell stands behind the Sunday morning explosion near Ma'aleh Adumim and it's possible that there will be more attempts to execute terrorist attacks using explosives," a military source told The Jerusalem Post's sister publication Ma'ariv.

The source questioned the sophistication of the cell however.

"The explosive device was small and unprofessional and the terrorist was not trained," he explained.

An investigation of the incident revealed that there were gas canisters in the suspect's car that were meant to explode and cause much greater damage.

She was sent to carry out the attack and the explosive was prepared for her, but the execution of the attack demonstrates that the terror cell was not organized or trained.

The source said the suspect is known to security forces and officials were checking which organization she belonged to.

Palestinian Arab media are denying the story, claiming based on "eyewitnesses" that the woman had an electrical problem with her car and it started an internal fire and that the police wouldn't let her (and her child, not mentioned in any Israeli media) leave the car. She screamed "allahu akbar" in fear, according to this version of the story.

Another Arab story claims that according to other "eyewitnesses" is that Israeli forces shot at the car for no reason.

The terrorist's name is Isra Djabaas, which happens to be the same surname as the person responsible for an attack with an excavator tractor in 2014 in Jerusalem that killed one.

Official Palestinian incitement continues

Fatah denied being part of a press release using its logo by the "General Command of the Third Palestinian Intifada".

But there is still plenty of incitement from official Fatah and PA channels.

Abbas Zaki, member of Fatah's Central Committee, stressed that Fatah has never abandoned the option of armed terror ("resistance") but said that it requires a consensus and unity.

Zaki told Anatolia News Agency, "Today, we defend ourselves...some with a stone and some with a knife."

Zaki also said that while there is no official sanction for an uprising, he praised the stabbers and stoners by saying that the attackers are "young men..(who) are driven by their consciousness and oppression in which they live."

More direct incitement to throw stones comes from the cartoonist at official PA daily Al Hayat al Jadida:

The same site published this bit of antisemitism last week:

This cartoon on the front page of Al Ayyam, also a pro-government daily, is more explicit in telling people to throw stones at Jews:

"Closer....closer"

(h/t IronyDome)

10/10 links: The New York Times Goes Truther on the Temple Mount; Why is Jaffa being attacked?

From Ian:

‘The New York Times’ Goes Truther on the Temple Mount

Was the White House ever in Washington, D.C.? Can we ever really know for sure? Not unless we dig under the existing structure and find indisputable archaeological evidence of the original structure, which British general Robert Ross is said—by some sources—to have torched in August, 1814.
If you find everything about the previous paragraph patently ridiculous, you are clearly not a reporter or an editor for The New York Times. This morning, the paper of record published a piece about Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, questioning whether or not it was the site of, you know, the Jewish Temple. “Historical Certainty,” the article’s headline reads, “Proves Elusive at Jerusalem’s Holiest Place.” Capping the piece is a quote from Jane Cahill, who the paper notes is not only an archaeologist but also a practicing lawyer and therefore, presumably, an expert on incontrovertible evidence. Did the ancient Jewish temple stand where the Dome of the Rock now stands? “The answer might be ‘yes,’ if the standard of proof is merely a preponderance of the evidence,” Cahill is quoted as saying, “but ‘no’ if the standard of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt.”
It’s hard to begin to dissect the Times’ potent blend of ignorance and malice. There’s reporter Rick Gladstone’s repulsive bad faith in continually moving back and forth in his text between the narrow question he seems to have asked Cahill and other scholars: did the Temples stand precisely on the exact spot on the Temple Mount where Aksa was built, or might they have stood, say 50 feet over? This, in addition to the idea, which Gladstone weaves in and out of the piece, that there is even the slightest credibility to the idea that “Jewish Temples” were, you know, the products of some kind of religious fever-dream that Zionists then appropriated for their own aggressive purposes.

Richard Millett: A Nice destruction of the Jewish state.

On Wednesday I went to the legal heart of London to hear a talk given by Professor Sir Geoffrey Nice QC. The talk Gaza-Israel: The Legal Military View was at Gresham College.
It was due to start at 6pm but I arrived at 5.50pm and by then every seat was taken including those in the overflow room. Latecomers were turned away with a copy of the talk, all 22 pages, Professor Nice was about to deliver.
On the tube home I read the Professor’s fantasyland; let’s call it Niceland.
In Niceland everyone is nice, except all Israelis (P.17):
And in Niceland history can be whatever you want it to be (P. 3):
“Israel as a state was thus imposed on and within Palestine in 1948…an as yet unfinished state project because the territorial ambitions of Israel were not satisfied. Thereafter, claiming to fight for the security of their people and preservation of their land, Israel fought their Arab neighbours, expanding Israel’s borders.”
And in Niceland those fantastical disappearing maps of Palestine used by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign are accurate (P. 5).
And in Niceland Israel never handed back the Sinai and made peace with Jordan (P.6):
“The 1967 war encouraged a revival of the “Greater Israel”, envisaged by the founder of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, as extending “from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates””.

Edgar Davidson: What to say to your MP about the failure of the media and politicians to acknowledge the current war against Israeli Jews

Note this was before I heard this evening about the appalling statement by the Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond in which he blamed Israel's 'occupation' and 'violence by Palestinians and Israeli settlers' for the current situation. And there are still people who think that the Conservatives and David Cameron are 'friends of Israel'. Remember Hammond also made a blood libel antisemitic statement (one of the worst ever made by a British Cabinet member) when he said that Israel wanted to spike the Iran deal because it 'wanted to maintain a permanent state of war'. Anyway, I used the online form to contact the Prime Minister to make the following complaint:
I am appalled by the Foreign Minister's statement today which largely blames Israel for the unprecedented wave of terrorist attacks against Jewish civilians in every city of Israel (averaging 100 per day and increasing as I write) resulting in numerous dead Jews. The fact that the surge in attacks came immediately after Mahmoud Abbas (the leader of the Palestine Authority) effectively declared war against Israel's Jews at the United Nations was also unreported by the media and ignored by the Government (just like the attacks against Israelis). The media have chosen ONLY to report incidents in which the Palestinian attackers were killed in the act of committing murder. Moreover, such reports have typically led with the headline "Palestinian killed by security forces...". Now the government seems to have fallen into the same BIG LIE narrative. Perhaps Hammond could also clarify or name even one 'settler' who has attacked an Arab.

10/09 Links Pt2: History Matters: There Was a Temple on the Temple Mount; Eliminate UNRWA

From Ian:

Sarah Honig: Abu-Mazen Proved Ezer Wrong

If things truly went our way, Palestinian Authority figurehead Mahmoud “Abu-Mazen” Abbas would for sure have announced unequivocally from the UN General Assembly podium that he is revoking the Oslo Accords with immediate effect.
Without much ado, he would have torn up the documents on which Oslo’s convoluted clauses, subsections, stipulations and provisos are listed. That would have been dramatic and would have left no uncertainty in anyone’s cerebral recesses that Oslo has at long belated last been ignominiously dispatched to the netherworld.
In fact, Oslo has been a smelly decomposing cadaver for years but no one, least of all diplomatically timid Israel, dared say it like it is.
Across the Green Line, Abbas and his front men hectored ominously in a refrain of irascible rants. If we don’t bow to Ramallah’s diktats, we were warned, Abbas will do the unthinkable and actually bury Oslo’s putrid remains.
Presumably that should have sent us all into a tizzy of trepidation.
In fact, though, Israel would have heaved a sincere sigh of relief had Abbas actually done the decent thing for once and pronounced the demise of the evil poltergeist that imperils our self-preservation prospects.
But it was apparently way too good to be true. Perhaps in a rare moment of clarity amid his petulant outbursts about “filthy Jewish feet contaminating Arab Jerusalem’s sanctity,” Abbas understood that he’d only be doing the “filthy Jews” a favor by taking them off the Oslo hook.

I am embarrassed to be an Arab

I have long resisted saying this, but the ongoing Arab violence in Jerusalem has pushed Arab idiocy beyond my capacity for tolerance. I now need to say it and to say it publicly: I am embarrassed to be an Arab.
From the start, we have refused to accept the existence of one tiny Jewish state. We fought that state tooth and nail using all the venom and anti-Semitism that we could muster. We isolated and mistreated our own Palestinian siblings so we could use them as tools against the Jews. We have not relented. We have not shown an ounce of compassion, humanity, or even smarts. We made the destruction of the Jewish home our signature cause. We made hate our religion. When will this nonsense stop?
Even some of us Arabs who have the privilege of also being Israeli have not learned to behave like civilized people. We dismissed, threatened, and silenced Mohammad Zoabi, one of our own, because he dared profess love for his country and revulsion towards terrorists. We have demonstrated in support, not of our own state, Israel, but in support of the terrorists who want her destroyed. (h/t Yenta Press)

There Was a Temple on the Temple Mount

I have many friends who find the New York Times’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be “anti-Israel.” By this, I think that they mean that given a (surprisingly large) number of possible narratives through which to present a news story, the Times often picks one that lies somewhere within the Palestinian spectrum. I never really bought this argument. The Times to me reads somewhat to the right of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. While the Times maintains a fairly consistent bias, that bias would fit well within the current Israeli spectrum, and not even all that close to the left edge. So I have not always agreed with the coverage, but it has rarely riled me. Today’s article by Rick Gladstone, though, Historical Certainty Proves Elusive at Jerusalem’s Holiest Place, was so misleading and confused that it really got my goat.
The article claims that there is no definitive evidence that the two ancient Jewish temples stood on the present day Temple Mount. The article strongly implies that this remains a live historical controversy. The problem with posing the issue that way is that it confuses several distinct historical questions. Once those questions are teased apart, it is clear that there is actually very little disagreement among professional historians about most of them. These questions are:
Did a Jewish temple stand on the present day Temple Mount? Yes. This is as historically certain a fact as one can get in the study of ancient history. The Temple Mount was built by Herod beginning at the end of the first century BCE – the Western Wall is the western retaining wall of that reshaping of the natural hill – and on top of it were a number of structures that belonged to the Jewish temple. These included courtyards, altars, and the Holy of Holies. Now it is true (and has long been recognized even in Jewish law) that we do not know precisely where on the Temple Mount those structures stood, but there is no question that they stood there.
Prior to Herod’s renovation of the temple, did it stand at this site? Almost certainly. I would give it a 98% possibility. The second temple was built around 520 BCE and underwent a few renovations before Herod gave it a major overhaul. If Herod moved the site of the temple we would know, both from the extensive archaeological excavations conducted all around the temple as well from literary sources. People notice stuff like that.

Ryan Bellerose: History Matters: 5 Myths About Israel

Myth One: Israel was created by the colonialists
The truth is that the Jews had to fight tooth and nail for their ancestral lands. While the British opened the door with the San Remo accords, and then the Balfour Declaration, the subsequent partition plan and the Palestinian mandate handing over 75% of the promised land (sorry bad pun) to the Hashemite Arabs to create Jordan, showed pretty clearly that the British were not particularly helpful. When you look at the arms embargo that ended up being completely one-sided, the fact that the British armed and trained the Jordanian legion, and then limited Jewish immigration while encouraging Arab immigration, gives you a very different picture.
It’s rather amusing to me that the same people who claim that the British created Israel, are the same ones who bring up the King David hotel bombing as proof of how bad the Jews are. First, the King David was the centre of the OCCUPATIONAL BRITISH GOVERNMENT. More importantly, they never ask why the Jews would be fighting against the people who were supposedly creating the Jewish nation. It’s a perfect example of why we need to not just listen to the colonialist narrative. They of course want us to believe that without colonialist aid, the Jews would have failed, when in fact the Jews were fighting the colonialists. Feel free to verify this – the British don’t like to admit it but the facts are all there for anyone who wants to actually dig.

Administrivia - social media update

I don't know what took me so long, but you can now access my Facebook page more easily, with the simple-to-remember address https://www.facebook.com/elderofziyon.

While I was at it, I noticed that my workaround for automatically updating my Google Plus page has not worked for over a year. It is not a high priority but I will hopefully get around to finding a way to fix that one day.

Also in the "someday" category I would like to create a mobile EoZ app. I once played with one for Android and I liked it a lot but I would prefer an app that works for both Android and IoS.

If anyone wants to volunteer for the many similar projects I have been kicking around (improving the search engine, tagging articles more consistently, designing a new site...you name it) just let me know.

Have a Shabbat Shalom!

Here's an UNRWA teacher photo that UNRWA won't take down

Over the past two months, I have found scores of offensive anti-semitic and pro-terror postings on Facebook by UNRWA employees.

But I haven't even bothered with the everyday photos that show that UNRWA teachers have no desire to allow Israel to exist.

Like this profile photo of Khitam Ashour, an UNRWA teacher from Nablus:

Many of the antisemitic posts have been removed by UNRWA, which refuses to acknowledge that I exist while clearly reading my posts.

But this one won't be. Because this is exactly what UNRWA has been teaching its students, directly, for over sixty years. (The mural itself is in the UNRWA Aida camp near Bethlehem.)

As I've pointed out, numerous UNRWA school logos erase Israel as well, many with very similar maps:

UNRWA cannot deny that it directly teaches its students that they will one day "return" to replace Israel with "Palestine." Its maps betray its policy.

And this call for the destruction of a UN member state is a direct violation of UNRWA's supposed neutrality standards.

They can pretend that the many pro-terror posts are mistakes done by individual teachers. They can sweep under the rug and quietly remove the school websites that teach hate (as they did with the Deir Yassin Co-ed Secondary School Facebook page featuring antisemitism and pro-terror posts, which was silently removed altogether.)

But UNRWA cannot remove this image because UNRWA educational policy, clear albeit unofficial, is that Israel has no right to exist.

10/09 Links Pt1: Glick: Abbas must be stopped; Why is the world ignoring a wave of terror in Israel?

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Abbas must be stopped

As for the incitement, the government needs to go to the source of the problem – Abbas’s blood libel regarding Jewish rights to the Temple Mount.
As things stand, Abbas is exacting a price in human lives for his obscene anti-Jewish propaganda about our “filthy feet defiling” the most sacred site in Judaism. By barring elected officials from visiting the Temple Mount, not only is the government failing to exact a price for Abbas’ obscene propaganda. It is rewarding him and so inviting Abbas to expand his rhetorical offensive.
To remedy the situation an opposite approach is required. Rather than bar elected officials from visiting the Temple Mount, Netanyahu should encourage them to do so. Just as he sent a letter to Jordan’s King Abdullah telling him that Israel is preserving the status quo on the Temple Mount, so he should write a similar letter to our lawmakers.
In his letter, Netanyahu should say that in keeping with the status quo, which protects the rights of members of all religions to freely enter the Temple Mount, so he commits the government to protect the rights of all believers of all religions to ascend the Mount.
The Palestinian terrorist onslaught now raging against us is not spontaneous. Abbas has incited it and is directing it. To stop this assault, Israel must finally take action against Abbas and his machinery of war. Anything less can bring us nothing more than a temporary respite in the carnage that Abbas will be free to end whenever he wishes.

Why is the world ignoring a wave of terror in Israel?

Not only has the Palestinian Authority failed to condemn these barbaric terror attacks, they have now, incredibly, sought to condemn Israel for defending ourselves. Abbas is surely giving new meaning to the term "chutzpah". Is this really a sign of a leader who yearns for peace?
Only when the Palestinian leadership unequivocally renounces terrorism and roots out and condemns all those who preach violence against Israel and hatred of the Jewish people, can there be hope for real peace.
As the PA continues to insist that the world recognize a Palestinian state, one must ask exactly what type of state it wants: one that teaches the virtues of peace, or incites and glorifies terror?
In a groundbreaking speech on Islamic extremism this July, the British Prime Minister David Cameron made clear, if you say “violence in London isn’t justified, but suicide bombs in Israel are a different matter” – then you too are part of the problem.”
To all those people who fail to condemn this Palestinian terror, or find ways to excuse, equivocate or minimize it, I say the same – "then you too are part of the problem."

Palestinians: What will happen to the Israelis when you take back Palestine of 1948 (Israel)?

The knife and the Koran

Here are two photos from Gaza rallies exhorting Arabs to stab Jews today:

Note the "bloodstains" on both knives.

A preacher in Gaza also brandished a knife during his sermon today while telling his congregants to stab Jews.

Muslims worldwide immediately denounced the juxtaposition of the holy Koran with violence, saying that these people are not true Muslims and that their use of the Koran and religion as excuse to murder innocent Jews is not acceptable.

Just kidding! You won't find a word of condemnation in any of the major Islamic websites against Muslims attacking Jews.

But it is not worth reporting. The media, by not highlighting and denouncing the daily and explicit Jew-hatred among Muslims, is condoning it.

There are a number of reasons for the lack of mainstream media reporting of every day hate like this.

One is that liberal reporters believe that Muslims really are inherently violent and it is not newsworthy when they do things like this. This means, of course, that reporters are bigoted.

Another is that journalists are worried that if they draw attention to these sorts of things, Muslims will more publicly defend terror in English and they will look bad. Hotheads might then make Islamophobic statements.

Yet another is that reporters don't care. Jews behaving badly is a major story; Arabs behaving worse is simply not interesting.

Finally, there is the meme that Arabs and Jews are the same, and they have equal moral claims to the land. By showing how, by any conceivable measure, the Arab side is far more supportive of violence than the Jews, it might weaken this meme of both sides being equal.

So accurate reporting be damned. Some stories must be buried, for the greater good.