Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, June 19, 2016

06/19 Links: Valdary: 21st Century Zionism; Tutu’s Nobel Nominee: Arab Murderer Of Christian Monk

From Ian:

1974 Ma’alot Massacre – My search for the brother and sister in the iconic photo

As Legal Insurrection readers know, my recent trip to Israel was intended to give me a chance to meet and help document the stories of the victims of the recent so-called Knife or Stabbing Intifada, such as the family of Yaakov Don.
Because my trip was cut short from two weeks to three days due to a family health emergency, I didn’t get to meet any of the victims or their families.
I also intended to document the victims of past terrorism, as I did in 2015 when I met with a survivor of the 1971 rocket attack on a school bus at Moshav Avivim, and the families of Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner, killed in the 1969 supermarket bombing masterminded by Rasmea Odeh.
In particular, I planned on focusing on the Ma’alot Massacre, the May 1974 takeover of a school in the northern Israeli town of Ma’alot by Palestinian terrorists who infiltrated from Lebanon. Of the over 100 hostages, 25 were killed including 22 students.

Chloe Valdary: 21st Century Zionism: The Importance of Place & Homeland in Popular Culture

As a Tikvah Fellow at the Wall Street Journal, I’ve spent the last 9 months researching the world of pro-Israel advocacy in the campus space — namely what works, what doesn’t, and how to make it better. What I’ve discovered in part is that we as a community don’t understand what Zionism actually is. We reduce this philosophy — to which there have been many contributions from an array of philosophers and thought leaders — to discussions about UN resolutions and media bias. But this is not the sum and substance of Zionism; the ideas at the core of Zionism have nothing to do with the BDS movement or other anti-Israel campaigns. Instead, Zionism is defined by concepts that inform the way we as human beings create meaning in our lives and shape a sense of identity. These tendencies are found in every society and are, in addition to being particularly Jewish, profoundly human. My comments below explore just how much the Zionist idea is found in the way we express ourselves in today’s popular culture.
When discussions about Israel arise in our inner circles, we often take the concept of “homeland” for granted. We reduce “homeland” to something that exists purely for political purposes — something to be divided or retained as Oslo, or American policymakers see fit.
Yet a homeland is not simply a pile of dirt and dust that exists to do the bidding of foreign diplomats. It is a physical space that plays a prominent role in the flourishing of a community. It satisfies that community’s need for rootedness — a concept central to the productive development of one’s identity. In many cultures, a homeland should not be held in high esteem merely for the sake of utility, (the production of goods and services), but for the cultivation of the community ontologically speaking, and for the sanctity of the individual who understands that he or she belongs to something: A place, A people, a history, and therefore a purpose and a destiny.

Islamist Apologetics

The Arab Spring was hailed as a movement that would finally bring democracy to the Middle East and an end to authoritarian rule from Tunisia to Syria. But as is often the case in the region, disappointment was swift to follow. In Egypt, the first free elections in 2012 brought to power the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and President Mohamed Morsi. But after only one year, the Egyptian people demanded he step down and called on the army for a coup to retake the country from the Islamists. This history encapsulates the tensions between Islamists and secularists in the democratic process, which is the topic of Shadi Hamid’s latest book, Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World.
Hamid, a senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, ends his book with a discussion of the dynamics between liberalism and Islamism in the Middle East, and the difficult democratic process after a revolution. He explains how democracy is struggling to gain ground in the region because the people often elect Islamists, which causes liberals to revolt and stage a coup. Islamist participation in the democratic process is polarizing because of the fears that it provokes (although Hamid doesn’t seem to think these fears are legitimate). This leads him to an interesting and thoughtful discussion of how to draft a constitution, who should write it, how much public involvement there should be, and how to craft nonnegotiable “supraconstitutional principles,” like our Bill of Rights, that limit what a democratic majority can do. This is a useful reflection on the complications inherent to the region because of its religious history and the relatively recent introduction of secular government there in the 20th century.
Hamid’s titular goal, to point out how Islam is “exceptional,” is also helpful in understanding Islam’s relationship to the law and the state. He spends the first part of the book explaining that Islam is fundamentally different from both Judaism and Christianity in its relationship to the state and governance. Christianity, he argues, didn’t have a “positive conception of divinely mandated governance,” because its founder, Jesus, was a dissident, while Judaism had a similar body of laws as Islam, but not the context for governing (Jews lived under non-Jewish rule for eighteen hundred years). Islam, on the other hand, is a juridical religion created to dictate every aspect of life, and was founded by Mohamed, who became the head of a state. Thus, unlike Judaism, Islam had both the body of law, and the context to implement those laws—until the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. This discussion is important in understanding politics in the Middle East, especially in the wake of the Arab Spring.

Jewish Americans are split on the question of Arab-Muslim immigration into the United States.

As the children of immigrants it is exceedingly difficult for us, from an ethical standpoint, to oppose the immigration of others into the United States. This is particularly true given the history of Jews in Europe during the middle of the last century.

The immigration question is largely partisan within American politics.

The Right tends to be wary of Muslim and Latino immigration into the country, when not in outright opposition, while the Left is generally willing to fling open the doors to whomever may come.

As someone concerned about the well-being of the Jewish people, however, it seems to me not unreasonable to be cautious. The scale of migration out of the Middle East that we are seeing today is somewhat comparable to the mass migrations that we saw following World War II.

It will, in fact, change the nature western societies, particularly in Europe.

Many Americans are concerned about Latino illegal immigration. As a Californian, I can tell you, that my neighbors tend to be concerned about gang activity, the prospect of rising crime, housing prices, and the economic hit that the tax-base will take in order to integrate the immigrant population into the schools and the medical facilities and so forth.

I am not.

What concerns me is that a Jihadi just killed about fifty people in Orlando, Florida, and all the Left can talk about is the NRA and Donald Trump.

As I wrote on Israel Thrives in response to a comment by Empress Trudy:

Can we, or should we, as the children of hounded immigrants deny the rights of other immigrants to come to the United States and enjoy "the blessings of liberty" as the Jewish people were able to do?

It's a sticky point, isn't it?

We are the children of immigrants, after all.

In fact, obviously, the US is a country of immigrants with the exception of Native-Americans.

So, if we wish to keep Jihadis out of the country we face an ethical dilemma.

Given Jewish history in the 20th century, it tends to be difficult for us to make the argument against immigration.

What I would insist upon, I guess, is a recognition of the fact that Islamic immigration is largely an anti-Semitic immigration - given polling data from the region - and therefore as a matter of basic common sense, and self-preservation, we are under no ethical obligation to support it.

It seems to me that there are two things that American Jews, and our friends, need to acknowledge.

The first is that the rise of political Islam is the single most significant international political happening since the demise of the Soviet Union and the second is that the gun control issue is a "red herring" when it comes to the issue of American Jihad.

Political Islam

We must recognize that political Islam is a very serious international political movement that represents a direct threat to the Jewish people and the secular West.

The Right seems to recognize this, but the Left does not.

In fact, the failure of the progressive-left to acknowledge the significance, or even existence, of political Islam represents a terrible and hypocritical form of bigotry. The "anti-racist" Left, I would argue, is the most racist political movement in Europe and the United States, outside of political Islam, today.

We call it Humanitarian Racism and it is a form of racism that presumes that "people of color," particularly Arab-Muslim men, are so "backward" and so deformed by western imperialism that they cannot be held to any standards of contemporary human decency. So, for example, if Arab parents and Arab media encourage their children to run out into the streets of Israel with hand-axes for the purpose of chopping down the first Jew that they see, we're supposed to believe that this is the fault of those Jews.

This is Humanitarian Racism and it is the prominent form of bigotry in the contemporary West.

The hypocrisy, of course, is profound.

If a Jewish kid wears dreadlocks at San Francisco State University he get accused of "cultural appropriation."

However, if Arab kids call for the genocide of the Jews via calls for "Intifada! Intifada! Long live the Intifada!" they are told by SFSU president, Leslie Wong, that they represent the very best of what the university stands for.

Gun Control, Orlando, and Immigration

It is reasonably obvious that Americans are going to have their handguns for home defense and their rifles and shotguns for shooting woodland creatures of various sorts.

The American Left, which used to represent my political hom, wants to argue that Orlando is about gun control.

It is not.

Orlando is about a violent political trend within the Muslim community that goes back at least to the 1920s with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo.

Some, for good reason, would argue that it actually goes back to Mohammad in the 7th century with his suggestion that Muslims should strike at the neck of the kuffars, the infidels. And although Omar Seddique Mateen was a native-born American with Afghani roots, the Orlando shooting points to the question of Arab-Muslim immigration into the United States because of the Jihadi inclinations of a significant percentage of its population.

This is not to argue that gun control is unnecessary, but merely to suggest that the Democratic Party is using gun control as a deflection of the real issue, the Jihad, which Democrats refuse to discuss lest they end up pointing the trembling finger of blame at one another while screaming from the hillsides "racist!"

We can never honestly face the Jihad, much less defeat it, if we cannot bring ourselves to discuss it.

The American Right seems comfortable enough discussing what is, in fact, a major international threat - just ask any freshly raped woman in Sweden - while those in the American Left would rather have root canal surgery than so much as breathe the words "radical Islamic terrorism."

There is a grand hypocrisy at work here.

The western-left claims to be "anti-racist" and yet represents the most racist political movement throughout Europe and the United States today with the sole exception of political Islam. The contemporary form of this racism is not entirely different from white western nineteenth-century imperial notions of "white man's burden." Smug and self-righteous white western leftists look upon their "little brown brothers" with benevolent contempt.

They honestly have such a low opinion of non-white people that they feel they must indulge any and all wrong-doing - up to and including the slaughter of around 50 people in an Orlando nightclub for the purpose of enforcing Sharia - as the fault of the US government for not rounding up guns. Or as the fault of a generalized, free-floating hatred for Gay people within American society. Or as the fault of right-wing "Islamophobia" which drives some Muslims into murderous fits of rage.

The truth is that most Muslims have no particular interest in waging Jihad or slaughtering their Gay neighbors. But, nonetheless, there is a trend within Islam that is highly traditionalist and that despises Gay people, Jewish people, non-Muslims, in general, and that believes that women should live their lives within a potato sack.

That trend is known as al-Sharia and it resides directly within the heart of the faith.

Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

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Gaza fisherman's bay

From numerous Arab media, and in English at the Hamas-affiliated Palinfo site:

The Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas denied news of the existence of a proposed 10-year truce with Israel in return for economic concessions to the Gaza Strip.

The movement stressed in a brief statement Saturday that the news reported was unfounded.

The news item claimed that the Israeli government provided a new offer to Hamas through intermediaries for the purpose of signing a long-term truce in the Gaza Strip, including a truce for 10 years in exchange for substantial economic concessions to the Gaza Strip.

According to more detailed versions of the story, Israel presented the offer through intermediaries to Hamas leaders in Qatar at the end of May. the proposal allegedly included an agreement for Hamas not to do any work on tunnels and weapons in exchange for a small commercial port between Ashdod and Gaza exclusively for Gaza with a rail line between this port and the larger one in Haifa, allowing Gaza workers to work in Israel, further opening crossings between Israel and Gaza for import and export, plus other points that were considered too sensitive for the document to mention.

I don't know if this offer was real, but this is not the first time that Hamas has denied any offers of a truce in exchange for calm.

You will be hard-pressed to find any public pressure, from the Western or Arab nations, on Hamas to accept such an idea of economic relief for a truce. Similarly, the idea of NGOs or news media calling on Hamas to accept Israel's existence or even a long-term truce is pretty much absurd. This even though the only concession asked from Hamas is to stop doing things that are illegal under international law and that could only lead to another devastating war for Gaza.

The only international pressure is, as always, on Israel and Israel alone.

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Osama Saeed Bhutta has joined Amnesty International as communications director, after leaving Al Jazeera earlier this year.

Here are some of his qualifications to become a major official at a human rights NGO:

Bhutta supports the idea of a restored caliphate across the Muslim world, claiming that it would be completely compatible with human rights.

There is no point in comparing the political form a caliphate might take to those in centuries past. Institutions such as the British monarchy or the papacy have existed for centuries, but bear little resemblance today to what's gone before. A restored caliphate is entirely compatible with democratically accountable institutions.

But what about the issue of sharia? Opposing it is apparently also one of the western world's .... Terms such as "sharia" and "caliphate" have important meanings to Muslims quite different from the distorted connotations they often carry in the west. The aim of Islamic law, contrary to popular belief, is not punishment by death or amputation of body parts. It is to create a peaceful and just society, with Islamic scholars over centuries citing its core aims: the freedom to practise religion; protection of life; safeguarding intellect; maintaining lineage and individual rights. This could be the basis for an Islamic bill of rights.

So, does Osama Saeed support the idea that Jews and Christians pay a poll tax if they live in Muslim countries? After all, that is Sharia law, is it not>?

Does he support equal rights for gays? Does he think they should be hanged? Or somewhere in between?

Let's be clear. The much-lauded Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam signed in 1990 did not call for freedom of religion, equal rights for women, equal rights for gays, freedom to leave Islam, freedom of expression (it explicitly says there is no right to disparage Islamic prophets,) and so forth. It is fundamentally opposed to everything Amnesty pretends to stand for.

In another article, Saeed writes "Mr Blair has attacked the idea of the caliphate - the equivalent of criticising the Pope." Really? A Muslim 'umma with a billion people under a theocratic rule is similar to the Pope today?

Saeed also wrote this in 2006:

Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki was originally hounded in the US becuase two of the 9/11 bombers happened to pray at his mosque. Many of my Muslim readers will either know him personally or have heard his lectures. He preached nothing but peace, and I pray he will be able to do so again.

Alwaki, by 2006, had claimed that the FBI or Mossad was behind 9/11, and he told his followers to never cooperate with law enforcement in reporting Muslims who support terror attacks. And Alwaki was already known to have had far closer ties to the 9/11 hijackers than just having them as members of his mosque. Oh, and this person who "preached nothing but peace" also had expressed support for suicide bombers killing Jews.

So Amnesty is hiring someone who calls Hamas suicide bombings "martyrdom operations," who is almost certainly against equal rights for gays, who supports Muslim supremacism within a new caliphate run by sharia law, and who openly supported someone who was known to have undeniable terror ties.

Wouldn't it be nice if some reporter would actually ask Amnesty's new communications director very specifically if, when there is a contradiction between the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Sharia law, which he would support?

(h/t Petra)

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06/18 Links: What Obama Actually Thinks About Radical Islam; Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Bold, Brave, and Right

From Ian:

Jeffrey Goldberg: What Obama Actually Thinks About Radical Islam

It is not only Obama’s seven-year war against jihadist organizations that calls into question Trump’s claim that he is working to advance the interests of ISIS (or, to put it another way, if Obama is indeed an ISIS agent, he’s doing a very bad job of it). It is also his publicly and frequently articulated demand, made of all Muslims, to fight harder against those who refract their faith through the prism of arid and merciless textual literalism. “There is ... the need for Islam as a whole to challenge that interpretation of Islam, to isolate it, and to undergo a vigorous discussion within their community about how Islam works as part of a peaceful, modern society,” Obama told me.
He immediately pivoted from this statement, though, by addressing Donald Trump—not by name, but his target was obvious. “I do not persuade peaceful, tolerant Muslims to engage in that debate,” he said, “if I’m not sensitive to their concern that they are being tagged with a broad brush.”
This represents the core of Obama’s anti-Trump argument. John Brennan, the CIA director, described to me the tightrope Obama walks on Muslim extremism this way: “The goal is not to force a Huntington template onto this conflict.” Brennan was referring to the political scientist Samuel Huntington, who posited the existence of a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West.
The fundamental difference between Obama and Trump on issues related to Islamist extremism (apart from the obvious, such as that, unlike Trump, Obama a) has killed Islamist terrorists; b) regularly studies the problem and allows himself to be briefed by serious people about the problem; and c) is not racist or temperamentally unsuitable for national leadership) is that Trump apparently believes that two civilizations are in conflict. Obama believes that the clash is taking place within a single civilization, and that Americans are sometimes collateral damage in this fight between Muslim modernizers and Muslim fundamentalists.

Bold, Brave, and Right

Ayaan Hirsi Ali defends—and embodies—the American Idea.
Perhaps we should put less stock in politically correct Islamic exegesis and listen instead to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She spent her formative years living under Sharia in Africa and the Middle East, where she joined the Muslim Brotherhood. As is the custom in many such locales, she was subjected to female genital mutilation. Rather than submit to an arranged marriage in Canada, Ali escaped to the Netherlands, where she applied for political asylum. She won a seat in the Dutch parliament. In effect, she reasoned her way out of the Islamic-supremacist ideology once she arrived in the West by comparing the teachings of the core Islamic texts to those of the Western canon, which she found far superior.
Today, Ali lives under the threat of death from her former coreligionists. She is protected by around-the-clock security. For her unwillingness to accept a Western progressive’s distorted vision of Islam, she is censured and often censored. It must baffle Ali that, even as she speaks in defense of Western civilization, her fellow Westerners often seem to reject the principle of free speech.
I had the privilege of interviewing Ali prior to the Burke gala. She told me that she doesn’t wish to be treated as a hero. Speaking the truth, she said, ought to be the norm rather than the exception. She was troubled by the West’s lack of confidence in its own ideas. Free expression, she said, is the great deterrent to the global jihad.
In her devotion to classical liberal ideals and her willingness to die in defense of them, Ali is in many ways more American than those who were born here. She sought to become an American citizen because she studied intently and embraced wholeheartedly the American Idea. America is more than a landmass; it is an exceptional belief system that enables human flourishing. Islamic supremacism is not only incompatible with America but also seeks its destruction.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s life is a testament to the notion that ideas matter, and great ideas are worth defending. If America is to remain the last, best hope on Earth, we must heed her words.

Brendan O’Neill: Orlando has exposed the poison of identity politics

This discomfort with the idea that the massacre was both homophobic and an attack on humanity is captured again and again in the strange and bitter post-Orlando commentary. A British journalist slams those ‘portraying the massacre as an attack on humanity’. A writer for the academic magazine the Conversation spells it out even more clearly. He says the 49 dead should be remembered as ‘queer lives’ rather than ‘“human” lives’ (those are his quote marks around human). We must ‘reiterate the queerness of our dead brothers and sisters’, he says, and refuse to allow them to be talked about as ‘disembodied, undifferentiated and abstract “human” lives’. Read that again. He is saying we must actively, consciously, avoid referring to the victims as humans – or ‘humans’, to use his preferred punctuation – and just refer to them as ‘queers’. This is ugly. A few decades back, if gay people were killed you might expect homophobes to say, ‘They were only queer, not real humans’; now, alarmingly, and in a sign of how depraved identity politics has become, it is supposedly pro-gay people who say this, who effectively say: ‘Remember them not as people but as queers.’
The end result – the end result of all identity politics – is that people are dehumanised. They are reduced from complex beings to symbols; from messy, brilliant members of the human family that other humans can relate to and empathise with, despite being different, to mere identities, mere characteristics, mere sexual preferences, mere genders, mere skin colours. I would say that the victims of Orlando have suffered a double dehumanisation. First they were dehumanised by Omar Mateen, who clearly viewed them as less than human, as ‘faggots’, deserving of nothing more than violent death. And now they are dehumanised by the identity-politics narrative, which explicitly demands that we siphon them off from ‘generalised’ discussions of humanity and discuss them as ‘queer lives’ rather than as ‘human lives’. In a more PC, less apocalyptic, violence-free way, the mainstream purveyors of the politics of identity are repeating Mateen’s dehumanisation of these 49 people; they echo his foul belief that these people were queer first and human second.
The post-Orlando discussion should be of concern to anyone who considers himself a humanist. For it has confirmed the entrenchment of the politics of identity, and exposed how thoroughly it has usurped, or perhaps replaced, the older, more progressive politics of human solidarity. It shows that there is no escape from the identities we’re branded with. You are ‘born this way’, and you die this way, and you will be remembered this way: as an identity rather than a human. We must challenge this. We must insist that the Orlando massacre, this slaughter of gay people, was an outrage against humanity. And we must make the case that what we have in common with the people who were murdered in that nightclub – a desire for freedom; a shared humanity; a capacity for autonomy and empathy – outweighs every single difference between us that is currently being cynically talked up by a media and political set in thrall to the corrosive politics of identity. Those 49 people were humans first, and every human should rage against their destruction.

06/17 Links Pt2: IDF hero's widow: Challenge PA incitement at UN; Save a Child’s Heart treats 4,000th patient

From Ian:

Has Abbas' Internationalization Strategy Set the Palestinians on the Path to Statehood?

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas travelled to Athens in late December to thank the Greek Parliament for recognising the ‘State of Palestine’. Abbas hailed the Greek Parliament’s decision and declared: ‘This is a grand Palestinian-Greek wedding.’ The Palestinian leader frequently travels to European capitals these days. In the past year, he has lobbied European Union (EU) officials in Brussels, courted the support of United Nations (UN) officials in Geneva, and sought the backing of Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
Glad-handing foreign dignitaries at UN offices in New York or Europe is part of a calculated strategy by Abbas to shift the Palestinian focus to the international arena. However, it has cost Abbas dearly at home. Palestinians, though overwhelmingly supportive of Abbas’s efforts to join international bodies such as the International Criminal Court (ICC), still think the aging Palestinian leader should resign.
Abbas’s quest for European recognition has come amid a downturn in relations with his Arab neighbours. A major crisis erupted between the PA and Jordan when Palestinian officials failed to coordinate with their Jordanian counterparts at the UN Security Council (UNSC) in December 2014. Saudi Arabia hosted a delegation from Hamas, Abbas’s Gaza adversaries, in July 2015. Egypt, though nominally in support of Abbas’s never-ending crusade against Hamas, regularly hosts Abbas’s top rival in Cairo.
Palestinian foreign policy in the Abbas era has largely focused on prioritising symbolic victories over pragmatic ones. Winning a vote at the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in 2012, or joining a host of international organisations in 2014 and the ICC in 2015, have done little to change the daily reality for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. These symbolic victories have convinced Abbas of an area of strength in the international community that isn’t necessarily there. His plans for another push at the UNSC and a possible international conference – as referenced in a meeting with Israeli journalists in January – are unlikely to win back a disillusioned people or please his neighbours.

US House okays funding boost for Israel’s missile defense

Under the shadow of a presidential veto threat, the House of Representatives passed a defense appropriations measure Thursday that included $635.7 million for Israel’s missile defense programs.
While the White House has offered conflicting explanations for its opposition to increased missile defense support for the Jewish state, pro-Israel groups on Thursday continued to criticize the administration’s reticence to accept the extra funding appropriated for Israel by the Republican-controlled House.
The massive $576 billion defense appropriations bill for the upcoming fiscal year included $268.7 million in research and development funding for US-Israel cooperative missile and rocket defense programs; $25 million in research and development funding for US-Israel directed energy activities, such as laser technologies, to combat missiles and rockets; $72 million for procurement of the Iron Dome rocket defense system; $150 million for procurement of the David’s Sling missile defense system; and $120 million for procurement of the Arrow-3 missile defense system.
The amount allocated to Israeli missile defense programs exceeded the sum requested by the Obama administration by over $400 million.

Former IDF Deputy Chief of Staff: Until Middle East Stabilizes, Withdrawal of Israeli Military From Judea, Samaria, Jordan Valley Would Be ‘Irresponsible’

A former deputy chief of staff of the Israeli army said that any decision to withdraw the IDF from Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley before the situation in the Middle East stabilizes would be “irresponsible.”
This was among many assessments made by Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yair Naveh during an interview with Israel Radio’s Esti Perez on Thursday.
Naveh also explained why he was, and still is, critical of Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza in the summer of 2014.
“[Israel] was playing on a different field from Hamas,” Naveh said. “We were trying to achieve a military victory, while Hamas was seeking political gains.”
Under such circumstances, he said, when two sides are after different goals, the whole notion of deterrence becomes irrelevant.
“What is clear to me is that Hamas’ main objective is preserving its survival as an organization.”
Therefore, he said, “In any confrontation with the group, past or future, it is its survival that Israel has to threaten. And it has to be made to understand that it is not immune…We certainly shouldn’t have said, as we did during the war, that we have no intention of harming its rule in Gaza.”

Not a bit of irony detected in this news article from The Malay Mail Online:

SABAK BERNAM, June 16 — Umno lawmaker Datuk Abdul Aziz Kaprawi alleged today that the Pakatan Harapan alliance was pitting Malays and Chinese against each other to create racial tension that would somehow lead to their electoral victory in Saturday’s twin polls.

The Sri Gading MP cited as example the racial billboards that had been put up by the federal opposition pact in Sekinchan last week in the run-up to the Sungai Besar parliamentary by-election. The controversial billboard has since been removed by the local authorities.

“They’ve run out of models to win. They are playing with racial sentiments to provoke anger. We are a multiracial nation and we need to tolerate one another. What is important is for each race to live together in peace,” Abdul Aziz told reporters after attending a function in Sungai Besar.

The Umno supreme council member alleged further that the Parti Amanah Negara-DAP-PKR pact was backed by Jews and urged Malaysians to reject the federal opposition to maintain peace within the country.

“We know that there are many Jewish elements aiding them in many ways and we don’t want any external involvement in the management of this nation,” Abdul Aziz said, without stating the basis for his allegation.

“We want this nation to be managed without external involvement. In many other countries, external involvement causes chaos, which leads to war. Here we want peace.”

Malaysian leaders routinely obsess over Israel and Jews.

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Remember: Anything nice Israelis do with Arabs is to distract the world from their crimes

Haters of Israel know that every time any Israeli does anything nice, or liberal, it is because he or she is trying to cover up for horrendous Israeli right-wing crimes. In fact, the nice things done are proof positive of this massive coverup engaged in by millions of people.

Glenn Greenwald knows this for a certainty. What more proof do you need?

From Yenta Press in the comments:

Jerusalem:
These two young Israeli musician were in a pharmacy when they overheard an old blind Arab man telling the pharmacist he does not have enough money to buy his medicines.

Since they did not have enough, they took him outside to the street, opened their guitar cover on the floor , and started playing their guitars hoping to collect money for the blind man.

It did not take long. Once they had enough, one of them went inside to buy the medicines and the other kept singing to the blind man.

How depraved these Israeli Jews are to keep finding nice things to do to Arabs so that the world is distracted from how much they despise the Arabs.

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06/17 Links Pt1: Glick: Obama and the moderate Muslims; Jihad-serving apologetics; The Middle East’s reaction to Orlando left me speechless

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Obama and the moderate Muslims

How can enforcing ignorance of a problem help you to solve it? How does refusing to call out the Islamic extremists that Islamic moderates like the Green revolutionaries and Sisi risk their lives to fight weaken them? How does empowering jihad apologists from CAIR and MPAC help moderate, anti-jihad American Muslims who currently have no voice in Obama’s White House? Eli Lake argued that it was by keeping mum on jihad that then-president George W. Bush and Gen. David Petraeus convinced Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq to join the US in fighting al-Qaida during the surge campaign in 2007-2008.
The same leaders now support ISIS.
A counter-argument to Lake’s is that Bush’s policy of playing down the jihadist doctrine of the likes of al-Qaida had nothing to do with the Sunni chieftains’ decision to side with the US forces.
Rather, they worked with the Americans first because the Americans paid them a lot of money to do so. And second, because they believed the Americans when they said that they would stay the course in Iraq.
They now side with ISIS because they don’t trust America, and would rather live under ISIS rule than under Iranian rule.
In other words, for them, the question wasn’t one of political niceties, but of financial gain and power assessments. And that remains the question that determines their actions today.
In the 15 years since September 11, first under Bush, and since 2009, to a more extreme degree under Obama, the US has refused to name the enemy that fights America with the expressed aim of destroying it.
Maybe, just maybe, this is one of the reasons that the Americans have also failed to truly help anti-jihadist – or moderate – Muslims. Maybe you can’t help one without calling out the other.

Terror-Denial

President Obama, Secretary Clinton, President Hollande and the “intellectuals” who groomed and still support them are fervent believers in “secular humanism.” They believe a collection of superstitions: that Arab-Islamic terrorists attack the West because the West attacked first, or because the West built prison camps for Muslims, or because the West supports Israel.
Memo to Barack Obama and John Kerry: Said Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood and Ayatollah Khomeini always thought the West was the enemy, and the West always supported the Arabs more than Israel — witness the British in 1933-48, Charles De Gaulle in 1967, the US State Department from 1948 through 1980, etc.
Another such superstition: there is no Arab-Islamic terror, because the terrorists also attack Arabs and Muslims. Second memo to Obama and Co.: The Nazis began their career by murdering Germans, and Lenin and Stalin began theirs by murdering Russians, even Communists. Just ask Leon Trotsky and the other Jews murdered by Stalin.
So if you want to witness a neurotic patient “in denial” of his illness, or if you want to study the superstitions by which Western leaders live, just tune in to the latest press conference of President Obama, President Hollande, the UN secretary general or the foreign minister of the European Union.
Terror-denial is not forward-thinking or progressive. It is just dumb.

Yehuda Glick: The right road to peace

After the signing of the agreement titled, “Gaza and Jericho First” in Cairo in 1994, Peres said in interviews that “this agreement is an agreement on Gaza and Jericho.
As for what will come next – I am opposed to a separate Palestinian state. I’ve said so a thousand times, and I have not changed my mind.”

How is it then that nowadays, even a prime minister from the rightist Likud party is touting this idea? As I understand it, this change in the public discourse occurred primarily as a result of a well-oiled propaganda campaign of the radical Left. Its method was simple – for many years any leftist who was interviewed by the media, no matter what the subject was, always made sure to begin his reply with something along the lines of: “Everyone knows that in the end there will be two states here, and that a Palestinian state will be established alongside Israel...” Slowly but surely, this supposed “fact” permeated the collective Israeli consciousness to the point that it came to dominate the public discourse as if it were an undeniable truth.
Today, while nearly half a million Jews live in settlements throughout Judea and Samaria, and an additional million residents in Greater Jerusalem, it’s very hard to believe that anyone rational really thinks that a Palestinian state can be established here. Albeit, the Palestinians were given chances in the past to establish such a state – whether according to the 1947 Partition Plan proposed by the UN, or just a few years ago during the terms of Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert as prime minister.
But now this option seems to be totally unrealistic, and therefore no longer on the table.
This being said, it should now be clear to any reasonable person that in the future there will be only one state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River – the State of Israel, with Israeli law and Israeli sovereignty applied over all parts of Judea and Samaria.

Before Tel Aviv, terror attacks had gone down for 7 straight months

In April I reported that the number of terror attacks in Israel had been continuously going down on a monthly basis since the current spree started in October.

The latest Shin Bet report for May shows that the pattern has continued:

Still, things are hardly calm:

Following is a regional distribution of attacks: 16 attack from the Gaza Strip, (3 in April); 67 attacks in the Judea and Samaria (75 in April); 17 attacks in Jerusalem (35 in April); 1 within the "Green Line" (2 in April).

Jerusalem and the Judea and Samaria area: Most attacks executed in May 65 out of 84 were in the form of firebombs (April: 91 out of 110).

Distribution of attacks according to regions and pattern profile:

Following is a distribution of attacks in May 2016 according to regions:

The Gaza Strip – 16 attacks: 2 rocket launchings; 12 mortar shell launchings; 2 small arms shooting.

Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem – 84 attacks: 11 IED (including pipe bombs and improvised grenade) (1 in Jerusalem); 4 small arms shooting; 3 stabbing (in Jerusalem); 1 run over; 65 firebombs (13 in Jerusalem).

The "Green Line" – one stabbing attack in Tel Aviv.

And rocket attacks have resumed after a rocket-free April:

Throughout May 2016 three rockets were launched** from the Gaza Strip towards Israel (within 2 attacks) and 19 mortar shells (within 12 attacks), as opposed to April in which no rockets or mortar shells were launched.

The amount of incitement in Arabic media has certainly been reduced, although there is still plenty there. It would be worthwhile to do a study showing correlations between incitement in news and social media and attacks. Incitement is the biggest cause of terror attacks, not generalized "frustration" as terror apologists like Ben Ehrenreich like to pretend.

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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)

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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.)

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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)

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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.

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