Friday, March 18, 2016

Palestinian prime minister justifies terror and then denies incitement on PA media

Palestinian prime minister Rami Hamdallah held a long interview with DW where he came across as smug and completely insincere.

When he was pressed to address Palestinian incitement to kill Jews, he first tried the old tactic of saying "Occupation!" Then he deflected with his claim that the PA only supports non-violent resistance. He then tried to justify the terror attacks. Finally, when pressed, he denied the charges altogether, calling those who make those charges liars.

Here is the music video that the interviewer was referring to. In this case, the video was shown on a Fatah TV station, not the official PA TV, but there have been similar videos shown there as well.

Here is just one recent example of direct incitement, by and to children, on official PA TV:

Hamdallah is supposed to be the moderate face of the PA, but he comes across as a condescending jerk.

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Ma'an Arabic has a story about how Israel is closing off some streets in Jerusalem, including Arab sections, for today's annual Jerusalem Marathon.

The newspaper, which is held up as being unbiased compared to other Palestinian Arab newspapers, refers to the event as the "Judaization Marathon." It refers to literature on the event that emphasizes that the marathon routes "combine scenic and cultural heritage sites in the capital of Israel."

Hamas news sites use similar language referring to the marathon.

Yesterday, streets in Manhattan were closed for the six-hour long St. Patrick's Day Parade. So far, I haven't heard from Amnesty about this massive violation of human rights.

The winner of the marathon was a Kenyan, 25-year-old Kipkogey Shadrack. Over 2,500 foreigners ran among the 25,000 participants, and over 1,000 police secured the routes and ensured that the runners would be safe from people with knives who are never referred to as violators of human rights.

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How will left-wing "Zionists" respond to the BTS bombshell? (update)

Arutz-7 reports:

Channel 2 news broadcast highly incriminating video evidence Thursday evening filmed with hidden cameras by nationalist group Ad Kan, which shows ultra-leftist group Breaking the Silence engaged in what appears like espionage activity against the IDF.

‘Breaking the Silence has crossed another red line,” Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said after the report was aired. “The investigative security forces are looking into the matter.”

The videos were gathered by Ad Kan’s undercover agents who infiltrated Breaking the Silence over a three-year period.

They show Breaking the Silence activists questioning ex-IDF soldiers – who are, in fact, Ad Kan agents – about details of the IDF’s security operations and equipment along the border with Gaza. The questions relate to how Hamas tunnels were discovered, what special forces were deployed and when, what kind of gun is deployed atop an IDF robot vehicle and more.

None of these questions have anything to do with allegedly immoral activities by the military in Judea and Samaria, which Breaking the Silence claims to be interested in exposing. Instead, they appear to be aimed at gathering intelligence about sensitive IDF operations along the border with Hamas.

In addition, a female Breaking the Silence activist revealed to an agent that she enlisted into the IDF’s Civil Administration in Judea and Samaria with the express purpose of gathering information about it, since she had been in touch with Breaking the Silence before she enlisted.

Breaking the Silence is acting like the victim:

Breaking the Silence CEO Yuli Novak denied that she was collecting classified information, adding: "there are several organizations, together with members of the Knesset from the Likud and Habayit Hayehudi, who are working to silence whoever tries to criticize the government and the occupation."

It sure sounds like a mostly European-funded organization has been spying on the IDF. How much of the information it gathered ended up with its European funders?

To me, the more important question is how will supposedly pro-Israel leftist groups like J-Street, the New Israel Fund, Yachad-UK, Hillel and others choose to respond to this report.

If they support BTS and choose to ignore the report, they will look like they are covering for a group that has proven that it is not pro-Israel but actively against Israel.

If they accept the report, then they should loudly denounce what the organization did and distance themselves from it, never hosting them on campus any more.

Even before this report it was obvious that BtS was not a pro-Israel organization in any sense. Natan Sharansky ridiculed the idea that it is a human rights organization and even called it a BDS organization. .

Specifically, Hillel International recently invited BtS to speak at Brown and Columbia Hillel despite all evidence that it is anti-Israel.

If it goes through with this after the Channel 2 report, then any pretense that Hillel is still pro-Israel goes out the window.

So how these supposedly "pro-Israel" organizations respond to this damning report will prove whether they have any claim to be truly pro-Israel.

UPDATE: The report:

שוברים שתיקה שותלים מרגלים בתוך צה"ל***מיוחד: שוברים שתיקה בתחקיר שכולם מדברים עליו***וידאו התחקיר המלא שפורסם הערב בחדשות 2 על החשיפה של ארגון עד כאן. לפיו התחקיר הזה, ארגון שוברים שתיקה מנסה לשתול בתוך הצבא מרגלים שלהם לצורכי מודיעין! זה פשוט מטורף לחשוב שארגון הזה מסובסד ע"י מדינות אירופה ומידע רגיש שכזה עלול להגיע אליהם. צפו ולא תאמינו! שתפו.
Posted by ‎מכאן - סדנאות הסברה ישראלית‎ on Thursday, March 17, 2016

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Jewish jokes from before 1905, part 6

OK, this joke book was from slightly after 1900. Sue me.

These jokes come from New Jokes and Monologues by the Best Jokers, Stage Conundrums, No. 4: The Brightest Stories and Best Jokes Told on the Vaudeville Stage, Issue 4, 1904.

A CHARITABLE HEBREW.
It doesn't hurt a men sumstimes he shall do some charity. I'll tell you vy so. I vas valking down the street de udder day, ven I seen a poor voman wid a baby in her arms. De voman vas crying. I never heard a voman cry so much in all my life. I vent by the voman and ask her for vy she cries. She told me she vas by de minister vit de baby, and de minister vould'nt christen de baby, because she didn't have de two dollars to pay him, I felt sorry for de voman, so I told her de baby shall have a name. I put my hands in my pocket, and all I could find vas a five dollar bill, so I says to her, here lady, here is a fife dollar bill, go by de minister, have the baby christened and I vill vait for me by de corner and you shall bring me tree dollars change back.

Vell I vaited nearly an hour de voman came back, and she handed me tree dollars, and said, miester you made me heppy. You see by dat little charity I made tree people heppy. De voman vas heppy because, she got a name for de baby. De minister vas heppy because he got de two dollars and I, I vas heppy because de five dollar bill was “counterfeit."

---

MRS. COHEN :—I don’t like this flat.

MR. COHEN Vat’s de matter, ain’t it a fine flat? Vy it has all do latest improvements, station house, vash stands, indecent lights, semetery, pluming and two kinds of cold water—“dirty and clean.”

MRS. COHEN :I know dat, but dere are no curtains in de bath room; every time I take a bath de neighbors can see me. _ '

MR. COHEN :Dat's all right, Rachel, if de neighbors see you, dey will buy de curtains.

---

Two Hebrews were walking up Broadway, in New York, one day, one says: "Abie, I vish I owned dat big building." His friend says: “If you did would you gif me half?" Abie says: “ No, I vouldn't, you make your own vishes." ‘

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03/17 Links Pt2: BDS from within; The Power of Words: There Never was a Palestine, sic

From Ian:

Alex Chalmers: Antisemitic anti-Zionism and the scandal of Oxford University Labour Club

Alex Chalmers was co-Chair of Oxford University Labour Club until he resigned in February, alleging that a ‘large proportion’ of club members had ‘some kind of problem with Jews’, while many used the slur ‘Zio’ and voiced support for Hamas. A controversy erupted and the Labour Party is now conducting an enquiry into antisemitism at the club. Chalmers argues here that the root problem is the poisonous ideology of antisemitic anti-Zionism which is bad for Diaspora Jews, bad for the Left, bad for Israelis and bad for Palestinians.
At the Labour Party Conference back in September 2015, the Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn addressed receptions held by Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East (LFPME) and Labour Friends of Israel (LFI). At both events he delivered relatively similar speeches in which he talked about the psychological toll that the conflict takes on both Israeli and Palestinian children and the need for both sides to compromise and negotiate. LFI received the speech enthusiastically, but at the LFPME event there was outrage. One attendee shouted ‘this isn’t about peace; this is about justice’, to enthusiastic applause from a large proportion of the room. When Benn tried to respond, he was heckled by people calling him a ‘disgrace’ and saying that he should not be Shadow Foreign Secretary.
This attitude of ‘justice’ over ‘peace’ is a damaging trend that has come to characterise much pro-Palestinian activism. That is to say, the demands of Western activists living in relative comfort have become progressively more detached from the aspirations of the actual people whom they claim to be defending. Whilst support for a two-state solution amongst Palestinians is lower than it has been historically, in the last 12 months, polling conducted by the Palestine Survey and Research Group has found that it is still the preferred outcome of between 45 and 51 per cent of Palestinians. Contrast this with the logo of the UK’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign which features the entirety of ‘historic’ Palestine with no mention of Israel.

Hotovely schools Harvard law students on Judea-Samaria

Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely (Likud) spoke on Wednesday afternoon with 50 law students from Harvard University's honors program.
As part of her ongoing efforts to campaign for Israel's rights in its Biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, Hotovely took the opportunity to speak to the students about the criticism against Israel over it's presence in the region.
"The time has come to return to the legal truth according to international law - the 'occupation' is a lie from the Palestinian libel factory, together with the claims of apartheid, this is slander disconnected from the legal reality," she said.
Hotovely continued, explaining, "the State of Israel did not occupy Judea and Samaria in 1967 from the state of Palestine, because there never was such a state. Jordan was illegally in possession of the territory, and we liberated Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria in a defensive war."
"After they were unable to defeat us in war throughout the years, the stage of delegitimization began; the BDS movement negates the state of Israel's right to exist, and the way to fight it is by revealing the lies and letting the truth be heard throughout the world."

Open thread

Discuss amongst yourselves. Play nice.

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Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

Anyone who has ever tried to babysit a group of Israeli kids knows the expression translated as “this will end in crying.” Sometimes you just know that there will not be a good ending for certain kinds of behavior.  Maybe a boy can pinch his big sister and run away once or twice, but ultimately she is going to catch him…and it will end in crying.

I am beginning to think that the Iranian campaign against Israel is in this category. There will come a time when the Iranian regime’s assistance to Hamas, its massive military presence in the form of Hezbollah on our northern border, its development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, its sponsorship of worldwide terrorism against Israeli and Jewish targets, and its continuing trumpeting that our nation will be destroyed, can no longer be ignored.

What is a real existential threat? It’s when someone says that he is going to kill you, you believe him, and you know that he has a weapon capable of doing it. Iran has met two out of three of these conditions. The only part we’re unsure about is whether it has the ability to carry out its threats.

The only reasonable response to an existential threat is to strike the enemy hard enough to eliminate the threat. That could mean bringing down a regime, destroying its military capabilities, or both. If there is no other option, it could mean a massive strategic attack that would also cause a large number of civilian casualties and damage.

Such a threat means your back is against the wall. It means you fight or die. It means that you do whatever is necessary to win because if you lose you are finished. It means that what the EU or Barack Obama think are irrelevant (unless you think they will intervene militarily).

No, Iran is not at that point yet. We don’t think the regime has deliverable nuclear weapons yet and we think we can handle whatever Hezbollah and Hamas can throw at us.

Even a coordinated attack including missile barrages from Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran, along with incursions in both the North and South via attack tunnels, plus numerous terror attacks from the PA and local ‘sleepers’ could be repulsed. We would suffer painfully, but we would prevail. Probably southern Lebanon and Gaza would end up looking like the surface of the Moon when it was over. Iran would lose its developing nuclear capability, too. That’s why it isn’t attacking us today.

But some things could change the equation. One would be Iran’s acquisition of deliverable nuclear weapons. This could happen tomorrow, and is almost certain to happen within a  few years unless the regime is overthrown, which seems unlikely.

Another would be the establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria. That would mean that in addition to Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, we would be fighting an American-trained and equipped PLO army on our eastern border, and that border would be right next to our most critical infrastructure.

A takeover of Egypt by Islamic extremists could also upset the balance. Although it might take a while before Egypt became a danger itself, an open Egyptian border to Gaza could multiply the threat from Hamas. There is also the possibility of the king of Jordan being overthrown, either by IS or Iran-backed radicals. There are probably other scenarios that would have the same effect.

What I am trying to say is that the situation is unstable. Any balance of power is temporary. And if – more likely, when – it tips against us, we will have no choice but to act to neutralize the threats. Once that happens, the usual constraints on action will be gone.  It won’t be a limited ‘mowing the grass’ operation and it may not be possible to employ the kind of tactics to minimize collateral damage that we have used in the past.

The greatest challenge will be to our leadership, which will have to overcome habits developed during decades of deterring or managing conflict.  If you doubt the importance of this, consider the 2006 Second Lebanon War, in which Israel was in a far better position vs. Hezbollah than today, and even had a tacit green light from the Bush Administration and the Sunni Arabs to finish off Hezbollah. But the team of Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni, Amir Peretz and Dan Halutz were not up to the job – and their military failure was followed by a diplomatic one, as the toothless UN Security Council resolution 1701 that they negotiated did not disarm Hezbollah or prevent the massive buildup that threatens war today.

Until recently, many Israelis felt that their leaders were too concerned about security, and wanted their government to place more emphasis on social and economic issues. As Olmert unfortunately put it at a speech to the Israel Policy Forum in 2005, “We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies…” Before the last election, PM Netanyahu was accused of making too much of a fuss about the weaknesses of the Iran deal.

But the lack of day-to-day personal security as well as revelations about how damaging the Iran deal has actually been have focused attention on security issues in general, including the broader strategic ones. If there were an election next week, it’s not likely that the candidates would base their campaigns on who would do a better job reducing the price of apartments.

No politician wants to be in the position of Golda Meir, who made the wrong decision in 1973 and did not preempt (or even prepare for) the Yom Kippur war, or Olmert, who bumbled his way to blowing an opportunity that, in hindsight, might have made the  picture look very different today. So these issues are very much at the forefront of our leaders’ minds.

I don’t think the folks sitting in Tehran understand us, and I think they are listening to their own braggadocio a little too much, because they don’t seem to grasp how dangerous it is for them to continue on their aggressive path. Sooner or later it will reach the point that we see them as a true existential threat. Then we will have no options except to preempt that threat.

It will end in crying.

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03/17 Links Pt1: Six hours in Gaza; Five years since the Fogel family massacre; The world Obama made

From Ian:

Six hours in Gaza: a first-person account by Jackson School Professor Joel Migdal

I was flooded with impressions as we drove into the old city of Gaza. The first was, unexpectedly, that it looked nothing like India. Given the severe poverty, even humanitarian crisis, that Gaza as a whole is experiencing, I had expected the obvious and wrenching poverty that I had seen in some Indian cities or many other Third World countries, for that matter—collapsing infrastructure, rickety shacks, a surfeit of beggars, children in rags, adults sleeping on the sidewalks. At least in this part of the city and others that I saw later in the day, none of that was visible. Instead, I saw hordes of children going to school, university students walking in and out of the gates of the two universities—both the children and the university students reasonably dressed. I observed morning shoppers buying vegetables and fruits from stands, shopkeepers opening their shops, and people walking purposefully to wherever they were going for the start of the day. There were cranes and construction workers everywhere, with lots of uncompleted buildings being worked on. A garbage truck, with a UN sign on it, was making its rounds.
I saw almost no signs of authority on the streets. No police. No guns. No moral police. One person commented to me that in 2009 Hamas was omnipresent, with lots of moral policing on the streets. Since then, such surveillance has fallen off, but people have learned to be self-policing in their behavior in public, he said, just to be safe and not harassed.
There was the occasional bombed out building, from the 2014 War. One had the entire top of the building, several stories, simply blown off. But other than those, most buildings were in decent shape, and some apartment buildings were downright nice. There were definitely some junkers on the road, but most of the cars looked like late-model varieties. Some of the side streets were pocked and broken up; the main thoroughfares, though, were in good shape. There were almost no traffic lights, and traffic was a bit chaotic. I must add again that I was in Gaza City (both the old and new parts of the city) only and did not go to some of the outer areas and refugee camps where the bombing in the 2014 war was the heaviest and where, I understand, destruction was massive.

At the UN, ISIS and Israel are equal

The UN envoy for Children and Armed Conflict, Leila Zerrougui, suggested including the Israeli army in the black list of countries and organizations that regularly cause harm to children along with Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the Taliban, and countries such as the Congo and the Central African Republic, infamous for their armies of children.
The culture of human rights, created by Jewish jurists after the Holocaust, is now being used by anti-Semites to foment a war against the State of Israel. Mr. Alfred de Zayas, the United Nations’ Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, blamed last year’s Paris attacks on the U.S., Western colonialism, capitalism, and “Israeli settlers”, implicitly justifying them as “a response to grave injustices and ongoing abuses perpetrated by the dominant, primarily developed countries, against populations of less developed countries”.
Instead of equating Hamas with ISIS and ISIS with Iran, the UN officials ponder whether to include the IDF on the same lepers’ list as Islamic State. Whether they succeed or not doesn’t matter: they very presence pollutes the political atmosphere and destroys the reputation of the Jewish State.
Israel’s biggest enemy today is not Jihadism, but the UN which entrusted the defense of human rights to China, Cuba, Russia and Saudi Arabia, among other liberal bastions, and to paranoid “experts” whose anti-Semitism resembles that of Doktor Joseph Goebbels.

UN "Human Rights" Council, From bad to worse, Sarah Willig, Touro Institute, March 15, 2016

PA’s collapse now seems a matter of when, not if

Highly placed Israeli politicians have been saying for months that the Palestinian Authority’s threat to stop security coordination was an empty one. The statement was made, time and again, including by senior ministers, that such a move would be “a suicidal act” for the PA and its president, Mahmoud Abbas.
But the proposal that Israel’s defense establishment recently made to the PA — that security responsibility for Ramallah and Jericho return exclusively to the PA, and that the Israeli army stop making arrests in those areas — shows just how seriously it is taking the threat.
The Israeli proposal was no mere whim. Representatives of all the relevant agencies — the army, the coordinator of government activities in the territories, and the Shin Bet security service — were at the meeting with PA officials at which the idea was presented.
The proposal itself, which was first reported by Haaretz, was also approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon — even though their own previous statements had indicated, any number of times, that they did not believe continued security coordination was in danger.

Recent mentions of The Protocols in Arab media

Writing in Al Wafd, Dr. Mustafa Mahmoud says that the US, guided by the principles of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is encouraging Sunni-Shiite conflict.

Fahd Amir Ahmadi in Al Riyadh says that Switzerland is the creation of the Elders, who wanted to create a neutral territory in the center of Europe so money could be freely laundered through it for their nefarious schemes.

Bashir Kurdi in Gulf-24 writes of a friend of his who stopped watching the news because to him everything is a result of the First Protocol to create chaos and revolutions and wars, all a legacy of Sykes-Picot and the Americans and Russians allowing "Zionist cancer proliferation" from the Nile to the Euphrates and from the Arabian Sea to the Black Sea.

Al-Ankabout has an article on how the Mossad nefariously uses women to accomplish their evil goals. This is also a commandment in the Protocols, as well as from a secret Masonic text from 1920. It included this great graphic graphic.

Laha Online has an article about "digital drugs," reporting on a conference on the topic "Digital Drugs and their impact on Arab Youth" at Prince Nayef Arab University for Security Sciences. it says that the phenomenon of digital drugs was introduced by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion which supposedly says "We have to occupy others with stunning colors of amusement and gaming in public forums, art and sex and drugs to distract from the exposure to our plans."

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From Ammon News:

Installing cameras at the Al-Aqsa Mosque/Al-Haram al-Sharif will enable 1.7 billion Muslims across the globe to remain in touch with the holy shrine and those taking care of it, State Minister of Media Affairs, Muhammad Momani, said on Wednesday.

The minister, who is also government spokesman, said the cameras will put an end to violations by extremist Israeli settlers, explaining that the cameras will not be installed at praying places at the holy shrine and this is a clear evidence that the cameras are meant to monitor moves by extremist Jews and not to monitor Muslim worshippers.

Momani added that the installation of the cameras will refute Israeli claims that "Palestinian rioting" is to blame for their provocations and violations against the holy shrine by Israeli police and extremists. The minister emphasized that the cameras and the footage they will provide will help Jordan document Israeli violations and pursue legal action at international arenas.

He noted that Israeli right-wing groups oppose the installation of cameras at the holy shrine because this measure will strengthen the Jordanian presence at the holy site.

From the articles I've seen, the footage from the cameras will not be public, but will be monitored by both Israeli and Jordanian security.

I have not seen any Israeli object to the cameras. On the contrary, Israelis want to have more cameras, including in the Al Aqsa mosque itself, because that is where rioters often stockpile rocks and fireworks, as their own videos have shown. Their backing down on that demand is seen as a great victory for Jordan.

In other words, Momani is doing pure spin. There is no danger of the cameras catching Jews doing anything provocative because there have been people videoing the Jews visiting for years and they never found any unprovoked actions (unless you consider silent prayer to be an obscene provocation.)

I would love for high resolution footage to be live-streamed from multiple angles 24/7. And archived.

The cameras are to be installed before Passover.

Here is the latest video of those stormin' "settlers" from yesterday:

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Egyptians double down on idea that the niqab came from Jews

I reported last month that an Egyptian "scholar" who is against women veiling themselves blames the custom on Jews.

Aminat Naseer, a professor of religion and philosophy at Al-Azhar University, has been an outspoken opponent of allowing female students to wear the niqab that covers their faces. So to discourage the practice she makes up fake quotes from Maimonides saying that Jewish women are not allowed to show their faces. her motivation, of course, is to associate a practice she hates with Jews.

Apparently the Arabic version of Times of Israel has reported on her recent comments about the supposed Jewish origins of the veil, and debunked it by quoting some actual exports in Judaism. She insists she is right, of course, but didn't bring any new proof.

However, another Egyptian "expert" has.

Dr. Mohammed Abu Ghadeer, former head of Israeli Studies at Al-Azhar University, says that the Hebrew Bible proves it so Jews cannot possibly deny it. He quotes Daniel, "verses 30-36," without citing any chapter number about a woman named Susanna who unveiled herself: "Susanna, very delicate and beautiful, was veiled; but those transgressors of the law ordered that she be exposed so as to sate themselves with her beauty."

There is no such mention in the Hebrew Bible. He is quoting the Protestant Apocrypha book of Susanna which was never part of the Hebrew Bible and was not discussed in any early Jewish sources. Some Catholic Bibles incorporate this story as a 13th chapter of Daniel. It is an interesting story but it misrepresents the Jewish concept of "eidim zomemim" (collusive witnesses) and under what circumstances they would be put to death. (Briefly, witnesses who falsely accuse others of a crime get the same punishment that the victim would have gotten, but the way that they are disproven is not the way young "Daniel" did it, even though it is a great story.)

The story takes place in Babylon and there were certainly Arabian tribes that veiled women at various times in history, but it was never a Jewish custom.

It is really funny that Egyptians must resort to associating any hated practice with Jews in order to delegitimize it among Muslims.

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Jewish jokes from before 1900, part 5

Continuing my Adar-themed series of Jewish jokes from old books.

This is from an 1786 work called "The Treasury of Wit; Being a Methodical Selection of about Twelve Hundred, the Best, Apophthegms and Jests; from Books in Several Languages. In Two Volumes. ..." By H. Bennet, M.A.

I found two relevant jokes. The first one is mildly antisemitic:

And...so is the second.

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03/16 Links Pt2: Israel World’s 11th Happiest Country; When Saudi Arabia Was a Jewish Kingdom

From Ian:

Israel World’s 11th Happiest Country Ahead of US, UK, France, Germany

The 2016 happiness index shows that there is a wide variation among countries and regions in their inequality of well-being, and in the extent to which these inequalities changed from 2005-2011 to 2012-2015. In the world as a whole, in eight of the 10 global regions, and in more than half of the countries surveyed there was a significant increase in the inequality of happiness. By contrast, no global region, and fewer than one in 10 countries, showed significant reductions in happiness inequality over that period.
But, according to the index, “people do care about the happiness of others, and how it is distributed. New research suggests that people are significantly happier living in societies where there is less inequality of happiness.”
Israel in 11th place is followed by Austria in 12th and the US in 13th. Germany is in 16th place, the UK in 23rd, and France is in 32nd, trailing the United Arab Emirate in 26th place. Surprisingly, Japan is in 53rd place.
The unhappiest country on the planet is Burundi, in 157th place, Syria is 156th, Afghanistan 154th and Yemen 147th. (h/t Yenta Press)

Before Islam: When Saudi Arabia Was a Jewish Kingdom

The discovery of the oldest-known pre-Islamic Arabic writing in Saudi Arabia, from ca. 470 CE, evidently caused some consternation, given its Christian and Jewish context.
In 2014, researchers from a French-Saudi expedition studying rock inscriptions in southern Saudi Arabia announced they had discovered what could be the oldest texts written in the Arabic alphabet. But they did so very quietly, perhaps because the context of the texts is something of an embarrassment to some.
The dozen or so engravings had been carved into the soft sandstone of the mountain passes around Bir Hima – a site about 100 kilometers north of the city of Najran, which over millennia has been plastered with thousands of inscriptions by passing travelers and officials. Conveniently, at least two of the early Arabic petroglyphs that were discovered cited dates in an ancient calendar, and expert epigraphists quickly calculated that the oldest one corresponded to the year 469 or 470 CE.
The discovery was sensational: the earliest ancient inscriptions using this pre-Islamic stage of Arabic script had been dated at least half a century later, and had all been found in Syria, which had suggested that the alphabet used to write the Koran had been developed far from the birthplace of Islam and its prophet.

High School Censors Swastikas, Missing Entire Point of Satirical Anti-Nazi Play, The Producers

Administrators have ordered the removal of swastikas from a high school production of The Producers, the famous Mel Brooks film that makes fun of Nazism.
The New York school district that oversees Tappan Zee High School considers the inclusion of a swastika to be offensive and, possibly, a hate crime—regardless of the context.
“There is no context in a public high school where a swastika is appropriate,” South Orangetown Superintendent Bob Pritchard told the local CBS station.
The kids in the play had a different reaction.
"It's satire, not supposed to be taken seriously," said Tyler Lowe, a student performer. CBS notes that Lowe is himself Jewish.

New video made from my "Apartheid?" posters

From Israel in Europe:

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Hamas rep signing declaration supporting Hezbollah

It's almost a joke in the Arab world to watch Hamas and the PA continuously pretend to want reconciliation but never actually being able to do it. The most recent talks were last month and ended in the same squabbling that they always do.

But there is one point of unity among not only the PA and Hamas, but also with Islamic Jihad. Against virtually the entire Sunni world - from which they get lots of aid - they have chosen to publicly support Hezbollah and Iranian ambitions in the Middle East.

Now the PFLP has joined them. Al Manar (Hezbollah) reports:

The secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Ahmed Saadat, stated from the Zionist prison that the Front is proud of Hezbollah and his resistance against the Israeli occupation and against the Western schemes along with the Palestinian factions.

In a letter, Saadat said that the Popular Front considers that the GCC as well as the Arab Interior and Foreign Ministers resolutions which blacklisted Hezbollah as a terrorist group are valueless and serve the Zionist entity.

"The entire world knows Hezbollah that asserts that the Palestinian cause is his priority, unlike the ruling junta."

Soon the PA will see a reduction in aid from the UAE and Saudi Arabia because of their displeasure at its tilt towards Iran, and the PA will then whine to the West that it cannot pay its bills.

Then again, Iran was just rewarded with a lot of cash.

Either way, the West will be paying for the next round of terror and incitement, either directly or indirectly.

And that terror is what unifies Palestinians more than anything.

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