Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, July 16, 2016

Palestinian "expert" says no evidence of a Jewish nation in the Middle East

Elian Hindi, a supposed expert on Israel affairs, has declared that there is no archaeological evidence of Jews ever having a nation in the Middle East.

Speaking on Wattan TV, Hindi said that there have been two phases of archaeological research in Israel. The first was between 1930 and 2000, when many international archaeologists combed the land and came up with nothing showing any sort of Jewish civilization. (Edward Robinson might have been surprised at this.) The second phase since 2000 have been archaeologists who have been religious Jewish scholars whose findings cannot be taken seriously. (Which would surprise lots of other people.)

Hindi said, "To this day all the relics discovered were either Roman or Arab Islamic and no traces of [Jewish history] have been found in Jerusalem or Palestine." (Which would surprise pretty much everyone with a brain.)

He added that Jews in the area were shepherds, not leaders.

Too bad the interviewer didn't seem to ask Hindi whether the Quran is then in error. It would have been fun to see him squirm.

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07/16 Links: Globalization of Palestinian Terror Tactics; How Israel-Hatred Helped Ruin Syria

From Ian:

How Israel-Hatred Helped Ruin Syria

The Arab world’s anti-Israel pathology prompted the Sunni states to rescue Hezbollah from the consequences of its own folly 10 years ago, and ensured Hezbollah would be capable of throwing the Assad regime a lifeline. A swift Assad defeat might have reduced the Syrian conflict’s destabilizing effects on other Arab countries while also dealing a setback to Iran’s growing influence in the region. Yet all these countries prioritized proving their anti-Israel bona fides over weakening Iran’s strongest military ally. And now, they are paying the price.
The Arab states may have learned their lesson: They aren’t rushing to rescue another Iranian-backed militia, Hamas, from the consequences of its own folly. Granted, they pledged billions of dollars to repair the devastation wreaked on Gaza by Hamas’s 2014 war with Israel. But as the Elder of Ziyon blog reported this week, very little has actually been paid.
Altogether, Muslim countries have paid only 16.5 percent of what they promised, compared to 71 percent for non-Muslim countries. And for the Gulf States, the figures are even lower: 15 percent for Qatar, 10 percent for Saudi Arabia, and zero percent for Kuwait. This is presumably not unrelated to last weekend’s assertion by former Saudi intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal that Iran is “spreading chaos” and destabilizing the region through its support of numerous militias, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad: If Riyadh views Hamas as an agent of Iranian destabilization, it has good reason not to throw it a financial lifeline.
The realization that their hatred of Israel has ended up hurting Arab states more than it has their intended victim is undoubtedly one of the drivers behind these countries’ budding rapprochement with Israel, as reflected most recently in Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry’s visit to Jerusalem this week. Unfortunately, that epiphany has come too late for battered, bleeding Syria, and for all the other countries now suffering the fallout from its ongoing civil war.

StandWithUs+: Globalization of Palestinian Terror Tactics

The globalization of Palestinian terror tactics. In France or in Israel, it's the same terror.
Our hearts go out to the victims, many of whom were children, and their families.

07/15 Links: Jihadi Terrorism: You Think It's Just the Jews? Think Again; Chloé Valdary: Slams Pro-Palestinian Group — Cites Arab Slave Trade

From Ian:

Jihadi Terrorism: You Think It's Just the Jews? Think Again.

Last night, at least 84 people were murdered in the French city of Nice by a Tunisian-born Islamist terrorist.
Whether you are pacifists or warmongers, gays or heterosexuals, atheists or Christians, blasphemers or devout, French or Iraqis, jihadi terrorism does not discriminate. Every one of us is a target: Islamist terrorism is genocidal.
When Islamist terrorists target Muslim dissident bloggers, faraway Yazidi women or Israeli girls, it should concern us in the West. Islamists are just sharpening their knives on them before coming for us.
If we do not speak out today, we will be punished for our indolence tomorrow.

Chloé Simone Valdary: Black Zionist Slams Pro-Palestinian Group — Cites Arab Slave Trade

A prominent African-American Zionist used social media to ‏blast a campus group for drawing parallels between racial violence in this country and the occupation of Palestinian lands by the Israeli military.
“I’m just like, wait a minute SJP. Let’s be real,” Chloé Simone Valdary said in the brief video, posted on both her Facebook and Twitter feeds on July 12. “The majority of people in your organization are Arabs. Let’s be real. Today Arabs still engaged in the African slave trade. I’m just putting it out there.”
“You want to exploit my people’s history?” Valdary said. “You want to exploit Jewish people’s history and twist and turn it to use towards your political gains?”
“Don’t act like you have solidarity with my people,” Valdery said, adding: “You need to stay in your lane.”
In recent years pro-Israel groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee have intensified outreach to non-Jewish and African American communities, in an effort to built a wider base of support. Valdery has collaborated with both AIPAC and the Zionist Organization of America. In 2014, Tablet Magazine heralded Valdary as an “African American firebrand” who “wants to ignite a Zionist renaissance.”

Caroline Glick: The Left’s ‘grassroots’

Foreign states have chosen to use undiplomatic means to influence government policies. The Knesset needs to make sure that these means are brought out in the open so we can know what we’re dealing with.
This finally returns us to Herzog and his fellow leftists, and their unhinged, libelous response to the passage of the toothless NGO law this week. Those libels were part of an ongoing campaign by Herzog and his comrades to delegitimize the government and Israeli society as a whole as an illegitimate gang of brownshirts in training.
Now that we understand the collaborative relations between the Left and foreign governments, we realize that these statements are part of the deal.
Herzog and his colleagues, who benefit from these subversive operations by foreign governments, help them along in their efforts to delegitimize the country.
After all, that’s what friends are for.
The time has come to put an end to this travesty.
As the Left showed on Tuesday, yet again, it has no intention of cleaning up its act. Subversion is the only card it has left. To save our democracy, the Knesset needs to stop beating around the bush and get to work.

EoZTV: Hasby Awards part 7: Best Satire (plus The Speech That Wasn't Given)

In this part, Not Anti-Semitic presents the award for Best Satire to our own PreOccupied Territory.

PreOccupied Territory's David did not get a chance to say everything he wanted to, so he sent me the speech he wanted to give:

Thank you. Wow. Thank you, Elder.

(Pause, turn)

If that is your real name.

(Look around).

Nice echo chamber you've got here. Is that Ben Rhodes there in the back?

No, PreOccupied Territory is not my real name. My name is David.

There is a whole list of people to thank for making this award possible, but we'll get to them by and by. We run the risk of running overtime on the acceptance speech and having the network pan the cameras away and turn the microphones off, but that's acceptable collateral damage. First I want to share with you a few of my favorite moments from the last couple of years doing this.

The first one is about two years ago, when a prominent Swedish politician tweeted an article of mine thinking it was serious, and then deleted the tweet. I have to give a shoutout to an Israellycool contributor named Judge Dan for that one, since he suggested the premise of the article: that Israel had issued a travel advisory for Sweden and other countries that had seen some terrorism. Former Prime Minister, and until a few months prior, Foreign Minister, Carl Bildt took it at face value, calling the advisory "a bit of an overreaction." But not as much of an overreaction as hastily deleting an embarrassing tweet that was screen-captured by a bunch of people and soon turned into a Times of Israel news story. That was fun.

Then there's the similar phenomenon of Palestinians and their supporters not getting the irony. I watch the number of Likes the page attracts on Facebook after a particularly successful post, such as the one about UNESCO declaring the World Trade Center an Islamic Heritage Site because thirteen Muslims were martyred on the planes that crashed there on 9/11. I could almost hear the cries of, "Yeah!" "That's right!" "Finally they get it!" as the number of shares spiked and I got a few more followers. They never last, but it's fun to watch how long it takes for the penny to drop, those folks to realize they're being mocked, and the count to go down again.

The last couple of moments happened right here. One was when I introduced myself to someone as the clown behind PreOccupied Territory, and he soon told me his favorite article - which also happens to be a favorite of mine: Two-State Solution Coffin Now Made Entirely Of Nails. I wrote that more than two years ago, and it was so gratifying to have someone else remember it.

The other was not a single moment, but the collective reactions from so many of you here, offering praise, acknowledgement, and various forms of encouragement. It can be a slog. I enjoy the creative process most of the time, and I push myself to come up with ten or eleven separate stories every week. But while I remember every single one of my successes, the duds far outnumber the hits - and it's especially frustrating to have something I pour my heart and soul into be relegated to obscurity. Two retweets. A couple of Facebook Likes. Then oblivion. So to come here and have my work be acknowledged, and appreciated by people who do seem to make a difference does wonders for my morale.

Of course I do what I consider my best work when awful thing are happening, so is that a good development?

But on to the thank-yous. There's a short list of people who deserve mention here, and it's not only them, but they also serve as stand-ins for all the people associated with them, who are also part of the story. I'll cite three of them by name and thus conclude.

Max Blumenthal, Ali Abunimah, and Richard Silverstein, thank you. Without you, what I do would not be nearly as necessary, possible, or as much fun.

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Good news! "Jews are NOT sons of apes and pigs"

This is the actual headline in an Al Watan op-ed.

The author argues that the Quran could not have meant that when Allah turned Jews into apes and pigs it could not have been meant literally, because Jews today do not resemble pigs or apes. Instead, the Quran merely meant that the Jews took on attributes of apes and pigs.

Besides, the article goes on, if Jews are apes and pigs, then that is an insult to Arabs who have lost militarily to them.

What a relief. Now he just has to convince the millions that really believe it.

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The EU coordinator on combating anti-Semitism, Katharina von Schnurbein, met with one of the leading purveyors of antisemitism in the PLO, Hanan Ashrawi, where she was told that Israeli Jews are the real racists.

Yes, this really happened.

One day after a meeting in the Knesset where von Schnurbein said that she recognized that anti-Semitism often lies behind anti-Zionism, she met with Exhibit A.

And Ashrawi didn't disappoint, going on a rant about "the racist culture of hatred that is being fed by the occupying power."

It will be recalled that Ashrawi's Miftah organization had articles on its website that said that Jews eat matzoh made with Christian blood on Passover, and defended it, calling me names for exposing it, before the world media started to notice it and Miftah then "apologized" (but only in English, while the antisemitic article was in Arabic.)

After that I discovered that Miftah also questioned whether there were any Jewish Temples in Jerusalem, that it supported terror attacks and glorified suicide bombers, It also condemns any sort of programs that encourage dialogue between Palestinians and Israeli Jews as "normalization," in direct opposition to the EU which funds several such programs.

But years after I exposed these antisemitic articles, and after the US and EU continue to fund Hanan Ashrawi's Miftah, is there still antisemitism on their website?

Of course there is!

This article says "History has taught us that the culture and mentality of Judaism is a culture of complaint and accusation against the other (goyim)"

The article goes on to say that the Talmud is a racist work, but the quotes it uses to prove that actually show how the Palestinians do not want to accept Jewish history. The article quotes the Talmud as saying "Why is Israel compared to an olive tree? To learn that just as the olive tree does not lose its leaves in the summer or in the winter, so too the children of Israel will never disappear completely from this world or the next." You can see how that would be offensive!

Or similarly, a medrash that says that God compared all the cities of the world to place the Temple and He chose Jerusalem. This is another example of "Jewish racism" which in fact reveals that Palestinian Arabs refuse to accept historical facts of the Temples in Jerusalem and the Jewish nation.

Oh, and it praises Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy.

This article castigates the US for passing a bill to monitor antisemitism, saying that the Arabs are the only Semites.

This article falsely says that major Israeli rabbis routinely call for genocide against all Palestinians. They sometimes call for God to destroy terrorists and those who want to see Israel destroyed, but not "genocide against Palestinians."

So, yes, the EU's official in charge of fighting antisemitism decided that it would be useful to get the perspective of someone whose organization has been responsible for spreading antisemitism.

And as the photo shows, the visit was not meant to be ironic.

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07/14 Links Pt2: Critics of Israel’s NGO ‘Transparency Law’ Are Wrong; UNESCO fiasco

From Ian:

Alan Dershowitz: Who Do Bigots Blame for Police Shootings in America? Israel, of Course!

Intersectionality seems to be driving hard left activists towards a "No True Scotsman" worldview: increasingly, they insist on a package of unrelated left-wing causes that must be embraced by anyone claiming the label of progressive — including the demonization of Israel as a racist, apartheid state.
Perhaps more worryingly, intersectionality tends towards the conclusion that the existing social, political, and economic system is flawed in so many profound ways, that any attempt at remaking it through democratic means is unacceptable. Activists have become increasingly obsessed with "Shut it Down" protest tactics, and a proud politics of "disrespectability," that prioritizes resistance to a "corrupt," "rigged" socio-economic system over respectful discourse and political compromise.
This helps to explain the sympathetic attitude of Black Lives Matter activists towards groups like Hamas, which embrace terror as a mode of "resistance" (in their view) against Israel. Indeed, Black Lives Matter activists have visited Gaza to express solidarity with Palestinians oppressed by so-called racist Israeli self-defense measures. While Black Lives Matter claims to disavow violence in securing its political objectives, many of its most prominent members are far more eager to criticize the "Israeli genocide of Palestinians" than to criticize Hamas for using rockets to target Israeli civilians. Black Lives Matter and other hard left groups have been notably silent about other oppressed ethnic groups such as Tibetans, Chechens, and Kurds. The only alleged "oppressors" they single out for condemnation are the Jews. This double standard raises legitimate questions about their real motivations.
Moreover, the conflation of police actions in American cities with Israeli military actions in Gaza raises a disturbing question: if the so-called oppression of Palestinians in Gaza and the oppression of people of color in the United States are two sides of the same coin — as the SJP implied in its tweet — are the violent tactics employed by Hamas, and perversely supported by many on the hard left, an appropriate model to emulate in the United States? One hopes that the answer is no, and that the intersectionalist radicals will make that clear to their followers.

Eugene Kontorovich: Why Critics of Israel’s New NGO ‘Transparency Law’ Are Wrong

Israel this week passed a law requiring domestic organizations that are primarily funded by foreign governments to disclose this connection in their communications with the government. The law, shepherded by Ayelet Shaked, is totally neutral with regard to the activities of the funded organization. However, European governments that fund political groups only on the left- and far-left of the political spectrum, have denounced the law in apocalyptic terms as undermining Israeli democracy and rightly inviting international opprobrium.
A major talking point of the law’s critics is that it has “no democratic parallel,” and that it puts Israel in the category of non-democratic regimes like Russia, and even sets it on the road to fascism. But if these claims are true, there is little hope for democracy in the U.S., which has had similar rules for decades, and imposed new ones a few years ago without a peep of international objection.
Critics of the Israeli law generally concede that the required disclosures are legitimate. They object that the application of such disclosure requirements only to groups funded by foreign governments, as opposed to those funded by foreign private individuals (who, unlike the EU, support both left- and right-wing political NGOs), are arbitrary and therefore sets Israel apart from other democracies. Both claims are specious.
First of all, treating foreign government contributions differently from private ones is entirely commonplace and rational, especially in the case of Israel.
Governments are indeed different from rich individuals. Governments have foreign policies, trade rules, and United Nations votes—and they use the groups they fund in Israel to produce documents that they then invoke when taking those actions. Private people have no similar powers. As a matter of basic democratic integrity, groups that depend largely on government funds should not be able to advertise their “NGO” status without at least some small-print clarification.

PreOccupiedTerritory: It Dawning On NGOs What ‘NGO’ Stands For (satire)

Following the passage of a law mandating greater disclosure for Non-Governmental Organizations that receive more than fifty percent of their funding from foreign government entities, the directors of such organizations are beginning to realize what the “non-governmental” phrase in the term means.
Organizations such as B’tselem, Breaking the Silence, and other NGOs have reacted with dismay and alarm since such a law was proposed during the previous Knesset term, as have various arms of the European Union and Obama administration. But whereas publicly those bodies rail against the law as a threat to Israeli democracy, privately a number of NGO directors have voiced a dawning awareness that perhaps defining themselves as non-governmental organizations should require that in fact they not be de facto agents of foreign governments.
“Maybe there should be another category of organization,” suggested one organizational director, speaking on condition of anonymity. “I mean, there already is the concept of foreign agent, but that sounds too sinister, and we could never get away with foisting our extreme left-wing agenda on the public if we were perceived as doing the bidding of foreign governments. We’re kind of in a bind like this.”
Another activist confessed that the terminology had bothered her for a long time. “When we accepted millions of dollars from the European Commission over the years the money functionally blinded us to the contradiction between our activities and our status as non-governmental,” she explained. “It was glaring, and my colleagues and I noticed it but chose to ignore it as long as the cash was flowing freely and we didn’t have to make the extent of our dependence on foreign governments public. But lately, with all the debate around this new law, I have to admit I’m uncomfortable.”

EoZTV: Hasby Awards Part 6: Best Watchdog

As we resume our posting of each of the speeches given at the Hasby Awards on July 3....

Radio host Yishai Fleisher speaks about UNESCO as the "legitimate arm of jihad" and introduces NGO Monitor as the winner of Best Watchdog. Shaun Sacks of NGO Monitor speaks about his journey from the IDF to help fight the haters of Israel and he mentions how effective his organization has been recently.

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Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

When the Zionists began to build the yishuv, the enterprise that would become the Jewish state, they had to develop an economy, a political system, an army for defense, a legal system, an educational system, a transportation network, a postal service, and countless other things. They got help, first from wealthy benefactors like Montefiore and Rothschild, and later – when they needed to resettle hundreds of thousands of often penniless refugees from the Holocaust and, later, from the Muslim world – from organized appeals in the Diaspora. In a highly controversial arrangement, Holocaust survivors in Israel also received billions as reparations from Germany (the state also received several hundreds of millions).

The Jews created cooperative enterprises in every economic sphere which enabled them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, despite a war of independence in which they lost 1% of their population, and massive immigration. Later they surprised the world by repeatedly defeating their more numerous enemies, and little by little transformed their economy to a more entrepreneurial model. Today Israel, despite the challenges, is a remarkable success, economically, socially and culturally. Not perfect, but still a remarkable success.

Despite what people think, Israel does not receive non-military aid from the US, and only modest amounts of money from Diaspora charities. Indeed, many Israelis think we can and should end the military aid, which comes with many strings attached.

Now let’s look at another group that ostensibly aspires to a state, the ‘Palestinians’.

Take the Gaza Strip, with 1.8 million residents, 72% of them with refugee status, wards of the international dole. There is no economy to speak of, except that created by UNRWA which feeds and educates its population with funds provided primarily by the US and Europe, and Hamas, which manufactures rockets, digs attack tunnels and prepares for war.

This population is rapidly growing; it is expected to reach 2.1 million by 2020, with a fertility rate of 4.2 children per woman (a conservative estimate). For comparison, the fertility rate among Arabs in Judea and Samaria is only 2.8. 21% of Gazans are between the ages of 15 and 24, and 64% under 25.

This huge ‘youth bulge’ combined with a lack of employment, is a guarantee of continued violence. And it is all paid for by the West, which, through UNRWA’s welfare policies, incentivizes Gazans to have children. Welfare costs for Palestinians increase every year, along with the population.

The West went along with Arab demands to prevent any resettlement of ‘Palestinian refugees’ and the UN granted refugee status to anyone who lived in pre-state Palestine for as little as two years – and to all their descendents in perpetuum, something done for no other refugee population. 99% of UNRWA employees are Palestinians, and the curriculum in UNRWA schools is aimed at keeping alive the narrative of Arab dispossession and dishonor that fuels the conflict. UNRWA does not ameliorate the conflict, it nourishes it.

Consider also the Arabs of Judea and Samaria, the great majority of whom live under the control of the Palestinian Authority. The PA, like UNRWA, is totally dependent on American and European money. The PA burns through most of the more than $1 billion a year it receives on corruption and its multiple ‘security forces’ (which sometimes engage in terrorism). It also disburses large payments to the families of prisoners in Israeli jails for security offenses, and to families of ‘martyrs’, including suicide bombers. The PA and its official media continue to incite violence and murder of Jews, and treat terrorists as heroes.

Large monopolies, like cement and telecommunications are in the hands of PA insiders. Crime is rampant and economic activity is stunted.

Both Israel and the Palestinians received injections of capital from abroad. Israel used it to help build the infrastructure of a state, and turn her refugees into productive citizens. The Palestinian Arab leaders stole much of the money, nurtured their people’s hatred and created a permanent class of stateless refugees as an army to fight Israel. Indeed, even if a Palestinian state were created in the territories, the refugees would not be welcome in it, because according to Palestinian dogma, the only way to stop being a refugee is to ‘return’ to ‘your home’ in Israel!

When the international community gave the Palestinians money for building infrastructure like waste treatment plants or power stations, they built mansions for PA and Hamas officials. Hamas took cement for rebuilding homes after the last war and used it to line attack tunnels. The only area in which they have shown any initiative is getting attention by killing people.

Do you see the difference here? The Jews really wanted a state. They were ready to sacrifice and struggle for it. They took advantage of the aid that was available and used it to build something. The Arabs aren’t even trying. All they want is to destroy our state.

The ‘Palestinians’ have contributed nothing to the world except violent terrorism since they invented themselves in order to oppose Jewish sovereignty some 60 years ago. It’s time to start weaning them off welfare. If they can switch from stabbing to state-building, then they should go for it. In any case, the world can’t afford to keep feeding them.

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07/14 Links Pt1: Fatah throws victory party for terrorist; International Funds for Terrorists

From Ian:

Amb. Alan Baker: International Funding for Salaries and Benefits to Terrorists

The direct and indirect channeling by the Palestinian official bodies of international donor funding to pay salaries of Palestinians imprisoned for acts of terrorism raises serious legal and moral issues that must be addressed.
Such financial support for Palestinian terror prisoners is a formal component within internal legislation of the Palestinian Authority.
In attempts to sidestep international criticism of such direct funding, the Palestinians have tried to conceal it through channeling donor funding through the PLO, the Palestinian umbrella organization.
Financial or other support for terrorists is a clear violation of PLO obligations pursuant to the Oslo Accords, and as such, an abuse of the bona fides of the U.S., European, and other government signatories to the Oslo Accords.
Transferring funding to terrorists runs counter to international counter-terrorism conventions and resolutions of the UN calling upon the international community to prevent terrorism financing.

Matti Friedman: How Lebanon humbled, but didn’t break, Israelis

Author and journalist Matti Friedman spent much of his IDF service in the late 1990s in South Lebanon at an isolated base called Outpost Pumpkin, an experience he details in his acclaimed new book, Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story. In this excerpt, published here to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second Lebanon War, Friedman examines the effect that Israel’s Lebanon entanglements have had on its leaders and people. The years of the Lebanon “security zone,” he believes, taught Israelis that they cannot shape the Middle East to their will and that their fate is not entirely in their own hands. Instead of despairing, however, Israelis have found an admirable way of living with a profoundly troubling reality.
I was sitting not long ago along one of the boulevards in Tel Aviv. The Middle East had succumbed in recent years to chaos and butchery dwarfing our own conflict in one tiny corner of the region. But our country was relatively calm, at least for a time, thanks not to anyone’s goodwill but to the force of our arms.
The promenade was full of teenagers in tank tops, tattooed riders of old-fashioned bikes, men with women and men with men and women with women, speaking the language of the Bible and of Jewish prayer. There were old people sipping coffee outside a restaurant, and some music. The country was going about its improbably cheerful business on a weekday evening.
Beyond the city were the neighborhoods of middle-class apartments with parking lots of company Mazdas, the kinds of places where I found many veterans of Outpost Pumpkin when I went looking for them to write this book, most having first passed through Goa or the Andes for decompression before coming back to their families, finding work as programmers and accountants and settling down to watch their kids on the swings. All of this is more than our grandparents, the perpetual outsiders of the ghettos of Minsk and Fez, had any right to expect.
But it seemed for a moment — and this can happen to me in a cafe in my corner of Jerusalem, or picking up my children at school, anytime — that the buildings on either side of the boulevard were embankments, and the sky a concrete roof.

10 years after the Second Lebanon War, Israel isn’t in Hezbollah’s sights

Another war with Israel? Not so fast
In early July 2006, it was hard to find a Lebanese or Israeli commentator who would have bet that a war between Israel and Hezbollah was imminent. The prevailing assumption was that Hezbollah would not dare to start anything just before Lebanon’s tourist season. We were all wrong. A foolhardy attack by Hezbollah on the morning of July 12, 2006, near Milepost 105 led to a war that lasted for 34 days. Since then, Hezbollah has taken care to avoid attacking Israeli targets except in retaliation for Israeli attacks inside Lebanese territory.
Despite the mistake we commentators made back then, we can cautiously venture that Hezbollah has no intention of starting a war this summer. One consideration may be, as it was then, the economic issue and the tourist season that is about to begin in Lebanon, which enjoys an average of 2.5 million tourists per year, though the numbers are in decline due to the tough security situation. A war with Israel would definitely not improve those numbers.
But unlike the Second Lebanon War, that is not the main point. The most important issue in Hezbollah’s decision-making, it is clear, is the situation in Syria and the war against Islamic State. As long as its people are fighting and dying in battle in Syria, it is hard to imagine Nasrallah being dragged once again into another stupid escapade against Israel. He has the ability to bombard every point in Israel with the abundant store of rockets and missiles in his possession. But even he realizes that in the new reality that has been foisted upon him, opening a new front with Israel could lead to his military defeat not only against the Israeli army but also against the radical Sunnis in Syria.

From Reuters:

A two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is more remote than ever, with the risk of generations of violence and radicalism unless leaders act, the United Nations' most senior official in the region said on Wednesday.

In his first public comments since the publication on July 1 of a report by the Quartet of Middle East mediators, the U.N.'s special coordinator for the region, Nickolay Mladenov, said the situation was approaching a point of no return.

"(The two-state solution) is perhaps the furthest away it's ever been, and in fact it is really worse than that -- it is slipping away as we speak," he told Reuters in an interview, citing Israeli settlement building and Palestinian violence and incitement as among the most troubling obstacles.

"It's time for the international community and the leadership on both sides to wake up."

"The only alternative (to a two-state solution) that I see is perpetual violence here in Israel and Palestine and entangling this conflict into the broader problems of the region," he said, adding it would be akin to "writing a blank cheque to violence and radicalism" for generations to come.

Is there any other place in the world where the granting of statehood to a group is considered critical to reduce "violence and radicalism" for generations to come?

There are many people who want their own states, from Inner Mongolia to the Basque region to Papua, from the Kurds to the Flemish. But no one is saying that their demands for independence is necessary to stop violence and terrorism for generations.

Palestinian Arab nationalism, alone among all the independence and freedom movements of the world, is linked closely to the existence of regional terrorism in the minds of EU and UN officials.

That seems to be what Mladenov is saying. Not to pick on him specifically: compared to other UN officials, he seems far more fair and reasonable. But the theme that violence will be reduced or eliminated if a Palestinian state is established creates the linkage between Palestinians not getting what they want and terrorism, a linkage that simply does not exist (or is much more muted) with every single other movement of national liberation.

There are only two possibilities if you accept this linkage: Either Palestinians are naturally prone to violence, or violent groups (like ISIS) will use Palestinian nationalism as an excuse for their terror.

If the first is true, then the entire world that accepts this reasoning is bigoted against Palestinians. The Arab League, Western Europe, the UN, the US - all of them either embrace this linkage or tacitly accept as obvious that violence is a natural reaction to lack of a full Palestinian state beyond the autonomy that they have been enjoying for two decades.

If the second is true, then the world is amazingly naive to think that terrorists can be succored by the existence of a Palestinian state side by side with Israel. And if this is true then one would expect that the logical reaction to ISIS terrorism would be to give them a state directly, not to make the bizarre assumption that they would stop their terrorism in Iraq and Syria because Palestine gets recognition hundreds of miles away.

Wouldn't that be rewarding terror? Well, of course, but how is creating an ISIS state different than creating a Palestinian state under the assumption that it will reduce terror in the region? Either way, the logic goes that terror will continue until a state gets created.

The linkage argument can only be described as bigoted, or stupid and inconsistent.

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National Lawyers Guild sued for not accepting advertisement from Israel

A lawsuit was filed yesterday in New York City against the National Lawyers Guild.

Last year, the National Lawyers Guild held an annual fundraising dinner and asked for ads:

Show your support for the NLG with an ad in our annual Dinner Journal!
Distributed at the Banquet of the #Law4thePeople Convention, placing an ad in
the journal is a great way to congratulate our outstanding honorees, publicize
your firm or organization, or just share a message of your own!

An Israeli organization in Gush Etzion sent in this ad for the journal:

On June 27, 2016, Bibliotechnical paid the $200 fee for publication of this advertisement.The Guild rejected the advertisement, advising Bibliotechnical that it would not accept monies from an Israeli organization according to the lawsuit. The next day, the $200 was refunded.

Here was the exact email that the Guild sent.

Thank you for reaching out. Unfortunately, we have a resolution barring us from accepting funds from Israeli organizations. Your refund to your credit card will be processed tomorrow (there is a 24 hour waiting period before we're able to process any refunds).

Here is the text of the relevant part of the 2007 resolution, which incidentally also calls for Israel to be destroyed via the fake "right of return":

The NLG is consistent in its anti-Israel activities. It has urged state governments to divest from Israel Bonds. Every article on its site that mentions Israel is an attack, with entire articles taken from such extreme left sites like TruthOut. It has urged the US to stop all aid to Israel. There is not even the pretense of objectivity.

To give you an idea of how far left the Guild is, the levels of sponsorship for a previous event were named, in increasing order, Resistance, Truth to Power, Solidarity, Revolution, Victory.

The lawsuit charges NLG with discrimination under New York City and New York State human rights laws, under which an institution can be considered a person for the purposes of the law. E.g.,

Bibliotechnical is a "person" within the meaning of the New York City Human Rights Law in that it is an organization and the New York City Human Rights Law defines a "person" as including "one or more, natural persons, proprietorships partnerships, associations, group associations, organizations, governmental bodies or agencies, corporations, legal representatives, trustees, trustees in bankruptcy, or receivers." New York City Human Rights Law Section 8-102.

The lawsuit was filed by David Abrams, a New York lawyer whom I have worked with.

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

Last night, Mrs. Elder and I attended the Rainbow of Music concert in Ra'anana to benefit the Malki Foundation.

Arnold and Frimet Roth established the Malki Foundation (Keren Malki) to memorialize their beautiful daughter Malki Roth who was murdered at age 15 by Palestinian Arab terrorists in the Sbarro pizza shop bombing in August 2001.

Keren Malki follows through on Malki's dedication to helping special-needs children. It provides therapies to those in need that are not covered by Israel's national insurance; it provides (sometimes expensive) equipment free of charge to those in need, and it sends special needs therapists to parts of Israel that are under-served.

One of the emotional highlights of the evening was the performance of Malki's Song, Shir Lismoach ("A Song of Joy.") Malki had written this song - music and lyrics - and intended to enter it into a competition, but missed the submission deadline and never told her parents. They found out about it from her classmates while they were sitting shiva for her.

The song, which is very upbeat, has been performed and recorded by some major artists in Israel. Here is a cell-phone video of Malki's Song being performed last night.

The lyrics in English:

Each of us has a share in the World to Come

And that is already a reason to be happy

We each have a spark and a start

And this is reason enough to be happy

You live, breath, move

That’s a good start

Each of us have a way of arriving

We all have a way back too

We each have a hope and a future

And a place in the World to Come

You live, breath, move

That’s a good start

Each of us have so many reasons

So you better start dancing now

We each already have a reason to laugh

So let’s all shout together-

You live, breath, move

That’s a good start

I highly recommend that you donate what you can to the Malki Foundation.

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

07/13 Links Pt2: US Govt. Defends anti-Semitic UNRWA Textbooks; How the UN Indirectly Funds Hamas

From Ian:

Administration Defends UN-Funded, Anti-Israel Textbooks for Palestinians

U.S. taxpayers provide nearly $400 million a year to a United Nations program that critics say sends anti-Semitic, anti-Israel textbooks to schools for Palestinian refugees.
An elementary school textbook calls the 1948 establishment of Israel a “disaster,” and a high school text tells of the “End of Days” when “Muslims fight the Jews,” among other examples in a report from the Center for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel research institute based in Jerusalem.
The agency—the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA—has come under scrutiny for years for supplying Palestinian schools with textbooks containing violent, anti-Israel references.
The Obama administration, however, defends the textbook program. A State Department spokesman told The Daily Signal that the books are part of “an education that instills respect for and appreciation of universal human rights and dignity of all persons.”
The program serves nearly 500,000 students in about 700 schools in the Palestinian territories, using the Palestinian Authority’s curriculum, according to the State Department.
The watchdog group UN Watch released a report last year accusing some of the Gaza-based U.N. agency’s employees of making anti-Semitic comments and celebrating violence on Facebook, providing 10 specific examples.

U.S. Imam: “Muslims Have The RIGHT To Take The Property Of FILTHY Christians And Jews”

Meet Abu Ammaar Yasir Kazi. He’s not some crazy Imam in the Middle East. He’s a college professor at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, who was described by New York Times Magazine as “one of the most influential conservative clerics in American Islam.”
In lectures to students at this American college, he blasts those in his class as being filthy and impure. He then steps up his vitriolic diatribes, by tearing into Christians, where he compares them to feces and urine, saying they are the “most evil of evils.” He then instructs his students that they should engage in jihad and fight all unbelievers until they convert to Islam, and that those who refuse to convert, should have their lives and property taken. “Property” which according to Islam, includes taking women as sex slaves.

"Gangster Islam" in Europe

"Gangster Islam," a crime wave packing prisons and overtaking Europe, is a problem the mainstream media will not report. Ordinary Europeans -- for fear of being called "racist" or even being imprisoned for "hate speech" -- are afraid even to talk about it. Timon Dias, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, discusses the issue in our latest video:

What the Arab nations know (Renato)

A comment by Renato on my article yesterday about how Arab and Muslim nations are not fulfilling their pledges to Palestinian Arab donor conferences sums up the situation nicely:

What I really think is that, in the end of the day, as Professor Yisrael Aumann shows in his great interview with EoZ, people usually are rational and make rational decisions - sometimes their rationale is debatable, but still makes sense to them.

After decades supporting "the most important cause in the world, the Palestinians", Arab leaders can't simply stop supporting them overnight, no matter how much the villas in Ramallah upset them. Ahmed Average would freak out, as his air-thin skin gets hurt by the slightest butterfly passing in the neighbouring country. So, to stick to the honor/shame demands, they appear to be champions of "Palestine", while deeds (and pockets) go where real world priorities lie.

Muslim leaders are fully aware that:

a) linkage/intersectionality/etc is crap

b) Palestinian "leaders" are too corrupt even for kleptocractic standards

c) Palestinian intransigence hasn't lead to any concrete gains other than PR stunts

d) Hamastan and Fatastan are independently ruled, and the rulers can't agree on even the most basic stuff

e) When left alone, Israel not only doesn't harm Muslims, she actually helps them

f) Jews are perfectly capable of keeping agreements and even improving on them, as Egypt and Jordan prove. They relinquished on stuff like tanks in Sinai and Tiran back to Saudi Arabia!

g) Muslims and Israel have a surprising number of shared enemies

h) The Internet has made it increasingly difficult for Muslim rulers to blame everything on Israel

With this in mind, it gets increasingly self-evident that Israel is not their problem. What is clear is that wasting money on "Palestine", which will end up in kleptocrats pockets anyway, makes less and less sense.

Therefore, Muslim nations are - slowly but surely - putting their money where their priorities are. Sure, keep the speeches for PR and internal consumption, but their deeds increasingly show that the situation is changing.

[EoZ] What is amazing to me is the amount of willful self-deception in Europe and the US to ignore the self-evident facts that the Arabs know listed above and still pretend that they are morally obligated to impose a peace plan that rewards the kleptocratic, terror supporting Palestinians.

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