Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, June 20, 2016

The absurdity continues: 41% of Palestinians in Palestinian territory are "refugees" from Palestine (update)

Today is World Refugee Day, and as they do every year, the fake Palestinian "refugees" are pretending to be real refugees.

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics released figures for the occasion. Out of all residents in the West Bank and Gaza, 41.6% are considered "refugees."

No one blinks at such absurdity.

If they are Palestinian and live in what the UN and their leaders call the State of Palestine, where exactly are they refugees from?

Moreover, the PCBS says that some 40% of all "refugees" live in Jordan.But the vast majority of them are full Jordanian citizens. So why are they considered "refugees"?

This is all before the question of why, alone among all "refugee" populations, Palestinians are the only ones whose refugee status is automatically renewed every generation.

There is no way under UNRWA's definition for Palestinians to lose their refugee status. Even if a peace plan would suddenly appear and the Palestinian leaders agree to stop insisting on the fake "right to return", UNRWA would have no means to take them off the roles.

The "refugee" status is permanently bestowed upon all Palestinians until they somehow all cram back into their alleged ancestral homes, in the same villages. Because if you say that they can move to a neighboring village in Israel and no longer be considered refugees, then why can they not live as citizens of "Palestine" in Nablus as non-refugees?

The refugee issue is a thinly veiled attempt to destroy the Jewish state. It has nothing to do with real refugeehood and calling Palestinians refugees is an insult to the millions of real refugees who are truly suffering today. And UNRWA is fighting to get as much of the world's refugee relief budget as it can, causing real refugees to be even worse off.

Happy World Refugee Day.

UPDATE: The PLO Negotiations Affairs Department tweeted this:

I responded:

Only if you assume a bizarre definition of "refugee" @nadplo
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) June 20, 2016

They then blocked me.

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From the Hamas site Palestine Times:

A girl was shot at dawn on Monday while in her home west of the Tal al- Sultan area of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

According to our correspondent the 13 year-old was critically injured, after suffering a gunshot wound in her chest area, while sitting in her home.

She was transferred to the European Hospital east of Khan Yunis.

Security sources suggested that the source of the gunfire that hit the girl was from Egyptian territory, as there was heavy fire on the Egyptian - Palestinian border.

Heavy fire on the border between Egypt and Gaza?

Al Quds adds that there are regularly police actions in Egyptian Rafah where Gazans hear gunfire and explosions, and more than once shells have landed on the Gaza side.

Just another aspect of the Middle East that no one hears about because Israel is not involved.

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Blood libel published in Turkish American News and many other places

This story has been published in dozens of Arab sites, and has spilled over into English sites as well:

An Israeli Rabbi, Shlomo Mlmad, the chairman of the so-called Council of Rabbis in West Bank settlements, had reportedly called on Israeli settlers to poison Palestinians through their water supply.

According to Israeli anti-occupation organization “Breaking the Silence”, the call for poisoning Palestinian water aim to push the Palestinians to leave their villages and pave the way for Israeli settlers to take over their lands.Israeli rabbis

The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) has denounced the move as an incitment against Palestinian people.

“This is an incitement and a call for killing the Palestinians,” Wasil Abu Youssef, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, told Anadolu Agency on Sunday.

He said such opinions by Jewish rabbis “prove that Israel is not a real peace partner”.

“Dozens of similar orders were made by rabbis that called for killing Palestinians, robbing their lands and farmlands and destroying their property,” he said.

This is complete fiction. There is no "Rabbi Shlomo Mlmad" and no "Council of Rabbis in West Bank Settlements."

The story appears to have started from a video published in NRG last week that allegedly shows Breaking the Silence's Yehuda Shaul telling a group two years ago, in English, that Jewish settlers poison the wells of Palestinians.

(Video below, sorry I couldn't stop it playing automatically.)

That blood libel by a supposedly Zionist Jew is bad enough, but he said nothing about a rabbinical decree.

The earliest mention of such a decree comes from the PLO itself. Not Hamas, not Iran, not even Fatah - but Israel's supposedly moderate peace partner.

Last Wednesday, the PLO's National Bureau for the Defense of the Land and to Resist the Settlements first reported this story, quoting this fictional Rabbi Mlmad from an alleged Channel 10 story a year ago.

If such a story was broadcast, it would have been all over the place.

So the source of the blood libel is the PLO itself, and then its Palestinian Authority subsidiary is now condemning a fiction that Mahmoud Abbas' people made up to begin with.

There is no moral difference between the PLO creating a blood libel of Jews poisoning wells and medieval antisemites claiming the same thing. Except now the rumors spread much more quickly. The news stories include photos of black-clad Jews as proxies for this imaginary 'rabbi."

Western governments and NGOs must pressure the PLO to retract and apologize for their overt and explicit antisemitism. Unfortunately, the West hardly ever even acknowledges it.

UPDATE: The EU-funded Ma'an published this as well.

Saeb Erekat's PLO Negotiations Dept refers to massacre of Jews in 1929 as a "revolt"

From the PLO Negotiations Affairs Department Twitter account:

The "Palestinian Revolt of 1929" is the heroic term that the current Palestinian leadership - including CNN darling Saeb Erekat, who heads the PLO-NAD - gives to the massacre of over 100 Jews throughout the land of Israel in 1929.

Even according to Palestinian histories, the worst crime they can accuse the Jews of was putting up a temporary screen at the Kotel between male and female worshipers on Yom Kippur of 1928, something which had been done in previous years. So, of course, they had to start stabbing Jews to death in Hebron, Jerusalem, Safed and elsewhere in 1929.

In Arabic, it was never called the "Palestinian Revolt" because the Arabs who rioted did not call themselves Palestinians. Instead, it was known as the "Buraq Revolution," Buraq being the name they give the Western Wall over the past century. So besides glorifying the murders of Jews as a heroic revolt, the PLO is renaming the massacre to make it sound like it was a "Palestinian" issue.

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Moderate PA arrests people for "violating the sanctity of Ramadan"

In Nablus, two men were arrested and sentenced to a month in jail for drinking alcohol while driving a car.

But they were not arrested for drunk driving.

They were arrested and sentenced for "publicly breaking the Ramadan fast."

The Magistrate's Court of Nablus, in handing down the sentence, stressed "the obligation to pursue violators of the sanctity of the holy month" and recommended that judicial authorities be vigilant both about violations of the law as well as about "assault on the sensibilities of Muslim fasters."

Also in Nablus, three people were arrested for eating and smoking behind a vegetable market. Police caught them red-handed and arrested them on charges of breaking the fast publicly.

The Nablus police chief warned all citizens against violating the sanctity of the holy month of Ramadan, warning that anyone who breaks the fast before sundown will go to prisom.

In Tulkarem, another man was arrested for smoking in public during the day. That case is being referred to the public prosecutor in that town.

The police in Tulkarem issued a statement saying that they will not allow anyone to violate the sanctity of the holy month of Ramadan, saying they have taken security measures to ensure the right of all citizens to maintain a spiritual atmosphere during the month.

Imagine the outcry if Israel would enforce similar laws during Jewish fast days, like the one coming up July 24, which is similar to Ramadan in the sense that it is from dawn to nighttime. If Israel would arrest people for eating in public it would be widely derided as a theocratic state with no respect for the human rights of non-Jews or non-religious Jews.

But when the Palestinian Authority does it, it is merely that that they are protecting the venerable traditions of their people and the alleged human rights of the religious Muslims not to be offended.

Amazing how in both cases, human rights are invoked to realize opposite results.

Equally amazing is that the hypocrites who hold these contradictory positions have no qualms about it.

If Jews tried to eat a meal at that spot, it would cause an international outcry about their "desecration."

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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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