Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, September 22, 2016

09/22 Links Pt1: Do Palestinians Deserve A State?; Mr. President: The Israeli settlements are legal

From Ian:

IsraellyCool: Do Palestinians Deserve A State?

If you believe they deserve a state what qualities worthy of a reward do you believe they’ve shown over the last 100 years of attacking Jews and trying to prevent Jews from living in Israel? Are you rewarding reprehensible behaviour?
Which terrorist atrocity was it that finally convinced you they deserve a state?
Something old and classic like slaughtering school children in Ma’alot, hijacking aircraft or murdering olympic athletes? Or perhaps the wave of suicide bombings of restaurants, hotels, buses or queues of children waiting to party? Or something more recent, rockets indiscriminately fired at civilians, spraying passing cars with bullets or pulling out knives and trying to slash at the necks of infidels on streets all over Israel.
Which of these terrorist atrocities finally convinced you they deserve a state?
If you believe they deserve a state, they have bombed, stabbed and shot their way into your heart.
If you say out loud they deserve a state you are one of those encouraging them to do what they did this morning: send a 14-year-old child to stab a soldier with the inevitable result. One of our young people has to live with having shot their child. If you say they deserve a state, you helped create the conditions where sending a 14-year-old girl to die at the hands of the IDF is inevitable. Of course they do it: it’s a great strategy. It convinced YOU to say “they deserve a state”.
Or do you just think they should have a state despite a century of terror because if they got it they would stop doing all these terrible things? Do you think they would set aside their supremacist claims that all of Israel belongs to Allah and their repetitive Jihadi proclamations that they won’t stop killing Jews until all of the Jewish homeland falls, once again, under the command of Allah’s soldiers and everyone here bends knee and submits to Islam? Do you think they’d even apologise for all they’ve done if they were rewarded with a state?
But you think they deserve a state! Why stop now when they’ve successfully won over someone like you to their righteous cause?

JCPA: Observations on U.S.-Israel Relations

Few surprising headlines emerged from the meeting of President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on September 21, 2016, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. Reporters and commentators were almost disappointed that the two leaders had an amicable meeting where both sides spoke of the “unbreakable” bonds between their two countries and the generous American security assistance.
The differences over Israeli “settlements” in the West Bank and Jerusalem, a topic of exaggerated American concerns from the first days of President Obama’s first term, were mentioned in their publicly restrained statements. Undoubtedly, the issue was raised in the Obama-Netanyahu private talks. One minor difference of opinion that emerged was over the time the two leaders spent in each other’s company, with Israeli sources saying 75 minutes and American officials reducing the period to 35. Was it a U.S. official’s manner of diminishing the Israeli leader’s importance?
The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same
The settlement contretemps is reminiscent of a meeting between then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and then-Minister of Defense Moshe Arens in Israel in the early 1990s. “We really laid the settlements issue on the line,” a resolute, maybe even proud, aide to Baker told me at the time. When I asked Arens about the talks, he related that the settlement issue was barely raised.

PMW: Fatah cartoon:Jews are behind world terror

Fatah has posted a cartoon that shows a Jew with a large nose and wearing a kippah (Jewish skullcap), comfortably seated in an armchair with the Star of David on it. Using a remote control, the Jew sets off an explosion in the city below, viewing the destruction as if watching TV.
The cartoon expresses a libel often voiced by Palestinian leaders that Israel and Jews are responsible for world terror. It was posted on the official website of Fatah’s Mobilization and Organization Commission. [Sept. 20, 2016]
A similar cartoon was recently posted by another Fatah commission, as documented by Palestinian Media Watch. It showed a long-nosed Jew lighting a fuse to blow up a bomb. Inside the bomb, a Shi'ite Muslim and a Sunni Muslim are both lying atop bombs, lighting fuses to blow up one other. This cartoon expresses the libel that Jews/Israel seek to destroy the Muslim world, and that they are taking advantage of internal Muslim fighting to do so.

EU offers free trips to the West Bank for journalists

From the EU and Palestinians Facebook page:

If you are interested in participating, please send a short CV/bio with a special focus on any work you have done in the Middle East, no later than 30 September 2016.

If a European based journalist has written critically about the Palestinian Authority - its corruption, its misuse of international aid, its support for terror by paying salaries to murderers and making them into heroes - do you think he would get this free trip? Or will it only go to "journalists" who will write only positive things about the Palestinian Authority?

Do you even need to ask?

There are two ethics violations here. One is that the EU is manipulating the media for its own ends. OK, everyone tries to do that, but by creating a litmus test as to which journalists can take advantage of an all-expenses paid trip to the territories, this is a bit egregious.

On the journalist side, it is generally agreed that it is bad form to accept such a trip. The NYU Journalism Handbook for Students says "Most reputable news organizations prohibit contributors from participating in press junkets, which are trips offered to journalists that are paid for by the entities the reporters cover, i.e., movie studios, electronics companies, government agencies." The Columbia Journalism Review is a little more flexible but insists that journalists reveal that the trip was paid for along with other caveats.

It will be interesting to see what EU-based reports come out of this trip at the end of October. it will be a good opportunity to identify what EU journalists are willing to flout their ethical obligations to their readers.

(h/t Irene)

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Dr. Gazi Hussein, writing in Maghreb news site Al Masir, says that Israel is using religion to create settler colonialism in the Middle East.

He starts off by saying that the Jewish and Zionist ideology is based on myths and legends, lies and greed, and it exploits antisemitism and the Holocaust to create a Jewish state "in the heart of the Arab and Islamic region."

Zionists were helped in this endeavor by European racist politicians, like Cecil Rhodes - and Adolf Hitler.

The transplant of the colonialist racist and terrorist Jewish entity is alien to the region, the intruders came from overseas as a tool to impose a new Middle East project and to dominate it as a prelude to the hegemony of Zionism over the world.

It is amazing how much can be accomplished by taking centuries-old claims about Judaism and magically substituting "Zionism" for "Judaism."

Hussein says that Jews should return from where they came - Germany, Russia, the Ukraine and others. Instead, he says, they celebrate their expulsion of Arabs as a national holiday.

World Zionism is successfully waging a relentless campaign against Arabism and Islam and prompted the American president and war criminal George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to launch a crusade on Islam and Arabism, and the destruction of Iraq and the deployment of the sectarian and ethnic war.

He ends off by saying that Israel is doomed to extinction, "sharing the fate of all intruders of Palestine throughout history, including princes and kings of the Crusades, and the fate of Nazi Germany and colonial French in Algeria and the apartheid in South Africa."

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Exeter U has a party that included antisemitic memes. +972 is upset - because it might reflect badly on anti-Zionists like them.

Dimi Reider at +972 has a scoop!

Anti-Semitic, white supremacist slogans at Exeter University event

Even the most off-hand displays of white supremacism and anti-Semitism — perhaps especially off-hand, “normalized” displays — are not only deplorable in their own right, but directly affect conversation on racism, anti-Semitism and Israel-Palestine.

Students attending an off-campus Exeter University party on Tuesday were seen sporting t-shirts with anti-Semitic and white supremacist slogans, +972 has learned.

Reports of anti-semitic incidents in the UK have risen by 11 percent in the first half of 2016, according to a recent report by the Community Security Trust, a UK organization providing security guards to Jewish schools and synagogues. Anti-semitism has figured heavily in headlines over the past year, especially in the context of the Labour party leadership race. The incumbent leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has been accused of being “too soft” on anti-Semitism among his supporters. The controversy has seen the distinction between anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic comments challenged vigorously by figures from the center rightwards, and a mix of soul-searching and recriminations on the Left.

In this context, even the most off-hand displays of white supremacism and anti-Semitism — perhaps especially off-hand, “normalized” displays — are not only deplorable in their own right, but directly affect national conversation on racism, anti-Semitism and Israel-Palestine.

The Tuesday night event, hosted by the local Snow Sports society at the Timepiece nightclub, saw guests use magic markers to scribble slogans and drawings on each other’s uniform white t-shirts. Most scribbles ranged between the bantering and the generically sexist — belaboured innuendos on the word “slope” appear to have been in vogue during the evening — but two rather different slogans stood out: “Don’t speak to me if you’re not white,” and, “The Holocaust was a good time.”

Reider linked to a Facebook page where many photos from the event were published. The pictures make is obvious that the phrases written on the T-shirts during this party were written by others, not by the wearers, and in fact the wearers may not have known what was written on their backs.

Many of the writings were crude, sexist, homophobic or otherwise obviously purposefully offensive, for example, "Free Herpes Here."

But there were other examples of personal graffiti that crossed the line besides the ones mentioned in the article. At least two party-goers had swastikas on the front of their shirts, so they cannot claim ignorance:

I did not see one photo that showed any anti-Zionist sentiment.

So why, when writing about a party where some of the knowingly offensive graffiti included white supremacism and Holocaust jokes, did Reimer bring up Israel and anti-Zionism? What relationship does it have to a story that references racism and antisemitism? And his linkage was the most important part of the story, according to the +972 editor that used that pull quote as the subheading!

+972 had a scoop: a large university event where students joked about the Holocaust and white supremacism. The story had nothing to do with Israel. But Reimer apparently is upset about antisemites who also hate Israel, because they make all Israel-haters look like antisemites.

As a result, a story about antisemitism must be contextualized to say "hey, we Israel bashers are against antisemitism too! Not only because it is deplorable, but also because it makes us look bad!"

The irony is that if +972 would have reported the story straight, it would have shown the +972 distances itself from antisemitism. By gratuitously linking the story to Israel, the magazine shows that to some extent, its discomfort with antisemitism is not simply because of how deplorable it is in itself, but because antisemitism's very existence might blunt its own incessant attempts to smear the Jewish state.

Which is, when you think about it, kind of disgusting.

(The story shows that the offensive sayings were discovered by a Palestinian student who witnessed the party and who was sickened by them. She wrote on Facebook, " “Making light of genocide and white privilege is not ‘banter’, you f*** imbeciles." She shows far more moral character than Dimi Reider.)

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09/21 Links Pt2: Palestinian Terrorist’s Wife to Address Clinton Foundation; Where Does BLM's Anti-Semitism Come From?

From Ian:

Palestinian Terrorist’s Wife to Address Clinton Foundation

Donald Trump is criticizing Hillary Clinton over the fact that the Clinton Foundation is honoring a Palestinian teacher whose husband is a convicted terrorist on Tuesday evening.
Hanan an-Hroub is scheduled to speak at a Clinton Global Initiative event in New York after winning a $1 million teaching award from another charity that donates to the Clinton Foundation. Her husband, Omar al-Hroub, spent 10 years in an Israeli prison for his role in a 1980 bombing that killed six Israelis.
The event is going ahead as planned, in spite of the recent Islamist terrorist bombings in New York and New Jersey, which injured dozens.
The Wall Street Journal noted Tuesday:
Omar al-Hroub was convicted on charges that he was an accomplice in a deadly bombing attack in Hebron that killed Israelis walking home from Friday night Sabbath prayers. According to an Associated Press account at the time, Omar al-Hroub was a chemist who provided chemicals needed for making the bombs.
Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller said:
Today’s report that the Clinton Foundation is feting the wife of a Palestinian man convicted of helping bomb innocent Israeli citizens is deeply disturbing, especially in the wake of this weekend’s attacks. The decision to honor the wife of a terrorist by Hillary Clinton’s foundation shows a complete lack of judgment and a callousness that should disqualify her from holding the presidency.
The Republican National Committee has also reportedly objected.
The biography for Hanan al-Hroub on the Clinton Foundation website does not mention the terror connection:

Trump campaign: Clinton should be disqualified for event hosting Palestinian teacher

An appearance by an acclaimed Palestinian teacher, whose husband served time for terrorism, at a Clinton Global Initiative event “disqualifies” Hillary Clinton from the presidency, according to Donald Trump’s campaign.
“Today’s report that the Clinton Foundation is feting the wife of a Palestinian man convicted of helping bomb innocent Israeli citizens is deeply disturbing, especially in the wake of this weekend’s attacks,” Jason Miller, a Trump campaign spokesman, said in a statement. “The decision to honor the wife of a terrorist by Hillary Clinton’s foundation shows a complete lack of judgment and a callousness that should disqualify her from holding the presidency.”
The emailed release linked to a Wall Street Journal story in which the Republican National Committee also condemned the appearance of Hanan Al-Hroub Tuesday evening at the final meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative.

Where Does Black Lives Matter's Anti-Semitism Come From?

Black Lives Matter has been guided to anti-Semitism by the concept of "intersectionality, which argues that all oppressions are interlinked and cannot be solved alone. Thus, women can never be treated fairly if blacks face racial prejudice, and the disabled are not given sufficient support to be equal to the abled, and unless the Palestinians are liberated from the Israelis, and the Israelis are liberated from their lives and their home.
"Intersectionality" urges us to view the world as divided into a conspiracy of oppressors and an agony of oppressed, and reduces people to a number of categories, such as gender, sexuality, race, nationality, religion, capability, etc. Differences, such as sexism, racism, nationalism and ability -- as opposed to what we have in common -- are reinforced.
Supporters of "intersectionality" cheer terrorists when they murder Jews. To them, that is just "social justice" at work.

Dear Rabbi Michaelson, The Sunrise Minyan is Free (Judean Rose)

By Varda Meyers Epstein

There's nothing quite like a rabbi who tells Jews to give services a miss at Rosh Hashana time. (Unless it's a rabbi who plans a trip to Israel for his congregants which includes a pilgrimage to Arafat's tomb, but I digress.) This time the rabbi leading sheep astray is Jay Michaelson, who, in his piece for The Forward, Why You Shouldn’t Go To Synagogue On Rosh Hashanah This Year, told Jews, Jews to stay away, come again another day.

Such as Sukkot, when we have those cool outdoor huts for instance. Because Rosh Hashana? According to Michaelson, it's an "epic fail."

Michaelson refers to Rosh Hashana services as big business, speaks of "kitschy mass performances that even your rabbi probably finds uninspiring," and urges you to stay home from shul come Hell or high water:

"There are at least three reasons for you to avoid your local temple or synagogue this Rosh Hashanah. First, the holiday’s themes and liturgy focus on the least believable, most misunderstandable aspects of Jewish theology. Sure, introspection is great, and asking for forgiveness from friends and relatives can be extremely powerful. But the Man in the Sky with the big Book of Life? The Birthday of the World? Who are we kidding here? Does anyone believe this stuff?
And yet, here we are again, listening to authority figures drone on about them, standing up, sitting down, praying to a deity we don’t believe in. No wonder half of American Jews are leaving the fold — this fold sucks."

It's kind of funny, a rabbi asking if anyone believes in this stuff. If he doesn't believe in "this stuff" and thinks our fold "sucks," then in what sense is he a rabbi? Or is there something I'm not seeing here??

To give the devil his due, it's important to point out that Michaelson specifies that the shul you should not go to is non-Orthodox. Which implies that he thinks the Orthodox have something going for them that the non-Orthodox do not. Which leads one to wonder: why is he not Orthodox?

But then, not everyone can be as wise as Michaelson, who used to write a column for The Forward called The Polymath. And then there was the column that made him (in)famous: How I'm Losing My Love For Israel. Oh woe to be Michaelson with his wrestling and his torment!

"I admit, it has become simply exhausting to maintain the ambivalence, the hugging and the wrestling, the endless fence sitting. My love of Israel has turned into a series of equivocations: 'I do not support the expansion of settlements, but the Palestinians bear primary responsibility for the collapse of the peace process in 1999.' 'The Israelis acted overzealously in Gaza, but they must be entitled to defend themselves against rocket attacks.' 'Yes, the separation wall is odious, but it is also effective and necessary.' Yes, but; no, but; defend, but. At some point, the complexity and ambiguity wears one out, particularly when the visuals on the anti-Israel side are so compelling, and so stark: walls, tanks, checkpoints."

Why must Michaelson sit on the fence? Why must he equivocate? Why would a rabbi not support the building of home in Judea and Samaria, the indigenous heartland of the Jewish people?

In what alternative world can Israel be called "overzealous" in its response to having over 10,000 projectiles shot into civilian Israel??? Why would Michaelson parrot the lies of the enemy of the Jews and call the Security Wall a "separation wall?" In what sense is it "odious" for the sovereign State of Israel to protect the lives of Israeli citizens, Michaelson's fellow Jews, with any and all means possible?

The "complexity" Rabbi Polymath sees is imagined. It's really quite simple. It's our land. They are lying and also killing us in an attempt to steal it away.

Really, really cut and dried. The good guys and the bad guys. A rabbi, of all people, should know the truth about his land and his people. And the truth about their enemies, the terrorists who murder them.

There is no need to feel or see any ambiguity here. The Torah says: "For all the land you see, to you will I give it, and to your seed forever." [Genesis 13:15]. The Talmud says, "If one comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first."

These are basic Jewish precepts. Presumably Michaelson learned these precepts in rabbi school. On what basis can a rabbi—can Michaelson—possibly see "ambiguity?" For all that there are "streams of thought" in Judaism, there is the Torah. And the Torah is perfectly straightforward on these issues, clear as cool, blue water flowing from a rock struck by a staff in the desert.

Rather it is Michaelson himself, who is ambiguous and complex. From the Wikipedia entry bearing his name we learn that Michael is "a teacher of jhana meditation in the Theravadan Buddhist lineage of Ayya Khema" and that he is "openly gay and often works in the intersecting fields of LGBT people and Jewish traditions."

Now there's ambiguity for you! A practitioner of a faith that sees homosexual activity as a grave sin who claims an intersection between the LGBT world and Jewish traditions. A loch in kop.

We get it: the Conservative and Reform have boring services. But why tell the people to stay home, when even you, Michaelson, acknowledge that the Orthodox have them beat. And we do.

Rabbi Michaelson, my heart breaks to think you came so close to telling them the truth. You sat on that fence and said not to go to a non-Orthodox service. What you didn't say was, "Come to an Orthodox service, if you want to see the real deal, feel the real deal."

You could have said, "If you want to feel Rosh Hashana as it is meant to be, get up while it is velvety dark, still, and quiet, to pray with the faithful at a Vatikin sunrise service. Pray alongside the serious daveners; those who care more about the quality of their prayers than their clothes. Sing jubilantly to your God with those who can sing and those who cannot and crown Him King as one. Prostrate yourself full length on the ground on a scarf you've brought with you for that purpose, so you shouldn't kneel on the ground (Jews don't do that). Cry to the sound of the shofar.

"And be home by 10:30 a.m. MAX."

Rabbi Michaelson, come to the Vatikin minyan in Efrat. God willing, I'll be there at sunrise with my black Isotoner ballet slippers (I shouldn't have my prayers distracted by aching feet). Why not join me there (but on the men's side, of course)? I promise it will all make sense. And it won't cost you a thing.

The sunrise minyan is free.

h/t Reena Ribalow for doing some of the digging on this story.

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Waqf Horrified To Discover Every Moment Of Jewish Day A Talmudic Ritual (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Jerusalem, September 20 - Members of the Islamic religious council governing affairs at the Temple Mount compound found to their shock and dismay today that not only Jews who visit the site perform Talmudic rituals, but that virtually every second of observant Jews' lives is grounded in and governed by the Talmud.

Waqf officials have raised frequent and voluble objections to the behavior of Jews on the Temple Mount, the plateau on which both ancient Jewish Temples once stood and which now houses the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. The accusations of Talmudic rituals have been used to incite violence against Jews throughout the country, and formed a central element of Palestinian rhetoric during and immediately before the current spate of stabbing attempts targeting Israelis.

To their chagrin, Waqf members have now been informed that Jews are continuously performing Talmudic rituals as part of their daily routine, from the moment they wake up in the morning to the moment they close their eyes at night - and often in the middle of the night if they are for some reason awake. The revelation has shaken the Waqf to its core, and the group agrees it must find a way to counter these powerful rituals that are obviously so dangerous that they are used to justify the current Knife Intifada.

"Talmudic ritual is everywhere," observed a perturbed Ayama Diqedd. "Jews do it even when it looks like they're doing nothing else. It could be a consciousness thing, just an internal effort to perceive the divine in things - something that's completely invisible to anyone looking on. Even our vigilante - I mean vigilant - guards whose job it is to prevent prayer and other rituals near Al Aqsa cannot hope to catch every instance. It's horrible."

"It's not just when they're doing nothing," added a rattled Adrinq Dayariyya, his Waqf colleague. "Even when it looks like they're involved in a mundane activity, Jews are doing that activity Talmudically. They follow Talmudic guidance not to take large strides; they make sure not to walk between members of the opposite sex; they avert their eyes from forbidden sights. There's no end. And compounding all this, even while they're doing these things according to Talmudic teachings, they're probably also thinking about the Talmud, which makes it even worse."

The Waqf now vows to redouble efforts to keep Jews away from the Temple Mount as the only effective means to safeguard the integrity of Al Aqsa. "Who knows what irreversible damage they could wreak with their Talmudic rituals?" warned Diqedd. "I shudder at the thought of Jews being allowed to do Jewish things.

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09/21 Links Pt1: New Research Confirms U.N. Obsession with Israel; No excuse for terror

From Ian:

PMW: PA libel continues: Terrorist stabbers are “unarmed” victims of Israeli executions

PA news agency about terrorist stabbers: "Unarmed Palestinians" have been "executed... on pretexts and empty excuses"

PA Minister of Justice ignored and denied stabbings: "Israel is waging a one-sided campaign" "The occupation is using the excuse that they tried to stab... and other baseless excuses"

PA TV about terrorist who attacked police with a knife in each hand: "Occupation soldiers... executed 28-year-old Sa'id Al-Amru... under the pretext that he tried to carry out a stabbing operation"Israel "targeted" him to "prevent Arabs from defending Jerusalem and Palestine"

PLO "called on the Palestinian factions and forces, associations, and unions to escalate the popular struggle against the occupation"

Several Palestinian terrorists have carried out stabbing attacks in the last few days, injuring Israelis. Some of the terrorists were shot and killed during their attacks. The violent acts of terror have gone unaddressed by Palestinian leaders, and have even been denied by some. Instead, Palestinian leaders describe the perpetrators as victims and accuse Israel of carrying out "summary executions."
The official PA news agency WAFA announced that Israel is carrying out "summary executions and daily killing[s]" of "unarmed Palestinians," and claimed several "citizens" had been "executed... on pretexts and empty excuses." [WAFA, official PA news agency, Sept. 19, 2016]
PA Minister of Justice Ali Abu Diyak chose to ignore and even deny the stabbings, calling Israel's response to the spike in terror attacks "a one-sided campaign" and categorizing the stabbings as "baseless excuses":

Khaled Abu Toameh: Palestinians: "The Mafia of Destruction"

Hamas and Palestinian Authority (PA) officials have turned medical care into a business that earns them hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. This corruption has enabled top officials in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to embezzle millions of shekels from the PA budget.
In 2013, the PA spent more than half a billion shekels covering medical bills of Palestinians who were referred to hospitals outside the Palestinian territories. However, no one seems to know exactly how the money was spent and whether all those who received the referrals were indeed in need of medical treatment. In one case, it appeared that 113 Palestinian patients had been admitted to Israeli hospitals at the cost of 3 million shekels, while there is no documentation of any of these cases. Even the identities of the patients remain unknown.
Hajer Harb, a courageous Palestinian journalist from the Gaza Strip, says she is now facing charges of "slander" for exposing the corruption. She has been repeatedly interrogated by Hamas. The PA regime, for its part, is not too happy with exposure about the scandal.
Gaza's hospitals would be rather better equipped if Hamas used its money to build medical centers instead of tunnels for smuggling weapons from Egypt to attack Israel.

Ben-Dror Yemini: No excuse for terror

Op-ed: Terrorists' main motive, both in Hebron and in Minnesota, is religious invigoration. The terrorism of the past few years needs no justifications such as 'desperation' and 'occupation.'
Over the past weekend, 70 to 90 Syrian soldiers were killed in a US-led airstrike, 36 people were murdered in a terror attack in a mosque in Pakistan, 17 Indian soldiers were killed in Kashmir, 29 people were wounded in an explosion in New York, a pipe bomb-style device exploded in New Jersey, a house in central Paris was raided following a warning of a terror attack, and a stabber attacked people in Minnesota while screaming "Allahu Akbar." That's just a partial list.
All these incidents, or "only" most of them, have something in common: Jihad. This past August, 1,637 people were murdered in jihadist terror attacks. Just terror, not including war. Almost all of them were Muslims. Some of the incidents – which took place in Somalia, Libya and Nigeria – only get reported partially, if at all. So the death toll is possibly much higher.
Why would a Muslim blow himself up in a mosque of all places? My young son asks me, over and over, why? And Over and over again I have no answer. What crime was committed by the small children who went to pray at the mosque? Why did the suicide bomber come to murder them of all people? They were not even Shiites. It was a devout Sunni who murdered devout Sunnis.

Chelsea bombing suspect’s wife and mother left US days before attack

The wife and mother of the Afghan immigrant suspected in the New York and New Jersey bombings left the US for the Middle East just a few days before the attacks, according to reports.
Ahmad Khan Rahami’s wife, Asia Bibi Rahami, has been intercepted by authorities in the United Arab Emirates after leaving the US for Pakistan, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Officials are working with authorities in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates to question her about what she knew about her husband’s plans, a law enforcement source told CNN.
Rahami’s mother, Najiba Rahami, left for Turkey three weeks before the attacks and has not yet returned to the US, a US official to ABC News.

From the EU and Palestinians Facebook page yesterday:

On the occasion of International Day of #Peace 2016, #Palestinian children will gather tomorrow in central #Ramallah - infront of the Ministry of education at 10:00- to send a message of peace to the world.
Under the slogan ‘We want #peace’, the #children will fly balloons, release white doves into the sky and sign a letter addressing the world to help them build a future of peace and stability.
This event is supported by the #European Union #Peace building Initiative (EUPI), in collaboration with the #Palestinian Ministry of Higher Education.

And today:

On the International Day of #Peace:
1000 #Palestinian children send a message of #peace to the world
The #EU Representative and the #Palestinian Minister of Education & Higher Education joined 1000 #Palestinian #children in Ramallah to celebrate the International Day of Peace. Children flew balloons and released white doves into the sky to mark this international day. A group of the children handed over a letter about their hopes and dreams of a better future. Copies of this letter were also sent to the members of the international quartet.
''We remain committed to investing in peace and security,'' said Ralph Tarraf, the EU Representative. ''Today, I joined Palestinian children who express their hopes for a better future in which they can live in peace and dignity. It is heartening to see that future generations share our vision of a peaceful resolution of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and urge us to act upon it,'' he added.
''We Want Peace'' initiative is supported by the European Union’s Peacebuilding Initiative (EUPI), in collaboration with the Palestinian Ministry of Higher Education.

The EU handed out balloons, gave the kids free T-shirts, and even got the kids to form the word "Peace" in front of the Palestinian Ministry of Higher Education:

In English.

What did this letter that the children supposedly wrote, all on their own, say? How do they define "peace"?

In short, what do Palestinian children think when they say that word?

Do they mean co-existence? Do they mean accepting a Jewish state next to them? Or do they mean that peace will occur only when the Jews have no political power and are relegated to dhimmi status (at best)?

Because that is what they are taught in Arabic. Their maps do not include Israel in any form.

So it may make for a nice photo-op to have Palestinian children release balloons and doves into the air, but the important thing is what they are taught. And from all evidence, they are not taught to embrace real peace.

The EU is not solving the problem - they are perpetuating it by creating PR stunts like this without actually pushing the Palestinian authorities to support normalization and real peace with Israel.

There is also an element of the EU acting condescending towards the Palestinians. The impression one gets from reading the EU descriptions is that the white man teaches the backward savages a new word, he films them playing with their new free toys and he pretends that he civilized them. Peace! Yeah!

To do a thought experiment - can you imagine the EU sponsoring a joint Israeli/Palestinian children peace rally?

Israelis would be all over it. Palestinians would actively fight against it.

And that is all you need to know about what Palestinian children are taught about "peace."

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From Reuters:

At a parade in Teheran on Wednesday (Sept 21), shown on state TV, the military displayed long-range missiles, tanks, and the Russian-supplied S-300 surface-to-air missile defence system.

At the port of Bandar Abbas on the Gulf, the navy showed off 500 vessels, as well as submarines and helicopters, at a time of high tension with the United States in the strategic waterway.

Among the weapons displayed was the new long-range"Zolfaqar" ballistic missile, named after a legendary sword said to have given by the Prophet Mohammad to Imam Ali. It has "a cluster warhead capable of hitting targets spread over the ground", according to Tasnim.

A banner on the side of a truck carrying the new missile bore a threat to Iran's arch-foe Israel: "If the leaders of the Zionist regime make a mistake then the Islamic Republic will turn Tel Aviv and Haifa to dust."

So not only is Iran threatening to perform a war crime, they are threatening to do it with a cluster munition whose use may be a war crime as well.

An Amnesty spokesperson said "That's unconscionable ! You are talking about Jews adding bedrooms to their houses in Jerusalem suburbs, aren't you?"

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King Abdullah of Jordan said this in his speech to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday:

Safeguarding Jerusalem is a key concern . . . . the Holy City; a strategic linchpin not only for my region but for the world.

This is a priority for me personally, and for all Muslims. We utterly reject attacks on Muslim and Christian Holy Sites and any attempts to alter the historic Muslim, Christian and Arab identity of the Holy City. As the Custodian of Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem, I will continue my efforts to protect these places, and stand up against all violations of their sanctity, including attempts for temporal and spatial division of Al Aqsa Mosque/Al Haram Al Sharif.

In this short section:

- He accused Israeli Jews of "attacking" Jerusalem holy sites
- He said that Jews have no rights to Jerusalem
- He implied that Israel should not have control over any part of the Old City including the Jewish Quarter and the Kotel
- He said Jews have no rights to their own holy sites in Jerusalem
- He implied that Jews walking around peacefully on their holiest site are desecrating it
- He implied that Muslims playing soccer or engaging in parkour on the Temple Mount are acting respectfully
- He accused Israel of trying to divide up the Temple Mount, which would be a great idea, but there are no such plans
- He implied that banning Jews from their holy sites is to "protect" them

Abdullah is the most ideal of all Arab leaders. Urbane, Western educated, not tied to terror and in fact very much against Islamic terrorism, not sympathetic to Hamas - all Arab leaders should be more like him.

Yet even this most liberal of Arab leaders is an antisemite who denies Jews the most basic of human rights - the rights to worship and the right to self-determination, for starters. Beyond that, he denies basic Jewish history and the Jewish historic ties to Jerusalem that predate Islam by about 1600 years.

The Arab world might accept Israel's existence one day for realpolitik reasons. But Abdullah proves that no matter how liberal the Arab world becomes, they will never, ever stop being antisemites.

(h/t Irene)

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B'Tselem continues its dishonesty in attacking the IDF

B'Tselem was always an anomaly among human rights NGOs.

Unlike HRW, Amnesty, Oxfam, DCI-P and others, B'Tselem doesn't lie outright. It grounds its opinions on some semblance of reality, although it shares the same problem that the other NGOs have in that it decides on its anti-Israel opinions before it starts its investigations and skews the results to fit its foregone conclusion.

B'Tselem just released a major new report, called "Whitewash Protocol: The So-Called Investigation of Operation Protective Edge." It makes a number of major charges.

One is that the Military Advocate General of the IDF faces an inherent conflict of interest:

The MAG – who is in charge of investigations within the military – is faced with an inherent conflict of interests when it comes to the investigation of these acts. On the one hand, he was responsible for providing the military with legal counsel before the fighting, worked closely with military personnel on the ground throughout the fighting and signed off on their policies. On the other hand, he is now tasked with deciding what cases merit an investigation and what measures will be taken upon its completion. In cases in which suspected breaches of law relate to orders he personally approved, the MAG would have to order an investigation of acts he is responsible for, and, should senior officers be investigated, an investigation against himself, or his direct subordinates.

I would argue that this is in fact not true. The MAG sets the policy that the IDF must adhere to, and the officers and soldiers are then tasked with adhering to the policy. It is not unreasonable for the entity that creates the policy to be the one to audit the actions of the army against that same policy. (The command structure of the MAG is completely independent of the rest of the IDF.)

B'Tselem argues that the MAG was asked specific questions during Operation Protective Edge about activities that the MAG would later have to decide on the legality of the actual proposed operation, and therefore it would be a conflict of interest for the MAG to investigate an issue if the soldiers followed its specific advice in a certain case. However, the MAG is not tasked with deciding whether IDF policies adhere to international law, but whether its actions do. If the MAG was tasked to investigate the legality of the policies themselves, yes, that would be a conflict of interest.

The bizarre thing is that after making the accusations of conflict of interest, B'Tselem sort of agrees that it has no proof for this charge, in a section that few people will actually read:

Since in any case the investigations carried out by the MAG Corps do not address policy or directives, the MAG’s conflict of interest with respect to his involvement in these issues remains theoretical. However, a conflict of interest may arise if there is a suspected IHL violation in a case that was defined as “exceptional”, and if the MAG or his representatives were involved in approving it. B’Tselem has no information as to whether there are any such cases.

So B'Tselem is accusing MAG of impropriety and a conflict of interest, but only on a theoretical level.

How devastating!

Another of B'Tselem's major issues is that the IDF is violating the international humanitarian law of proportionality. Yet it devises an entirely new definition of the concept:

The MAG’s conclusion that all the attacks he examined were lawful in that those responsible for them could disregard the harsh outcomes of dozens of other attacks that took place during the fighting has a far reaching implication that applies to all strikes carried out during the operation: It absolves every level of officials involved in the attacks – from the prime minister, through the MAG himself through to the soldiers who ultimately fired – of the duty to do everything in their power to minimize harm to civilians. In fact, the MAG sets the bar very low in terms of what is required of those responsible for the attacks – including senior military officers and the MAG (who are not under investigation in any case) – by doing no more than examining what they knew in practice, while entirely disregarding the question of what they should have known, including the obligation to learn from their own experience.

Consequently, the MAG’s determination that the attacks he examined did, in fact, meet the proportionality requirement is also cast into doubt. This principle is based on balancing the assessment by those responsible as to the anticipated military advantage against their assessment as to the anticipated harm to civilians. Yet when the projection as to harm is made while knowingly disregarding the result of nearly identical strikes carried out in the days prior to the making of the assessment, namely that dropping a bomb in the middle of a residential neighborhood could result in many more civilian deaths than anticipated; that the warnings the military gives are not always efficient and that the intelligence information is sometimes incomplete or inaccurate – then their assessments of anticipated harm to civilians become hollow and worthless.

This is not what international law requires. The military commander, in the heat of the battle, makes the decision based on the information he or she has available to him or her at the time. B'Tselem is demanding that the commander to also anticipate what he doesn't know!

If military intelligence says that a building is empty or almost empty, that is a major factor that the commander has in making decisions. It cannot be otherwise in a battle. The fact that sometimes the intelligence was wrong is not a reason to mistrust intelligence which is objectively pretty accurate most of the time. Even B'Tselem's own analysis of the people killed in buildings during the war shows that in nearly all the cases of many casualties, there was a valid military target inside. That's pretty good intel!

To demand that a military commander second guess his intelligence reports is beyond absurd. There was not a pattern of mistakes, as B'Tselem implies. There were some, and there will be some in any war.

Again, B'Tselem shows a tiny bit of honesty:

Like any other legal rule, IHL is also up for interpretation. Interpretation is also obviously influenced by the worldview of the person offering it, including the MAG, yet as longs [sic] as it is reasonable and reflects the purpose of the law it is considered legitimate.

But then it goes beyond international law and even morality into its own universe:

However, an interpretation whereby such extreme harm to civilians (as was seen in Operation Protective Edge) is lawful and is not considered “excessive” – as the MAG argues – is unreasonable, legally wrong, and founded on a morally repugnant worldview.

One only has to read the MAG reports to see that calling their worldview "morally repugnant" is itself morally repugnant. The MAG spends thousands of hours looking at individual cases, prioritizing the ones where there were the highest number of casualties. It finds, based on actual research, that in most cases the actions of the IDF were legal. B'Tselem wants to ignore the specific cases - because it has no evidence to contradict any one of them - and instead does some hand-waving and spews out "But look at how many people died! It must be illegal, even if we can't show why!"

Ironically, B'Tselem's own statistics prove that the IDF targeted terrorists and show that most of the civilians who were killed lost their lives because of Hamas' human shield policy, not Israel's disregarding international law.

B'Tselem pretends to be honest - and compared to HRW and Amnesty, it is - but in the end, it still bases its analysis on bias, not on facts.

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09/20 Links Pt2: A definition of anti-Israeli anti-Semitism; A Dangerous Mix of Truth and Fiction

From Ian:

Obama: Israel cannot ‘permanently occupy, settle Palestinian land’

US President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that while the Palestinians should reject terror and incitement, Israel must recognize that it cannot “permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land.”
“Surely Israelis and Palestinians will be better off if Palestinians reject incitement and recognize the legitimacy of Israel. But Israel must recognize that it cannot permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land. We all have to do better,” the US president said at the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
In his wide-ranging address, Obama sought to use his last appearance before the global body to define how his leadership had put the world on a better trajectory over the last eight years. At the heart of that approach, Obama said, is the notion that conflicts are best solved when nations cooperate.
The president cited his administration’s outreach to former adversaries Cuba and Myanmar as key examples of progress. He also cited the resolution last year “of the Iranian nuclear issue through diplomacy” as a key achievement over the past eight years.
In his address, Obama spoke of a “less violent” and “more prosperous” world but one rife with “uncertainty, unease and strife,” as nations struggle with a devastating refugee crisis, terrorism and a breakdown of order in the Middle East.
“Despite enormous progress, governing has become more difficult, and tensions are more quick to surface,” he said, adding that the world now faces a choice, to “press forward with a better model for cooperation and integration, or retreat into a world that is sharply divided.”

David Collier: Stupidity, The Hinde Street Methodist Church and Israel

It’s the 19th September 2016. My attention was drawn this week to an exhibit in London at the Hinde Street Methodist Church. An exhibition that seeks to enlighten Londoners about ‘what it is like to cross a checkpoint everyday’. It is called “You cannot pass today”. It is based on ‘checkpoint 300’, a crossing between Bethlehem and Jerusalem.
Odd really. Even internal European travel can be problematic, and just a few weeks ago I stood for over an hour in a queue at an airport. Not sure what ‘experience’ Londoners are lacking. Borders can be frustrating. We all know that.
Yet Hinde Street Methodist Church decided that it wishes to divert funds from a deserving cause so yet another exhibition against Israel could go ahead.
I was busy preparing for the new academic year. Soon, I will be moving from campus to campus, talking to students, trying to understand the hate. Then Hinde Street knocked on my door. I decided to go and see what they wanted me to learn.
The event apparently is part of the “World Week for Peace in Palestine & Israel”. I found information on this from ‘The Palestine Israel Ecumenical Forum (PIEF)’ which judging from their stated goal of ‘ending the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories’, is just another one sided anti-Israeli movement hiding under the umbrella of a church group.
The information packs are the usual fare. The action card instructs you how to lobby your local MP, begging them to blame Israel. The section on additional resources lead with Mondoweiss and the Electronic Intifada. Let’s face it, this is one sided hatred of Israel dressed up in the costume of the local priest.

Richard Millett: Anti-Semitic comments show the Method in the Methodists’ Madness.

I went to Hinde Street Methodist Church’s exhibition in London about Israel’s security checkpoints today expecting something on the scale of the St James’s Church’s lifesize reproduction of Israel’s security barrier outside their own church in 2013 which cost £30,000 to construct. Hinde Street Church’s reproduction, however, was more of an IKEA job.
First, all of the exhibition was inside the church and second, the checkpoint was made from simple plywood with various negative commentaries about the wall, including quotations from the Bible, attached to it.
There were also real photographs of Israeli checkpoints, some sort of jenga section and three prayer stations for silent contemplation.
Third, the Zionist Federation and the Board of Deputies had spent the weekend persuading the church to accept as part of the exhibition literature (including two big boards) explaining why the security checkpoints are so necessary (see below).
The exhibition didn’t seem to be busy (it runs till friday) but the ZF/BOD literature will be effective in countering those unsuspecting members of the public who wander in. My hunch though is that the exhibition will only attract real Israel haters coming to have their views on the Jewish state confirmed.
David Collier and I sat at a prayer station in discussion with two elderly British women for about 15 minutes. We played dumb about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one of the women proceeded to tell us, inter alia, that Israel has an “unkind society” and that Israel in the West Bank is akin to Putin conquering the Ukraine and transporting Russians there.

Fatah celebrates terror. Like they do every day.

The Fatah Facebook page celebrates terror literally every day.

Today they show this newly colorized picture of airplane hijacker Leila Khaled and late Fatah terrorist Abu Jihad:

The caption says, "We are from January the 1st [1965 - the first Fatah terror attack], oh homeland... one generation salutes the next one."

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

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“Why? Why are they doing this?” Over the past year Israelis have been horrified again and again at the seemingly ever decreasing age of the terrorists attacking us. Young children are picking up knives and going out to kill Jews – with full knowledge that they will not survive the attempt.

How does a child become a murderer? Why would a child kill?

Although we all find ourselves surprised each time, this issue is not new. The answer to how this happens is also very clear. It is right in front of us. The problem is that we don’t want to see….

“Why did you want to do it?” the reporter asks 14 year old Husam Abdul from Shechem. The teenager had been sent to explode himself in order to kill Israeli soldiers.

The reporter tries to put words in the Husam’s mouth: “You did it for Paradise right?” but as children often do, Husam blurted out the inconvenient truth: “Because the people, they don’t love me.”

This happened years ago but it will never leave me. This boy represents all the boys sent to kill. This one scene is a vivid example of the problem that is currently overwhelming Israel and the rest of the free world.

No one wants to look at this. It’s too ugly, too horrible to comprehend. We westerners like to believe that everyone is the same; everyone has the same morals and ideals. Everyone loves their children the same etc. Unfortunately, that is just not true.

During Operation Protective Edge Israelis tried to explain to the world that Hamas uses women and children as human shields, that teaching children to aspire to martyrdom is child abuse. I don’t think people outside Israel, even those that follow what happens here, truly understand what this means. No one wants to comprehend something so twisted…

14 year old Husam was sent to blow himself up by grown-ups. He didn’t go off on a whim; this is not a childish prank. Grown-ups took a child, strapped a bomb on him (you will see in the video how difficult it is to remove the suicide belt, after all it’s not meant to come off) and then sent him off to die. Someone significant in this boy’s life convinced him that dying would raise his value in the eyes of the people closest to him – his father, brother, cousin, uncle…

“You did it for Paradise, right?”

Someone that knows that Israelis consider children precious, picked a child to go kill Israelis, coldly calculating that softhearted Israelis would let this boy approach close enough to explode, killing himself and IDF soldiers or, if he had gotten through the checkpoint – Israeli civilians.

This is not a problem created by a single sick person, it permeates the society. Life is not precious and the end justifies the means – even if that means sending your own child to die.

Please watch this video. Notice the details, particularly the contrast between the behavior of the soldiers and that of the boy, considering the mission he was sent to accomplish. At the end of the video you will see that it says there were “four similar attacks attempted at that checkpoint within months and children are no longer a surprise”. The English subtitles are not written professionally but I think the English is clear enough to understand – Husam’s case is one example amongst many. It no longer surprised anyone that a child was sent as suicide bomber because it had happened before. Since then this type of child abuse has become more frequent and even more extreme (for example the terrorist that attacked IDF soldiers in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge with a baby in his arms). So many people around the world decry Israeli checkpoints. Does watching this video help you understand why checkpoints are necessary? Why soldiers must search everyone, including children?

Now we are seeing more and more children and young people choose to commit terror attacks on their own initiative. They have learned their lessons well; they know what is expected of them.

“You did it for Paradise, right?”

Golda Meir once said: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”

She was right.

And it is only when this is understood worldwide that there will ever be any hope for peace.

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