Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, November 04, 2015

11/04 Links Pt2: Dershowitz: Debating against BDS - and winning; Beware of friends bearing boycotts

From Ian:

Alan Dershowitz: Debating against BDS - and winning

BDS sends a false message to the Palestinian street: namely, that international economic and political pressure can force Israel to capitulate to all Palestinian demands.
BDS opposes any effort at negotiation that isn’t premised on the recognition that Israel is an apartheid state. Indeed, many of its leaders refuse to recognize the right for Israel to exist as a nation-state for the Jewish people. In so doing, they are empowering radicals on both sides of the issue who have no desire to see a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
Many liberal activists such as Mr. Tatchell—whose advocacy on behalf of LGBT rights I greatly admire—have made common cause with BDS, hoping to pressure Israel to end the occupation, and afford greater self-determination to Palestinians in the West Bank. They seem to believe that a movement advocating non-violent tactics is necessarily the best way to achieve a lasting peace. But BDS is radically opposed to any negotiated settlement, and has increasingly begun to regroup bigots of all stripes who feel comfortable with the language used by its leaders, such Mr. Barghouti.
Mr. Tatchell and many pro-BDS academics also feel that Israel has committed human rights violations both in the occupation of the West Bank, and in its prosecution of the armed conflicts in Gaza. During the course of the debate I issued the following challenge to the audience and to my opponent: name a single country in the history of the world, faced with threats comparable to those faced by Israel, that has a better record of human rights, compliance with the rule of law and seeking to minimize civilian casualties.
I invited audience members to shout out the name of a country. Complete silence. Finally someone shouted "Iceland", and everyone laughed. When the best is treated as the worst, in the way the BDS movement singles out Israel for accusation, the finger of blame must be pointed at the accusers rather than the accused. In the end, the case against BDS won not because of the comparative skill of the debaters but because I was able to expose the moral weakness of the BDS movement itself.

Douglas Murray: Britain's New Racism

This effect -- the Corbynization of British politics -- has already had one notable effect. Last week Sir Gerald Kaufmann, a man with a track record of anti-Semitic comments, said something crazed even by his own high standards. Speaking at an event organized by the Hamas-affiliated "Palestine Return Centre" in Parliament, Kaufman claimed that the Conservative party had been influenced by "Jewish money." Asked why the UK government had allegedly become more pro-Israel in recent years he said, "It's Jewish money, Jewish donations to the Conservative Party -- as in the general election in May -- support from the Jewish Chronicle, all of those things bias the Conservatives."
What Kaufman said next is in some ways even more extraordinary. He claimed that the Palestinians "are living a repressed life, and are liable to be shot at any time. In the last few days alone the Israelis have murdered 52 Palestinians and nobody pays attention and this government doesn't care." He went on to claim that the recent stabbing attacks on Israeli citizens had been fabricated by the Israeli government in order to allow it to "execute Palestinians."
There have already been complaints about this statement from other MPs, including other Labour MPs. But what can be expected of the Labour leadership? Jeremy Corbyn is an old friend and ally of Kaufman's. They have shared anti-Israel platforms for years. However, whereas ordinarily a party leader would discipline an MP for such outrageous and false claims, nothing has happened -- nor will happen -- to Kaufman. It is a failure that should bring shame on the party. Even the Liberal Democrats managed eventually to withdraw the whip from their Baroness Jenny 'Boom' Tonge, who has repeatedly spread blood-libels about Israel. But Kaufman is part of Corbyn's Parliamentary base, and the kind of people who lap this sort of thing up are part of Jeremy Corbyn's wider base in the country. What is a leader like him to do?
This, then, is one of the already jolting effects of the Corbyn leadership. Wholly predictably, it has begun to mainstream anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories, and it has encumbered the political left with few defences to the accusation that it is they who now harbour the proponents of the greatest racism of our time. Is it too much to hope that an alliance of Jews and non-Jews of every imaginable political stripe will push back to ensure this does not happen?

Israeli academic shouted down in lecture at University of Minnesota

On Tuesday afternoon an Israeli academic was shouted down by two dozen protesters as he tried to begin a lecture before about 100 students and faculty at the University of Minnesota. The speaker was Moshe Halbertal, a professor at NYU Law School and a professor of Jewish thought and philosophy at Hebrew University. He was invited to deliver the Dewey Lecture in the Philosophy of Law, which is organized annually by the law school. That the freedom to present a lecture is threatened in this way at a public university is appalling, calling not only for punishment of violations but for a clear statement by university officials defending the free exchange of ideas.
The lecture, which I attended, was delayed half an hour as one by one the protesters stood up to shout denunciations of Israel and were escorted from the hall by university police. One young woman came screaming back into the lecture after having been ejected. Outside the hall, the protesters chanted so loudly that it was difficult to hear Halbertal, much less to concentrate on what he was saying, until 45 minutes after the lecture was to have begun.
The protests were apparently organized by a group calling itself the “Anti-War Committee,” which bragged on its Twitter feed about having disrupted the lecture and complained that the protesters’ “free speech” rights were violated when a few were arrested. It appears that no law students were involved, but many of the demonstrators were college-aged and the protest was endorsed by a group called Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a university group. According to its Facebook page, SJP “promotes justice, human rights, liberation, and self-determination for the Palestinian people.”
The lecture was entitled, “Protecting Civilians: Moral Challenges of Asymmetric Warfare.” The talk did not directly address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though Halbertal drew in part on his experience helping to draft the Israeli army’s code of ethics. When he was finally able to speak, Halbertal argued that in fighting “asymmetric wars” (typically, wars between professional militaries and insurgencies or resistance movements) professional combatants should err on the side of protecting noncombatants from casualties, even when they thereby increase risks to themselves or to their cause. (h/t Zvi)

Protesters shout down Israeli Professor at U. Minnesota law school

Leora Eisenberg, a high school student who wanted to attend the lecture, posted on Facebook:
So, you think BDS wants peace?
I was lost. I needed to get a lecture by noted Jewish-Israeli lecturer and philosopher Moshe Halbertal on the ethics of war. I had just come from school. I knew I’d be the youngest in the audience, and I was okay with that. I’ve always been precocious, especially for Israel.
I saw one lame protester in front of the building. So, one person showed up to protest the “apartheid regime.” Carry on. Protest. You have your rights.
As I came into the building, I heard some really loud chanting. I mean, really loud. And as a Russian-Israeli Jew, I know loud. I didn’t realize it was in front of the lecture hall. I couldn’t actually get in.
Because if I did, they would probably physically assault me. They championed their slogans of peace… right? (“Hey hey, ho ho, they occupation has got to go!”) But they also had at least three police officers standing in front of the doors and brandished (fake) blood-covered babies and made some vaguely anti-Semitic slurs. (all while holding signs proclaiming that Zionism is not Judaism)
I was afraid to go in. And when I finally could (through the secret back door), I was shaking too hard to focus. At one point, a BDS protester burst in, started screaming and was escorted back out by the cops– at which point, I heard the protesters drift off (and finally be taken outside).
So, you still think BDS wants peace?
Think again. I didn’t realize peaceniks make 17-year-olds girls scared to go to lectures on foreign policy. I didn’t realize peaceniks could be so violent.

Ayatollah Khamenei explains it all (ElderToons)

From AP:

The slogan "Death to America" is not aimed at the American people, but rather American policies, Iran's supreme leader said in comments reported on his official website Tuesday.

Khamenei says the "aim of the slogan is not death to American people. The slogan means death to U.S. policies and arrogance." The slogan has "strong support" In Iran, he said.

Ah, but what about that other phrase?

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.@UNRWA Maintains Neutrality On How To Destroy Israel (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Jerusalem, November 4 - In keeping with the organization's mandated policy of not taking sides in political disputes, a spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) clarified today that the agency has no official position on how the destruction of the world's only Jewish state will be accomplished.

Spokesman Chris Gunness stressed to reporters today that contrary to recent reports of UNRWA employees violating the neutrality required of them by celebrating the murder of Jews, the agency enforces a strict code of ethics under which no specific avenue for causing the demise of the State of Israel and killing its Jewish inhabitants is shown favor or disfavor.

"You might have been hearing about teachers at UNRWA schools, or other UNRWA functionaries, allegedly violating our organization's neutrality policy," said Gunness at a press conference. "But those reports are either malicious distortions or erroneous renderings. This agency does not, and had not in the past, allowed its employees to express exclusive preference for any particular method of bringing about the end of Israel and massacring all Jews who reside there." Gunness explained that Facebook posts and other evidence that appeared to show UNRWA employees glorifying stabbing, vehicular homicide, shooting, or rockets were in fact merely metaphorical devices for conveying the purpose and goals of the organization and the population it serves, rather than a violation of neutrality regarding how best to rid historical Palestine of the usurper rapist ape-pig Jews and any pretensions they may have to sovereignty.

"I guarantee that none of the supposed violations of neutrality by UNRWA teachers, for example, stands up to scrutiny" challenged Gunness. "For neutrality to be breached, you would have to prove that the person who made the allegedly non-neutral post, or who shared an allegedly non-neutral image, is actually trying to say that the specific kind of violence being invoked is preferred over others. That's just nonsense. No UNRWA personnel are irresponsible enough to think, let alone say, that stabbing every single Jew is the only acceptable path toward bloody redemption of the homeland from the Khazar invader. Every single one of our employees has been vetted, and we have determined to our satisfaction that nary a one would object to, say, nuking Israel out of existence, or poisoning the whole country's water supply with anthrax, instead of stabbing all the Jews or running them over."

"So please stop giving coverage to these alleged violations of neutrality," he asked reporters. "This is a non story."

11/04 Links Pt1: How a Blood Libel against Israel Is Born; PA names soccer tournament after terrorist

From Ian:

JCPA: How a Blood Libel against Israel Is Born

On Friday, October 30, the primetime show The Agenda on Ontario’s TVO network, with anchorman Steve Paikin, explored the question of whether the Palestinian violence marks the beginning of the Third Intifada.
Two interviewees were asked to give their assessment: Yoni Goldstein, editor of the weekly Canadian Jewish News, and Khaled Elgindy, a fellow of the Brookings Center for Middle East Policy and former adviser to the Palestinian Authority on permanent-settlement issues from 2004 to 2009.
Elgindy presented a distorted picture of the situation that pins full responsibility for the Palestinian violence on Israel. He asserted that a new intifada would probably be a better option for all of the sides, because it would be organized and would seek clear-cut objectives. In other words, Elgindy implied that a wider outbreak of violence, which would wreak numerous civilian deaths like the Al-Aqsa Intifada that began in September 2000, would be better than the current level of Palestinian violence, which so far has not succeeded to kill large numbers of Israelis.
Elgindy went on to say:
I would disagree that the Israeli response has been effective. It’s not been effective. It’s been very repressive, and it has been almost as random in its violence as the knifing attacks except far more deadly in terms of the number of Palestinian casualties….
Israel has arrested hundreds of Palestinians basically just mass arrests rounding people up. It has shot into crowds of unarmed protestors. There is a sort of ‘shoot to kill’ policy that appears to be the main rules of engagement for Israeli security forces where they shoot first and ask questions later. And we saw just the other day, the Israeli police conducted an investigation into a Palestinian woman who was shot in the city of Afula and they found in fact that she wasn’t carrying any weapon. That the initial report that she had a knife was false and that she was simply executed for no reason.
To put it mildly, Khaled was not speaking the truth. There have been no cases whatsoever of Israeli security forces shooting into innocent crowds. The casualties among the Palestinians stem from the multitude of terror attacks against Jews, of which there have been many hundreds just in the last month. The arrests being made are not random, but are responses to violent activity or to intelligence information. Israeli open-fire orders do not allow shooting to kill except in life-threatening cases, such as the use of firearms, firebombs, knives and potentially lethal stonings.
The blood libel against Israel has reached a peak with the description of the incident where the woman in Afula was shot. The facts are entirely different from those Elgindy presents in his version.
The female attacker was not Palestinian, but rather an Israeli Arab residing in Nazareth named Asra Awad. She was not “executed,” but rather moderately wounded in her lower extremities by the gunfire and treated in a hospital.

PMW: Palestinian football tournament named after murderer ‎who stabbed two to death last month

Terrorist Muhannad Halabi murdered two Israeli civilians and wounded the wife and infant of one of them, in a stabbing attack in the Old City of Jerusalem in October. Now, the Yasser Arafat Youth Center in Jenin has named a football tournament after the murderer.
Headline: "Bal'a Club wins the Martyr Halabi cup for football"
"The Martyr Yasser Arafat Youth Center (Al-Attara - Jenin) succeeded in organizing the first football tournament named after Martyr (Shahid) Muhannad Halabi, which took place on its football fields. The final game was played by the Yasser Arafat Youth Center and Bal'a, which rightly won the title." [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nov. 2, 2015]
Palestinian Media Watch has reported on official PA gestures in honor of this murderer. A PA municipality named a street after him and the mayor said, "This is the least we can do for Martyr Halabi." Abbas' Fatah movement brought soil from the Al-Aqsa Mosque to his grave. Private institutions and people have also honored terrorist Halabi, with the PA Bar Association awarding him an honorary law degree and parents in Gaza naming their newborn son after the murderer.
It is not surprising that private institutions and organizations like the Jenin youth club decide to honor murderers who have killed Israelis. Glorification of terrorist murderers is a practice repeatedly carried out by the PA and Fatah, as documented by PMW.

Sudanese Man Attempts to Murder Israeli on Ethiopian Airlines Flight

A Sudanese man was arrested by Ethiopian authorities for attacking an Israeli man on an Ethiopian Airlines flight from N’Djamena to Addis Ababa last week, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Tuesday.
A 54-year-old Israeli man, identified as Arik and an employee for an Israeli communications company that operates in Africa, was on the flight with the intent to get on another flight to Israel after landing in Addis Ababa.
“About 20 minutes before the plane started its descent the passenger sitting behind me identified me as Israeli and Jewish,” Arik told the newspaper.
“He came up behind my seat and started to choke me with a lot of force,” he continued, “and at first I couldn’t get my voice out and call for help. He hit me over the head with a metal tray and shouted ‘Allah akbar’ and ‘I will slaughter the Jew.’ Only after a few seconds, just before I was about to lose consciousness, did I manage to call out and a flight attendant who saw what was happening summoned her colleagues.”
Most of the other passengers chose not to get involved, with the exception of one Lebanese passenger who assisted the crew in stopping the attack, Arik said. (h/t Yenta Press)

Orthodox Jewish Man Stabbed in Brooklyn; Victim in Stable Condition (VIDEO)

An off-duty volunteer for Brooklyn-based Jewish ambulance service Hatzalah was stabbed in the back on Tuesday night while walking in Crown Heights, local blogs reported.
The victim, identified as 34-year-old Dovid Katz, was treated on the scene by his colleagues and then rushed to the nearby Kings County Hospital, where he was reported to be in stable condition, sources said.
According to the report, he did not see the attacker, who approached from behind and then quickly fled the scene following the assault. One witness cited by a local blog described the assailant as an “African-American male wearing a hoodie,” but noted that “this has not been confirmed.” The attacker is still at large.
Local website Crownheights.info warned local residents, “Please beware of your surroundings and be extra cautious when going outside until the assailant is apprehended.”
A leader of the largely Chabad Chasidic local Jewish community also called on residents to be on guard.

Ma'an published a report from the Shabaka NGO. Excerpts:

In January 2013, the Jordanian government announced a non-entry policy for Palestinian refugees. Since then, those Palestinians who had been able to cross into Jordan (usually relying on forged documents or smugglers) have lived in fear of being arrested and deported back to Syria. Furthermore, Palestinians who fled to Jordan cannot legally live in the refugee camps established for Syrians, but at the same time, cannot legally work to earn money to rent housing outside of camps. The one exception is Cyber City, which is more of a detention center than a refugee camp, and where Jordanian authorities have been transferring Palestinians who are in the country clandestinely since April 2012. Palestinians are confined to Cyber City unless they decide to return to Syria.

As for Lebanon, the authorities began requiring as of the end of 2013 that Palestinians from Syria apply for a visa before entering the country. And as of May 2014, Lebanese authorities were only allowing Syria-registered Palestinian refugees entry into the country if they had the documents needed to travel to a third country, limiting their stay in Lebanon to a maximum of nine hours. In May 2014, restrictions were placed on the ability of Palestinians from Syria to legally renew their residency papers. As a result, the majority of Palestinians from Syria who are currently in Lebanon live under the threat of arrest and deportation to Syria.

In Egypt, the government does not allow Palestinian refugees to register with the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). At the same time, Egypt falls outside of the area of operation of the UNRWA. Consequently, there is currently no UN agency responsible for the protection and assistance of Palestinian refugees in Egypt. Additionally, it has become all but impossible for Palestinians from Syria to get visas to Egypt. Because Palestinians (unlike other refugees in Egypt) cannot register with UNHCR, they cannot get residency permits, receive food vouchers, medical assistance, or any other services provided by UNHCR. Palestinians can currently apply for a one-month visa to travel to Egypt, but they also need to get clearance from Egyptian security services, a clearance that is rarely granted. Palestinians fleeing Syria for Egypt have been subjected to arbitrary arrest, prolonged detention or deportation to a third country, and collective expulsion by Egyptian authorities.

...The situation of Palestinians from Syria who are already inside Turkey is also far from ideal: Because Turkey is not part of UNRWA’s area of operations, Palestinians in Turkey do not have access to the agency’s assistance. Normally, these Palestinians would fall under UNHCR’s mandate. However, UNHCR services, which are distributed through the Turkish government, are not reaching Palestinian refugees, whose legal status in Turkey remains unclear. Part of the problem is that the Turkish government does not allow UNHCR to perform refugee status determination on its soil.

A Separate and Unequal Legal Status

Palestinian refugees maintain a separate legal status from other categories of refugees. This separate status is enforced through an exclusion clause in article 1(D) of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees that states that the convention does not apply to persons who are already being assisted by another UN organ or agency. At the time of the signing of the 1951 convention, Palestinian refugees were already receiving services from UNRWA and the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine and were thus excluded from UNHCR’s mandate. However, if interpreted correctly, article 1 (D) also means that Palestinians who are located outside of UNRWA’s normal areas of operation or who are unable to access UNRWA assistance immediately fall under the mandate of UNHCR.

It is worth recalling that the exclusion of Palestinian refugees from UNHCR’s mandate was pushed by Arab states, who feared that absorbing Palestinians with other categories of refugees would harm the right of return as a primary solution for Palestinians who were expelled or fled from their homes in 1948. However, as has been noted in Badil’s publication Al-Majdal, this exclusion has also contributed to the “construction of a separate and unique category of ‘Palestine’ refugees and therewith created an environment in which discriminatory policies can flourish”. Indeed, it is clear from the examples above that Palestinians fleeing the conflict have seen their mobility and access to international protection curtailed in part because of their Palestinian identity and separate legal status.

Furthermore, Arab states often justify their discriminatory policies against Palestinians in the name of protecting the Palestinian right of return. In an interview with the newspaper al-Hayat, Jordan’s prime minister Abdalah Ensour justified Jordan’s restrictive policies toward Palestinians fleeing Syria by explaining that allowing Palestinians from Syria into Jordan would absolve Israel of its responsibility toward Palestinian refugees.

He ended his explanation by saying that “Our Palestinian Brothers have the right to return to their country of origin. They should stay in Syria until the end of the crisis”. Similarly, the Lebanese government has generally justified its denial of basic rights (such as the right to work or to own property) to Palestinians on its soil as a form of support for the Palestinian right of return that is predicated on the non-integration of Palestinians into Lebanese society. The current hardships faced by Palestinians from Syria who are in Lebanon or those trying to reach Lebanon cannot be divorced from Lebanon’s pre-existing policies toward Palestinians on its soil.

Isn't it remarkable that in a world where the Palestinian issue takes up so much of the United Nations' time and so much of the media's attention, practically no one is talking about how Arab nations are treating their Palestinian brethren?

Terrorist mom is very proud - and now her dead son is being used for blood libel (update)

Rusaila Shamasneh is very proud of her dead terrorist son.

On October 12, Muhammad Nazmi Shamasneh, 22, from the village of Qatana, got on a bus near the entrance to Jerusalem. He stabbed a 19 year-old IDF soldier, inflicting minor injuries, and tried to grab his weapon. He was shot and killed by police.

His body was released for burial, and now his mother Rusaila is celebrating his death.

"I am sad only because I was not with my son" at the moment of his death to join him in martyrdom, "but I am very happy for the death of my son for Jerusalem and proud of that," she said.

She insisted that all the visitors to her house act joyful at the "wedding" of her son.

Rusaila then went to the roof of her building and shot celebratory gunfire in joy at her son's death.

But the Paleesinian Authority is not done with trying to get propaganda value from Muhammad Nazmi Shamasneh.

From JPost:

Israel harvested the corneas from one of the bodies of a terrorist responsible for an attack at the entrance to Jerusalem last month, according to reports by Palestinian media.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health issued an official statement, claiming to have made the discovery at the morgue where the body was being housed.

The attack took place on October 12 on bus line 185. A terrorist sitting in the back of the bus stabbed a soldier, called out "Allahu akbar," and attempted to steal the soldier's weapon.

Yes, this is the same guy. Since he was not successful in murdering any Jews, now he is being used to create a blood libel.

It is the Palestinian way of recycling.

(h/t Ian)

UPDATE: More fun from the necromom. (h/t Bob K)

Those Israelis, humiliating an innocent young man (video)

Anti-Israel activists have been spreading this video they say of Israeli soldiers wantonly attacking a young man because he refused to humiliate himself by taking off his pants.

#WatchIsraeli Occupation Forces (IOF) brutally attack unarmed Palestinian young man for his refusal to take off his trousers2 November 2015, Occupied Jerusalem, Palestine#شاهد جنود الاحتلال يهاجمون شابا فلسطينيا أعزلا بوحشية ويعتقلونه على الرغم من رفع يديه وملابسه في القدس المحتلة#Zionist #False_Gods #Kabalah #Vodo_State_of_Israel #Gang #apartheid #Palestine #SaveAlAqsa #EndIsraeliOccupation#اعدام_طفل_فلسطيني #المسجد_الأقصى_يشتعل
Posted by Shehab News Agency on Monday, November 2, 2015

What cruelty! What brutality!Just taking a random Arab and forcing him to be humiliated like that!

A short time earlier, here is what this upstanding young man did. He attacked a tour guide by pummeling her on her head with a bottle.

But hitting a Jew on the head with a bottle is legal resistance against tyranny. Humiliating an Arab is a war crime. Those are the rules, as interpreted by today's top arbiters of morality and international law.

(h/t Gidon Shaviv)

Another Gaza store with a stabbing mannequin

From Reuters:

A mannequin holding a knife displaying a jacket that reads "stab" (L) is seen outside a clothes shop in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip November 3, 2015. The shop owner said the display was made in support of Palestinians committing stabbing attacks against Israelis.

This is besides the other one I showed on Sunday, which as Israellycool discovered, was outside a shop named "Hitler."

(h/t UK Media Watch)

11/03 Links Pt2: PA and Fatah: Israel had "no right" to be created; Amnesty's true mission

From Ian:

PA and Fatah: Israel had "no right" to be created
From Palestinian Media Watch:

On the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration of Nov. 2, 1917, the PA and Fatah repeated their claim that Israel has "no right" to be created and attacked the declaration, calling it "ominous".
The Balfour Declaration was a letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Baron Rothschild stating that "His Majesty's government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" and is seen as the basis for later international commitments to establish the State of Israel.
Abbas' Fatah movement posted the picture above of Balfour engulfed in flames, accompanied by the text:
"We will not forget the ominous promise, the Balfour Promise (i.e., Declaration) given by those with no ownership to those with no right"
[Official Facebook page of the Fatah Movement, Nov. 1, 2015]
The official spokesman of the PA National Security Forces, Adnan Al-Damiri, posted similar statements:
Text on photo:
"We will not forget the ominous promise, the Balfour Promise made by those who have no ownership to those who have no right. Nov. 2, 1917" [Facebook page of PA National Security Forces, Adnan Al-Damiri, Nov. 2, 2015]

Balfour Declaration Anniversary Erases Jewish Connection to Holy Land

It’s hardly surprising that the myth of an existing historical Palestinian state that was ‘colonized’ by European Jews continues to circulate if this is the sort of lazy historical background being fed to media consumers.
- Nowhere in the article does it mention that Palestine, as it was known as then, was a part of the Ottoman Empire and there had never existed an independent Palestinian state.
- Nowhere in the article does it mention that indigenous Jewish communities had lived in the Land of Israel going back over 3,000 years and there existed a continuous and uninterrupted Jewish religious and national connection to that land.
- The article mistakenly writes that the Balfour Declaration gave instructions “to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.” In fact, the Declaration supported a Jewish homeland, and not necessarily a state. The Balfour Declaration was but one step on the way to the fulfillment of the Zionist program of restoring Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish people’s ancient homeland.
- Indeed, to talk of Palestinians in those days referred to both Jewish and Arab residents of the land. When the Daily Mail refers to “without prejudicing the Palestinian communities already there,” it is not clearly stating just who those communities are, instead working on the presumption that Palestinian communities were Palestinian Arabs.
- This is compounded by the statement that “The Palestinians are furious that their land has technically been promised to the Jewish people.” In 1917 at the time of the Balfour Declaration, there was no national Palestinian identity – the non-Jewish residents of the land considered themselves to be part of the wider Arab nation and Arab nationalists sought an independent Arab state not in Palestine per se but as part of the Ottoman Arab Middle East as a whole.
- So it was not at that time “their land” that the Palestinians are allegedly furious that it had been promised to the Jewish people.
By missing out any historical context, the Daily Mail has erased legitimate Jewish rights that existed even before the Balfour Declaration and has constructed a Palestinian national identity that did not exist in 1917. (Note: this does not mean that a Palestinian identity did not emerge in later years.)

Amnesty's true mission

Amnesty International's conclusions on the situation here in Israel are always bizarrely perverse. The latest is no different: "Israeli forces have carried out a series of unlawful killings of Palestinians using intentional lethal force without justification ... based on the findings of an ongoing research trip to the West Bank, including east Jerusalem. ... The organization has documented in depth at least four incidents in which Palestinians were deliberately shot dead by Israeli forces when they posed no imminent threat to life, in what appear to have been extrajudicial executions. ... Since Oct. 1, Israeli forces have killed more than 30 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Israel either after stabbings were carried out or the Israeli authorities allege stabbing attacks were intended.
"There is mounting evidence that, as tensions have risen dramatically, in some cases Israeli forces appear to have ripped up the rule book and resorted to extreme and unlawful measures. They seem increasingly prone to using lethal force against anyone they perceive as posing a threat, without ensuring that the threat is real," Amnesty International wrote in a press release on Oct. 27.
As blogger Elder of Ziyon has already exposed, Amnesty's "in-depth documentation" is based on lies. This is the most egregious element of Amnesty's attempt to insert itself into the situation.

"Jews always split Muslim societies"

From Egypt's Misr5:

Jews are always working with the rule of divide and conquer, that is, they create differences between people in one country and in different countries around them so that they are the masters. Jews have walked this path a long time ago, even before the advent of Islam.

In Yathrib "Medina" (communities of Jews were supplying both sides of a war with money and weapons to perpetuate the war between them, and so the war lasted nearly 120 years.

This is the dirty role played by Jews in general...

Even now Jews are behind the strife in Syria, and in Yemen, as well as in Iraq, in Libya. In Egypt it is no secret that they control the money and the media, and this way they caused many cracks in Egyptian society...

Allah says, "Hold on to Allah and be not divided among yourselves ...".

The cartoon was not drawn for this article but it was used as the illustration to symbolize Jews tearing Muslim and Christian Arabs apart.

South African Israel-hater Suraya Dadoo. tweeted an article to me she wrote defending Hamas:

She writes, among other things:

Throughout the four-day visit to South Africa, Misha’al spoke at length about an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza, based on 1967 borders, with the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees. Hamas had committed itself to a just political solution – not merely a “two-state solution” where a Palestinian ‘mini-state’ has its major cities cut off from each other, its government unable to control its own water resources, develop its agriculture, or manage its trade with neighbouring states.

In a joint statement, Mary Kluk and Ben Swartz of the SAZF and SAJBD again invoked the Hamas Charter, claiming that “the core ideology of Hamas is underpinned by a rabid hatred of the Jewish people.” Yet, on the day the statement was issued, Misha’al was scheduled to meet progressive Jewish groups in Johannesburg.

“The problem is not Judaism or Jews, it is the occupation,” Misha’al said repeatedly during interviews.

According to Misha’al, the Hamas Charter is no longer a true expression of the movement’s overall vision, and does not reflect the current thinking of the movement. Hamas does not even use the Charter on its website and uses its election manifesto, and more recent documents, to describe its overall vision and objectives. For Israel’s apologists, however, Hamas has not gone far enough, and they demand that the movement formally abrogates the Charter.

Therefore, she writes, Israel should really negotiate with Hamas. (She pretends that Hamas would actually negotiate with Israel!)

So I went to the Hamas website to see their new, improved and moderate position filled with liberal ideas.

They wrote a press release to mark the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration yesterday. (Not in English, of course.)

The Hamas movement on this painful anniversary emphasizes the following:

First - The Balfour Declaration is unjust and void and unacceptable...

Second - The imposition of such an entity as a fait accompli by force through the expulsion of our people from their land can not change the facts of history and geography, because our people hold the steady and sacred rights and refuse to compromise at all costs.

Thirdly - we affirm our commitment to use the resistance in all its forms, especially the armed resistance as a strategic option is able to deter the occupation and recover the usurped rights and liberate the land and holy places and Al Aqsa and liberating the prisoners.

Fourthly - emphasize the need to enhance the uprising through a unified national consensus in the face of the Zionist attack on Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Fifthly - we call on the leaders of Arab and Islamic countries and all the Liberals in the world to bear the historical responsibility to help our people for liberation from occupation, providing support to our people and pressure the occupation to force them to stop the aggression against our people and leave our land and our holy places.

Sixth - we call upon the international community, especially the international organizations to act to protect Palestinian refugees everywhere, securing a decent life for them in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and to spare them the horrors of internal wars.

Seventh - We applaud the masses of our people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and in Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa and our prisoners in Israeli jails, to trigger resistance in every inch of the land of Palestine in defense of the land, honor and sanctities.

Hamas, as always, makes it clear that their goal is the destruction of Israel and the ethnic cleansing of all Jews from the land. And terrorism is their strategic method to accomplish that.

This is not a new message. Hamas has been remarkably consistent. Yet there are a lot of people who want to try to fool the world into believing that Hamas is not a terror group, despite its own explicit words.

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

From Ian:

NYTs: The Facebook Intifada

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.

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.