Sunday, April 03, 2016

Nasrallah confirms: The Twelfth Mahdi has been seen!

There is no explicit reference to the Mahdi in the Qu'ran, but references to him are found in hadith (the reports and traditions of Muhammad's teachings collected after his death). According to Islamic tradition, the Mahdi's tenure will coincide with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ (Isa), who is to assist the Mahdi against the Masih ad-Dajjal (literally, the "false Messiah" or Antichrist).[5] Differences exist in the concept of the Mahdi between Shia Muslims and adherents of the Sunni tradition. ...For most Shia Muslims, the Mahdi was born but disappeared and will remain hidden from humanity until he reappears to bring justice to the world, a doctrine known as the Occultation. For Twelver Shia, this "hidden Imam" is Muhammad al-Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam.

From the Iranian ABNA agency:

Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah confirmed that the meetings between Imam Mahdi (PBUH) and certain personae during the different epoch's of his major occultation aims at preserving the faith of the Twelver Shias in order for some of them not to be influenced by the propaganda that doubts the truth of his apparition.

In an exclusive interview with Lebanese Al-Manar Channel on the late Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Bahjat, Sayyed Nasrallah asserted that he has learned from authentic sources that the Iranian cleric met with Imam Mahdi (PBUH) several times for his deep faith and piety.

The leader of Hezbollah, and arguably the most powerful person in Lebanon, believes fairy tales about the Hidden Imam popping up and chatting with his favorite ayatollahs.

Later in the article Nasrallah says that the same Bahjat sent him a special prayer to prevent him from being murdered. .

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04/02 Links: What’s Palestinian Peace Education?; Leahey's dangerous letter; Obama: Iran agreement 'a substantial success'

From Ian:

Hamas finally acknowledges holding 4 Israelis, including bodies of 2 soldiers

Hamas on Friday publicly acknowledged for the first time that it was holding four Israelis: two Israeli citizens who crossed into Gaza on their own accord and the bodies of two soldiers killed in 2014’s Gaza war.
The group published photos of the four: slain soldiers Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin, 29-year-old Avraham Mengistu, and a Bedouin-Israeli citizen whose name has not been released for publication.
Hamas denied reports in recent days that Israel and Hamas may be nearing a prisoner swap for the four, with a spokesman for the group claimed the reports were misdirection by the Israeli government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Netanyahu is lying to his people” and “deceiving the families of the captive soldiers,” spokesman Abu Obeida said in a statement.
“There are no talks or negotiations relating to the prisoners. The enemy will not get information about the four without paying a clear price before and after the negotiations,” he added.
On Monday the London-based daily Asharq al-Awsat quoted a source in the Gaza-based Islamist group as saying that though there were currently no direct negotiations between Hamas and Israel, international mediators were trying to broker a prisoner swap.

What’s Palestinian Peace Education?

Hroub is also part of the narrative of his wife’s motivation for teaching peace since she conceived it as a reaction to seeing her husband shot by Israelis and experiencing the terror of her children. But I haven’t seen her mentioning the terror felt by her husband’s victims and their families in any account of her receiving the prize.
Today, Omar Hroub is an official with the Palestinian Authority and, according to most of the coverage of his wife’s honor, supports PA President’s policies. If so, he is no supporter of peace since the PA has spent the last year supporting the “stabbing intifada” and fomenting exactly the kind of religious-based hatred against Jews that his wife’s curriculum is supposed to be combating.
But even if we leave the husband out of the discussion, a New York Times feature published today that includes an account of a visit to Hroub’s classroom gives us a taste of what Palestinian peace education means.
When most observers think of Middle East peace education, the assumption is that the students are taught the sorts of things that are a routine element of most Israeli schools: respect for the other side and their culture and language, the importance of non-violence and recognizing the rights of all ethnicities and faiths even in the midst of a struggle between two peoples for their own separate national identity and sovereignty in one land. It’s a difficult thing to teach in a country where violence and hatred against Jews is being promoted by the other side and there are those that resist the message. But despite the claim that Israel is becoming more intolerant, the rarity of incidents of anti-Arab violence, and the generally tolerant nature of Israeli society at a time when their nation is under assault from a wave of terror testifies to the success of its peace education curriculum.
But, in the Hroub classroom, peace education isn’t about how to get along with Israelis and Jews. It’s about teaching the children how to peacefully disagree with each other and their teacher. That’s a good thing for them to learn, especially at a time when so much of Palestinian popular culture and official media encourages violence. But it is not the same thing as promoting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

04/01 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: Bewildered Britain still doesn’t get it; Zionist 'joins' radical leftist tour

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Bewildered Britain still doesn’t get it

The British still don’t understand, though, that the UK and Europe have long funded and connived at not just Palestinian terrorism, but the incitement that causes it.
They don’t understand that this incitement is based on anti-Semitism, not a dispute over land boundaries.
They don’t understand that anti-Semitism is the signature motif of a deranged culture that should be treated as a pariah rather than excused, sanitized and rewarded, as Britain does with the Palestinians.
They don’t understand that the anti-Semitic derangement that drives the Palestinians also drives the Muslim war against the West.
They don’t understand that by indulging the lies, intimidation and moral inversion of Palestinian Jew-hatred, Britain and Europe have made it impossible to fight off the Islamist threat to themselves.
They will only start to defend themselves properly when they start treating Israel as their indispensable ally rather than a cosmic foe.

David Collier: Jews and Hamas propaganda at Birkbeck

The event started and the ‘Palestine Remix’ product itself is impressive. The technology behind the website allows for the user to engage with documentary evidence, search videos using text references and then take the chosen excerpts to share on social media, download or to ‘remix’ into a bespoke documentary. All available in several languages. ‘Heady stuff’.
And they want to push this as an education tool in our schools and in our universities. Coming just a day after I attended a dire Zionist event, this highlights the gulf between the tired, lifeless, self-indulgent Zionist leadership in the UK and the fresh, innovative and spirited defence emerging from the Palestinian side. And a useful tool it would be too if it were not total propaganda. Al-Jazeera has delivered an instrument of total historical revisionism. The timeline of 1948 does not include a single violent Arab action. This, the underlying distortion in the Arab narrative that turns a bloody civil war and a battle for survival into a one sided and brutal rout.
There is even a documentary about Moroccan Jews who describe Zionist actions that ‘conned’ them into fleeing Morocco. As hundreds of thousands of Jewish Arab refugees were created through persecution and expulsion, this website passes it off as a self created ‘Zionist plot’.
Rawan Al-Damen relies on the exception/rule strategy that fuels the entire Palestinian propaganda machine. They take the rule (Arab violence and rejectionism) and make it look like an exception whilst taking the exception (Israeli extremist action) and make it look like the rule. This way, they get to turn the entire story on its head and the victim becomes the aggressor. This piece of software should get nowhere near children or students, it is a brain washing machine.

Hamas whines that its Twitter accounts were closed

From AFP:

The Palestinian group Hamas lashed out at Twitter on Friday, after the social media giant allegedly closed a number of its accounts.
The party's military wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, said its English and Arabic-language accounts had been closed for the third time in two weeks.

One of the closed accounts had more than 140,000 followers, it said in a statement.

Hamas is designated a terrorist organisation by the European Union and many Western nations.

Al-Qassam accused Twitter of showing a "clear bias to the Israeli occupation where it should (adopt a) neutral position toward both sides."

It said that Israeli officials were allowed to encourage "racism, extremism and terrorism" on the site, and called on the company to reopen the accounts.

Just for fun, here is one of Hamas' socially responsible videos, along with a couple of screen shots showing the translation.

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From pan-Arab news site Alwset News:

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) revealed that 63 mosques and Islamic centers in America had been attacked in anti-Muslim incidents during the year 2015, and this number was the highest since September 11, 2001 attacks.

These statistics might suggest, given the continuous talk in the media about Islamophobia, that Muslims in the United States are the religious group most vulnerable to attacks. But the truth is, and it may even be a surprise: the Jews are the most vulnerable to religious hate crimes.

In the year 2014 , there were 1092 hate crime against religions, and Jews were the victims in more than half of them, with 58.2 percent, while attacks against Muslims came in second with 16.3 percent, according to what is stated in the report on hate crimes, published by the American FBI every year.

In 2013 , Jews also ranked first among vulnerable groups of religious hate crimes with 59.2 percent, while Muslims also came second at 14.2 percent.

This sounds like something I could have written.

In fact, I have.

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04/01 Links Pt1: Palestinians: Presidents for Life, No Elections; Eleanor Roosevelt on the "Nakba"

From Ian:

Khaled Abu Toameh: Palestinians: Presidents for Life, No Elections

Senior figures who have dared to challenge Abbas's autocratic rule have already found themselves targeted by the president and his men. Ask former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who had his organization's bank accounts seized by Abbas, or Mohamed Dahlan, the former Fatah commander and minister who was forced to flee the Palestinian territories after falling out with Abbas and his sons. Perhaps deposed PLO Secretary-General Yasser Abed Rabbo, who overnight was stripped of his powers and thrown to the dogs for speaking out against the president, would have a word to say. In Ramallah, they call them the "Abbas victims."
We would need a crystal ball to know what will happen the day after Abbas disappears from the scene. Perhaps, say some, we shall witness a scene reminiscent of the old days of the Soviet Union "Politburo," with the next president chosen by a group of Fatah and PLO leaders who will meet in Ramallah. This seems the most likely scenario, in the absence of any chance of free and democratic elections, and in light of the continued split between the two Palestinian entities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
We do not need a crystal ball, however, to know that Abbas will leave a legacy of chaos. His adamant refusal to name a deputy or even discuss the issue of succession in public has already created tensions among the top brass of the PLO and Fatah. The Palestinian public, for its part, has precious little confidence in its leaders.
The behind-the-scenes power struggle that has been quietly raging in Ramallah for the past few months is likely to lead to a state of paralysis in the Palestinian arena and leave the Palestinians without an acceptable leader. Or, as senior Fatah official Tawfik Tirawi put it, Abbas will be the last president for the Palestinians.
Palestinians are plagued with leaders who desire one thing: personal power. The Palestinians are marching away from achieving a state, partly because they seem incapable of the fundamental political principle of free and democratic elections. The day after does not look promising.

Eleanor Roosevelt on the "Nakba"

We have history.
They have narrative.
Eleanor Roosevelt was more than the wife of Franklin- she was one of the most articulate champions for human rights of her generation.
Her archives are digitized and are available online
In her March 23, 1956 column "My Day", read what she has to say about the Arab refugees who fled Israel (In 1956, they were not yet called "Palestinians")
NEW YORK—I have an anonymous letter which asks me what is being done by the United Nations about the plight of the nearly one million Arab refugees of Israel aggression.
Isn't it astonishing how many mistakes can creep into one sentence.
There are 800,000 refugees who are being cared for by the U.N. and have been cared for since, during the war, their own Moslem mufti in Jerusalem called upon the Arabs in Israel to leave.
Israel was not the aggressor in this war. The Arabs were the aggressors. The partition of Palestine and the creation of the State of Israel was the result of U.N. action.
The Arabs did not accept the new state. So Israel fought and gained more land, holding it by defeating her Arab attackers.
The Arabs who did not heed the call of the Mufti and leave Israel during the war are still living there. As a minority, they have certain grievances. But, by and large, with eight representatives in the Knesset (the parliament), they have a voice, as citizens of Israel, to demand redress for their wrongs. (h/t Bob Knot)

Cash for terror: how PA duped British backers

This is an extended version of an article that first appeared in the 'Mail on Sunday'.
A new report by Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli NGO, suggests Western donors have been duped. It details a series of documents and official statements exposing how the PA continues to fund salaries of convicted terrorists.
Evidence includes the Ministry of Finance saying last year in an official statement that it transfers almost half its budget to Gaza, adding that this included "the salaries of prisoners, the released and the families of the Martyrs and wounded".
The report also reveals the PA transferred an extra 444m shekels (£81m) to the PLO in 2015 - significantly, only marginally more than the 442m shekel budget given to its own Ministry of Prisoners' Affairs the previous year before it transferred responsibility.
Itamar Marcus, the report's author, argues the move was a facade to appease donors.
"There is willful blindness by the UK and EU, who were happy not to even carry out the simplest investigation," he said.
"This money sends a message to people that it is heroic to kill Israelis. And it gives these people a social status, so they can buy nice cars and kids aspire to be like them."
The group also discloses two cases of individuals claiming to have carried out attacks for cash. In one Khalad Rajoub, a father-of-seven arrested for attempted murder two years ago, told police he had big debts and planned to die during an attack.

.@UNRWAUSA goes to anti-Israel groups to hire interns

Earlier this year this site (and others) exposed the fact that essentially every employee of UNRWA-USA expressed anti-Israel views on social media. All of those accounts were made private or taken down as a result.

Just in case you need more evidence that American Friends of UNRWA is an anti-Israel organization, meet their intern from last summer, Hashem Abi Sham'a:

He explicitly calls Israel an "apartheid state" and supports BDS:

Earlier, he said that Israel is not part of a Middle East that he envisions.

Sham'a's internship has ended, he now goes to school in Ireland.

But how was this anti-Israel activist recruited to work fror UNRWA-USA?

UNRWA-USA recruits its interns directly from people who are members of anti-Israel groups!

UNRWA-USA does not even pretend to be even-handed - if you hate Israel, you are a candidate to work for UNRWA USA!

(h/t Bob Knot)

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"When (the knifer) dies, he becomes a shahid."

Mahmoud Abbas gave an interview to Ilana Dayan of Israel's Channel 2 in which he explicitly says he is against knifings and other attacks on Israelis and claims that they come from desperation and hopelessness:

Abbas : If I know that (my grandson) had a knife you think I would shut up about it?! You know, we, our security services, go into schools to look for in schools, students' bags, to check whether they have knives. You do not know it. In one school we found 70 boys and girls carrying knives. We took the knives from them, talked to them and told them it was a mistake. "We do not want you to kill and die". "We want that you will live and others live".

Ilana Dayan Could be that they just do not listen to you?

Abbas : When a child goes and takes a knife, he does not consult with anyone. Even with his parents, nor his brother. He doesn't say: "I'm taking a knife and going out". No sensible person would allow his son to come to him and tell him: "I want to take a knife and kill", and he will answer him: "you are wise." It is not possible. It is not possible. He will take away the knife and lock him inside. Parents do not want it.

Ilana Dayan but afterwards they become a shahid, or martyr, they are praising them ...

Abbas : Sorry, when he died ...

Ilana Dayan: They get consolation from you, and they get compensation, and become saints ...

Abbas : When he died, he is a martyr. When he dies, he becomes a martyr. Shahid ...

Ilana Dayan: But then it becomes a next example for...

Abbas : No, no.

Ilana Dayan: ..he becomes a role model. And then another one wants to be like him.

Abbas : Once he dies, it is another matter. Another matter. I do not want him to be a martyr. I want him to live. But after he dies, it was over. I do not know where he is going. So don't settle accounts with us over this.

Ilana Dayan: So why this keeps happening?

Abbas : Ask yourself why this boy, 15, takes a knife and knew he was going to die, and still going. Ask yourself why. This is because there is no hope for him.

Despite Abbas' insistence that kids who die while trying to murder Israelis are "martyrs," this is theatre meant for the Israeli left to make them believe that Abbas is peaceful. And this is easy to prove.

All of Abbas' major speeches and statements and meetings are published on the official PA news agency site, Wafa. But Wafa didn't mention this interview. Instead it mentioned a phone call between Abbas and the Egyptian Foreign Minister.

The official PA daily newspaper, Al Hayat al Jadida, didn't report on this interview. But at the same time that Israeli media reported on it, Al Hayat reported that Abbas issued a decree to restructure the Central Election Commission. And it has a video of a school event honoring the mothers of "martyrs."

Abbas' meetings and statements are also published on his Facebook page. But the only entry from about the same time as this interview being published was about Abbas giving awards to some teachers and journalists.

If Abbas and the PA is against knife attacks, then where are the news stories about that?

If there was a school where 70 children brought knives in their backpacks, why was this not reported in Palestinian news media? Why are there no op-eds that say that the knife attacks are immoral?

On the contrary, only this week the official Fatah Twitter account published this image of a knife, saying "Israel is forcing the young Palestinians to follow this path to Jerusalem. Leave our land, you, your occupation, and your soldiers, and let us live in peace."

And Fatah's social media has been explicit in supporting knife attacks in the past as well, such as this one from Facebook showing a Jew being stabbed captioned "Here is Jerusalem, you crazies, beware!"

If Abbas is against murdering Jews, then why is this not said in Arabic on the media that he controls? Why is the message being given the exact opposite, that martyrdom is wonderful and praiseworthy?

It's too bad that Ilana Dayan didn't ask these questions.

Abbas is trying to do to Israeli Jews what J-Street is trying to do to the American Jewish community - fragment them and weaken them by appealing to those who really, really want peace and are willing to believe the words of a proven liar rather than the facts.

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Facebook investigates, decides blood libel does not violate community standards

I reported on Tuesday that an Arab newspaper published a lurid antisemitic article, posting the blood libel as fact. It also posted the article on its Facebook page along with medieval paintings of Jews murdering children.

Here's the page with Facebook's poor translation - replace "Easter" with "Passover". The "Dracula" part is obvious. The article said that Israeli Arabs ("48 Arabs") are terrified that Jews will kidnap and murder their children by placing them in nail-studded boxes to drain their blood to make matzah - "Zionist Pie" - before Passover.

Commenter Ben complained to Facebook that this was hate speech (and so did I.)

Facebook responded by saying that, no, accusing Jews of murdering Arab and Christian children to eat their blood is not a violation of community standards at all!

Apparently there is nothing you can say that is so antisemitic that Facebook would consider it beyond the pale.

There is another possibility. Facebook might have given the page to an Arabic speaker, who then made the decision that accusing Jews of the blood libel is not offensive.

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Police clears OSU student who said he would "come for everyone's life" if BDS motion failed

Remember Cailin Pitt?

He was the anti-Israel student who tweeted this seeming death threat before the BDS resolution was voted down at Ohio State University:

From The Columbus Dispatch:

The tweet spread quickly, and by Thursday one Israel-oriented news site featured it under the headline, “Student threatens mass murder if Ohio University doesn’t support BDS,” an international call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

The student government voted down the divestment resolution, and by Thursday night, OSU police had interviewed Pitt. A university statement said the police department, working with the FBI, determined that Pitt did not pose a threat.

“It’s a mess,” Pitt said Thursday. “It’s pretty much my fault.” He said he regards “coming for lives” as a slang term meaning to confront someone with whom one disagrees, but he acknowledged that it could have been misunderstood.

Urban Dictionary, a slang website, says this about Came at my life: “Similar to chewing someone out, or personally attacking one’s character. Can be used in future tense such as, ‘Don’t make me come at your life.’ Or present tense: ‘I’m coming at your life right now!’ ”

Maybe. But the expression "come at your life" is not the same as "come for your life."

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03/31 Links Pt2: BDS Groups Encourage Congress to Curb Aid to Israel; The Ongoing Failure Of Global Journalism

From Ian:

NGO Monitor: BDS Groups Encourage Congress to Curb Aid to Israel

On February 17, 2016, U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy and 10 members of Congress sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, advising him to open an investigation into “gross violations of human rights” in Israel and Egypt. The lawmakers cited Amnesty International “and other human rights organizations” in suggesting that Israel has carried out “extrajudicial killings” of Palestinian terrorists. Secretary Kerry was asked to determine if these killings would restrict military assistance to Israel, as per the Leahy Law. While the small number of signatories reflects the widespread rejection of this false claim in Congress, the media impact is significant.
Anti-Israel groups who collaborated on the letter
Multiple anti-Israel organizations contributed to the letter. NGOs involved in this campaign are involved in anti-Israel BDS (boycotts, divestment, sanctions), demonization and lawfare activities. As a result of their strong political biases and their methodological errors, these groups are not accurate sources of information.
- Amnesty International– Amnesty regularly publishes methodologically flawed, one-sided reports condemning Israel and accusing it of human rights violations.
- Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)- JVP seeks to drive a “wedge” in the Jewish community over support for Israel.
- American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)- AFSC is involved in BDS campaigns on campuses and churches in the United States
- National Lawyers Guild– National Lawyers Guild, a Marxist organization, engages in anti-Israel “lawfare,”
Involvement of members of Congress in recent anti-Israel activities
- Nine of the signatories of this letter also signatories of a June 2015 letter to Secretary Kerry, claiming that Israel tortures Palestinian children during detention. The 2015 letter was organized by AFSC and Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-P).
Funding
- Eight out of the signatories receive funding from JStreetPAC, designed to help elect politicians sympathetic towards JStreet’s goals. (h/t Yenta Press)

Prize to ‘nonviolent’ wife of terrorist will not be rescinded

The British-based foundation that awarded a Palestinian Authority schoolteacher a $1 million prize for teaching nonviolence will not change its decision, despite revelations that the woman's husband participated in a horrific terror attack that murdered at least six Jews, reports the Associated Press.
The Varkey Foundation awarded Hanan al-Hroub of El Bireh its Global Teacher Prize two weeks ago, in a ceremony in Dubai. In selecting her, it cited her slogan "No to Violence" and her efforts to protect Palestinian schoolchildren from the effects of living in a conflict zone. The ceremony was addressed by Pope Francis via video link.
It has since been revealed that her husband, Omar, served ten years in Israeli prison after being convicted as an accomplice in the 1980 Beit Hadassah bombing attack that murdered six Jews as they approached Beit Hadassah in Hevron. According to an Associated Press account at the time, Omar al-Hroub was a chemist who provided chemicals needed for making the bombs.
An article in the Qatari newspaper al-Araby al-Jadid drew attention to his sordid past by praising him as a "freedom fighter...who took part in one of the most daring guerrilla operations in the occupied territories."
In a statement, the Varkey Foundation said it does not look into the conduct of candidates' relatives and that the teacher was committed to nonviolence.

IsraellyCool: The Ongoing Failure Of Global Journalism

And that’s it. Just a brief mention of her husband and specifically a mention that marks HIM as a victim of Israeli violence! Now we switch from the Washington Post to the efforts of Aussie Dave here on this blog. Five days before on March 18 he posted this piece: Hanan Al Hroub, Winner Of Global Teacher Prize, Married A Terrorist.
Oh, that’s interesting, the Washington Post didn’t mention that her “lawyer” husband has a terrorist past. I wonder how that slipped past them.
But this also piqued the interest of another Israellycool contributor (JPF) and he did some investigative journalism: also known as searching for stuff in Google. He published on March 29 but this is based on the Palestine Chronicle from March 17. He found that this Global Award teacher had the following in her biography:
Hanan Al-Hroub was born and raised in the alleys of Dheisheh refugee camp… She married a Palestinian freedom fighter, Omar Al-Hroub, who took part in one of the most daring guerrilla operations in the occupied territories, the Dabboya operation, in Hebron in May 1980. When the guerrillas were being pursued in the mountains they attacked a group of settlers going from the illegal Kiryat Arba settlement to the Dabboya building near the Ibrahimi Mosque. Thirteen settlers were killed, including their military leader in Hebron, and dozens were injured. Months after the operation, the guerrillas were captured; Omar was imprisoned and spent many years in Israeli prisons before being released. It was then that he met and married his life partner who became the best teacher in the world.
You see when you look at the Palestinian media, they’re PROUD of the fact her husband murdered Jews. This husband wasn’t released from prison because he was remorseful (of course) he was released in a prisoner exchange. A journalist might want to ask her and her husband directly how they feel about this. What messages does she convey to her students about “guerrilla operations” that kill Jews? But we don’t have many journalists any more.

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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