Thursday, March 31, 2016

Arab media upset that Abbas said nice things about Jews to delegation

I reported that Mahmoud Abbas had met a delegation of Sephardic Jews this week.

The delegation was actually of Israeli leftists of Sephardic origin, who wanted to genuflect to Abbas in order to tell Abbas, as Galei Tzahal put it, that "there are Israelis who want peace."

A rabbi from Kiryat Gat, Avraham Golan, blessed Abbas with long life, a sculptor gave Abbas a statue of his bust, and they all ended up eating what was reported to be a kosher meal in the middle of Ramallah (I wonder who the supervising rabbi was?)

Abbas, knowing that he has an audience that would unquestioningly accept any lies he says, responded by saying that the Mizrahi Jews are considered fully part of the Arab nation, that he wants to have peace talks with anyone including Netanyahu....and that he enjoys listening every day to the songs of Israeli singer Moshe Eliyahu whose family lived in Syria.

Now Arab media is upset that Abbas said nice things about Jews.

Egyptian paper Al Arabya News (not to be confused with Al Arabiya) called the event a "disaster" exposing that Abbas "adores Israeli singing." The newspaper is critical of Abbas in general.

It added that the blessing given by the rabbi was similar to the weekly blessings that Jews in Arab countries used to give to their political leaders as a sign of appreciation and loyalty. (Actually, that is a standard part of the Shabbat service in every prayer book, not just in Arab lands.)

It should be mentioned that the Fatah Platform explicitly calls to meet with Israeli leftists in order to help split Israeli society against itself:

Restoring our direct and strong relations with the Israeli peace camp, and revitalizing our joint action for a just peace, without mingling it with normalization with Israel, which is rejected while occupation continues.

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Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

The case of the soldier who killed a wounded terrorist continues to create a political storm in Israel. In my last post, I noted that if in fact the soldier did not have good reason to believe that the terrorist had a suicide belt, then he violated IDF orders that a wounded terrorist who does not pose a risk should not be harmed. As more information becomes available, I am becoming more and more persuaded that the position taken by army officials and Minister of Defense Ya’alon is correct in a narrow sense: the soldier’s action was not legally justified.

But the problem is not the soldier, although he will probably be punished. How can you have an army where soldiers can violate orders and not be punished?

The problem is the orders. The problem is that we are at a point in time when the moral principles that are supposed to guide our behavior have come into conflict with the demands of the geopolitical environment in which we must survive.

Jonathan Haidt argues persuasively that moral principles seem to us to be intuitively true, and then we try to justify them. We do this sometimes with rational arguments and with appeals to authority, including, in the case of Jews, the Torah and writings of the Sages. But the ultimate source of the intuitive feeling of rightness attached to laws like “do not murder” develops from an evolutionary process. Humans are clever, and they find ways to show how reason and authority justify what they intuitively ‘know’. But this happens after the fact.

A human culture creates a consensus for those moral principles that promote the survival of the culture. These values become part of the way people perceive the actions of others. They become intuitive. Cultures that internalize the wrong principles die out.

Like any evolutionary process, moral evolution takes place in response to environmental pressures. When the environment changes, existing principles and the rules that are derived from them have to change too. This is similar to what happens in biological evolution. If a population of animals or plants living in a particular region experiences a severe change in climate, either it adapts, moves or dies out.

Today Western cultures are under attack by an Islamic jihad. The Jewish people, who share many characteristics with both the West and the Islamic world, are also a target of the jihad. Unlike the short, intense wars of the 20^th century, the jihad is prosecuting a long, low-level conflict which occasionally bursts into flame along the extensive seam between the Islamic world and the West. Israel is right on this seam, and because of both its ties to the West and the Jewish people’s historical relationship to Islam, it is a flashpoint for violence.

This conflict, which has affected Jews in the Land of Israel almost since the birth of Islam, has become part of the environment in which the Jewish people lives. The importance of compulsory military service to Israeli culture is just one of the ways the conflict shapes the fabric of our lives.

In the West – Europe and North America – cultural evolution has moved in a different direction than in Israel. Since 1945, it has been touched little by war, and the greatest challenge (especially in North America) has been dealing with what has been called ‘affluenza’, the disease of having too much of everything.

The wars of the 20^th century were blamed on nationalism and ethnic particularism, and the reaction elevated values of universalism, empathy, equality, and concern for all humans over concern for one’s own group. In America, the old hierarchies changed drastically after WWII, which led directly to the civil rights movement, spawning a whole new moral vocabulary.

Israel, being a mixture of the West with the Middle East, has absorbed a certain amount of the new Western morality. But both the influence of more traditional Jewish beliefs and the reality of the conflict have resulted in a sharp divergence of attitudes. This was thrown into sharp relief by the affair of the soldier, which has given rise to both extreme condemnations of his act, and demonstrations in his favor.

There is a contradiction between the official position of the Army and government, which wish to be aligned with the ‘enlightened’ West, and the reality of the conflict. In this case, enlightenment means that once a terrorist has been rendered harmless, a soldier must instantly stop seeing him as a target for possibly deadly force, and instead see an injured human being that should receive medical treatment.

Under the best of conditions, it’s a difficult for a person to make this transition, but a conflict in which terror attacks are a daily occurrence and in which the soldiers that must respond are also a target of them makes it harder. Since the soldiers are not an isolated segment of the population as in the West, but are conscripts who are everyone’s children, it’s easy to understand the fury in the streets and on social media.

This is exacerbated by the strategy of the jihadists to exploit Israel’s concern for fighting according to moral principles in order to inflict more damage. So they attack our civilian population and use their own as human shields. They take advantage of Israel’s humanitarian aid for the population of Gaza to divert materials to build attack tunnels. And they take advantage of the propensity of the West to empathize with them – at the same time that other jihadists kill westerners in their own countries – to get them to apply pressure to Israel to fight back less aggressively.

What is happening is that the moral principles of the West, developed in an age of relative peace and affluence, weaken the society that espouses them when they must confront the Islamic jihad. This is seen quite clearly not only in Israel, but in Europe where the fabric of society is currently being torn by an invasion of Muslim migrants, who are actually beingwelcomed by some of their governments and elites.

In order to survive, a culture must adapt to its changing environment. Israel, unlike Europe, still has a strong particularist strain. In Europe, healthy nationalism has been snuffed out, decried as ‘right-wing extremism’, leaving only the true extremists to carry the banner of the Right. In Israel, Zionism – Jewish nationalism – isn’t dead, although the Left would like to kill it.

Israel can defeat the jihad, but in order to do so it has to adopt what the Left would call a more ‘primitive’ code of ethics, but in fact one that is adapted to the life-and-death struggle we are in. It should place the protection of all of our people, including soldiers, above all other considerations.

It would be better if we didn’t have to do this. It would be wonderful if we could cooperate with the Palestinian Arabs – there could be an economic miracle that everyone could participate in. Palestinian children could become scientists, doctors, or teachers of something other than hate. But that isn’t the world we live in. We live in a place where it is either us or them. They are killing our soldiers, our mothers and fathers and grandmothers. Even the young ones are taught to kill. We have to stop them, whatever it takes.

If we don’t evolve, we will be erased from history like the dinosaurs.

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03/31 Links Pt1: ISIS Makes the EU More Anti-Israel; Muslim Zionist recognized for her contributions to IDF

From Ian:

Evelyn Gordon: ISIS Makes the EU More Anti-Israel

Like every major Islamist attack in Europe, last week’s terror attacks in Brussels left many Israelis wondering whether Europeans will finally understand what Israel faces. Unfortunately, such attacks are more likely to intensify anti-Israel activity in Europe. To understand why, it’s worth reading an article from the Islamic State magazine Al-Naba that propounds a surprising thesis: Jihad against Israel doesn’t take precedence over jihad anywhere else.
The article, translated by MEMRI, argued that the “Palestine first” slogan, which has reigned supreme for almost seven decades, has led good Muslims to ignore all the other places where jihad is no less necessary, or even more so. Indeed, it said, Muslims’ top priority should be purifying lands already under Islamic control, for both religious and practical reasons. Religiously speaking, “The apostate [tyrants] who rule the lands of Islam are graver infidels than [the Jews].” And practically speaking, defeating Israel won’t be possible without first destroying neighboring Arab regimes that are its “first line of defense.” Consequently, “Waging jihad with the aim of replacing the rule of the Jews with a regime like that of those who currently rule Gaza and the West Bank is jihad that is null and void,” because it would just replace infidel Jews with infidel Muslims.
But fighting Jews also doesn’t take precedence over “fighting the Crusaders and all the polytheists in the world,” the article stressed. In fact, “Muslims everywhere should fight the infidels nearest to them,” since that’s where they have the best chance of succeeding.
That last sentence sums up why Islamic State’s approach is Europe’s worst nightmare. For decades, Europe had a cushy arrangement: All the world’s jihadists were so fixated on Israel that they were willing to overlook longstanding hatreds against “Crusader” Europe, as long as Europe would help them wage war on Israel. As Manfred Gerstenfeld pointed out this week, many European countries — including Switzerland, Germany, France and Italy — tried to take advantage of this offer: They sought deals under which Palestinian terrorists could operate freely in their countries – usually without fear of arrest, but with swift release guaranteed if arrests were necessitated by American pressure – and in exchange, the terrorists wouldn’t attack those countries.

UN Watch exposes bias of proposed Palestine investigators, incurs wrath of Palestinian delegation

Some of the antisemitic events in March we missed

The World Zionist Organization publishes a monthly roundup of antisemitic activities worldwide. Here are some from March that I had missed during the month.

March 3, Thessaloniki - A rally against the new electronic “card of citizen” gathered hundreds of people in front of the oversized statue of Alexander the Great in Nea Paralia of Thessaloniki, reports journalist Sofia Christoforidou.

Laypeople and members of the Greek Orthodox organization “Agios Vasileios” protested the “instruments of Antichrist and the New World Order” holding religious icons, banners, Greek and Byzantine flags. One of the banners featured the message: “No to the card of citizen. There is only one enemy: The international Zionism.”

Antisemitic publications with titles like “The Jewish-Zionist vampire Soros is thirsty for Greek blood” were available for purchase during the demonstration. The protesters shouted slogans against “the Jewish” Mayor of Thessaloniki, Yiannis Boutaris.

One of the speakers was the excommunicated Abbot Methodios, who at a similar rally in Athens a few weeks ago threatened the Jews with a “Greek Hitler”. In Thessaloniki, he suggested again that the Christians are enslaved by “the Jews”. He also said that the Jews “were cannibals, when the Greeks were building Parthenons.” His Jew-hate rant was warmly applauded, reports Sofia Christoforidou.

March 6, Berlin – a 27-year-old man broke a glass bottle on the head of a 75-year-old man near subway station Walther-Schreiber-Platz.

Police said that at around 19:00, a 75-year-old man sat near the young man on the platform at the subway station. The young man began to shout antisemitic insults at him and showed him antisemitic symbols. Later, he hit him in the head with a glass bottle, and the older man was slightly injured.

March 22, Toronto - According to the Toronto Police Service 2015 Annual Hate/Bias Crime Statistical Report, the number of hate crimes that were directed against the Jewish community last year was the largest compared to other communities.

The Jewish community is followed on the list by the black community, the LGBT community and the Muslim community.

France, March 9 - The leader of the Jewish community in France denounced Monday what he called the ‘’unbearable’’ situation of Jewish children ‘’who suffer physical and verbal abuse at public school.’’

In an interview with radio channel Europe 1 ahead of the annual dinner of CRIF, the political representative body of French Jews, Roger Cukierman declared : ‘’In many schools, Jewish children are beaten, insulted because they are Jewish.

‘’This is the reason why today out of fear only one third of Jewish children go to public school,’’ said the CRIF President.

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Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah shows again how "moderate" it is

The Palestinian Authority never tires of telling people that it supports non-violence. But the Fatah party, which is headed by PA president Mahmoud Abbas, posted this on Facebook yesterday for "Land Day:"

Land Day March 30th

Fatah - the salt of the earth and the revolution's gun

Fatah Youth

Meanwhile, a Fatah party leader, Jamal Muhaisen of the Fatah Central Committee, said that the US is under Jewish/Zionist occupation:

He also emphasized Mahmoud Abbas' point that all the other conflicts in the region are really peripheral to the Palestinian cause, adding that the US is behind all the other Middle East fighting in order to protect Israel.

Will any reporter ever ask Mahmoud Abbas about why the party he heads continues to incite, and whether he agrees with Muhaisen? Keep in mind that Abbas cracks down hard against people who disagree with him - but he doesn't say a word against statements like these.

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

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From The New Antisemite (original story at Joods Actueel):

At least two Israelis were injured in the terror attacks in Brussels. Israel would like to fly them home and so in order to release them from the hospital, a Jewish volunteer called up the Crisis Center set up by the Ministry for Internal Affairs to ask about the procedure.

He was told that the Israeli victims could not be sent back to Israel, they can only be sent back to Palestine. The family of the victim is shocked and says that "It's just like Iran here".

This is not the first time an emergency responder decides a Jewish medical emergency is a good reason to preach for Palestine. During the Gaza war, a doctor refused to treat a 90 year old Jewish woman, and suggested to "send her to Gaza for a few hours."

Here is the English transcript of the phone call, along with audio, which tool place Wednesday afternoon:

XXX: Good afternoon, my name is XXX, I am a volunteer in the Jewish coordination committee of Antwerp. We are contacted by persons… we have 2 persons of the Jewish community that were hurt in the attacks in the airport

Crisis Centre: Yes sir

XXX: They are prepared to be transported back to Israel. Our volunteers are busy with it and take care of everything but we received information from the hospital that we need special papers from the police that they can be released. Is this correct and to who should we ask that? Can you tell me more about that?

CC: That is effectively.. I will take a look. So … they go back to Palestine.

XXX: Not Palestine, Israel.

CC: Yes, but that was before Palestine, of course. OK

XXX: Could you repeat that again, please? What is the name?

CC: That … Palestine.

XXX: Can I get your name, please?

Cc: Of course, Zakaria.

XXX: And you know only Palestine?

CC: Sorry?

XXX: You don’t know Israel, only Palestine?

CC: I know the Jews went to there, that Palestine received (opvangen) them and that there is a war between Israel and Palestine, of course. And the occupation… that’s what's on the news of course.

XXX: Can you help me with the question I have, or not?

CC: Naturally, of course. Thus they go back to Palestine and ask that they could get an attestation. Voila, it is noted.

XXX: Can I have you name again, I didn’t understand it well.

CC: Zakaria

XXX: Zakaria?

CC: That is correct.

XXX: Zakaria what? What is your last name?

CC: I am not obliged to give it.

XXX: OK

XXX; Thank you very much.

CC: You're welcome. Bye

There were several Israeli victims of the attack, including one who needed to be placed in an artificial coma.

JTA adds:

Michael Freilich, the editor-in-chief of Joods Actueel, said it “defies imagination” that a Belgian state employee would display the anti-Israel behavior that is commonplace in Arab countries. He also called for punishing the operator instead of issuing the “standard apology.”

The recording’s release follows at least four recorded cases in which people who either spoke Arabic or wore Muslim traditional garb, destroyed, concealed or removed Israeli flags at an impromptu memorial space set up for the attacks’victims at Place de la Bourse in Brussels. It features many flags, including of Arab countries and the Palestinian Authority.

(h/t Rudi)

UPDATE: The Crisis Center apologized and says it fired the employee.

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03/30 Links Pt2: Associated Press willingly cooperated with the Nazis; Inside the BDS lions' den

From Ian:

Deri mulling revoking resident status of BDS founder

Interior Minister Aryeh Deri said Monday that he is considering revoking the resident status of BDS founder Omar Barghouti.
Deri was among four government ministers to participate in an afternoon question and answer round at Ynet and Yedioth Ahronoth's anti-BDS conference in Jerusalem. Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked and Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz also answered questions about combating BDS.
Earlier in the day, Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon and Education Minister Naftali Bennett took part in the morning question and answer round, along with Opposition leader Isaac Herzog, MK Tzipi Livni and MK Yair Lapid.
"The revoking of citizenship or residency is a tool that is hardly ever used because it constitutes a human rights violation," Deri said.
The interior minister has already revoked the resident status of several terrorists from East Jerusalem who committed attacks over the past six months.
Barghouti, he said, was born in Qatar and received a resident status in 1994 after marrying an Israeli woman from Acre and claiming his life is in Israel.

Associated Press willingly cooperated with the Nazis, new report shows

The Associated Press news agency willingly cooperated with Nazi Germany, submitting to the regime’s restrictive rulings on the freedom of the press and providing it with images from its photo archives to be used in its anti-Semitic and anti-Western propaganda machine, a new report reveals.
When Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists rose to power in 1933, all international news agencies but the US-based AP were forced to leave Germany. The AP continued to operate in the Third Reich until 1941, when the United States joined World War II.
According to German historian Harriet Scharnberg, the world’s biggest news agency was only allowed to remain in Germany because it signed a deal with the regime.
The news agency lost control over its copy by submitting itself to the Schriftleitergesetz (editor’s law), agreeing not to print any material “calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home,” she wrote in an article published in the academic journal Studies in Contemporary History.
Scharnberg’s research was first reported by the UK-based Guardian newspaper.
According to the paper, the Nazis’ so-called editor’s law forced AP employees to contribute material for the Nazi party’s propaganda division. One of the four photographers working for the company in the 1930s was Franz Roth, a member of the SS paramilitary unit’s propaganda division. His pictures were handpicked by Hitler, the Guardian writes.

Flashback 2003: CNN’s Iraqi Cover-Up

In a shocking New York Times opinion piece, CNN’s chief news executive Eason Jordan has admitted that for the past decade the network has systematically covered up stories of Iraqi atrocities. Reports of murder, torture, and planned assassinations were suppressed in order to maintain CNN’s Baghdad bureau.
Jordan has not always been so candid — nor honest. Just six months ago on public radio, when challenged regarding the veracity of CNN’s Baghdad reports, Jordan stated:
“CNN has demonstrated again and again that it has a spine; that it’s prepared to be forthright… we work very hard to report forthrightly, to report fairly and to report accurately and if we ever determine we cannot do that, then we would not want to be there [in Iraq]"

Oxfam barely acknowledges Israel's existence

If you look for Israel in the alphabetical list of countries in Oxfam's site, you won't find it in the section with the other countries that begin with "I".

Instead, you will see this:

The state of Israel is merely an appendage to the "occupied Palestinian territories."

And when you actually look at the entry for that section, you find out that apparently Israel was occupying Palestinian territories in the 1950s:

Amazing what you can learn from these unbiased, evenhanded, peace-seeking NGOs.

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Paint Manufacturer Wondering When 'Pinkwashing' Will Affect Sales (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Haifa Bay Industrial Zone, March 30 - A local manufacturer of paints, dyes, and other chemicals hopes to see a sign very soon that Israeli pinkwashing activities are taking place, since he anticipates increased retail sales as demand for pink colors increases accordingly.

Pinhas Vardi, the owner and operator of the Nirlat Paint Company, told his employees at their monthly meeting yesterday that any time now, they should see an uptick in sales of pink paints and dyes, because international organizations and media have been full of discussion over Israel's policies of pinkwashing to distract the world from their relationship with the Palestinians.

"More and more pundits and activists have declared that Israel is engaging in a practice called pinkwashing, and as we experts know, that requires the right materials - materials that we make together, right here," he pronounced. "The rhetoric has become louder and more common, which leads me to the optimistic conclusion that at some point, the government will run out of pink dyes and need to replenish its stocks - and we will step in to fill that need with the fastest, highest-quality, and most affordable pink paints and dyes this country has ever seen!" he added, to the general sound of cheering.

Workers expressed a similar, if cautious, rosy outlook. "With all the bad news related to this part of the country recently, it's good to hear something promising for a change," said quality control engineer Tzvi Ut. "[Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah threatened to hit the chemical plants with missiles; all the heavy industry in the Haifa region is apparently causing cancer and other diseases; and of course we always have this city's ethnic tensions. For once, it looks like something positive will happen here. I',m not thoroughly convinced, but really hope it does."

Line worker Laha Tav confessed she anticipates a massive increase in sales. "To judge from all the pinkwashing rhetoric, it looks like successive governments have been at this for a long, long time - and that means they're going through a massive inventory of pink paint and dye," she gushed. "I'm trying not to get too worked up about this, because I don't want to jinx it, but clearly the government - the Ministry of the Interior, I guess - is going to need tremendous amounts of new materials. There will be more than enough orders for all the paint sellers in this country to fill, and then some. Pinkwashing is supposed to be this huge endeavor, so I'm looking forward to lucrative overtime pay."

A call to the Ministry of the Interior asking to speak to the Director of Pinkwashing elicited only a confused response.

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03/30 Links Pt1: Douglas Murray: "Excuses" for Terrorists; BHL: Israel Upholds Democratic Values While in State of Emergency

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: "Excuses" for Terrorists

Even so, in the eyes of many Europeans, Israel is seen to have done something for which suicide bombers are thought to be an understandable response. Whether said or unsaid, this is the rationale that makes terror against Israel a lesser offense than terror everywhere else.
Well, what a shock the rest of the world will one day have to undergo. Because if you allow an "excuse" for one false narrative of Islamic extremists, you will then have to allow it for the others. You will, for example, have to accept the word of ISIS that Belgium is a "crusader" nation, deserving to be attacked because it is involved in a "crusade" against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). You will have to accept that for standing up to the Islamic extremists in Mali and Syria, these Islamic extremists have the right to attack the people of Belgium, France, Sierra Leone, Canada, the United States and Australia.
You will have to accept that Europeans can be killed for publishing a cartoon, simply because a foreign terrorist group says so, and then accept that the cartoonists brought it themselves.
The enemies of Israel and the enemies of the rest of the civilized world have some minor differences, but there is far more that they have in common. They are both driven not only by the same jihadist ideologies but by the insistence that their political and religious view of the world is relevant not just for them, but needs to be implemented against all of the rest of us.
It may take a while to realize it, but we are all in the same boat. It also may take a while until European cities reach for the blue and white bulbs; but if we start to question where those bulbs went, we might get closer not only to understanding Israel's predicament, but to understanding the predicament that is also now our own.

Moments before King David gets Arrested…

Two weeks ago we reported about the Israeli Channel 2 report showing how "Breaking the Silence" asks many questions from former soldiers that had nothing to do with human rights and sound a lot like intelligence gathering against Israel.

Here is the full report with English subtitles:

It is fascinating to see how the Left is defending this.

At first, Haaretz put out a sarcastic piece that was remarkably fact-free and that ignored the charges in the story.

But then the newspaper came up with a novel defense of apparent treason: The information collected was not that sensitive!

See that? "Only!"

Haaretz believes that treason is OK if it is only minor treason. It is not concerned that the information is being passed on to BtS' European funders or to the Palestinian Authority.

Israeli soldiers have been convicted of posting similar secrets on social media without realizing the gravity of the issue. But to Haaretz, an organization dedicated to slandering the IDF is above such petty concerns as espionage.

Breaking the Silence, for its part, responds that all of its reports are cleared by the military censor so therefore it cannot be guilty. But espionage is not usually published. The concern is what Breaking the Silence is doing with the classified information it is gathering, not whether it is publishing secrets. Is it sharing the raw footage and interviews with its European funders? Is it passing information on to groups that encourage violent Palestinian demonstrations?

These are the questions that the Shin Bet is now investigating.

But seeing how these Israeli groups are defending apparent espionage against the State puts a lie to the idea that they are animated by their patriotism and their desire to improve the army.

(h/t Yoel)

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Ma'an op-ed supports terror

Ma'an has an article by Ramzy Baroud that is upset that there are not more terror attacks against Jews.

The article, entitled "Why is a popular uprising yet to take off?" expresses frustration that there aren't more knifings and shootings and car rammings, because this is just what is needed. He mostly blames the current Palestinian leadership for suppressing the natural violence that he wants to see:

This is a generation that is the most educated, yet; most politically savvy and, thanks to the huge leaps in digital media technology, is the most connected and informed of the world around it. The ambitions of these youth are huge, but their opportunities are so limited; their earth has shrunk to the size of a single-file queue before an Israeli military checkpoint, where they are corralled on their way to school, to work and back home. And, like the Israelis who shot at anyone who dared to protest, Abbas imprisons those who attempted to do so.

It is a generation that simply cannot breathe.

The current Intifada is an expression of that dichotomy, of a generation that is so eager to break free, to define itself, to liberate its land, yet resisted by an Old Guard unremittingly holding on so tight to the few perks and dollars they receive in the form of allotments every month.

History must remain in constant motion, and the last six months have been the attempt of an entire generation to move the wheels of history forward, despite a hundred obstacles and a thousand checkpoints.

This might be the most difficult Intifada yet; for never before did Palestinians find themselves so leaderless, yet so ready to break free. The outcome of this tension, will not only define this whole generation, as it defined my generation of the 1987 Intifada, but it will define the future of Palestine altogether.

It is all nonsense meant for a Western audience (it is not published in the Ma'an Arabic edition), ignoring that the terror spree was actually sparked by Abbas and the PA claiming that Jews are attacking Al Aqsa, and not about "occupation." It is the story that English-speaking Palestinians tell gullible Westerners.

Baroud is frustrated that the current terror had not yet morphed into a much larger terror spree.

Ramzy Baroud has always explicitly supported violence, and Ma'an has given him a platform for his incitement many times over the years. But the EU-funded newspaper places a disclaimer on the bottom saying that "The views expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily reflect Ma'an News Agency's editorial policy."

So it is OK to publish an op-ed that advocates the murder of Jews then - it's freedom of speech!

Of course, Ma'an would never publish an op-ed calling for Abbas to negotiate with Israel without conditions. Some topics are too controversial, after all, for the EU-funded news site to tackle.

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Amnesty issues anti-Israel petition on "Land Day"

Today is "Land Day," when Arabs in Israel and the territories protest - often violently - about alleged Israeli seizures of Arab-owned land.

According to Arab media, Amnesty International issued a petition that it sent to Israeli officials and the media where it warns that Israeli actions in the Negev are going to make hundreds of Bedouin homeless.

The petition centers around Umm al-Hiran, an illegal village that Israel had declared its intent to demolish since 2003.

You can see from its photo that the buildings are arranged haphazardly. Like other illegal Bedouin villages, people just start to build wherever they want and then declare that they owned the land for centuries.

I've seen the sprawl of hundreds of illegal Bedouin villages in the Negev and reported on them. And Israel has created towns that the illegal residents can move to, a fact that the NGOs don't want to talk about. It is a real problem that deserves a real solution and not the simplistic sloganeering that Amnesty (and HRW) is engaging in to preserve the "rights" of Arabs to build wherever and whenever they feel like.

The Amnesty petition, according to the articles, has 1,500 signatures.

I couldn't help but recall that I once sent a petition to Amnesty about its silence concerning Arab anti-semitism, specifically in regard to antisemitic Ramadan TV series in the Arab world meant to incite hatred against Jews. My petition received some 2,200 signatures and StandWithUs sent a similar petition with over 4,700 signatures, both of which were delivered to Amnesty's headquarters in London.

If Amnesty cares so much about petitions, why does it ignore petitions about how it is complicit in allowing incitement against Jews in the Arab world?

(See also this infographic issued by Israel that explains the truth around Bedouin villages in the Negev.)

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Help EoZ become even more effective

(This post is pinned to the top of the blog for the day.)

I am proud of this blog, but there is a lot more that needs to be done.

During this quarter we redesigned EoZ for the first time in many years. There were some problems during the transition but they have mostly been solved and the site looks much more professional. I had to hire an outside consultant to fix many of the issues, and the experience convinced me EoZ must be moved to a better, more flexible platform. That means paying for a hosting site, paying for the proper add-ons and paying for other services like protection against denial of service attacks.

But while doing all of these things in the background, we are still generating content that you cannot find anywhere else. And we've made a difference more than once.

We publicized a textbook that included anti-Israel propaganda, prompting the publisher to pull the volume and destroy the copies, at no small expense. Our article about how the official US government visa site doesn't include the Israel flag was widely shared and reported, with over 6000 Facebook "Likes." We embarrassed the PLO to redesign their site after pointing out that the map of "Palestine" they used really proved Jewish ties to the land.

Beyond that we have done original analysis that has been widely shared, (and, in this case, used by the Wall Street Journal in an editorial.) We have delved into history to disprove conventional wisdom.

Every day, and in every article, we try to teach you something you would not have known otherwise. And we want to be able to do more of this. But in order to do that we need more resources, and that is how you can help.

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03/29 Links Pt2: Glick: Israel’s democratic collapse; The Always Reliable United Nations; The EU Can Go to Hell

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Israel’s democratic collapse

Israeli democracy is in critical condition.
Sunday, the High Court of Justice ruled that the government’s natural gas policy is unlawful. The policy, which was negotiated with foreign energy companies, was to be the basis for developing the massive offshore Leviathan gas field. It was supposed to anchor future gas prices, ensure gas revenues for the government and energy security for the country in the coming decades. On the basis of this policy outline, the government negotiated deals to supply natural gas to Egypt, Turkey and Jordan.
Given the enormous cost of developing offshore gas fields, the policy, which was determined in close consultations with legal experts and regulators, determined a base price for natural gas that would be frozen for 10 years. The point of the price freeze was to encourage investors to take the financial risk of exploring and developing Israeli fields. The price freeze guaranteed them a minimal profit on their investment.
In a healthy democracy, the court would never have agreed to adjudicate the populist petition against the government’s gas policy submitted by a consortium of radical NGOs.
Under normal rules of standing that apply in every other mature democracy in the world, the petitioners would have had no right to submit their petition.
In states not controlled by a legal junta, as the people’s elected representative it is the government’s sole prerogative to determine the state’s energy policy and to sign deals with foreign governments and investors.

How a Court Sank Israel’s Economy

For the first several decades of its existence, the state of Israel was the butt of the old Jewish joke about Moses leading the Jews to the one place in the Middle East without natural resources. But after the discovery of vast natural gas fields off its coast (as well as shale oil on land), the jest no longer made sense. As Arthur Herman wrote in a feature in the March 2014 issue of COMMENTARY, the potential bounty from the Tamar field that has already begun producing natural gas and the far bigger Leviathan site on which development has not yet begun had the potential to make Israel the world’s next energy superpower. The prospect of not only energy independence but also of a large export business that would not only enrich the Jewish state but enable economic ties that would create new relationships and alliances that would make it far more secure.
The only worry about all this was not whether the gas could be brought out or whether it would play a part in transforming Israel’s economy. The only problem was whether Israel’s fractious political system and over-regulated economy and a judiciary and bureaucracy that seem most comfortable when stifling innovation and growth rather than enabling it would find a way to gum up the works and stop the gas fields from being exploited. Unfortunately, we now have the answer to that question.
Yesterday’s ruling by Israel’s High Court of Justice struck down a deal that Prime Minister Netanyahu had brokered between the government and Texas-based Noble Energy – which has taken the lead in developing Israel’s big energy project —and an Israeli firm that would have allowed work on Leviathan to begin.
This decision is the culmination of years of maneuvering that pitted Netanyahu’s government against a coalition of left-wing opponents determined to stop the project.

Michael Lumish: The European Union Can Go Straight to Hell

Jihadi violence in Europe, we are to understand, is because the Europeans have failed to suckle Arab-Muslim immigrants close enough to their breasts and if only they would be more open and gracious then the Jihadi immigrants would become harmless accountants and fishermen and shoemakers.
The truth, of course, is that Arab-Muslim imperial ambitions, grounded in hatred of the infidel - particularly the Jew - is what drives their violence throughout the world upon non-Muslims. It is due to western and American racism that the West blames itself for Muslim violence against its own people. It is because western "liberals" think of non-whites as inferior creatures in need of protection that they refuse to assign agency to their "little brown brothers" who are in need of protection against the allegedly aggressive West.
The current western-left attitude toward non-western people "of color" is reminiscent of, and in part derived from, nineteenth-century notions of "white man's burden." The condescension is so rich that the western-left refuses to even acknowledge that it is not their culture, but the Arab culture that has been the most successful imperialist-colonialist power within recorded human history, since the Romans.
The Europeans, in their ideological blinkertude, pay lip-service to Palestinian-Arab responsibility for the long Arab war against the Jews, but they always pressure and blame the Jews.
At the very least, the boycott movement “would swing into virtually nothing” if there was no Israeli-Palestinian conflict “to tag unto,” he argued.
I have to say, I love these European geniuses. What he is saying - if I can figure the math correctly - is that if there were no Arab-Israel conflict there would be no BDS movement against the Jews of the Middle East to begin with.