Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, November 03, 2015

11/03 Links Pt1: The Facebook Intifada; Why Palestinians Don't Want Cameras on the Temple Mount

From Ian:

THREE weeks ago, my father was riding on a public bus in Jerusalem’s Armon Hanatziv neighborhood when terrorists from East Jerusalem shot him in the head and stabbed him multiple times. Afterward, as he lay unconscious in the intensive care unit of Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, fighting for his life, one question was on my mind: What inspired the two young Palestinian men to savagely attack my father and a busload of passengers?
My father, Richard Lakin, dedicated his life to the cause of Israeli-Arab reconciliation. Ever since moving to Israel from Connecticut in the 1980s, he spent his career teaching English to Israeli and Arab children. Inspired by his experience marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, he became a founding member of Israel Loves Iran, a social media initiative designed to bring the citizens of these two nations closer together. When news of his tragedy broke, many of the Christian, Muslim and Jewish residents of Jerusalem who knew my father and admired his work rushed to his bedside to pay their respects and say a prayer for his recovery. Even Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, stopped by on his recent visit to Israel.
Watching the well-wishers congregating in the intensive care unit, however, I realized that the world leaders who were having the most impact on the situation in the Middle East right now weren’t Mr. Ban or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Jack Dorsey of Twitter and other young entrepreneurs who shape the social media platforms most of us use every day.
It may sound strange to talk of Twitter and Facebook as relevant players in the war against terror, but as the recent wave of violence in Israel has proved, that is increasingly the case. The young men who boarded the bus that day intent on murdering my 76-year-old father did not make their decision in a vacuum. One was a regular on Facebook, where he had already posted a “will for any martyr.” Very likely, they made use of one of the thousands of posts, manuals and instructional videos circulating in Palestinian society these last few weeks, like the image, shared by thousands on Facebook, showing an anatomical chart of the human body with advice on where to stab for maximal damage.

Khaled Abu Toameh: Why Palestinians Do Not Want Cameras on the Temple Mount

The Palestinian Authority (PA) will continue to work against having cameras in the hope of preventing the world from seeing what is really happening at the site and undermining Jordan's "custodianship" over Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem.
Another reason the Palestinians oppose King Abdullah's idea is their fear that cameras would expose that Palestinians have been smuggling stones, firebombs and pipe bombs into the Al-Aqsa Mosque for the past two years.
The cameras are also likely to refute the claim that Jews are "violently invading" Al-Aqsa Mosque and holding prayers on the Temple Mount. The cameras will show that Jews do not enter Al-Aqsa Mosque, as Palestinians have been claiming. Needless to say, no Jewish visitors have been caught trying to smuggle weapons into the holy site.
It remains to be seen how Secretary Kerry, who brokered the camera deal between Israel and Jordan, will react to the latest Palestinian Authority escalation of tensions. If Kerry fails to pressure the PA to stop its incitement and attempts to exclude the Jordanians from playing any positive role, the current wave of knife attacks against Jews will continue.

Amb. Alan Baker: Palestinian Incitement to Violence and Terror: Nothing New, But Still Dangerous

Lessons to Be Learned
No peace process can be expected to prevail if it is constantly and systematically being undermined by a pervasive policy of incitement and indoctrination. All three factors make the peace process impossible: the fear, suspicion, and hatred against the other side emanating from the highest levels of government, permeating through the religious, social, cultural, and educational system, down to the youngest and most impressionable.
It is reasonable to assume that a culture of mistrust and hate, fanned by constant religious and public incitement, inevitably leads to violence and terror, and, as such, undermines the concept of peaceful relations. A leadership that openly and officially sanctions and encourages such incitement cannot come with clean hands to the international community and complain about lack of progress in the peace process.
Clearly, the institution of appropriate and effective public machinery within the religious, cultural, and educational infrastructures of the Palestinian Authority is a necessary and urgent requirement in order to supervise and prevent incitement at the public level. But such a policy could only be implemented if the Palestinian leadership were to demonstrate through its own acts, declarations, and behavior a sincere and genuine will to end incitement and halt its use as a weapon, and to live up to the Palestinian commitments in their agreements with Israel. The damage that has been done in molding the minds of countless children and youth to hate Israel, to hate the Jew, and to view terrorists as role models, will likely take many years, and possibly a generation, to mend.

Pal newspaper: Balfour Declaration worse than Holocaust (which is fake anyway)

Palestinian news site Amad has an op-ed about the Balfour Declaration, saying that it is far worse that anything that happened to Jews in the 20th Century:

The British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour's promise to the Jews to give them a homeland in Palestine is worse than the alleged Holocaust against the Jews in Germany in the Nazi era,

Balfour was advocating the displacement of an entire people and the extermination of any political, economic and social rights of an entire people. He granted the establishment of a homeland for Jews and Zionists and racists from all over the world in Palestine.

A comparison between these most prominent incidents in the twentieth century, the Balfour Declaration and the Holocaust:

Before Balfour, Jews were not more than 5% of the total population of Palestine, and the result of that declaration their numbers increased from fifty thousand immigrants to six hundred and fifty thousand of more than seventy nationalities coming from all over the world and depriving the Palestinians from their homeland amid the silence of international community and denial of indigenous land owners.

The second event was the Holocaust of Jews at the time of the Nazi movement, which saw the destruction of a large number of the Jews of Europe during World War II, according to Jewish story. This story has been employed by Jews on a large scale as a means of sympathy for them, and they are exaggerating and amplifying this incident so much so that the United Nations issued a 2005 decision to commemorate it on 27 January of each year, despite denials by many historians that dispute the facts and evidence of the gas chambers which are alleged by the promoters of the Holocaust.

The Germans encouraged the Jews to emigrate to Palestine in the 1930s, and the Jews had the sympathy of the whole world and provided assistance and support to them, setting up the Israeli state in Palestine, and Germany paid compensation to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and the State of Israel and still Israel blackmails Germany and the world with this Holocaust which is unconfirmed historically.

COmpare that with the racist the Balfour Declaration, which was approved by the United States, France, Italy formally as well as Japan, and in 1922 and approved by the League of Nations Council on the draft mandate, and the consequent disastrous consequences inflicted on the indigenous Palestinian people people of the land, displacing and killing them and torturing them and alienating them in all around the ground and thousands of Palestinian refugees who found that many countries closed their doors in their faces, ...

The Holocaust of Hitler opened to the Jews the doors of the world, and everyone was looking for ways to rectify this alleged Holocaust, and give them a home on the land of Palestine even though their population did not exceed fifty thousand at the time, while the Holocaust of Balfour displaced Palestinian people and prevented them from establishing their home on their own land and the land of their ancestors.

This is the sort of stuff that Palestinian Arabs accept as fact.

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Peace Now panicking because there is so LITTLE settlement activity

In Ha'aretz, Peace Now's Lara Friedman and Hagit Ofran are clearly frustrated by Binyamin Netanyahu's accurate statement that settlement construction has actually slowed down under his watch.

But since they don't have any statistics to counter his statement, they rely on obfuscation.

Netanyahu... last week tried to turn the tables on the critics, claiming that settlements cannot be the cause of violence, since their growth has actually slowed during his time in office, compared to his predecessors. He probably based this claim on a statistic highlighted in a report in Haaretz, according to which the average number of new housing units built in settlements in the West Bank per year since 2009 has been lower than during the preceding 20 years.

But beware: a single statistic taken in isolation always obscures far more than it reveals.

OK, let's hear it.

So has settlement growth really slowed under Netanyahu? To begin with, the statistic on new housing starts ignores East Jerusalem, an area in which for the past six years settlement construction has been at its highest annual level since 2000. Much of this construction alters potential future borders, in significant ways, between Israel and Palestine; a new settlement called Givat Hamatos, approved under Netanyahu but not yet constructed, could be a potent deal-breaker.

Which construction that has been done under Netanyahu alters any future borders in any meaningful way? They don't say - they only point to one of the many plans that have gone nowhere.

Likewise, Netanyahu has outdone his recent predecessors with respect to settlement activity in the heart of East Jerusalem’s Palestinian neighborhoods. Virtually from the moment he took office, with the 2009 approval of a new settlement in Sheikh Jarrah, through last week’s settler takeover in Silwan, under Netanyahu the settler enterprise in these volatile areas has boomed.

Peace Now calls this building a "settlement."

Peace Now keeps very careful track of the numbers of every house. Yet here they won't say the actual number of houses purchased by Jews in Arab neighborhoods.

Because it is a handful. I'm sure they know the exact number but they won't tell you because it is so small.

The number of buildings owned by Jews in Silwan is exactly six. I don't know about Sheikh Jarrah but it cannot be much higher. I believe there are 20 buildings in Maaleh Hazeitim.

Peace Now, however, calls every single building a "settlement".

Another problem is methodological. Netanyahu has been prime minister for longer than anyone since the legendary David Ben Gurion. Comparing only two out of his three full terms in office is misleading. If we compare his entire time in office, including the 1990's, or if we compare his last tenure alone to the other tenures in recent years, Netanyahu has built more in settlements than any of his recent predecessors (except for Ehud Barak in 2000).

This is hilarious. Even though the new homes built under Netanyahu in the 1990s are meaningless towards his statement about how they have slowed down in recent years, Peace Now is so desperate to paint him as a militant expander of Israel's borders that they feel they must include those numbers - even though his 1990's settlement activity was no different than those of Labor prime ministers. But since he has been in office longer, Peace Now wants to change the statistics from "annual construction" to "total construction" in order to paint Bibi as worse than other PMs.

In contrast, during Netanyahu’s 2013-2015 term, new construction starts in West Bank settlements have spiked, reaching a higher level than under any government since 2000. This spike was driven by a surge in planning and tenders following the end of the moratorium, and by the Kerry-led 2013 peace effort, which was accompanied every step of the way by new settlement announcements and approvals. Based on data for the first half of this year, and barring a deliberate slow-down, this trend can be expected to continue in 2015.

Here Peace Now is resorting to its normal tactics of conflating statistics on housing approvals with actual construction. All the paperwork in the world doesn't translate into actual buildings, as we have seen. How many times has Peace Now warned about tens of thousands of approvals over the years? Where are those houses?

As I have shown previously, there can be as many as 8 separate approvals before a house is built. Peace Now warns about huge amounts of imminent construction which almost never materializes.

Peace Now loves to talk about how Israel is about to construct thousands of units in Ramat Shlomo - an overcrowded neighborhood that would remain in Israel under every and any conceivable peace plan - yet not a single new house has been built there in over a decade.

Peace Now keeps telling gullible media and governments that Israel is inexorably expanding and taking over Arab areas. Yet the pace of expansion has been glacial since Oslo.

But Peace Now's funding is dependent on these lies, so now that the truth about the slowdown has been publicized,they are panicking.

They end the article with a bit of truth that applies to them far more than it applies to Bibi:

Statistics can help track specific aspects of Israel settlement policy, but like any statistics, when cherry-picked they obscure more than they reveal.

Peace Now is dedicated to obscuring reality with cherry-picked statistics in this very article. It shows that they see their main sources of funding from the EU as potentially drying up if the settlements are really not the obstacle to peace that the Leftists need them to be.

It is really sort of pathetic that we have a leader of Israel, who claims to be supporting settlements, who is actually hindering them, and the people who should be celebrating that downturn of construction are angry at this slowdown because it threatens their revenue stream.

.@UNRWA worker calls Jews "the filthiest among mankind"

From the Facebook page of an UNRWA worker with the apparent name of Reem Kasem, we find this:

Oh Allah,

Just as you cleansed/purified the land with the water of rain,

cleanse/purify Palestine from the filthiest among mankind.

Say Amen oh Lord of the world

She also likes to include kids in the "non-violent resistance:"

Plus the usual pro-stabbing posts:

But UNRWA blames the stabbings on everything but incitement from their own workers.

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

Top Palestinian Excuses to Stab 80-Year Old Ladies

(Stabbing of old lady at :20)

Here is a list off the top of my head of excuses I've read over the years given either by Western apologists for Palestinian terror, or Palestinians talking to gullible Westerners, to justify terrorism, including Monday's stabbing of an 80 year old woman and a 71 year old man:

"Occupation"*
"Brutality"*

"Humiliation"
"Settler violence"*

"Muslims restricted from Al Aqsa"

"Jews allowed on Al Aqsa"

"Settlements"

Anniversary of Balfour/Partition/Israel's birth/Assassination of top terrorist/Deir Yassin...

Colonialism

"Terrorist Jews in Hebron"

"Poverty"

"The siege of Gaza"

The Gaza war
"Israel kills our people"

Checkpoints

Lack of progress on peace talks*

"All Israelis are soldiers."

"Hopelessness"

"Israel's disproportionate response to stabbings"*

Here is a list of reasons Palestinian Arabs tell themselves in Arabic to justify trying to murder Jews:

Jews are going to destroy/divide Al Aqsa

We are defending our land

It is Jihad

Here is a comprehensive list of the real reasons Palestinians want to stab an 80-year old lady in Rishon LeTzion:

Because she is Jewish

* All the starred excuses were used by UNRWA's Chris Gunness in a single interview.

11/02 Links Pt2: Dershowitz defeats BDS at Oxford Debate; Israel 6th healthiest country in the world

From Ian:

Dershowitz Wins Oxford Union Debate on Boycott Israel Movement

Alan Dershowitz, a famed Harvard Law School professor and Middle East expert, won over Oxford University’s Oxford Union on Sunday in a debate over the Boycott Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against the state of Israel, defeating his opponent 137-101 in the heart of liberal academia.
Mr. Dershowitz told Breitbart News how he managed to convince students that the case for boycotting Israel was unjust, and only sabotages the peace process.
“The other side argued that BDS was an alternative to war. I argued that BDS was an alternative to a negotiated peace because it disincentivizes the Palestinian leadership from negotiating a compromise resolution and instead misleads them into relying on external pressure to delegitimize Israel,” he said.
Dershowitz squared off against Peter Tatchell, a self-described human rights advocate who is a member of the Green Party of England and Wales.
BDS, which advocates for a boycott of exports to and imports from the State of Israel, has been described by some as an anti-Semitic movement, given that many of its proponents refuse to recognize the sovereignty of the Jewish state.
Advocates of BDS commonly ignore the atrocities committed by actual dictatorial regimes, and tend to only focus on Israel, the only free, democratic country in the Middle East.
The Harvard professor argued that the side that promotes the boycott of Israel approaches the topic from a deep-rooted anti-Semitic perspective.
“BDS is anti-peace, anti-negotiation and anti-Israel. I am pro-peace, pro-negotiation, pro-Israel and pro-Palestine… BDS is based on bigotry. If Israel was not the nation state of the Jewish People, then this debate wouldn’t be happening today,” he said during the debate.
BDS leaders refuse to debate him, which says a lot about their supposed longing for peace, he added, stating: “BDS will absolutely not bring peace. If the BDS movement is desirous of peace, then why will its leaders not debate me?” (h/t Yenta Press)

What Do Palestinians Want?

Palestinians view Israeli words and deeds through a powerfully distorting lens. A half-century of Israeli restraint at the Temple Mount has failed to convince most Palestinians that there is no plan to replace the mosques on Haram al-Sharif with a Jewish house of worship. A decade-and-a-half marked by prolonged and intense bouts of violence has persuaded Palestinians that the use of force generally helps them, and many have formed these views based on earlier rounds of attacks against Israelis and Westerners dating back a number of decades. Additionally, a series of confrontations between the West and the Arab/Islamic world has ingrained in most Palestinians a belief that attacking Western or Israeli targets, far from constituting terrorism, is legitimate resistance. Hence, Israel is an unlikely candidate to mitigate Palestinian support for violence.
The onus is therefore on the Palestinian leadership to recognize the dangers posed to its own self-interest by the current volatile circumstances and to take a firm and consistent stance against violence. Of course, there is no expecting Hamas to adopt such a position, which would contravene its organizational ethos and traditions ingrained over two-and-a-half decades. But is it utterly inconceivable that a successor to the eighty-year-old Abbas might do so? Whatever his weaknesses may be—and they have been abundantly on display in recent weeks—Abbas has preached for a decade that violence is not beneficial to the Palestinian cause and has consistently ordered his security forces to cooperate with Israel in quelling armed attacks. This is at least a precedent on which a stronger and more courageous leader might build.
In any such effort, the Arab countries with the greatest stake in preserving stability and preventing the further ascendancy of radical Islamic forces in their neighborhood might have a refreshingly constructive role to play (especially Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia). So might the United States and Europe, which have both an interest in cooling fevers and various diplomatic, political, and financial levers at their disposal. Though Palestinians possess a remarkable capacity to form their own, independent perception of the world around them, they are not immune to the consequences of their actions or to the changing incentives they face. If the U.S. and other Western powers were to begin vociferously condemning violence initiated by Palestinians, to penalize the PA and Hamas until attacks stop, and to ensure that under no circumstances will gains, diplomatic or otherwise, accrue from them, this, too, might exercise a meliorating effect over time.
Palestinian support for violence, and the attitudes underlying that support, have developed and become entrenched over a period of decades. Altering those attitudes can only begin once the attitudes are recognized for what they are, without blinking and without excuses. Toward that end, I hope this essay, along with the broader research project of which it is a part, can serve as a catalyst.

A Soldier’s Mother: When the Arabs Make Our Point Better Than We Ever Can

According to popular misconceptions, the left will always tell you there is hope for tomorrow and the right will always tell you that peace is un-achievable. The left will tell you that Israelis just have to be more accepting, more able to see the good in every human being; and the right will say that all Arabs are our enemy…Every. Single. Damn. One. Of. Them. These are the words of people who do not understand left, center, or right.
Ironically, the majority of people who have daily interactions with Arabs…are right wing. We live next to them, among them, not in some tower in Tel Aviv perched on high as a few Arabs sweep the streets below. We ride the same trains, wait at the same bus stops. By interactions, I mean discussions, comments, etc.
I was recently told by a woman that I am a target but she is not. I’m a target because I live in Maale Adumim, and she lives in Raanana. Obviously, she said this a few weeks ago, before two terrorists chose her city to make the point that she is as much a target as I am; that they do not differentiate between those who live here versus those who live there.
We are right wing. We are not stupid. We are not filled with hatred. We are not, as my college friend (now a big thinker in a think tank in Washington from which he tells us of maps and solutions that will bring the peace he envisions for us), said a few years ago, living in “limbo.” We lead productive lives, filled with family and friends, work, social events and more. My city has a museum, a Cultural Center, a Music Conservatory and a Country Club. Bowling alley. Schools. Emergency Medical Care Center. In short, we are simply Israelis. On average, we are as educated, as intelligent, as honorable, as peace-loving as those who live anywhere else in this country.

Arab media - and governments? - signal their displeasure with the knife attacks

Over the past day, at least a dozen Arabic newspapers, mostly out of Jordan and Egypt, published articles about a Salafi preacher who is against attacking Jews and even soldiers in Israel.

Jordanian preacher Ali Hassan Al-Halabi said, in response to a question, that it is not permissible to kill Jews in Palestine as "there are shari'a agreements that protect people's rights and lives."

Even in regard to attacking soldiers, he says:

Let me ask you a question. Does this man, who walks down the street with a gun, kill every Muslim he sees? ...Our brothers in Palestine tell us that the Jews do not attack anyone who does not attack them. Nobody should say that by my saying this I am defending the accursed Jews, but this is the reality. If they killed any Muslim they saw, nobody would be left in Palestine. All the people would leave Palestine. They would flee to other countries. But the people there stay put - in the 1967 territories, in the 1948 territories, in Jerusalem. They remain there, with the Jews around them with their weapons. You see (the Palestinians) killing the Jews, who only kill (Palestinians) when they are attacked.

But like I said before, the Jews only do this out of wickedness and heresy. They have principles. They want to be able to say, "We are better than the Muslims who kill us unprovoked. We don't do that.

The original video, however, was released last February.

So why the sudden coverage now?

The articles are saying that it is becoming popular on social media, but Arab newspapers won't publish just anything. They are sending a message.

I have not seen enthusiastic support for the current stabbing spree in wider Arabic media, and it seems that by reporting on this Salafi preacher now, a message is being sent to Abbas: this behavior is not acceptable and it makes Arabs look bad.

There has been a growing feeling over he years that Arab nations are sick and tired of the topic of Palestine, especially since the other Arab nations have much bigger issues to deal with than to spend so much time pretending that Israel - the mot stable country in the region - is the cause of all of their problems. They might hate Israel and Jews but they know that they are not threatened by the Jewish state. And the level of whining from the Palestinians is way out of proportion to their actual situations, which are in many way better off than those of middle class Arabs throughout the region.

The Arabs are sending a message by publicizing this video - this time, the PA cannot expect as much support for its role in incitement and murder from their fellow Arabs.

Wrote Oscar Wilde’s father William, an Anglo-Irish surgeon, in 1838 following time spent overseas:

“Were I asked what was the object of greatest interest that I had met with and the scene that made the deepest impression on me during my sojourn in other lands, I would say that it was the sight of the Jews gathering to mourn over the stones of Jerusalem. It was a touching sight to behold, in front of the Mosque before the western wall, one of the western walls which formed the holy of holies and the ancient temple … it was a touching sight, and one that years will not efface, to witness that mourning group and hear them singing the songs of David beneath the shadow of those very stones that once rang with the same swelling chorus when Jerusalem sat on high. But not now are heard the joyous tones of old, for here every note is swollen with the sight of Judah’s mourning maidens, or broke by the sobs and smothered groans of the patriarchs of Israel. But that heart must be sadly out of tune whose chords would not vibrate to the thrilling strains of Hebrew melancholy chanted so sad and low by the sons and daughters of Abraham in their native city. Much as they venerate the very stones that now form the walls of the enclosure, they dare not set foot within its precincts: for the crescent of the Moslem is glittering from the minaret of Omar, and the blood-red banner of Mohammed is waving over their heads.”…’

His account of his travels was first published in 1840; the passage I quote above appears in a book entitled From Oxford to Rome, and how it fared with some who lately made the journey, published in London in 1847.

Although William Robert Wilde used the term “mourning maidens” most of the women who worshipped at the Kotel were married and many were not young, but otherwise what he writes is a fair summary of the situation surrounding Judaism’s holiest site in the long years of Ottoman rule.

Here, for instance, is another first-hand account of Jews at the Kotel by a sympathetic nineteenth-century Christian traveller (name not given, though from a seeming hint dropped it may have been Ferguson), which I found in a British newspaper (the Lancaster Gazette) of 16 December 1848:

“Forbidden to approach the site of their Temple, they pay a heavy tax to the Sultan for the miserable privilege of meeting on a small strip of ground adjoining its outer wall, when they put their petitions through the crevices, in the fervent belief that they will find the same acceptance as when offered in the Temple in all its glory. Once a week [Fridays] they meet thus to pray, and once a week to wail over the desolation of their Temple …. And thus, week after week, and year after year, and century after century, they have gathered together and wept, till time … has given that grief reverence and majesty for its antiquity alone. The ceremony to which I refer was, by the sorrowful earnestness of the supplicants, rendered extremely interesting. Old men were there who had lived all their lives in expectation of the consolation of Israel, and were now about to drop into the grave without seeing that hope fulfilled. And children were there, brought by their mothers, to join their prayers for the day it might be yet their lot to behold. But there was one … circumstance which detracted somewhat from the interest of the scene. Few of the maidens of Israel were there. Can it be that the allurements and occupations of the present life, and the gay dreams of youth, had tempted them to forget that they were strangers in the land of their fathers? Perhaps, rather, that years of danger and suffering had taught youth and beauty to shun the evil eye of the Moslem.”

A long and graphic eyewitness account from later in the century sheds further light on the sorry situation. First published in the London Daily Telegraph, it was reproduced by the Jewish Chronicle (7 January 1870). Here it is, without further comment from me, for its significance speaks for itself:

“In this clear, bright moisture-free air everything looks so close and near that you fancy you could drop a stone down upon the roofs that lie far away beyond rifle shot and it is only as your eye becomes accustomed to the distance that you take in the grandeur of the city upon which you look…. At your feet is the vast, bare, open space on which once stood the Temple of Solomon – on which now stands the Mosque of Omar. A few Mussulmans [sic] sit smoking gravely under the shadow of the trees planted here and there close beneath the Sacred Shrine … But, unless you wear the turban, there is no entrance here for either Christian or Jew, without special permission. The ground is too sacred, in the eyes of the Muslim, to be desecrated by the foot of the unbeliever….

The most impressive memory I shall ever carry away with me from Jerusalem is that of the Jews weeping before the walls of Zion. The Hebrew population is said, in the guide-books, to be about one-third of the whole city.... The Jews of Zion are neither prosperous, active, nor influential; and, as Muslims and Christians, disagreeing in everything else, agree in oppressing the children of Israel, these have a hard time of it in the city of their fathers. No native Jew can enter the precincts of the Temple, where now stands the Mosque of Omar, without the risk of being maltreated and stoned, if his presence is detected by a Mussulman. Once a week, however, and once a week only, the Jews are permitted by the Turks to come and pray at the foot of one of the high stone walls on which the plateau of Solomon’s Temple is supported. The hour of prayer is fixed, whether by chance or irony, upon the Mussulman Sabbath; at that hour the Jews flock to the narrow strip of ground, enclosed beneath high walls, where alone they can pray in public for the coming of the Messiah, and the restoration of the chosen people to the Promised Land. There are a few Rabbis, clad in long fur-lined cloaks and low-crowned velvet caps; but the great bulk of the worshippers are aged men and women of the poorer sort …

Men and women stand apart, the worshippers, as they each arrive, taking up their station close to the wall, with their faces buried as far as may be in their slits and fissures. All along the line there rises a murmur of wailing cries and sobs. There are few amongst the company who have not Hebrew books of prayer in their hands, out of which they recite long swings of words chanted to a low sing-song tune. From time to time one of the elders reads out a prayer, and at each pause the chorus of men and women join in with a long wailing cry. But, as a rule, it seemed to me, each person prayed after his own fashion, and the voices rose and fell in a constant ebb and flow of sound; but, as worshipper after worshipper turned away slowly from the wall, after kissing it repeatedly, you could see tears running down their wrinkled cheeks.

The Turkish soldiers were lounging on the parapet of the wall above. In former years, they would throw down stones upon the Jews as they stooped in prayer, or insult them with opprobrious names. Now the power of the West is too much dreaded for the Moslem official to venture upon the exhibition of his contempt for the unbeliever. But, amongst the common folk, who have not the terror of the Pasha before their eyes, the old hatred of creed still survives. On the day when I visited the place of wailing, a group of dark-eyed, bold-faced stalwart Arab women sat with their children, in a corner of the pathway whereon the Jews were praying. An old Jewish dame, very feeble, bent, and wrinkled, laid her large hide-bound prayer-book on a stone beside her while she buried her head in a hole in the wall; forthwith one of the Arab girls stole up stealthily and carried off the book in triumph. The old Jewess, when she discovered her loss, begged and prayed for its return, but was told she could not have her book again unless she paid five piastres – about a shilling – to the girl who had stolen it. There was wrangling and whining for ever so long, but the Arab girl stood firm; the Jewish women were afraid to touch her, and at last they made up the sum amongst themselves by odd half-pence, and handed it to the impudent young hussey, who pocketed the coin, and then announced that now she would not return the prayer-book, as she saw the old woman valued it, till she had double the price named.

Seeing that our party were strangers, one of the Jewesses came up to me, and asked me, in German, to help them get the prayer-book back. I volunteered, through my dragoman, to pay the couple of shillings which was needed to redeem the book; but the Arab wench raised her terms again, and stood out for more. Happily, a threat that I would take the old woman to the English Consul – like many other unmeaning menaces in this world of ours – succeeded where persuasion had failed; and the girl, pouring forth a volley of abuse against myself, the Bible, and the Jewish race, raised up the prayer-book into the air, threw it as hard as she could fling right into the midst of the group of Jewesses, and then ran down the hill laughing loudly.”

[EoZ] Compare with today.

11/02 Links Pt1: Abbas says all of Israel is “occupation”‎; Sorry Bill, It’s Not Up to Israel

From Ian:

Abbas says all of Israel is “occupation”‎

Palestinian Authority Chairman Abbas disclosed his opinion about Israel, speaking last week to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Abbas made it clear that he rejects Israel's right to exist in any borders as he denounced what he called the Israeli "occupation" of "67 years" - that is, since Israel's creation in 1948. The PA routinely teaches its children that it sees all of Israel as an "occupation" that will end some day, as Palestinian Media Watch has shown. It is rare that Abbas himself says this in an international forum. Abbas said: "How long will this protracted Israeli occupation of our land last?" - implying that he sees all of Israel as "an occupation" that rightfully should not "last."
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas: "Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, haven't you wondered: For how long will this protracted Israeli occupation of our land last? After 67 years (i.e., Israel's creation), how long? Do you think it can last, and that it benefits the Palestinian people?"
[UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, official PA TV, Oct. 28, 2015]
Later on in the speech, Abbas repeated that he considers Israel an "occupation" since its creation. He also demonized Israel:
"[The] holy sites which have been desecrated every other second again and again for seven decades now, under an occupation that does not quit killing, torturing, looting and imprisoning..."
It should be noted that Abbas' first statement that he views Israel as an "occupation" since its creation "67 years" ago - did not appear in the transcript of his speech that the official PA news agency WAFA publicized in both English and Arabic. WAFA publicized Abbas' rejection of the "occupation," but the next sentence specifying "67 years... Do you think it can last?" did not appear in WAFA's transcript.

Abbas rejects Israel’s legitimacy in any borders: All of Israel is an ‎‎“occupation” ‎

Fatah: Israel murders Palestinians and plants knives next to bodies

The above cartoon was tweeted by Abbas’ Fatah movement yesterday. It repeats the Palestinian libel documented by Palestinian Media Watch that Israel is fabricating stabbing attacks, as a pretext for killing Palestinians. The cartoon shows 6 Palestinians lying dead in pools of blood and an Israeli soldier walking by with a basket full of knives, planting a knife by each dead body. Text states in Arabic and English: “Shoot... add a knife... take a photo.” [Fatah Twitter account, Nov. 1, 2015]

IDF Blog: Who Inspires You?

Since October 1st, 2015 over 64 terror attacks have struck Israeli civilians. This terror doesn't exist in a vacuum. Watch and see for yourself.

A Palestinian Student Said He Was Tortured And Is Seeking $1 Million In Damages

Palestinian accounting student Ahmad al-Deek, 22, had been beaten on and off for five days and could barely walk. But the only men who would help him out of his jail cell were those who had carried out the beatings — intelligence officers for the Palestinian Authority.
“There were five [interrogators]. They took turns beating me,” al-Deek said. “At first, I thought one of them was a good guy. He said he knew my brother, and that he wanted to help me. He turned out to be the worst.”
Al-Deek’s torture did not come at the hands of Israel, whose ongoing military occupation of the West Bank includes the arrest of hundreds of Palestinians each year, or at the hands of Hamas, the Islamic militant movement that rules the Gaza Strip with an iron fist. Al-Deek is one of hundreds of Palestinians arrested and allegedly tortured each year by the Palestinian Authority (PA), a government held up as moderate, whose Western-backed leadership is tasked with operating in the Palestinian-controlled territories of the West Bank.
While many cases of torture go unreported, al-Deek has filed a lawsuit against the PA and is seeking $1 million in damages. His case, the first to be brought before the PA on such charges, is bringing unprecedented attention to the brutality Palestinians are facing at the hands of their own government. (h/t Ronin0948)

From the official PA news agency Wafa:

Israeli settlers Sunday resumed their provocative tours into al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem, despite of recent remarks made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, where he vowed that ‘his’ government will not change the status quo at the compound, according to local sources.

WAFA correspondent said groups of Jewish settlers, accompanied by a police escort, entered the site through the Moroccan Gate, before they were confronted by Palestinian worshipers who chanted religious slogans to protest their entry.

This came amid intensified presence of outdoor students and Islamic Waqf personnel who barricaded themselves inside the compound to confront illegal Jewish entry to the Islamic holy site.

When the PA talks about the "status quo," they don't mean for Israel to allow the screaming inciters back on the holy spot. By saying that all Jewish presence on the Mount is "illegal" they are making it clear that the only "status quo" they respect is the one where Jews are banned altogether.

This recent tweet from a Reuters correspondent indicates that he thinks so, too.

Another member of the ultra-Orthodox community visits Al Aqsa/Temple Mount despite protests against it yesterday pic.twitter.com/p4O1TWWIHh
— Luke Baker (@LukeReuters) October 27, 2015

NYT reveals its racism while attacking Israel for racism

The New York Times had one of their regular Sunday articles slamming Israel for some reason or another. This one was because Israel is accused of not doing enough to help the tens of thousands of African refugees who have been flooding into the country.

As the continuing refugee crisis in Europe demonstrates, Israel is not alone in trying to deter refugees. But according to a report in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, it has the distinction of having one of the lowest asylum acceptance rates in the Western world. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once warned that the arrival of African people poses a demographic risk to Israel: “If we don’t stop their entry, the problem that currently stands at 60,000 could grow to 600,000, and that threatens our existence as a Jewish and democratic state.”

For context: Israel now hosts about one tenth of one percent of all worldwide refugees and displaced persons.. And those are the ones that the NYT feels compelled to write a photo essay on.

It is true, Israel accepts far fewer refugees as citizens than Germany or France. But Israel is a tiny country and if it would accept a significant number of immigrants it would not be able to handle the numbers that would follow.

If Denmark and Tunisia would magically switch places, Denmark would be building a fence and putting the refugees in camps as well rather than let the country be overrun with people who would outnumber the Danes if given the chance.

Yet as the Times tries to paint Israel as vaguely racist for not allowing these Africans to stay in the country, it engages in its own racism.

Look at this sentence again: "one of the lowest asylum acceptance rates in the Western world." Why should Israel be compared only to the Western world? Why is it not considered a possibility for the refugees from Darfur and Ethiopia to become refugees in non-Western countries?

I count about 18 countries that are within the radius of distance from Eritrea to Israel.

Why is it so absurd to ask that Saudi Arabia or Oman or the UAE take in some of their fellow Muslim refugees from the Sudan, or for Egypt or Jordan to accept Christians from Eritrea? Other African countries are poor, to be sure, but why is it so absurd to expect some of them to take in more of these refugees who share far more in common with them than most Israelis?

To the New York Times, non-Western nations cannot be expected to act with kindness and mercy and charity. That is something expected from Israel, not from Egypt or Libya. .

No one is happy with how Israel is forced to act to discourage more refugees. But given that Israel is the only Western nation in the area, it cannot be a magnet for millions of people.

The reason the trip to Israel is dangerous is because of the countries in between. Yet how much space has the Times spent on those who were murdered and raped and kidnapped en route and the culpability of the nations in which these occurred?

No, those nations aren't "Western" and therefore are not expected to engage in normal moral codes. No reason for the newspaper of record to bother writing about that - they are savages and expected to act that way.

Of every country within the shaded area in this map, only Israel is expected to treat these people with respect.

There is a story there. But it is not one that the New York Times seems interested in covering.

Chris Gunness pretends to be neutral and then shows his bias (plus video)

Middle East Eye has a print and video interview with UNRWA's Chris Gunness that shows yet again what a liar and apologist for Palestinian terror he is.

When MEE asked Gunness about staying neutral in what many perceive to be an unbalanced conflict, he said he agrees that “it is a very unbalanced conflict in that you’ve got one side throwing stones and on the other side often with guns,” but “we can only do this work if we remain neutral" and "UNRWA’s neutrality is the family's silver".

I would say that it is a very unbalanced conflict when one side has raised generations of people to believe that killing the other side is moral and just and the other side has hundreds of biased NGOs dedicated to tying that side's hands behind its back as it tries to defend itself. One side cares about morality and the other doesn't. One side is expected to adhere way beyond the letter and intent of international law while the other is not expected to even act like normal adults.

So Gunness, by framing the conflict the way he did, shows that he is far from neutral.

Gunness also managed to find many reasons to justify knife attacks while insisting he was not trying to condone them:

Gunness cited “settler violence… which happens largely with impunity", “not having access… to al-Aqsa” and “disproportional use of force” by the Israeli army as “driving the Palestinians, particularly a new generation of younger Palestinians, to feel there is no political future.”He stressed that neither he, nor the UN condone Palestinian knife attacks “but on the other hand, they all have a context, and that context is the deepening occupation and the brutality the comes with that.” The reality is “a new generation of younger Palestinians” that “feel there is no political future"

Of course, the elephant in the room is incitement to murder, incitement that in no small way comes from UNRWA itself. I put together this video to address that aspect of his interview:

Sophisticated anti-Israel propaganda

I found this article in an obscure African website.

It starts off as a quite interesting story about how an Israeli worked hard to try to save the African wild ass from extinction by airlifting a dozen from Ethiopia for a Biblical animal wildlife preserve in Israel in 1972. he enlisted government officials and even the army to transfer the animals. It begins as a feel-good story about how Israelis care about their original native animals.

But halfway through, it turns into an anti-Israel screed, saying that Ethiopian Jews feel that they are less important to Israel than donkeys since they were not airlifted until ten years later,and they still feel discriminated against. It goes through a brief history of Israel that includes lies like "During the 1947-8 war, Zionist forces drove out approximately three-quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs."
The rest of the article ends up being a critique of Israel and Zionism, calling Israelis racists.

Who wrote this article?

David Sheen, of Electronic Intifada, who makes his living writing anti-Israel pieces and giving anti-Israel speeches.

But this one starts off as a seemingly well-researched human interest story and only after the reader is "hooked" does he introduce his poison.

It is a very sophisticated propaganda technique. People who are already reading something they are emotionally invested in are not as likely to start critically thinking halfway through.

.@UNRWA teacher is very interested in coexistence in stoning

Yousef Samaan is an UNRWA teacher.

He recently posted this, with one stone thrower wearing a crucifix as a necklace.

"Christians of Palestine, Almighty Men and blood brothers"

See how UNRWA teaches respect for all humans? As long as you understand that Jews are subhuman, of course.

11/01 Links: Antisemitic hate speech by Abbas’ advisor on Islam: Jews represent “evil”

From Ian:

David Horovitz: President Abbas, tell your people to stop stabbing us

President Abbas, if you truly care about your people, you need to tell them to stop stabbing us.
They’ve killed about a dozen Israelis in the last month or so, and maybe three times that number of Palestinians have died in the attempt — suicidal stabbers, kamikaze knifers.
You’ve not condemned them. In fact, you’ve encouraged them — while simultaneously peddling the double-speak that we’ve been killing them in cold blood. You’ve publicly declared that “every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem” is clean and pure and blessed. You’ve reassured each new prospective killer that “every martyr will reach Paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah.”
You obviously don’t care about our people, who have had the temerity to build a thriving Jewish state in our historic homeland, and who you lie about and incite against. But since your people understandably seek their own independence, and to be freed from our rule, you need to tell them that trying to kill us one at a time with knives and screwdrivers and whatever else comes to hand is as counterproductive and doomed as the long series of previous efforts to massacre and terrorize us into leaving — the conventional wars, and the suicide bombings, and the rockets, and the car-rammings, and the relentless effort to demonize and delegitimize and isolate us internationally.
The path to the statehood and independence you seek is actually relatively straightforward. It was wide open in 1947 — all your predecessors had to do for a first-ever Palestine was accept a revived Israel. Instead, they opted for war and futile, bloody, tragic self-sabotage. Today, it’s a case of convincing Israel that it is safe for us to partner with you. Convincing us, to paraphrase president Bill Clinton at the Rabin rally on Saturday night, that the risks of peace are less severe than the risks of walking away.

Antisemitic hate speech by Abbas’ advisor on Islam: Jews represent “evil”

Abbas' advisor on Islamic Affairs and Supreme Shari'ah Judge Mahmoud Al-Habbash demonized Jews and Israel using classic Antisemitic hate speech, presenting Jews as "evil" and Israel as "Satan's project." He presented the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as an expression of "the historic conflict" - a conflict between "good and evil, between two projects: Allah's project vs. Satan's project," during a sermon on official PA TV. Palestinian Media Watch has exposed the repeated Antisemitic content of another Palestinian teacher of Islam, teaching at the Temple Mount. He recently stated that "Jews worship the Devil."
Abbas' advisor on Islam spread his Antisemitic beliefs in a Friday sermon broadcast on official PA TV:
Mahmoud Abbas' Advisor on Religious and Islamic Affairs and Supreme Shari'ah Judge Mahmoud Al-Habbash: "The conflict here in Palestine between us and the criminal occupation and its criminal leaders, is a further manifestation of our trials, a further manifestation of the historic conflict between truth and falsehood, between good and evil. Throughout history, there has been a conflict between good and evil. The good is represented by the prophets and their supporters. The evil is represented by the devils and their supporters, by the satans and their supporters. We are not inventing anything new here (i.e., Palestinian-Israeli). This is a conflict between two entities, good and evil, between two projects: Allah's project vs. Satan's project, a project connected to Allah, which is his will - true and good - and a project connected to oppression and Satanism, to Satanism and animosity, occupation and barbarism." [Official PA TV, Oct. 23, 2015]

Palestinian News Agency Editor-in-Chief: The Jews Will Enjoy Security Only under Arab Rule

Palestinian journalist Dr. Nasser Al-Laham, editor-in-chief of the Maan News Agency, recently said: "The Jews have never had a golden age except under an Arab and Islamic state." He further said: "they have always had and always will have security only under the protection of an Arab state." His statements were posted on the Maan Network Online on October 28, 2015.