Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, June 17, 2016

Greta Van Susteren's video makes her a star in Israel

Last week, Greta Van Susteren of Fox News gave a video editorial supporting Israel in the face of terror attacks.

She was interviewed by Channel 10 in Israel about the piece which achieved huge popularity there.

(h/t Yoel)

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

Jamal Shawahin wrote an article that was published in various Arab media praising the Tel Aviv attackers as "New Fedayeen."

The article contains both classic antisemitism and projection.

The opinion of the Jews is that the land can only accommodate a single religion, and they mean to destroy Islam and then Christianity and afterwards they will go to East Asia for the elimination of Buddhism, Hinduism and all religious beliefs as long as they are not Jewish. They plan to spread east and in all directions for the elimination of peoples, and their motto is that the whole earth is for Jews only and that all others must leave either by force or voluntarily and it does not matter where.

Jews and Judaism are under the impression that they are created as a chosen people and everyone else is meant to carry firewood and perform irrigation and everything that they see as trivial. The Jews saw themselves in the position not only of religion. Even those who can be described as moderate [are the same], they are all alike in their desire to subjugate everyone who is not a Jew.

The Jews and the Torah may adopt references to love and peace and even heaven and the afterlife, but the transmission of the Jewish spirit is only to Jews, who believe this since the dawn of Islam, and even before that to insist to the Roman governor to crucify Christ.

Throughout known history they use the basest means to implement their goals and this is what made them isolated in Europe. The Germans warned of their danger, as did US presidents, especially at the beginning of the last century.

The Palestinian Authority and others link up with Netanyahu and Lieberman and claim that peace is possible as they condemn the heroic deeds carried out by neo-Fedayeen, most recently in Tel Aviv where they prevailed over four.

Another article, from a Qatari writer, justifies all terrorism against Israelis under the pretext that all Israelis are soldiers and all Israeli children are paramilitary as they are taught from kindergarten to hate and fight Arabs and Muslims.

Once again, there is no backlash in Arab media for articles like this (although this week there was respectful disagreement by one writer saying that an article that claimed that the Holocaust was a myth and the Jews deserved it anyway was not quite accurate in all its specifics.)

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

06/16 Links Pt2: US Congressman: defund UNRWA schools; NGO Monitor Triggers Major Changes in Holland, UK, and Switzerland

From Ian:

Lawmakers call for defunding UN schools after film shows Palestinian kids praising ISIS

U.S. lawmakers want to cut off funds to United Nations-run schools where a new documentary shows kids as young as 13 declaring they want to kill Jews and join ISIS.
The documentary, “The UNRWA Road to Terror: Palestinian Classroom Incitement," shows children as young as 7 in schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) expressing support for terrorism. One clip shows a 13-year-old Palestinian student chanting “With Allah’s help I will fight for ISIS, the Islamic State.”
Members of Congress and sources with knowledge of pending legislation told FoxNews.com that lawmakers are looking to introduce bills cutting off funding from such schools before Congress adjourns this summer.
Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., said major reform is needed to UN schools.

NGO Monitor Triggers Major Changes in Holland, UK, and Switzerland

Today, June 16, the Dutch Parliament approved a proposal requiring the government to review funding for NGOs that promote BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) targeting Israel, and, in particular, the Human Rights and International Law Secretariat based at Birzeit University in Ramallah.
A similar debate and vote is scheduled to take place in the Swiss Parliament on Friday, June 17. The Dutch and Swiss governments, along with Sweden and Denmark, provide $17 million to this framework over three years ending in 2016. As documented in NGO Monitor research reports, this money is used for core funding to 24 NGOs, including many of the leaders of BDS and lawfare campaigns, such as Badil and Al Haq, and a number of Israeli political NGOs.
In parallel, the British Parliament held a debate this week on the government’s international aid activities, including the distribution of funds by the Department for International Development (DFID). In this debate, MPs cited NGO Monitor research reports on this funding, calling on the government to stop diversion of funds to anti-peace Israeli and Palestinian NGOs. Following the debate, DFID officials announcement policy changes. In response, Sir Eric Pickles, MP declared: “I welcome a shift in DFID’s funding toward peaceful coexistence projects that better support a peace process, along with the Minister’s agreement to look at alleged abuses of British aid by particular Palestinian NGOs.”
In all three instances, the parliamentary debates, votes, and policy changes followed recent briefings from NGO Monitor, based on our research reports. The need for responsible policies regarding NGO funding from Europe has been repeated by Israeli government officials, diplomats, and members of the Knesset in their contacts with European counterparts.

Why Palestinians hate Shavuot

A thought occurred to me as we were reading the story of Ruth in synagogue this week: Palestinians must hate Shavuot.
If there is one Jewish holiday which overflows with reminders of the flimsiness of Palestinian claims against Israel, it's Shavuot. Start with Megillat Ruth. The central events of the story all take place in Bethlehem. The first two verses identify the city as "Bethlehem, in Judea." The residents are all Jews. They speak Hebrew.
There is no mention of any "Palestine" or "Palestinians." Those terms did not even exist until many centuries later.
These facts cannot sit well with Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority. As recently as March 21, Abbas declared on official PA Television: "We were in this land since before Abraham…The Bible says, in these words, that the Palestinians existed before Abraham." I wonder which Bible it is that Abbas has been reading!
Similarly absurd statements were recently made by Abbas's Advisor on Religious Islamic Affairs and Supreme Shari'ah Judge, Mahmoud al-Habbash. "We have been here for the last 5,000 years, and have not left this land," he declared on PA Television on June 3. "Our forefathers are the monotheist Canaanites and Jebusites." (Translations from Palestinian Media Watch.)
Of course, Habbash's claims are nonsense. As every legitimate archaeologist, anthropologist, and Mideast historian will attest, there is no connection whatsoever between the Palestinian Arabs of today and the Canaanites. Islam did not even exist until the 7th century CE. The Arabs came here from the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century C.E.

Back to Entebbe: Former Israeli hostage reveals diary

"Every time I fly abroad, I take a close look at every passenger and at each member of the air crew to make sure they are not terrorists," says 81-year-old Sarah Davidson, one of the Israelis who was held hostage in Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976, after Air France Flight 139 was hijacked en route to Paris.
"This is just part of who I have been for the past 40 years," she said.
Davidson, her husband, Uzi, and their two sons, Ron, then 16, and Benny, then 13, were on their way to the United States on what was supposed to be Benny's bar mitzvah trip. She kept a diary detailing their captivity, which ended on July 4, 1976, after Israeli commandos carried out a daring raid and rescued the hostages in Operation Thunderbolt (later renamed Operation Jonathan, in memory of Sayeret Matkal commander Yoni Netanyahu -- brother of now-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu -- who was killed in the raid).
Ahead of the 40th anniversary of the events, the Davidson family recently gave an interview to Israel Hayom in which they talked about their ordeal. Benny said he had been "very afraid of [Ugandan dictator] Idi Amin, who arrived and spoke with us."
Uzi Davidson, then an Israeli Air Force navigator, recalled how he made a split-second decision to eat his military entry pass to make sure his hijackers wouldn't find out about his sensitive position.

A bizarre story has been popping up in Arabic news sites today about the origins of a Jordanian dish called mansaf.

Mansaf is lamb cooked in a sauce of fermented dried yogurt and served with rice or bulgur.

According to a supposed expert in Jordanian folklore, the dish was invented to help slaughter Jews.

Hamed Al-Nawaisa says that the root n.s.f in Arabic means to blow up, to destroy or demolish. Arab women would tell the guests that their dish is “destroyed” (munassaf), meaning that all traces of undesirable parts of wheat were cleared from it.

But then the article claims that Wikipedia (Arabic) has another version, with a story about an ancient “Jordanian Arab” king and Jews.

It is well known that Jews must not mix meat and dairy products. So there was a “Jordanian Arab” king called Mesha (in fact he was 9th century BCE Moabite, not "Jordanian Arab." The Jordanians are pretending that they are descended from Moabites just like the Palestinians pretend to be Jebusites or other Canaanites.)

Mesha asked that his people (who were familiar with the Jewish kosher law) to cook meat together with milk in order to be sure that his people were not Jewish and were hostile towards the Jews and violate Jewish beliefs.

When he was told that his entire people indeed cooked meat in milk, he announced that he was destroying/demolishing (nasf) his pacts with the Jews who “betrayed him and violated all their pacts with him”.

The last sentence of the article sums it up:

“And this is the reason that this dish was named mansaf, because it destroyed (nasafat) the pacts/agreements/treaties with the Jews, and then Mesha declared war against the Jews, and defeated them badly."

The main Arabic Wikipedia entry on mansaf says nothing of the sort but the Egyptian Wikipedia does say this story.

I see mention of this legend in recent years. This writer says that Mesha then used the mansaf as a lucky meal before all battles with the Jews, and that the food itself today is a declaration of eternal Jordanian enmity towards the Jews. He recommends that mansaf be served often to ferret out Jewish spies in Jordan who would naturally refuse to eat this dish.

While the story is fiction, the fact that it is reported and believed so readily is a sign of how eager Jordanians and other Arabs are to cling to an illusion of military superiority over the Jewish nation - and how they are all too happy to ascribe antisemitic origins to the food they eat.

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

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

Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

Analogical reasoning is basic to human survival. If you can eat a peach, it’s probably safe to eat an apricot. Those of us who favor profiling for security believe that future terrorists will probably be a lot like past terrorists, and so we should look harder at the ones that fit the profile. Every day we make hundreds of decisions based on analogical reasoning: a thing or situation seems like one we are familiar with, so we treat it in a similar way.

Of course there are good analogies and bad ones. There are poisonous mushrooms that look like edible ones. Part of intelligence is knowing when an analogy is a good one in regard to the particular aspect that is important in that case. Political analogies are common, and can be dangerous.

One of the worst analogies ever is the analogy between ‘Palestinians’ and black Americans (here’s a classic expression of it by Condoleezza Rice). Their history is different, their situation is different, and their behavior is different. There is nothing that one can deduce from the story of American blacks that can help one understand the ‘Palestinians’, or vice versa. The reason blacks in pre-1960s America were not allowed to sit at lunch counters with whites is nothing like the reason Arabs aren’t allowed to move freely between Gaza and Israel.

Why on earth would anyone think this? Lately, an entire ideology has appeared based on bad analogies. Just as Freud made sexuality the main driver of human behavior and Marx placed economics in that role, the new ideology of intersectionality tells us that it is oppression and discrimination. From the (somewhat mind-numbing) Wikipedia definition:

Intersectionality holds that the classical conceptualizations of oppression within society—such as racism, sexism, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and belief-based bigotry—do not act independently of each other. Instead, these forms of oppression interrelate, creating a system of oppression that reflects the "intersection" of multiple forms of discrimination.

Apparently the idea developed after feminist scholars argued that black women are doubly oppressed because of their membership in two oppressed groups (this may be empirically false, but nobody cares). It has since been generalized to a sort of unified field theory for all victims of all kinds of ‘oppression'.

This concept is related to the hierarchy of victimhood, in which being black gets more points than being white, being Palestinian gets more than being American, and so forth. Then the one with more points is allowed to tell the other that his perceptions are invalid due to his privileged point of view.

It also fits in with postcolonial theory, in which most conflict between groups is explained as a result of the oppression of a (usually non-white) colonized people by (usually Western) colonialists. The colonization can be military, economic, spiritual, or a combination; or it can be in the past but have left its victims traumatized. We could call this ‘post-colonial stress disorder’.

The prime analogy for Americans is always racism toward African-Americans, with which their national conscience is pathologically obsessed, even more so than Germans are with Jews. The more it is studied, the more it seems sui generis and not similar to other forms of discrimination. But to the intersectionalist, all the isms are similar.

You may have noticed that Jew-hatred (commonly called ‘antisemitism’) is not mentioned in the definition, being subsumed along with ‘Islamophobia’ in “belief-based bigotry.” This obscures the fact that Jews are hated for reasons having nothing to do with their beliefs or lack of them. If this isn’t clear from recent history, it should be obvious from looking at anti-Jewish propaganda which depends on all of the traditional racial stereotypes and blood libels that have characterized Jew-hatred for several hundred years.

It also enables those who want to minimize its prevalence by lumping it with other minor ‘bigotries’, while the minuscule phenomenon of ‘transphobia’, for example, has its own category.

Finally, it’s convenient to not explicitly mention Jew-hatred because most people who subscribe to intersectionality and related dogmas see Jews as oppressors rather than victims. Needless to say, Muslims are high on the list of the victimized, colonized and oppressed, which brings us to another failure of analogical reasoning.

There’s no recognition of the distinction that can be made between irrational hatred based on race or ethnicity, and opposition to the ideological aspects of Islam and shari’a and its violent manifestations. It’s all considered ‘bigotry’. So intersectionalists suppress the legitimate criticism of the jihadist ideology that more and more characterizes Islam as it is practiced today.

I’ve saved the worst bad analogy for last. A corollary of intersectionality is solidarity, “the belief that there is a common thread of discrimination that binds together many ostensibly different communities,” which include everything from the poor, to disabled people, to animals, to climate-change activists, to Palestinians. Because all kinds of ‘oppression’ are thought to benefit a Western, white, male, rich, heterosexual ruling class, activists join together with other ‘oppressed’ groups against the power structure that is responsible for it. This Marxist panacea-ism* leads to absurdities like anti-sexual assault activists cooperating with Students for Justice in Palestine – “because all oppression is one.”

Intersectionality suppresses the cognitive dissonance that would normally arise when, as is happening now, LGBT people are being asked to join the struggle against “Islamophobia,” while others are pointing out that there is a shari’a-based death penalty for gay sex in several Muslim countries, and when a Muslim has just murdered 49 people in a gay nightclub – and at least in part was motivated to do so by his religious belief. In a feat of mental acrobatics, the conflict between Muslims motivated by Islamic ideology and the gays they oppress evaporates, and only the fact that each group sees itself as a victim remains.

Just as human behavior is motivated by more than sex and economics, not every conflict is a case of oppression, not all forms of discrimination are the same, and not every problem is related to entrenched white straight male privilege. But thanks to the doctrine that arguing against the propositions of intersectionality indicates that the speaker supports the ruling class and can be ignored, the dogma becomes irrefutable. Like other irrefutable dogmas (e.g., Marxism, Objectivism), intersectionality gets its persuasiveness from a massive circular argument. Unfortunately, it is as pernicious as it is popular.

* Panacea-ism: the belief that there is one single solution for all the world’s ills.

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

06/16 Links Pt1: PA Minister of Education honors terrorist who murdered policewoman; Islamic Terrorists Are Not Motivated By Hate

From Ian:

PMW: PA Minister of Education honors terrorist who murdered 19-year-old policewoman

The Palestinian Authority Minister of Education visited a school this week in order to “honor the souls” of three terrorist “Martyrs” who had attended the school. Among the “Martyrs” was the murderer earlier this year of 19-year-old Hadar Cohen, an Israeli policewoman.
The article in the official PA daily points out that the students in the school named their class after two of the terrorists.
The Minister of Education, Sabri Saidam, added that:
“After the announcement of the results of the high school matriculation exams, a tribute to the Martyrs' families will be held at this school as a sign of loyalty to them and to their sacrifice.”[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, June 12, 2016]
Palestinian Media Watch has documented that a central teaching of the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Education is terror glorification.

A terrorist's mother makes 'V' sign at site of attack

The parents of Palestinian terrorist Muhannad Halabi, who murdered rabbis Nehemia Lavi and Aharon Bennett in Jerusalem's Old City last October, decided to carry out a provocation in the same spot: They recently visited the site of the attack, on Hagai Street, where the mother was photographed making a "V" sign.
It was just another effort to glorify Halabi, who was killed by Israeli security forces at the scene of the attack. He was recently honored by al-Quds University, where he studied law. During a recent event at the university, Halabi was praised by the speakers and his parents were given his diploma.
Recently, Palestinian groups began collecting money to rebuild his family's home, in the village of Surda near Ramallah, which had been demolished by the IDF as a deterrent against future attackers. After it became clear the home would not be rebuilt on the same plot, the money went toward buying a fancier place in the nearby village of Abu Qash. The place spans about 3,870 square feet and is currently undergoing renovations. Palestinian officials also named a road after Halabi and built a memorial honoring him.

Khaled Abu Toameh: Palestinians: Anarchy Returns to the West Bank

Hostility towards the Palestinian Authority (PA) seems to have reached unprecedented heights among refugee camp residents.
A chat with young Palestinians in any refugee camp in the West Bank will reveal a driving sense of betrayal. In these camps, the PA seems as much the enemy as Israel. They speak of the PA as a corrupt and incompetent body that is managed by "mafia leaders." Many camp activists believe it is only a matter of time before Palestinians launch an intifada against the PA.
Nablus, the largest city in the West Bank, is surrounded by a number of refugee camps that are effectively controlled by dozens of Fatah gangs that have long been terrorizing the city's wealthy clans and leading figures.
Hamas, of course, is cheering on the sidelines as it watches the PA-controlled territories going to hell.

The Fatah Facebook page looks back nostalgically at some older PLO posters with identical themes of a rifle emerging from the Dome of the Rock that is covered in a keffiyeh:

The caption for this 1979 poster says "Long live Jihad!" And indeed, the Facebook post also emphasizes "on the path to Jihad" - where the meaning of jihad is clearly military given the context.

Fatah has long linked violence with the religious symbolism of the Al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock.

For example, these two Fatah posters with the themes "The Flags of the Revolution Will Fly Until Liberation" and "Confrontation is our choice" were both notably created during the Oslo process:

This Fatah poster is even more recent, from 2010, with the caption "No choice except resistance":

The use of the holy spot as iconography for Fatah posters is fairly widespread, and the message is unmistakable - the impetus for fighting is religiously-directed jihad, not a secular concept of independence.

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

The Independent falsely claims Israel cut off water supply to Arabs

The headline and photo in The Independent:

The first paragraphs of the article by Peter Yeung:

Israel has cut off the water supply to large areas of the West Bank, Palestinian authorities have claimed.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians have reportedly been left without access to safe drinking water during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, a period of fasting, at a time when temperatures can exceed 35C.

The northern city of Jenin, which has a population of more than 40,000, said its water supplies had been cut in half by Mekorot, Israel's national water company. Jenin is home to a refugee camp, established in 1953, which contains 16,000 registered refugees.

Finally, after 13 paragraphs of accusations of Israel deliberately withholding water from Arabs, comes the "balance:"

A spokesperson for the Israeli government told The Indepedent there is "no truth" in the claims, and said the shortages were down to faulty water lines.

They said: "Several hours ago, COGAT's Civil Administration team have repaired a burst pipe line, which disrupted the water supply to the villages of Marda, Biddya, Jamma'in, Salfit and Tapuach. The water flow has been regulated and is currently up and running.

COGAT even shows a short video of the burst pipeline, commenting "COGAT's Water Unit is available around the clock to address any water disruptions throughout Judea & Samaria, and we continue to work diligently to ensure that civilians have access to running water at all times."

Israel has no incentive whatsoever to purposefully withhold water from Arab civilians. The article makes it sound like the army is simply being vindictive and petty, when in fact the COGAT unit tries to help Arab civilians as much as it can - that is its entire purpose.

The International Business Times coverage was even worse.

Israel is reported to have cut the water supply to the West Bank during Ramadan, in a move often dubbed "water apartheid" by critics of Israel. The state-run Israeli water company, Mekorot, shut the valves of the lines leading to areas in the West Bank, reports have stated on Wednesday 15 June.

Israel's step is likely to leave tens of thousands of Palestinians living in the volatile region without water for safe consumption. Israel has sanctioned water available to Palestinians living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip ever since Israel's occupation of the areas, which started in 1967.

It gets even worse.

UK Media Watch contacted COGAT and Mekorot:

COGAT has informed us (in a series of emails) that... due to increased usage during the summer months, Mekorot (Israel’s water carrier) was forced to reduce the overall supply to ALL areas of the West Bank – including in Jewish communities.

We sent an email to Mekorot, who then confirmed to us the increased demand during the summer months has resulted in shortages in the West Bank “to Israeli settlements and Palestinian areas“. A resident in an Israeli community in Samaria who we spoke to confirmed that the shortages have indeed affected Jewish communities.

COGAT told the Independent reporter this - and he didn't bother to mention it, because the idea of Israel discriminating against Arabs is simply too good to bother contradicting with facts.

UK Media Watch did further investigations that Peter Yeung didn't:

[COGAT] told us that, in order to accommodate Palestinians during Ramadan, when Muslims can’t drink water during the day, “the water supply has been increased during night-time in order to meet the needs of the residents”.

Additionally, COGAT noted that, beginning at the start of Ramadan, on June 6-7, “the water supply to Hebron and Bethlehem [was] expanded [by] 5,000 cubic meters per day in order to meet the needs of the residents“.

This shows another dimension to media bias against Israel. Accusations of mendacity against the Jewish state are treated as facts, as is often the case, but when those lies happen to coincide with the biases of the reporters, there is little or no attempt to find out if there is another side of the story. (In this case, the COGAT quote was only added after complaints to Yeung, he didn't bother to contact COGAT or Mekorot before submitting the article.)

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

Influential website Politico has an anti-Israel story by Ben Ehrenreich that is literally filled with lies that for some reason were not considered worth checking.

The centerpiece is an interview with a former Israeli soldier turned "peace activist" named Eran Efrati who described the horrors of what IDF soldiers do to Palestinians in Hebron. Of course it is not possible to debunk specific details of the soldier's anecdotes or alleged conversations with his superior, but this one incident that he mentions is simply impossible - and with it goes Efrati's credibility:

That weekend, Efrati recalled, settlers filled the central city. He was assigned to escort a group of them into the Patriarchs’ Tomb, a site holy to both Islam and Judaism, where Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their wives Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah are believed to be buried. The settlers were allowed into the Palestinian side of the site, into the mosque. What he saw there shocked him: Israeli children were peeing on the floors and burning the carpets. Their parents were there—the mosque was packed with settlers—but no one was stopping them. He and another soldier grabbed one of the children and took a cigarette lighter from his hand. “He started screaming at us,” Efrati said. “We laughed at him.” Five minutes later, “one of our very, very high-ranking officers came inside the mosque and said, ‘Did you steal something from the kid?’” They tried to explain, but the officer only repeated the question. “We said yes.” The officer ordered them to give it back and apologize. They found the child, apologized and returned the lighter. The boy ran right into the next room, Efrati said, and resumed setting fire to the carpets.

The Cave of the Patriarchs is the second-holiest site in Judaism. Several times a year Jews are allowed to visit the entire holy site. Those are the only times of the year that Jews can visit the cenotaphs of Isaac and Rebecca. Naturally, on those days the site is crowded with fervently religious Jews who take the opportunity to pray in a place they are normally banned from.

The tomb is holier to Jews than it is to Muslims.

The idea that religious Jews would allow (or, as implied, encourage) their children to urinate and set fires in this sacred spot is beyond absurd. In 2009, there was a small fire at the site from Jews placing too many candles there for religious reasons but it caused no damage. Arab websites would be filled with allegations of Jews urinating at the site and purposefully setting fires - but the story begins and ends in the sick and hateful imagination of Eran Efrati, and happily believed by Ben Ehrenreich.

(There have been reports of Muslims urinating next to the Torah scrolls at the site and otherwise desecrating it.)

Given that this story is simply not possible, Efrati's other lurid tales from Hebron should be treated as equally suspect. And for any real journalist, they would be. But for Ben Ehrenreich these are too good to check, since the target is religious Jews and the army.

Ehrenreich then goes on to extrapolate on the reasons for the knife intifada based on these lies:

If you terrorize people long enough, they eventually lose their fear. They hold onto the anger. This last October, after a year of relative calm, young Palestinians began attacking Israeli soldiers, police and civilians, occasionally with guns or cars but most often with household implements: knives, scissors, screwdrivers. The attacks were uncoordinated and outside the control of the Palestinian leadership or the traditional armed factions. Many occurred in or near Hebron, often at checkpoints or other sites of friction between Palestinian civilians and the Israeli military, but also on buses and trains in Jerusalem, in supermarkets and in the streets.

This is the Western media view of the uprising, and as I demonstrated previously, it is a lie. Arab media never blamed the violence on "frustration" or general "anger" at "occupation." They were very specific as to their reasons: because of supposed Israeli designs on the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and later as revenge for Israel killing those who attacked Israelis. And it can all be traced back very specifically to Mahmoud Abbas' speech in September when he said, referring to Jews who peacefully visit the holy site, “Al-Aqsa is ours and so is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet. We won’t allow them to do so and we will do whatever we can to defend Jerusalem.”

It was a call to violence. And the attacks started shortly thereafter.

The incitement against Jews escalated and it expressed itself with stabbings and shootings and car rammings that were cheered by Mahmoud Abbas' own political party as well as by other factions. Those who were killed for trying or succeeding to kill ordinary Jews were heroes. Only after Israeli forces responded with increased security did the targets turn to the soldiers at the checkpoints, because the would-be stabbers could not as easily reach Jewish population centers. And the people most vulnerable to propaganda - teenagers - were the ones who were the most likely to attack,

The meme of "frustration" is a convenient untruth meant to blame the victims.

When I was back in Israel and the West Bank earlier this month, the violence appeared to be ebbing. Until Wednesday’s shootings, no Israelis had been killed by Palestinians since February 18.

This simple statement shows how Ehrenreich knows the facts and wants to minimize Arab responsibility for the violence.

On March 8, American Taylor Force was murdered, and 10 others injured, in a stabbing spree in Tel Aviv. But since he wasn't an Israeli, Ehrenreich wants to ignore that attack to make it appear that the timeline of "calm" is longer.

The terrorist who murdered Taylor Force didn't know that he was an American. But Ehrenreich chose to ignore this attack to minimize Palestinian culpability for violence and strengthen his thesis that Israelis are not in as much danger as they claim. That is why he chose to frame this sentence the way he did.

And it is all the proof you need to show that Ehrenreich isn't trying to illuminate the situation in Israel, but to obfuscate it for his own anti-Israel propaganda purposes.

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

06/15 Links Pt2: When Someone Says He’s Only Anti-Israel, Not Antisemitic, It’s a Lie; What to Expect from an Independent Palestinian State

From Ian:

Sting Operation Reveals Facebook’s Double ‘Community Standards’ in Relation to Pro-Israel Posts
Facebook apologizes for removing pro-Israel post

Facebook was forced to restore a posting it had removed from a pro-Israel page, after a social-media experiment revealed that an identical pro-Palestinian posting was not deemed to be in violation of “community standards.”
The restored posting in question, on the Israel Video Network page, was a meme that read: “It is called Israel and not Palestine. Share if you agree.”
On May 25, the Israel Video Network received a notice from Facebook that the post was being removed for violating community standards. In addition, group administrators were warned that the page would be shut down if it continued to post similar items.
According to former Yesh Atid Party member of Knesset Dov Lipman — who now serves as the director of public diplomacy in the vice chairman’s office of the World Zionist Organization — after he was alerted by Israel Video Network of Facebook’s behavior, he and his team set up a sting operation to test whether an identical post — but one which favored the Palestinians — would produce the same results.
In a statement on Tuesday, Lipman wrote, “My staff set up a page called ‘It’s called Palestine and not Israel’ and we, with the help of a friend, loaded an exact replica of the first graphic but exchanged the words ‘Palestine’ and ‘Israel.’ We then had people complain about the new graphic and Facebook responded that the new graphic did not violate its community standards.”
After repeated attempts to get in touch with a live person at Facebook “to complain about this inconsistency,” Lipman penned an open letter in the Jerusalem Post, exposing Facebook’s behavior.

World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder: When Someone Says He’s Only Anti-Israel, Not Antisemitic, It’s a Lie

“When someone says they are not antisemitic — they are only anti-Israel – that is a lie,” the president of the World Jewish Congress said on Tuesday night.
Ronald S. Lauder made this assertion in a speech he delivered at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where he received the Guardian of Zion award from the Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies at Bar-Ilan University.
Addressing the approximately 200-strong audience of movers, shakers and Israeli academics, Lauder — the 20th recipient of the annual award – spoke about the increasingly unabashed expressions of antisemitism and Israel-hatred “not just from the far-Right, but from the far-Left.”
Whereas in the past, he said, Jews were to blame for all ills, “According to today’s antisemites, whatever is wrong in the world, Israel is at fault.” This, he added, “is no longer a fringe element of society,” and “when you hold Israel to a different standard, when you lie about Israel, its past and its present and its people — and when you want Israel to disappear — that makes you an antisemite… pure and simple.”

Clifford D. May: Terrorism and economic warfare

So today, non-state actors lead the campaign. Omar Barghouti, credited as a co-founder of the so-called BDS (for boycott, sanction and divest) Movement, has stated plainly that the goal is not to pressure Israelis into making concessions that might lead to peace. “We oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine,” he has said.
With two BDS supporters appointed — courtesy of Sen. Bernie Sanders — to the Democratic Party’s platform committee, even Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of left-leaning J Street, seems to have grasped the truth. The movement, he now says, “fails to recognize Israel’s right to exist, to support a two-state solution, to differentiate between the occupation and opposition to Israel itself.”
In recent months, more than 20 governors have signed anti-BDS laws. In response, BDS advocates are angrily asserting that their freedom of speech is being violated. That’s a canard. These laws simply make clear that taxpayers — in Illinois, South Carolina, Colorado, Florida and a growing list of other states — will not support companies that discriminate against Israel.
“The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that conditioning government money on compliance with anti-discrimination policies does not violate the First Amendment,” legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich pointed out. He added: “Israel boycotts — which target all businesses from a particular country — have the key hallmark of impermissible discrimination: They cut off business to people and companies not because of their own particular conduct, but on the basis of who they are.”
BDS advocates claim to fight for “social justice” but they turn a blind eye to the Muslim-on-Muslim wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen, the genocide of Middle Eastern Christians and Yazidis, the enslavement of girls in northern Nigeria and the routine executions of gays in Gaza, Iran and other corners of the Islamic world.
“Anti-Semitism,” the British rabbi-philosopher Jonathan Sachs recently observed, “is a virus that survives by mutating. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated because of their religion. In the 19th and 20th centuries they were hated because of their race. Today they are hated because of their nation state, Israel.” There may be treatments for this virus but no one has a cure.

Representatives of the Jewish community in Tunisia are presenting a request to the Truth and Dignity Commission (Instance de Vérité et Dignité) to investigate institutional abuse of Jews in Tunisia from 1955 to 2013.

The filing demands an investigation into "abuses and violations and other illegal acts suffered by the Tunisian citizens, whose only fault is that they are affiliated with the Jewish religion, since independence."

The Commission was set up in 2013 to address these sorts of complaints from citizens.

The complaint lists various examples of abuse suffered by the community, such as losing their citizenship and losing their property.

There are about 1,500 Jews remaining in Tunisia. There were more than 100,000 Jews there in 1956 when Tunisia won independence from France.

Lyn Julius just wrote a biting Huffington Post article about Tunisian Jews in wake of the pilgrimage there a few weeks ago:

One of the modern-day pilgrims was a rabbi from England: Liberal Judaism’s senior rabbi, Rabbi Danny Rich.

As well as visiting Al-Ghriba — the oldest synagogue in Africa — Rabbi Rich met Tunisian government members.

“Jews have lived successfully in Tunisia for centuries and the authorities seem determined to ensure that the ancient Jewish communities in Djerba and Tunis are both safe and able to thrive,” Rabbi Rich told the Jewish Chronicle.

His words must have been music to the Tunisian government’s ears.

Yes, Jews had lived in Tunisia for centuries - indeed there were 105, 000 in 1948. But Tunisia had failed miserably to hang on to its Jewish community - just 1,000 still remain, most in the enclave known as Hara Kbira on Djerba. By anyone’s reckoning, Tunisia’s rapid cleansing of its Jews is a sign of catastrophic failure. Tunisian Jews have been departing in waves over the last 50 years.

The latest wave was in June 1967, following the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbours. About 100 Jewish-owned businesses in Tunis were attacked and looted. The Great Synagogue, on the Avenue de la Liberte, was ransacked and set on fire. Rioters called out to “throw the Jews into the sea” and to burn them. Some 13,000 Jews took the hint and fled - many with nothing but a suitcase.

Numbers continued to dwindle and families left Djerba in the wake of the Arab Spring, which broke out in Tunisia in 2011.

But well-meaning westerners such as Rabbi Rich perpetuate the delusion that all is, and always has been, well. Tunisia is desperate to boost its fragile economy and image as a tourist destination, its Number One industry - and Rabbi Rich is all too willing to play the game. The Al-Ghriba pilgrimage is the highlight of the tourist calendar, bringing much-needed tourist dollars to the island of Djerba and filling its hotels.

While in Tunisia Rabbi Rich attended a conference at which the Minister of Culture promised support for a museum of Tunisian Jewry.

Few can argue with that. Except that if numbers continue to decline, the Museum of Tunisian Jewry may end up as nothing more than a forlorn reminder of Hitler’s project to establish the Museum of an Extinct Race.

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

Harrowed Khamenei Describes His Orlando Nightclub Ordeal (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Tehran, June 15 - Now back in the safety of the Iranian capital, Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ali Khamenei described for well-wishers the tale of his miraculous survival in the Orlando, Florida nightclub where a Muslim radical killed 49 people and injured 53 on Sunday.

Khamenei, still visibly distraught from the horror of the incident, escaped harm by hiding behind and under other patrons, and managed to hold another person between himself and the gunman long enough to escape the carnage. Friends and relatives in Iran described his actions as heroic.

The Supreme Leader, 76, was spirited back to Iran immediately following the shooting. He had traveled to Orlando to visit the various Disney theme parks and the Universal Studios resort, and in the course of his stay discovered that Pulse, an establishment catering mostly to an LGBT clientele, was celebrating Latin Night as part of Pride Week, and he decided to check out the scene, which is illegal back home in Iran.

However, recalled the Ayatollah, gunfire soon rang out and people scrambled. He managed to avoid being seen by Omar Mateen, the shooter, at one point even flinging a 25-year-old man into the path of the gunfire, an act he regards as heroic. "I soiled myself, but kept my wits about me," he said, breathing heavily as the moments came back. "Somehow I managed to conceal myself from the shooter. I managed to maintain a buffer between him and me of at least one person who was immodestly dressed, and therefore deserved to be shot. But it was close. I hightailed it out of there as best I could."

Khamenei had dismissed his bodyguards for the Pulse excursion, a move he now questions. "Nobody knew who I was there - I looked like any old hipster, so my personal security as Ayatollah wasn't really in doubt," he explained. "But I guess no one expected this. From now on, I'm not going anywhere without protection," he added, glancing at his wallet.

A spokesman for the Ayatollah said he lost several friends in the massacre, but was still in shock and urged visitors not to bring them up. "Please show sensitivity at this difficult time," the spokesman urged. "It will help with the healing process."

The incident marks the first time since 2011 that Khamenei has encountered such acute physical danger to his life. That year, he was one of seventeen hospitalized for heat stroke at the Tel Aviv Gay Pride Parade.

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

06/15 Links Pt1: Amnesty: Whitewashing the PFLF to Condemn Israel; Hamas Threatens Jordan

From Ian:

MEMRI: Palestinian Columnist: Armed Struggle Must Be Ever-Present, But Used According To Circumstances; It Must Not Be Considered A Crime

Following the June 8, 2016 shooting in the Sarona compound in central Tel Aviv, Hani Al-Masri, a columnist for the Palestinian daily Al-Ayyam, wrote that a distinction must be made between organized resistance, which should be subject to strategic considerations, and spontaneous actions by individuals, which are an effective deterrent because the Israeli security forces are hard pressed to prevent them. He added that, in the absence of a leadership and organized action, spontaneous actions are better than nothing.
Al-Masri called to preserve the option of armed Palestinian resistance as defense against the aggression of the Israeli occupation and the settlers, and to combine it with other modes of resistance, as circumstances require. He added that all Israelis are legitimate targets, since they all serve in the military except for the ultra-Orthodox, most of whom are extremists who incite to kill non-Jews. Al-Masri did advise to avoid targeting children or targeting people indiscriminately in public places, "as befitting the just nature of the [Palestinian] cause and our moral superiority," and to "take into account" the presence of Israeli Arabs and "Jews who oppose the Zionist enterprise or who are fighting to defend Palestinian rights."

PMW: PA TV teaches kids that Israel's Mount Meron is "in Palestine"

PA TV teaches kids that Israel's Mount Meron is "in Palestine"
During the month of Ramadan official Palestinian Authority TV is entertaining kids with different games and quizzes. One quiz question on the children's program The Best Home taught Palestinian children to deny Israel's existence and replace it with "Palestine," when the host presented the highest mountain in Israel (not including Mount Hermon in the Golan), Mount Meron, as "the highest mountain in Palestine":
PA TV host: "What is the highest mountain in Palestine: Mt. Meron, Mt. Olives or Mt. Ebal?"
Girl: "Gerizim."
PA TV host: "Mt. Meron (in the Galilee), Mt. Ebal (near Nablus) or Mt. of Olives (in Jerusalem)?"
Girl: "Ebal."
PA TV host: "Ebal? Is Ebal higher than Meron?"
Girl: "Mt. Meron."
PA TV host: "Good job, good job! Give her a hand!"
[Official PA TV, June 7, 2016]
This is not the first time Mount Meron in northern Israel is presented as being located in "Palestine." Previous years' quizzes have included the same question and many others presenting different locations in Israel as "Palestine."

Why Palestinians Reject Peace

When Shipler was actively reporting on the conflict, he was an exponent of the idea that peace could only come when both sides would be able to see the justice in the claims of the other side. By that definition, it’s clear that one side has moved toward peace, the other has not.
Shipler’s assertion that most Israelis no longer view themselves as the sole victims in this conflict is unquestionable. It is also unquestionable that Palestinian attitudes have gone in the other direction. Indeed, Shipler’s impressions reinforce research conducted by Daniel Polisar demonstrating that support for terror and opposition to peace was mainstream Palestinian opinion and not merely the views of a small group of violent extremists.
After two decades of concessions and withdrawals on Israel’s part, Palestinians now routinely speak of all of Israel—including liberal, cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, where terrorists struck last week—as “occupied” territory. So, despite the emphasis on settlements and Netanyahu’s supposedly hardline personality, Israel’s willingness to do what Shipler and peace activists advised had the opposite effect on the Palestinians than they thought.
By granting legitimacy to Palestinian concerns, Israelis haven’t inspired reciprocity but have encouraged their foes to double down on their narrative in which the Jews are interlopers without rights or history. It has convinced them that the Israelis are thieves who must be forced to disgorge all of their stolen goods (i.e. all of Israel) rather than fellow humans with whom they must share land if there is to be peace. Shipler seems to have caught onto the basic conundrum of the peace process that has eluded many of his successors at the Times and elsewhere in the media.

Did the UAE suspend its $500M annual aid to PA?

On June 12, a popular and prolific Palestinian columnist named Jihad el-Khazen wrote an article for the pan-Arab London-based Al Hayat that caused a sensation.

El-Khazen interviewed an unnamed senior Gulf official who sharply criticized President Obama, saying he was acting more as a professor than a president and saying that perhaps Donald Trump would be a better president. He called Obama's Middle East strategy a disaster: "He pulled out of Iraq and then returned. He reduced US forces in Afghanistan and then increased them. He drew red lines in Syria and then ignored them. He says the Saudis are allies, but then he is not serious in cooperating with them. He accuses us in the Arab coalition of killing civilians; the Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan hundreds of thousands of civilians, and now they are blaming us. The situation between the Gulf and Washington has gone from bad to worse."

Crown Prince Zayed of Abu Dhabi

That wasn't the controversial part in the Arab world. This was:

The Gulf official told me that the entire leadership of the Palestinian National Authority must resign, there is no confidence. He asked me, "Have you heard about the PA deal with the United Arab Emirates?" I told him I definitely hadn't and asked him for clarification.

He said that the UAE had for four years subsidized the Palestinian Authority by about $500 million a year, and that he personally carried a symbolic Palestinian keffiyeh in solidarity with the Palestinians.

[Former PA prime minister] Salam Fayyad came to Abu Dhabi, saying he decided to establish a non-governmental organization. Officials in Abu Dhabi chose to support his association with ten million dollars.

They were surprised when the prosecutor general of the Palestinian Authority froze the transfer of $700 thousand dollars to the NGO of Salam Fayyad, and accused the Emirates of trying to launder money through the Palestinian territories.

The official said angrily, "Can you believe that the UAE would choose to launder funds through the Palestinian territories and that the amount is only 700 thousand dollars?"

The Emirates are now demanding the Palestinian president to apologize publicly, and have stopped all aid to the Palestinian Authority.

The official PA Wafa news agency and Fatah went bananas over this. They said that the el-Khazen article was an "obscenity" and asked Al Hayat why they would choose to publish such "vulgarity." They are also demanding that Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed answer whether he really has the opinions mentioned in the article towards the PA.

But there was no denial that funds had been suspended to the PA.

The Arab world are once again showing how sick they are of the Palestinian issue and their corruption. The West should be wondering why Arabs who know the PA well and have supported them for decades are now cool towards their "brethren."

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

Canadian "Independent Jewish Voices" supports antisemitic conspiracy theories, linked to Holocaust denial article

Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) is essentially a Canadian version of "Jewish Voice for Peace," a virulently anti-Israel group that uses its Jewish members as a shield against charges of antisemitism - and manages to get media attention as a legitimate voice of the Jewish community.

Whoops.

This link goes to the well-known antisemitic conspiracy theory site Veterans Today, and the editor of that site added these paragraphs to the original article by rabid Ziophobe Alan Hart:

One of the most prevalent abuses of what is called the holocaust is the ritual exploitation of numbers which have long been debunked, but are still continually abused. I used to remind all media ten to twelve years ago that the Auschwitz plaque had been changed from the “four million died”, to roughly “one million died”.

I did the math for them… 6 minus 3 does not equal 6, except in holocaust math. Not a one of them was aware of the change in the Auschwitz plaque; but still, after all of this time, media never fails to use the old debunked number.

This link by IJV to the Holocaust-denial article was exposed by B'nai Brith Canada:

A group that calls itself Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), and passes itself off as an organization that speaks on behalf of Jewish Canadians, promotes Holocaust denial through social media, a B’nai Brith investigation reveals.

Postings on the group’s official Twitter and Facebook accounts have been directing followers to articles from the white supremacist hate site Veterans Today. One article in particular falsely asserts that no more than 1-million Jews were killed by Nazi Germany and characterizes modern antisemitism as a natural reaction to Israeli policies. The article was also promoted online by Sid Shniad, a B.C. resident who serves as IJV’s co-chair and official spokesperson.

Both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Law Poverty Center have denounced Veterans Today as a white supremacist hate site, replete with false accusations of Jewish responsibility for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the assassination of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy, and the Sandy Hook elementary school shootings.

The posting by IJV cannot be described as accidental or unknowing. In fact, one Facebook follower of the IJV page explicitly pointed out that the article supports Holocaust denial, but IJV failed to answer it or delete the link.

IJV then went into attack and coverup mode.

It apologized for linking to the story, but defended author Alan Hart. Here is its amended defense:

In 2015 IJV provided a social media link to an article written by the widely-respected journalist and Mid-East expert Alan Hart entitled, “A truth most Jews don’t want to know about anti-Semitism”. Like Hart, IJV strongly condemns anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial of any kind.

Hart’s article was re-published on a website called Veterans Today which upon further examination proved to be an extremely disreputable site that engages in wild conspiracy theory and Holocaust debunking. The editor at Veterans Today inserted a note into the article denying the number of Jews exterminated in the concentration camps that we find repugnant.

We thoughtlessly linked to Hart’s article on the Veterans Today site. We acknowledge that our oversight in this respect was lax: we didn’t verify the nature of the Veteran’s Today website, and we didn’t examine the Editor’s note. For that, we apologize to our members and supporters for our carelessness. IJV has now removed that link.

IJV is claiming ignorance about the nature of Veterans Today - and also about the fact that the article it linked to included Holocaust denial inserted by VT's editor. It seems more than strange for a group, and many of its members individually, to link to an article without actually reading it.

The idea that they knew nothing about Veterans Today is far-fetched. After all, VT itself praises IJV and its coordinator Tyler Levitan in 2015, with the VT editor saying that he wanted to get in contact with Levitan to see how they could work together.

Even without VT's adding the explicit Holocaust denial to Hart's article, IJV's defense of Alan Hart as a "widely-respected journalist and Mid-East expert" betrays its fringe agenda. After Bnai Brith Canada pointed out that Hart peddles outrageous 9/11 conspiracy theories, IJV added that they don't support that part of Hart's oeuvre. Yet they still defend him and call him "widely respected."

Also, IJV has another 9/11 conspiracy theorist on its steering committee, Diana Ralph. IJV deleted that page after it was exposed.

In fact, IJV has been furiously cleansing its social media timelines and website of embarrassing materials as Bnai Brith Canada has been exposing them.

This isn't the first brush that IJV had with crazed conspiracy theories that they now claim to disavow. Check out this Facebook post from 2012:

This episode shows that IJV is not mainstream and represents no one besides a tiny fringe of self-hating Jews who are happy to use their ostensible Jewish ancestry as a means to bash Israel. Its orgy of support for unhinged antisemitic and anti-Israel conspiracy theories and its pathetic attempts to cover them up in the past few days proves this better than anything else.

(h/t Aidan Fishman)

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