Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, March 10, 2016

UNRWA cover-up continues! UNRWA logo removed from hate-school page

UNRWA sprung into action after I revealed that one of their schools in a Gaza City camp last October held a ceremony to support the stabbing spree against Jews and posted about it on Facebook.

Oh, they didn't announce that they were launching an investigation. They didn't say that people would be fired. They didn't apologize for this blatant breach of UN and human rights. They didn't say a word about the child abuse they were involved in.

No, they first took down the specific posts that I referred to.

And now they removed the UNRWA logo from the page!

From this:

To this:

Will they claim that this school is not a UNRWA school? Even though it is located inside an UNRWA camp?

Most UNRWA schools follow the same design and all use the UN blue color scheme, and this school is no exception. Also note the UNRWA logo on these girl's vests in this photo taken earlier today:

And earlier photos on their Facebook page leave no doubt:

Not to mention that the school is mentioned on UNRWA's own site!

Once again, UNRWA is showing that it doesn't actually care that its schools teach support for terror - but it cares very much about the possibility of losing funding because of meddling Westerners who want to know how hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent. So they want to add some barely-plausible deniability to the hate that they teach, knowing that their donors (with the notable exception of Canada) are not likely to stop funds as long as they are fed a line about UNRWA caring about neutrality and human rights.

It is a cover-up and it is happening in front of our eyes.

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Legal scholars Eugene Kontorovich and Avi Bell have written an impressive new paper submitted to the Arizona Law Review that uses a well-known principle of international law to determine the borders of nations and applies it to Israel.

Here are the important excerpts of the 70-page paper.

ABSTRACT: Israel’s borders and territorial scope are a source of seemingly endless debate. Remarkably, despite the intensity of the debates, little attention has been paid to relevance of the doctrine of uti possidetis juris to resolving legal aspects of the border dispute. Uti possidetis juris is widely acknowledged as the doctrine of customary international law that is central to determining territorial sovereignty in the era of decolonization. The doctrine provides that emerging states presumptively inherit their pre-independence administrative boundaries.

Applied to the case of Israel, uti possidetis juris would dictate that Israel inherit the boundaries of the Mandate of Palestine as they existed in May, 1948. The doctrine would thus support Israeli claims to any or all of the currently hotly disputed areas of Jerusalem (including East Jerusalem), the West Bank, and even potentially the Gaza Strip (though not the Golan Heights).

What is uti possidetis juris?

Today, it is generally accepted that the borders of newlyformed states are determined by application of uti possidetis juris as a matter of customary international law. The doctrine even applies when it conflicts with the principle of self-determination. Summarizing the operation of the rule, Steven Ratner explains, “[s]tated simply, [the doctrine of] uti possidetis [juris] provides that states emerging from decolonization shall presumptively inherit the colonial administrative borders that they held at the time of independence.” Recent decades have shown that uti possidetis juris applies to all cases where the borders of new states have to be determined, and not just in its original context of decolonization. Thus, for instance, uti possidetis juris was used to determine the borders of the states created by the dissolution of the Soviet Union,Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.

Does it apply to Israel?

The application of the principle of uti possidetis juris to the legal borders of Israel seems straightforward. Israel emerged as a new state in 1948, when it declared statehood at the expiration of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. The new state of Israel was immediately invaded by its neighbors and several nonneighboring Arab states, and at the conclusion of hostilities, Israel possessed only part of the territory of the Mandate (the remaining mandatory territory was occupied by the states of Syria, Egypt and Transjordan). Israel and its neighbors reached armistice agreements, but they failed to reach peace treaties or boundary agreements. For its part, the British Mandatory government—the immediately prior ruling authority until 1948— did not propose or reach any agreement on borders with the new state. While there had been proposals to divide the territory of Palestine between two new states (one Jewish and one Arab), Israel was the only state to emerge from the Mandate of Palestine.

Israel’s independence would thus appear to fall squarely within the bounds of circumstances that trigger the rule of uti possidetis juris. Applying the rule would appear to dictate that Israel’s borders are those of the Palestine Mandate that preceded it, except where otherwise agreed upon by Israel and its relevant neighbor. And, indeed, rather than undermine the application of uti possidetis juris, Israel’s peace treaties with neighboring states to date—with Egypt and Jordan—appear to reinforce it. These treaties ratify borders between Israel and its neighbors explicitly based on the boundaries of the British Mandate of Palestine.Likewise, in demarcating the so-called “Blue Line” between Israel and Lebanon in 2000, the United Nations Secretary General relied upon the boundaries of British Mandate of Palestine.

Given the location of the borders of the Mandate of Palestine, applying the doctrine of uti possidetis juris to Israel would mean that Israel has territorial sovereignty over all the disputed areas of Jerusalem and the West Bank and Gaza, except to the degree that Israel has voluntarily yielded sovereignty since its independence. This conclusion stands in opposition to the many public figures who have pronounced that international law dictates very different boundaries.Amazingly, however, such pronouncements reveal no awareness or discussion of the application of uti possidetis juris to the borders between Israel and its neighboring states. Indeed, the literature on both the doctrine and the Israeli-Arab conflict has almost entirely ignored application of uti possidetis to Mandatory Palestine.

At its expiration in 1948, the borders of the Mandate of Palestine, both internal and external, were relatively well demarcated and uncontroversial. Thus uti possidetis juris could be a powerful tool for resolving extant disputes about the borders of Israel. To be sure, Israel appears to be interested in drawing consensual new boundaries that differ from the borders established by uti possidetis juris. Uti possidetis juris does not preclude later modifications of borders. Application of uti possidetis juris, as is customary in other boundary disputes, would nevertheless provide a clear baseline for future negotiated solutions.

Why would this apply to Israel whose boundaries did not come close to the British Mandate lines after the 1948 war?

On May 14, 1948, when Israel declared its statehood, its forces controlled only a small part of Palestine. While Israel’s geographic scope of authority expanded by the end of the war, the armistice agreements that ended the war in 1949 left large parts of Palestine in the hands of Syria, Egypt and Jordan. The doctrine of uti possidetis juris, however, rejects possession as grounds for establishing title, favoring instead legal entitlement based upon prior administrative borders. And it is clear that the relevant administrative borders of Palestine at the time of Israel’s independence were the boundaries of the mandate as they had been set in 1923. Israel was the only state that emerged from mandatory Palestine, and it was a state whose identity matched the contemplated Jewish homeland required of the Mandate, and that fulfilled a legal Jewish claim to self determination in the Mandatory territories. There was therefore no rival state that could lay claim to using internal Palestinian district lines as the basis of borders. At the same time, while considerable efforts had been invested in creating and advancing proposals for altering the borders of the ultimate Jewish state and a companion Arab state, no such efforts had ever been crowned with the success of implementation. Thus, it would appear that uti possidetis juris dictates recognition of the borders of Israel as coinciding with the borders of the mandate as of 1948.

Certainly Israel has the right to voluntarily modify the borders in peace agreements, and the authors suggest that perhaps Israel's withdrawal from Gaza would also have that legal weight. Nevertheless, this legal principle that has been the basis of determining the borders of many other states worldwide should be equally applicable to Israel's borders.

The paper notes that historically there was a competing legal principal, uti possidetis de facto which says that legal possession of land only applies to where there is actual control - but no international court has applied that principle in modern times, and it is universally understood in determining the borders of other nations that uti possidetis juris is the single guiding legal principle.

But what about the rights of Palestinian Arabs within the boundaries of the British Mandate?

Another set of problems related to the Palestine Mandate concerned questions of self-determination. From the outset, the Palestine Mandate was anomalous, in that it recognized a particular people as entitled to express its self-determination on the territory of the Mandate, even though that people was not at that time the majority population of the Mandate. Over the years, Palestinian advocates have argued that this portion of the Mandate was ultra vires, and that the Jewish people were not entitled to receive a grant of the legal right to self-determination. The argument has little to recommend it. But even if the argument were well-founded, it would have little effect on the outcome of the uti possidetis juris analysis, as we have seen. Even unlawful treatments of the right of self-determination have not been seen as grounds to undermine the uti possidetis borders of other Mandates.

A potentially more serious matter is the question of whether the Jewish people were the only nation entitled to self determination in the Mandate of Palestine. The Mandate itself gives no indication of there being another entitled nation, describing only a Jewish national home and no other national home or national expression. The Mandate provides for a single partition (the separation of Transjordan from the remainder of the Mandate), but no other. The Mandate of Palestine was not, of course, the only Mandate to encompass populations who would not be granted the right to self-determination and an independent state (consider, for instance, the Kurds in the Mesopotamian Mandate). However, the Mandate of Palestine was the only one in which the majority population (the Arabs of Palestine) was not granted a right of self-determination by the founding documents. It may be argued, nonetheless, that, notwithstanding the silence of the founding documents of the Mandate, the Palestinian Arabs did have a claim to self-determination. General Assembly Resolution 181 of 1947 would have given both the Palestinian Jewish and Palestinian Arab peoples independent states.

The rights of multiple nations to self-determination on a given territory should not, prima facie, disturb application of the doctrine of uti possidetis juris. This is not simply because the doctrine of uti possidetis juris does not rely upon the existence of a prior claim of self-determination for the new state. Nor is it simply because uti possidetis juris may actually conflict with and override the demands of self-determination, as the International Court of Justice stated explicitly in the Burkina Faso case.321 The most important reason for rejecting the idea that multiple claims of self determination forbid application of uti possidetis juris is that many of the states that have had their borders established by uti possidetis juris have, in fact, been subject to multiple claims of self-determination; in no case has the existence of an additional nation with a right of self-determination defeated application of the doctrine of uti possidetis juris. This is true even when the new state that claimed the benefit of uti possidetis juris was later itself driven apart by new internal claims of self-determination. Yugoslavia and the U.S.S.R. provide several examples of this. Consider, for instance, Serbia (later subject to the secession of Kosovo) and Ukraine (later subject to the highly controversial secession of Crimea).
If an Arab Palestinian state had achieved independence in 1948, alongside the Jewish one, this would doubtless have affected the application of the rule of uti possidetis juris. With two states having achieved independence at the same time within the Mandate of Palestine, it would obviously not be possible for both states to share the borders of the Mandate. Different lines would have to serve as the basis of the borders of each states—if the new states could not reach agreement on mutually acceptable boundaries, the borders of districts or subdistricts would have to do. But, despite the potential self-determination claim of the Arab population of Palestine, only one state was born in 1948 at the termination of the prior administration. As the Palestine Mandate ended, the state of Israel achieved independence. No other state did.

Likewise, if the partition of Palestine envisioned by General Assembly Resolution 181 had been implemented, even if only administratively, the application of uti possidetis juris would have changed. Resolution 181 called for a U.N. Commission to take over administration of Palestine as the Mandatory withdrew. The Commission was to “carry out measures for the establishment of the frontiers of the Arab and Jewish States and the City of Jerusalem” and then to assist in the creation of provisional governments before the states achieved independence. However, the Commission never arrived in Palestine. Neither the Commission nor the Mandatory ever sketched out the proposed frontiers. At no time was a separate administration ever set up for the proposed Jewish, Arab and Jerusalem territories as called for by the resolution. In short, at the time of independence, there was only one administrative unit in Palestine. To attempt to apply uti possidetis juris to any borders other than those of the Mandate would leave the remaining Mandatory territories terra nullius, which is exactly the situation the doctrine seeks to avoid.

The paper concludes:

It is likely that a future peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians future solutions will reflect the parties’ presumed desire to accommodate Palestinian self-determination, as well as the right of states to modify existing uti possidetis juris borders by agreement. Uti possidetis juris is not, therefore, the last word on matters.

At the same time, it is likely that any future solution to the boundary disputes of Israel that wishes to take international law seriously will have to take account of the rules of uti possidetis juris. The doctrine is therefore an indispensable starting point for legal discussions of borders.

And that is the precise point. The 1949 armistice lines never held any legal value under international law, they were meant to be temporary. Jordan's seizure of the West Bank was not recognized by international law. The assumption that the so-called "1967 lines" should be used as the borders of a Palestinian state is legally baseless.

UPDATE: Video of a lecture that describes this in detail:

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Meet Mohammad Wari, one of the Arabs who was stabbed in Jaffa

Mohammad Wari is one of the victims of the Jaffa stabbings this week:

Reading Wari's social media posts you see an example of a successful, secular and funny man who happens to be an Arab who lives in Israel.

He is a product manager at Hola, an Israeli company that allows people to bypass Internet filters and that can be used in places like Iran and China. His LinkedIn profile says:

ENTP personality type. Continuously striving to improve my performance and expand my knowledge. I'm an avid self-learner, taking an active role in being a team player, leading brainstorm sessions, finding solutions, helping the team to stick with its objectives, and reaching its goals. I'm a big supporter of team diversity and believe that ultimately it serves a crucial role in finding creative solutions. Very experienced in product management, I like taking basic ideas and leading them to the next level, improving on what there is and filling the gaps on what's yet to be done.

Wari is a staunch atheist and hates religious-based conflict.

He works out at the gym:

He has gone skydiving:

Wari is also not shy about expressing political opinions and he speaks out against anti-Arab racism in Israel. He visited Berlin over New Year's. He likes Western music. He loves going back home to visit his family.

In other words, he looks, sounds and acts like any other single young Israeli professional.

The Palestinian Arabs (and other anti-Israel activists) who support terror attacks hate the Mohammad Waris as much as they hate Israeli Jews. They don't want Arabs in Israel and the territories to be seen as normal people, but only as victims. They don't want Palestinian youths to aspire to be like Mohammad Wari - they want them to be like his attacker.

Mohammad Wari shows that the entire philosophical basis of the Palestinian Arab leadership, and the propaganda that is force-fed to people worldwide, is wrong.

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Work accident!

A Hamas terrorist named Suleiman Mohammed Liadi was killed in some sort of training accident on Wednesday.

Hamas' obituary mentions that he was a tunnel worker but does not say that he died in a tunnel accident. We can only speculate on what killed him.

Now that he is dead, Hamas can show us his face while its members, for some reason, keep hiding their own faces even deep within Gaza during his funeral procession:

Far more Hamas terrorists have died this year by their own actions than were killed by Israeli forces.

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03/09 Links Pt2: Israeli Arab Diplomat Disrupted by Chants of ‘Long Live the Intifada,’ ‘Allahu Akbar’

From Ian:

Israeli Arab Diplomat’s Lecture at UC Davis Disrupted by Chants of ‘Long Live the Intifada,’ ‘Allahu Akbar’ (VIDEO)

A talk by an Israeli diplomat at the University of California, Davis on Monday was disrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters, The Algemeiner has learned. After unfurling a large banner across the room, the demonstrators chanted “Long live the intifada,” and other slogans, then exited the premises.
George Deek, an Israeli Arab Christian, was speaking on “The Art of Middle East Diplomacy,” when some 30 people moved to the front and sides of the room, according to witnesses and video of the event.
Completely obscuring Deek from the audience, they unfurled an enormous banner across the front of the room that read “1948=1492,” referring to the years of the Israeli War of Independence and the year in which both Columbus discovered America and the Jews were expelled from Spain.
They then began chanting anti-Israel slogans. Upon their exit, they yelled “Allahu Akbar!”

Protesters Interrupt and scream at Israeli Diplomat with "Long live the Intifada" at UC Davis

Palestinian Bassem al-Tamimi lead plaintiff in suit against dozens of Americans for supporting Israel

A group of Palestinians led by professional provocateur and propagandist Bassem Al-Tamimi has filed suit against a slew of Americans, American businesses, American organizations, international businesses and Israeli entities. The Complaint is embedded at the bottom of this post.
Altogether nineteen Plaintiffs have brought claims against fifty-three defendants. Plaintiffs’ attorneys are Martin F. McMahon, a colleague in his law firm, and Sameer Jarrah, who claims a license to practice law in Jordan.
Al-Tamimi is a familiar figure. He is at the heart of LI’s ongoing battle with Ithica, New York’s public school system (where he encouraged third-graders to become “freedom fighters for Palestine”), peddles the blood libel that Israel harvests and sells Palestinians’ organs, and uses his own daughter (and other children) as props in his war against Israel

Shirley Temper’s Father/Terror Supporter Bassem Tamimi Has US Visa Revoked

Bassem Tamimi, terror supporter & enabler, and father/exploiter of “Shirley Temper”, has apparently had his US visa revoked, according to a letter he himself posted on his Facebook page.
In 2012, Tamimi was arrested and sentenced to prison for planning demonstrations in Nabi Salih, as well as “soliciting” others to throw stones at IDF soldiers as they attempted to disperse the weekly rallies. Later that year, he was again arrested, this time for an illegal demonstration in the car park of Rami Levy, a supermarket accessible to both Jews and palestinians. I am guessing he failed to disclose at least one of those.
Tamimi has just been in the news, leading a group in some anti-Israel lawfare: filing a lawsuit in a US federal court against Sheldon Adelson, Elliot Abrams, John Hagee and a range of banks, companies and NGOs “linked to the settlement enterprise and to alleged war crimes in the three Gaza wars.”

German bank teller refuses service to Israeli

A bank teller at Bank Sparkasse, one of the largest banks in Germany, refused to open an account for an Israeli living in Berlin, telling him that Israeli passport holders are under embargo.
As a result of Ynet's request for comment, the bank's management - after an inquiry that lasted two weeks - responded by saying it was an error done by the teller, adding: "All we can do is apologize."
The Israeli, Yakir Avraham, went to the bank's branch in the Alexanderplatz area of Berlin, and when he gave the teller his Israeli passport in order to open the bank account, the teller took the passport and went into another room to check it. She returned a few minutes later and said "I'm very sorry, but we cannot open up a bank account for you here. We aren't allowed to open accounts for citizens of countries under embargo."
"I was in shock at first. How did it get to the point that they treat us like lepers? I took my passport and left the bank," Avraham told Ynet.
Immediately after the incident on February 24, Ynet turned to the bank management asking if there was a specific bank policy concerning Israel, and what they meant by "a country under embargo." The bank clarified that there is no official policy, and it was simply a mistake made by the teller.

Palestinian teachers have been on strike for several weeks, demanding higher wages that had been promised to them.

Understandably, Palestinians have been very interested in this story, because it affects their kids' futures - it might push the school year into the summer, forcing kids to study during Ramadan fasts, and some might not be ready for college entrance exams.

But Amira Hass of Haaretz is very frustrated that there is no anti-Israel angle to this story. Since that is all she knows how to write, she must invent one.

For the perplexed left, this strike doesn’t sit well with the definition of the Palestinians as victims and as combatants rightly opposing our violent rule. Some people don’t understand why teachers are investing their energies in internal matters. Why don’t they march up to army checkpoints and participate in demonstrations against the separation barrier? And how is it that they are demonstrating about wages while their current and former pupils take part in the lone-wolf uprising, being killed by Israeli gunfire?

However, if instead of converging on Manara Square these teachers were to march en masse towards the civil administration building, east of Ramallah, which houses the bureaucrats who represent the Israeli government, the real arbiter of everything, the IDF would massacre them. The wily Oslo accord turned official Palestinian institutions into a buffer zone between Palestinian subjects and the military rulers.

...The teachers are taking a stance not of victims, but as members of a society that knows it can be an agency of change, not just a needy and passive entity. At the same time, their protests relieve Israelis of the need to understand their own responsibility, as well as relieving pressure on Israel the occupier.

According to Hass and Haaretz, Palestinians simply do not have any responsibility - ever. They are always victims (except for when they cooperate with Israel; then they are monsters.)

In the incredibly condescending world of the radical Left who pretend to care so much about Palestinians, the Palestinians themselves have no more responsibility for their actions than animals do.

This anti-Arab racism of the Left is a truly remarkable phenomenon that is terribly under-reported. But you can see it every single day in Haaretz, +972 and other fringe publications that are taken seriously by too much of the world.

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The Las Vegas debate between J St and RJC is a failure before it begins

Tonight, there will be a much ballyhooed event in Las Vegas:

As described in the Jewish Journal last month:

The Republican Jewish Coalition and J Street are set to put aside their political differences for a brief pause to discuss the U.S.-Israel relationship next month in Las Vegas, according to a news release.In a first-of-its-kind event, J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami and Republican Jewish Coalition Executive Director Matt Brooks will appear together on March 9th at Temple Beth Sholom to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the relationship between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the policy preferences and beliefs of Jewish Americans, according to the organizers.PBS’ Jon Ralston will serve as moderator.The two organizations were on opposite sides of the aisle in last summer’s debate over the Iran nuclear agreement. J Street and the RJC are also fighting over the control of Congress in 2016, both invested in winning Congressional seats in battleground states across the country. J Street’s PAC has already announced it will spend as much as $3 million in over 100 local races across the country, challenging incumbents who have opposed the deal, while RJC aims to combat J Street race for race, and support the Republican incumbents.

The framing of this event is flawed and it cannot result in anything good for the American Jewish community.

The entire discussion is framed as a Democratic versus Republican discussion. Both Ben Ami and Brooks have a vested interest in keeping the event framed this way - Brooks because he wants to siphon Jews from the Democrats and Ben Ami because he wants to appear as if he is representing the Democratic pro-Israel center.

But this is false. Ben-Ami represents a fringe part of the Democratic Party. His J-Street is funding Democratic candidates who support the disastrous policies of the Obama White House - against Zionist, loyal Democrats who passionately oppose those policies. Where do they fit in this discussion?

Jeremy Ben Ami consistently claims that J-Street, by being for a two-state solution, is representative of the mainstream of American Jewish opinion. But even AIPAC and Bibi Netanyahu support a two-state solution. Ben Ami represents only the far Left view of "Israel is always wrong" - but that fact will not be revealed.

Ben-Ami is way out of the pro-Israel mainstream when he insists on the Green Line as being the start of all negotiations and the presumption that Jews have no rights in Judea and Samaria. (A truly pro-Israel supporter of the two state solution would want to keep as much of Judea and Samaria as possible as a beginning negotiating position and let the parties hammer out the details. Demanding that hundreds of thousands of Jews be ethnically cleansed from their homeland ab initio, and that Israel return to being nine miles wide, is not a pro-Israel position.)

Ben Ami is way out of the pro-Israel mainstream when he insists that Jerusalem be divided and the holy sites given to those who would happily slaughter any Jews who want to visit them.

Ben Ami is way out of the pro-Israel mainstream when his entire organization anti-democracy. J-Street is based on the idea that Israelis don't know what is good for them and that their democratically elected leaders are fanatics who must be taught a lesson about peace from their wise cousins who live thousands of miles away. J Street's entire purpose is to marginalize Israelis and tell the US to pressure Israel (and only Israel) to make more and more concessions for a peace deal while asking nothing from the Palestinians (and giving them veto power over any agreement that doesn't suit them.)

You can support a two-state solution - eliminating the demographic issues and minimizing the security issues - without starting negotiations from a position of giving everything up to begin with. But not according to J-Street.

These issues are what need to be debated with Jeremy Ben Ami - how he is betraying and misrepresenting Jewish American liberal Zionist positions as his own.

But that debate will not occur, because his opponent will happily agree that mainstream Jewish Democrats believe the same extreme positions as Ben Ami.

Look at Jeremy Ben Ami's Twitter feed. You will not find a single time that he has defended Israel. Ever. He has never defended its actions, its army, its leadership, or even its people against the lies and slanders. On the contrary, he has contributed much to the lies and half-truths about Israel. He is not pro-Israel no matter how many times he says he is. That is what must be discussed - how Ben Ami is not pro-Israel nor pro-democracy even from the perspective of liberal Jews.

But Brooks has no incentive to strengthen bipartisan support for Israel. He wants everyone to become Republican. That's his job.

The way that both sides approach the event is described in Jewish Insider:

Matt Brooks: ”When Jeremy and I meet tonight I look forward to a very engaging conversation on what it means to be pro-Israel in today’s climate and how we as a community can be most effective in representing the issues of concern within the Jewish community. There is a big difference in the views and tactics of RJC and J Street and tonight’s conversation will highlight and showcase those differences in a way that the community can discern and choose which is most effective and in the best interest of the Jewish people. This will be a civil discourse but no doubt I’m sure that we’ll see some real fireworks. The stakes are now more important than ever.”

Jeremy Ben-Ami writes… “My case is straightforward, based on data and experience from decades of national elections: Jewish voters support candidates who best reflect the values on which they were raised and policy positions that advance those values. Most Jewish voters support policies that make Israel safer not just against rockets but against some of the more fundamental threats to its future as a democratic Jewish homeland… Looking at the Republican field and particularly the present front-runner, I don’t envy Mr. Brooks — putting the metaphoric football down to yet again make the case that, yes, Charlie Brown, this is the year Jewish Americans will switch their allegiance to the Republican Party.”

So these issues which are vital to be exposed will instead be hidden. The mostly liberal Jewish audience will not be aware that they are being given a false choice between J-Street's disguised anti-Israel positions and those of a party that very possibly will be represented by Donald Trump (a theme that Ben Ami is anxious to hammer tonight.)

We do not need another reason to turn the question for support for Israel into a Republican vs. Democrat issue.

But that is inevitably going to happen tonight, and the losers will be a huge chunk of the American Jewish community who want to support Israel but do not want to vote Republican. And that is way too big a prize to sacrifice on the altar of partisan politics between J Street and the RJC.

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Iran Offers Jews Blood Of Homosexuals For Matzah (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Tehran, March 9 - In the spirit of what it called religious tolerance for the minorities within its borders, the Islamic Republic of Iran announced today that it would supply the Persian Jewish community at no cost with all the blood it needs to prepare unleavened bread for Passover this year, citing the availability of a large number of homosexuals to be executed. Passover begins the night of April 22 this year.

Ayatollah Edwar Davnorweesh of the Isfahan Religious District sent a notice to the leaders of Iran's 9,000-strong Jewish community that the recent uptick in hangings and beheadings of gay men in the country meant that the government was in position of being able to supply hundreds of liters of human blood for purposes of preparing matza, and that the Jews would not need to furtively murder non-Jews this year in order to obtain the liquid.

"Our efforts to purify our land of homosexual scum have afforded us the opportunity to foster religious tolerance and enable others to follow their traditions at the same time," the announcement read. "The alacrity with which our enforcement mechanisms have apprehended, tried, and meted out the appropriate sentence to deviants has enabled us to offer, free of charge, all of the blood we can drain from the criminals' bodies to our cherished Jewish community for purposes of kneading into matza, as everyone knows is their ancient practice."

Davnorweesh promised that given the higher risk of homosexual blood containing HIV, it would be tested before being supplied to matza bakers. He expressed bewilderment that those facilities were not equipped with tanks to hold non-Jewish blood, and offered to provide that equipment as well if necessary.

Jewish leaders have yet to respond to the overture, which may or may not have been extended in good faith, according to analyst Maha Rahl, who studies Jewish-Iranian relations. "It's hard to shake the feeling there's something cynical going on on the part of the regime," she said. "At the same time, it would be unwise for this minority community to reject such a gesture. Their welfare is at the mercy of the Ayatollahs, and getting on the bad side of a newly empowered hardline government may not be the wisest thing when every move by the community is scrutinized for signs that they do not show enough gratitude for not being persecuted more, or, worse, hints of Zionism."

Community officials declined to answer questions regarding the possibility that homosexual blood might be unacceptable under Jewish ritual law.

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03/09 Links Pt1: Jaffa terror victim was US Army vet, MBA student; Fatah celebrates murder of American

From Ian:

Avni: Terror shouldn’t be rewarded

Making sense of death is a near-impossible task. But with more than four months having passed since the brutal murder of my father, Richard Lakin, a dual citizen of both Israel and the United States, some things have become clear to me.
Firstly, the evil of terrorism does not discriminate, striking down the very best of people.
Secondly, terror does not occur in a vacuum. More than 30 Israelis have been killed during the latest wave of violence, almost half murdered by Palestinians aged 20 or under — children who have been indoctrinated to kill through poisonous incitement.
Thirdly, and perhaps most unequivocally, my father’s treasured values of coexistence, equality and peace must not be allowed to perish with him.
You would be hard-pressed to find a greater advocate for peace and coexistence than my father. As a young man in Connecticut, he pioneered the integration of the school at which he served as principal, and marched alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights struggle.
Our family has been following the terrible events of the past few months closely. With every attack we relive the nightmare and ask ourselves the same question: What causes a teenager to grab a knife and butcher an innocent civilian? As my father well understood, people are not born with hate, it is inculcated.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas must shoulder much of the blame. He has shamelessly endorsed the actions of countless terrorists, praising their “martyrdom.” He even made a condolence call to the family of Bahaa Allyan, one of the two young terrorists who murdered my father.
Last month I wrote to President Obama, urging him to condemn Abbas’ visit to the parents of the terrorist who murdered my father, and to call upon Abbas to curtail the wanton incitement that is fueling this wave of terror. I know that Vice President Joe Biden, who will be visiting Israel soon, shares the same values as my father. I am sure that he too will take the simple message of my father’s book, “Teaching As an Act of Love,” and convey it to President Abbas: “Every child is a miracle,” a miracle that should be nurtured with love, not hatred.

Jaffa terror victim was US Army vet, Vanderbilt student

The American tourist killed in Tuesday’s terror attack in Tel Aviv was identified as 29-year-old Taylor Force, a graduate student at Vanderbilt University, the school said in a statement.
Force, a Lubbock, Texas native, was killed and at least 10 people were injured Tuesday evening when a Palestinian man carried out a stabbing spree in Jaffa. Five of the injured were described as being in critical condition.
The attack was the third of the day; two policemen were badly hurt in a Jerusalem shooting earlier, and a 40-year-old father-of-five was stabbed repeatedly and moderately injured in an attack in Petah Tikva before managing to stab his assailant with his own knife.
Force was a US army veteran, according to his LinkedIn profile and an article published on a business school review website. He graduated from West Point Military Academy in 2009 and served as a field artillery officer from 2009-2014 at Fort Hood. A veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, he was in Israel on a school program.
Force’s wife was severely injured in the attack, according to Zaki Heller, spokesperson for the Magen David Adom ambulance service.
“It is with extreme sadness that I write to inform you that Taylor Force, a student at our Owen Graduate School of Management, was fatally wounded March 8 in a stabbing attack while on an Owen school trip to Tel Aviv, Israel,” the Nashville, Tennessee university said in a statement. “All other Vanderbilt students, faculty and staff on the trip are safe.”
“This horrific act of violence has robbed our Vanderbilt family of a young hopeful life and all of the bright promise that he held for bettering our greater world,” school Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos wrote. “Taylor’s family and his friends and colleagues have our deepest sympathy and utmost support.”

Fatah celebrates murder of American tourist

Fatah and the Palestinian Authority celebrated yesterday’s murder of Taylor Force, an American tourist who was visiting Israel with Vanderbilt University. Fatah’s official Facebook page posted a drawing of a knife held over the PA map of “Palestine” that includes all of Israel and the PA areas.
Text on arm: “The heroic Martyr (Shahid)”
Text on map is name of Taylor Force’s murderer: “Bashar Masalha”
[Official Fatah Facebook page, March 9, 2016]
Palestinian terrorist Masalha ran through the streets of Tel Aviv-Jaffa yesterday stabbing every civilian he passed, killing Force and injuring 11.
Official PA TV coined the American and other victims “settlers.” The PA often calls all Israeli cities - "occupied" - and all Israelis - “settlers” - a category of people they have claimed that international law gives them the right to murder. By calling the American a “settler” - even though he is not Israeli and was in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, official PA TV news is putting the blame on the victim.
PA TV likewise honored the killer calling him a “Shahid” - an Islamic Martyr:

PA TV News: American terror victim is “settler,” his Palestinian killer is holy “Martyr”

An NGO that deserves no donations - but gets plenty anyway

We have discussed "Defense for Children International-Palestine" before. They have consistently called terrorists "innocent children," counting children killed by Hamas rockets as victims of Israel, and coaxing children to make up the most lurid anti-Israel stories they can for their reports which often then get picked up by mainstream media.

DCI-P is a pure propaganda organization that calls itself a human rights NGO.

The latest example comes from a new report where DCI-P pretends to document the deaths of 41 children since October 1. (The article and report are not yet on their English site as of this writing.)

Not once does the news release mention that any of these teens were involved in terror attacks at the time they were killed.

To issue reports that say that Israel is killing innocent children in cold blood without even deigning to mention a single word about what they were doing at the time is a travesty and a slander.

The report lists Fuad and Nihad Waked, killed while attacking people and killing Tuvia Weissman at a supermarket, as victims.

At the exact same time that Palestinians are lauding them as heroes.

But DCI-P claims to support human rights for children. From looking at its website it appears that 90% of what it does is document often imaginary Israeli crimes and the other 10% is some vague activities on "teaching children about their rights." Apparently that claim is enough to prompt it to be funded by:

1. Interchurch Organization for Development Cooperation (ICCO and KerkinActie) Netherlands
2. Bread for the World – Germany
3. Save the Children International
4. Stichting Kinderpostzegels Nederlands (SKN) – Netherlands
5. ARCI Cultura e Sviluppo – Italy
6. Mundubat - Spain
7. Broederlijk Delen - Belgium
8. United Nation Development Programme -UNDP
9. Swiss Interchurches Aid- HEKS
10. World Vision
11. The United Methodist Church
12. The United Church of Canada
13. Temporary International Presence in Hebron – TIPH.
14. UNICEF
15. Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
16. Solidarity Fund
17. French Consulate
18. Open Society
19. MANARA
20. Geneva Kantoon
21. Human Rights and International humanitarian law Secretariat

Either these donors just like to throw money at any organization that claims to be supporting children, or they share a special hate for Israel. If they read any of DCI-P's reports with the slightest bit of skepticism, they know the truth.

We know that DCI-P has nothing to do with truth or accuracy. They are a bunch of liars who have learned that people will believe anything as long as it is "documented" with bogus evidence and half-truths, sprinkled with lies that they coach children to say.

DCI-P is not pro-children. It's main purpose is to create bogus reports to encourage more terrorism by children.

But what about the funders? Are they dupes - or is their hate for Israel so strong that they believe that the stream of lies out of DCI-P is worth more than other actual charities that really do help children?

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Palestinian media calls killing of stabber with his own knife "Jewish terrorism"

FrontPage described the remarkable scene yesterday:

Israelis have fought Muslim Jihadis trying to stab them with umbrellas and selfie sticks, not to mention good old-fashioned guns. Yonatan Ezriyahav, an Orthodox Jewish man, took the knife he had been stabbed with and turned it against the terrorist.

The Muslim attacker stabbed the Orthodox man in the neck. He managed to grip, pulled the knife from his body and lunged for the perpetrator and stabbed him several times in the body including the stabbing him directly in the neck. then he sat down and, according to bystanders said: "I killed a man who tried to kill me."

Palestinian Press Agency, which is mostly aligned with Fatah reports on this story with the headline "This is Jewish terrorism: Shocking Video: Israelis beating and stabbing to death a Palestinian youth."

Hebrew sites published a video in which a young Palestinian who stabbed a Jew is left to bleed to death without giving him any medical assistance.

According to eyewitnesses, the Israelis beat the young man and stabbed him to death.

And it appears in the video the Israelis are wishing death to the young man and demanding not to resuscitate him with ugly insults.

So a video that shows Israelis angry at a man who almost managed to murder a Jew is being used to incite Palestinians to murder more Jews.

Or, as Western media likes to say, a "cycle of violence."

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From TOI:

Iran on Wednesday test-fired two ballistic missiles, which an Iranian news agency said had the phrase “Israel must be wiped out” written on them in Hebrew. An Iranian commander said the test was designed to demonstrate to Israel, whose destruction Iran seeks, that it is within Iranian missile range.

Phrases threatening Israel have been emblazoned on missiles fired before by Iran, but this test came after the country signed a nuclear deal with world powers, including America. Hard-liners in Iran’s military have fired rockets and missiles despite US objections since the deal, as well as shown underground missile bases on state television.

I couldn't find any images that showed the phrase written on the missiles, but this news is prominent in Iran's state media.

There were two other stories about these missile tests in Iranian media that were not picked up by Western wire services.

Islamic Revolution Guards Corps Brigadier General Hossein Salami said that Hezbollah possesses more than one hundred thousand missiles Iran has tens of times that number of missiles - over a million of them, of various sizes and types, ready to be launched at the "enemy" at any moment from any point in the country from underground silos.

He added that "we convey all our expertise and our operational, scientific and tactical and strategic achievements to our brothers in the Islamic world and the resistance front against the United States and Israel and their regional allies."

In addition, IRGC Brigadier General Amir Ali Haji Zadeh said Iranian missiles are available "to the peoples of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and all the oppressed of the world," saying that the missiles constitute a threat to anyone who wants to launch an attack on the oppressed Muslim peoples.

"The work of the evil Zionist regime is completely clear to us, and the range of over 2,000 km for our missiles allows us to face this entity from a distance," he added.

President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry assured critics that sanctions will remain in place against Iran's ballistic missile program even after the nuclear deal:

Obama said last July:

As I said yesterday, even with this deal, we will continue to have profound differences with Iran: its support of terrorism, its use of proxies to destabilize parts of the Middle East. Therefore, the multilateral arms embargo on Iran will remain in place for an additional five years, and restrictions on ballistic missile technology will remain for eight years.

In addition, the United States will maintain our own sanctions related to Iran's support for terrorism, its ballistic missile program, its human rights violations, and we'll continue our unprecedented security cooperation with Israel and continue to deepen our partnerships with the Gulf states.

Kerry was more specific on Face the Nation a few days later:

Secretary Kerry, you're allowing as a part of this deal a terrorist nation to get both conventional arms and ballistic missiles. Why is that a good idea and why is that a part of this?

KERRY: Actually, we're not.

There is a limit on their ability to do so. Under the arms embargo, arms control, there will be limit of five years, and under the missile, in eight years, and the reason that we're only able to limit them to the five and eight, which is quite extraordinary that we got that, was that three of the nations negotiating thought they shouldn't have any and were ready to hold out to do that.

And we said under no circumstances. We have to have those. And they add on to additional mechanisms that we have to hold them accountable on arms and missiles. We have the missile control technology regime. We have other missile restraints on them. We also have other U.N. resolutions that prevent them from moving arms to the Houthi, prevents them from moving arms to the Shia, prevents them from -- to the Shia militia in Iraq, prevents them from moving arms to Hezbollah.

So, we have an ability way beyond, nothing to do with this agreement, to continue to enforce those issues.

How's that strategy working out?

Meanwhile, the amount of information about of Iran's nuclear program under the "unprecedented" inspections regime has been significantly reduced, according to reports.

But don't worry - the world is a safer place with Iran developing missile technology unhindered, with the ability to hide its nuclear weapons program.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

.@UNRWA starts its cover-up, and the @StateDept covers up for UNRWA

Today, AP's Matt Lee followed up in asking the State Department spokesperson John Kirby about whether they have any comment on the article I wrote yesterday about UNRWA inciting kids to become "martyrs" in "defending al-Aqsa."

The response was tepid, filled with wishy washy diplomatic cover for UNRWA and insisting that UNRWA takes these things seriously.

"Our blood and souls we will sacrifice for you, oh Al-Aqsa"

If UNRWA takes them seriously, then why am I still finding things every few months? Why aren't they policing themselves?

UNRWA today told the Gaza City school I reported on to take down the Facebook timeline entries from October 20, 2015, when the incitement ceremony was held. Many of the photos are still up (and won't be tomorrow after UNRWA reads this.) UNRWA did the least amount possible. They just covered up the easily visible parts but didn't uproot the problem. If UNRWA was really as serious about incitement and antisemitism as the State Department alleges, this wouldn't be a game of whack-a-mole - they would be publicly denouncing this incitement and announcing a plan to stop it once and for all. They would be doing what I'm doing to pro-actively find these issues before someone else does.

But they never did that and they never will, as long as their donors like the US government keep giving them cover as if specific UNRWA teachers are bad apples but UNRWA has no problems at its schools in general. I've uncovered enough institutionalized antisemitism at UNRWA schools based on their own social media sites to know better, and the State Department knows better as well.

Kirby's quote about how neutrality is vital to UNRWA sounds like it was written by Chris Gunness, not the US government. It is so obviously false as to make the rest of the statement a joke.

Here is today's State Department briefing discussing my scoop. I superimposed the evidence from UNRWA school webpages that show that there is nothing "alleged" about this: UNRWA schools are literally teaching children to kill themselves attacking Jews to stop them from visiting the Temple Mount.

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03/08 Links Pt2: In New Low, Scholars Defend Medieval Blood Libel Charges Against Israel

From Ian:

In New Low, Scholars Defend Medieval Blood Libel Charges Against Israel

Leave it to the Middle East studies establishment to defend the vilest forms of conspiratorial anti-Semitic rhetoric, provided it’s in service of demonizing Israel. Jasbir Puar, the Rutgers University women’s and gender studies professor and Israel-boycott advocate who, in a controversial February 3 lecture at Vassar College, charged the IDF with the organ harvesting, deliberate maiming, and stunting of “Palestinian bodies,” can certainly count on support from its ranks.
Notorious Israel-bashers such as Rashid Khalidi (Columbia University), Joel Beinin (Stanford University), and Steven Salaita (American University of Beirut) are among the signatories to an open letter to Vassar College President Catharine Bond Hill defending Puar against an alleged campaign of “vilification and hatred” following her inflammatory lecture. Unlike the vast majority of academic jargon-filled apologias for bigotry that populate the lecture circuit, Puar’s talk was widely covered and rightly condemned by a disgusted public. In evoking “hate mail and other threats” against Puar, the authors allude to the specter of death threats — whether real or imagined — a time-honored tradition among academics unaccustomed to the twin horrors of criticism and accountability.
The letter inveighs against the particular evils of a February 17 Wall Street Journal op-ed by Mark G. Yudof, former University of California president, and Ken Waltzer, professor emeritus of history at Michigan State University, titled, “Majoring in Anti-Semitism at Vassar.” Yudof and Waltzer had the temerity to point out the obvious: by accusing Israel of extracting organs from Palestinians for medical research, Puar was “updating the medieval blood libel against Jews.”
In the face of such censure, and unable to silence Puar’s critics, the letter’s authors urge President Hill to take the drastic action of writing “a letter to the Wall Street Journal … condemning in no uncertain terms the unjustifiable attack on Vassar and on Professor Puar.” Take that, free speech!

NYTs: An Anti-Semitism of the Left

The rise of the leftist Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of Britain’s opposition Labour Party appears to have empowered a far left for whom support of the Palestinians is uncritical and for whom, in the words of Alan Johnson, a British political theorist, “that which the demonological Jew once was, demonological Israel now is.”
Corbyn is no anti-Semite. But he has called Hamas and Hezbollah agents of “long-term peace and social justice and political justice in the whole region,” and once invited to Parliament a Palestinian Islamist, Raed Salah, who has suggested Jews were absent from the World Trade Center on 9/11. Corbyn called him an “honored citizen.” The “Corbynistas” on British campuses extol their fight against the “racist colonization of Palestine,” as one Oxford student, James Elliott, put it. Elliott was narrowly defeated last month in a bid to become youth representative on Labour’s national executive committee.
What is striking about the anti-Zionism derangement syndrome that spills over into anti-Semitism is its ahistorical nature. It denies the long Jewish presence in, and bond with, the Holy Land. It disregards the fundamental link between murderous European anti-Semitism and the decision of surviving Jews to embrace Zionism in the conviction that only a Jewish homeland could keep them safe. It dismisses the legal basis for the modern Jewish state in United Nations Resolution 181 of 1947. This was not “colonialism” but the post-Holocaust will of the world: Arab armies went to war against it and lost.
As Simon Schama, the historian, put it last month in The Financial Times, the Israel of 1948 came into being as a result of the “centuries-long dehumanization of the Jews.”
The Jewish state was needed. History had demonstrated that. That is why I am a Zionist — now a dirty word in Europe.

AFP Celebrates Murder: On International Women’s Day

Today, on International Women’s Day, the Agence France Presse (AFP) wire service published an article celebrating the wives of convicted Palestinian terrorists. Not all terrorists of course, only those who attack Israelis.
"Jailed Palestinians' wives caught between pride, struggle"
AFP starts by explaining that, “More than 7,000 Palestinians are currently held in Israeli prisons, with around 600 serving life sentences.” In a startling example of unashamed media bias, AFP makes no mention of why those prisoners are held, the terror that many have committed, or the number of lives they have claimed.
AFP says nothing of the Israeli victims or their families, nor does it mention that the Palestinian Authority government pays incarcerated terrorists sums far beyond what they could earn while free, thus creating a strong economic incentive to kill Israelis.
AFP goes on to make an emotionally charged case study of one Ahed Abu Golmi, mentioning only at the end of the article that he went to prison because of his role in the 2001 assassination of Rehavam Ze’evi, the Israeli Minister of Tourism. (Is there any country in the world where assassinating a government minister wouldn’t land the assassin in prison?) Not surprisingly, the article does not bother to interview, or even mention, Ze’evi’s family: he was survived by his wife Yael and their five children.