Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, October 30, 2016

10/30 Links: Palestinians funded UK Labour leader’s 2009 trip to meet Assad; Is There An Occupation?

From Ian:

Palestinians funded UK Labour leader’s 2009 trip to meet Assad

The leader of the UK’s Labour party visited Syria in 2009 on a trip paid for by a Palestinian rights group and met with Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Jeremy Corbyn made the trip along with other members of parliament from all three of Britain’s major political parties, the Daily Mail reported on Saturday.
A far-left politician who in 2009 called Hezbollah and Hamas his “friends” – an expression he recently said for the first time he regretted using – Corbyn has been accused of encouraging vitriolic speech against Israel as well as Jews by befriending anti-Semitic movements and individuals.
The Syria trip seven years ago was funded by the Palestinian Return Centre, which recently organized an event in the House of Lords during which one member of the audience won applause for claiming that Jews were to blame for the Holocaust and comparing Israel to the Islamic State group.
Members’ Register of Interests records showed Corbyn reported the Syria visit as costing £1,300 ($1,500) and that the purpose was “to visit Iraqi and Palestinian refugee camps in Syria.”
The visit was held to mark the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the United Kingdom committed to viewing favorably the establishment of a Jewish national home in what would later become the British Mandate on Palestine.
Following his return to Britain, Corbyn told parliament at the time that “I pay tribute to the fact that Syria has accommodated a very large number of refugees and ensured that they are able to live in that country in safety.” (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Trump Threatens to Release Video Proving Obama, Clinton Carried out Harambe Murder (satire)

At his most recent rally in New Hampshire, Donald Trump dropped a bombshell that has the general public scared, confused and shocked.
“Folks, it seems that creating the most violent terrorist organization in the world was not enough for Obama and Crooked Hillary, and nor is the current “reinvestigation” by the FBI into Clinton’s emails. No, something far more nefarious is going on in the Democratic Party,” the Republican nominee told an enraptured crowd of supporters hanging on to his every word. “I have proof from a very not-credible source that they together, Hussein and Crooked, shot and killed Harambe, that poor innocent gorilla. Terrible, just terrible.”
When questioned whether he was implying that government policies indirectly resulted in Harambe’s death, he quickly clarified that he meant they literally shot the Gorilla themselves. “Listen, I saw the video, I saw it, you will see it too (thank you, Assange). It shows Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary setting up an M40 sniper rifle in the meerkat exhibit, lying on either side of the rifle, and pulling the trigger together. The only part of Hillary that isn’t crooked is her shot when killing innocent gorillas. They are really dangerous! Really bad people!”
Republican supporter Nathan Edelpitz commended the republican candidate for bringing out the truth. “We all knew Harambe was an inside job. Finally we have someone courageous enough to tell it like it is.”
When asked to comment on the allegation, Clinton was visibly confused “I’m pretty sure I never left that video on my email server….not that I killed Harambe with a well-placed sniper shot…that would be silly.”

IsraellyCool: Citi Should Follow The Lead Of American Express

Citibank is the largest foreign bank in Israel. It placed its Citibank Innovation Lab in Tel Aviv. It invests so much in Israeli innovation because to quote a Citibank representative himself it was a “no brainer” to use Israeli talents for this purpose.
Roger Waters has campaigned to prevent every single act from appearing in Israel and sometimes succeeds in doing so using classic antisemitic tropes and lies. He considers Hamas a “peaceful” organisation and actively promotes violence against Israelis calling it “legitimate resistance”.
Considering how much Citibank invests in Israel, and considering the hate and violence Waters represents we ask that Citibank follow the lead of American Express and drop their sponsorship of Roger Waters.
I have complete respect for Citi in Israel. They utilize our innovative workforce, I’ve banked with them. Maybe it’s someone in their corporate office who is simply unaware of who Roger Waters is and represents. But we need to get the message out.
I don’t know who put up this petition, but I signed it and so should you.

A Symbol of the Pro-Palestinian Movement

As the progressive-left and Democratic Party fling around charges of racism like confetti, perhaps it is time to remind people of the forms of western-left racism.

Why, after all, should Republicans and independents get all the fun?

There are charges of racism to be flung with wild abandon on all sides!

The racism embedded in the progressive movement, and thus embedded in the Democratic Party, takes three interrelated forms.

These are humanitarian racism, anti-white racism, and anti-Semitic anti-Zionism.

Humanitarian Racism

The most prominent form of western-left racism is what scholar Manfred Gerstenfeld dubbed "humanitarian racism."

Humanitarian racism is the primary form of racism practiced in the West, today, but it is a socially acceptable form of racism. It is a type of racism that currently flies under the radar of most Americans even as a form of racism. Humanitarian racists regard all minority groups, and all individuals within those minority groups, as perpetual victims of white racist imperialism, including minority students at elite American universities.

Western-left humanitaran racism acts as a sort-of umbrella racism that shields and nurtures hostility toward white people, malice toward the Jewish state of Israel, and demeaning condescension toward all peoples of non-European backgrounds.

As an underlying theme within the western progressive-left, humanitarian racism can be defined as a prominent form of discrimination typified by the tendency to see minority groups as mere pawns on a world stage dominated by malicious white people intent upon imperial dominance.

Wherever the humanitarian racist casts his eye he sees aggressive western imperialists intent on stealing the resources of non-white peoples in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He sees aggressive western corporate marauders endeavoring to impose their vapid and inauthentic Playstation Culture on the peaceable indigenous peoples of the world. He sees People of Whiteness absconding with the cultural creations of indigenous cultures.

And, of course, he sees the United States reeking havoc throughout the world in order to yank another filthy dollar out of other people's lands and labor.

Among the things that the humanitarian racist refuses to see, however - aside from the idea that white people are not evil - is the fact that non-white people have dignity, history, and agency. While those of us who are concerned about the rise of Political Islam respect that movement as an aggressive power in the world, humanitarian racists pity Jihadis as Victims of the White Man who can be sympathized with when they endeavor to kill non-Muslims.

The Muslim worlds, in particular, represent ancient peoples with long histories of struggle and dominance that created highly influential works of science, art, architecture, religious innovation, and various other forms of cultural production. Islam, after all, is the most successful example of aggressive imperialism in world history. Of the great national powers, only Islamic imperialism to this day maintains far-flung colonies thousands of miles from the imperial bases of Mecca (for the Sunnis) and Tehran (for the Shia).

When humanitarian racists look at Muslim societies outside of the West they see little children in need of protection in a way suggestive of nineteenth-century European notions of "white man's burden." When non-racists, of any type, look at Muslim societies, outside of the West, they see the inheritors of a once great theocratically-based empire that fell into decline when faced with superior western technology, but now resurgent as the West loses confidence in itself.

Whatever the influence of white westerners in the world - good, bad, or otherwise - the humanitarian racist refuses to recognize that non-whites are not merely victims. This is due to the essential narcissism of the movement which insists that ultimately everything is about white people.

Here's a newsflash.

It isn't.

Anti-White Racism

It is not unfair to say that following the Vietnam War, within academia, post-structuralist theorists undermined the knowability of truth, while post-colonial theorists reduced the world to indigenous victims "of color" and their white, imperial victimizers.

It is for this reason that the well-meaning students at the University of Wisconsin sell "All White People are Racists" hoodies, which is an act that ultimately encourages violence by thugs upon ordinary Anglo-type nobodies walking home from work.

It is also for this reason that so many anti-white humanitarian racists believe that there is something inherently malicious within white Wonder Bread culture, particularly in the United States. It is not merely that the petite bourgeoisie support western imperialism through their very act of being - that and paying taxes - but that there is something deplorable and irredeemably awful in White Ways of Being.

The concept is entirely nonsensical, of course, yet it is fascinating.

Many anti-white bigots think that Whiteness is not merely about skin-color, but about ways of being (ontologies) and ways of knowing (epestimologies). In this way Whiteness is essentialized into a form of evil that is directly embedded not only into white-European cultures, but into every aspect of white lives. White people are "white" not merely for coming out of the Euro-family of peoples, but as a matter of consciousness characterized by vapid inauthenticity, rapacious greed, and heartless militarism.

Like Ahab's Great White Whale, "whiteness" symbolizes a form of evil in the world and, therefore, irrepentant white people, much like Jewish-Israelis and their "Zionist" supporters, are fabricated as an enemy of "indigenous" people, everywhere.

Anti-Semitic Anti-Zionism

Humanitarian racism should be of particular interest to those of us concerned about the rise of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism and the well-being of the Jewish State of Israel.

Jewish-Israelis are surrounded by a hostile population in the Middle East that outnumbers them by a factor of 60 to 70 to 1. Many of those neighbors advocate for the destruction of those Jews given any real opportunity. The Long Arab War against the Jews of the Middle East is grounded in an irrational, Koranically-based rancor, but sold to the West as a matter of "social justice."

Following World War II, Nazi-flavored anti-Semitism met with (and married) traditional theocratically-based anti-Jewish Muslim bigotry which then heavily influenced the Palestinian Narrative. Within that narrative, the returning Jewish remnants, including Holocaust survivors, are portrayed as violent colonialist intruders intent on the ethnic-cleansing and exploitation of the Palestinian-Arabs.

This, in a nutshell, is the so-called "Palestinian narrative" and western humanitarian racists gobble it up like cherry pie.

Jewish-Israelis, who want nothing so much as to be left the hell alone to create their medical and technological doo-dads and live their lives without friends and family blown to smithereens by Jihadis, are depicted as the very worst people on the planet.

The Muslim peoples of the Middle East have persecuted the dhimmi minorities in that part of the world since Muhammad started receiving astral visitations from the Archangel Gabriel in the seventh-century.

And every generation Jews are told by both Arabs and Europeans just why it is that we deserve a good beating.

This generation is no different.

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

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Once again, religious Jews accused of cutting down olive trees - on Shabbat

From Ma'an:

Israeli settlers on Saturday morning cut down 18 olive trees belonging to a Palestinian family in the village of Nahalin, west of Bethlehem in the southern occupied West Bank.

Journalist Hani Fanun, whose family owns the trees, said his family went to harvest olives on their land in the Wadi al-Hariq area of Nahalin, and found that settlers from the nearby illegal Gush Etzion settlement bloc had cut down over 18 large olive trees.

Whenever I see these stories, which almost invariably come out on Saturdays, I look for photos.

Most of the photos accompanying the stories show old, archive photos. but this time I actually found some photos apparently taken on Saturday of the damage:

In the photos where one can see the fallen branches, the leaves are wholly or mostly brown.

So how likely is it that these trees were cut down only hours beforehand?

We've mentioned before that cutting down olive trees is a very time consuming and difficult job. And Palestinian Arabs often prune olive trees and then claim that "settlers" are chopping them down - in order to claim compensation.

The top two pictures in particular make it appear like the trees were pruned almost down to the trunk, which is common for olive trees. Why would the "settlers" chop down the branches individually?

As usual, there is no evidence that Jews skipped synagogue on Saturday morning to cut down olive trees. This appears again to be a case where Palestinians cut or pruned the trees themselves, perhaps weeks ago, and went to the media yesterday.

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The headline in Haaretz says "Papyrus With Earliest Hebrew Mention of Jerusalem Likely Fake, Experts Say."

The article itself shows that this is a lie.

It quotes two experts, neither of whom say that it is "likely" to be fake.

The first one, is Professor Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University:

Maeir said there were too many unanswered questions about the papyrus. “How do we know it isn’t a forgery intended for the antiquities market?” he demanded, adding that forgers could have deliberately “sacrificed” this document in order to prepare the way for selling other papyri that they would “discover” later.
The fact that carbon-14 dating proved the papyrus’ age is insufficient, he added. “After all, there are well-known cases in which writing was forged on an ancient ‘platform,’” he said. “It’s very possible that only the papyrus itself is ancient.
“In my humble opinion, the need for additional tests is glaring, especially if a government agency is publishing this and giving it a seal of approval. Why wait for the arguments and only then do the additional tests? They should have done them first.”

Maeir is not saying that the papyrus is "likely fake," just that authorities should have done more testing and vetting before announcing it.

The other expert is from the US:

Prof. Christopher Rollston of George Washington University also voiced skepticism, writing on his blog that he believed the document was a forgery.
“The fact that the papyrus itself has been carbon dated to the 7th century BCE certainly does not mean that the writing on the papyrus is ancient,” he wrote. “In fact, it really means nothing. After all, ancient papyrus is readily available for purchase online (check the web and see!), thus, no modern forger worth his or her salt would forge an inscription on modern papyrus.”

But Rollston did not write on his blog that the document was a forgery. He enumerates many ways for motivated forgers to use ancient papyri and even to forge ancient inks, thereby invalidating any modern methods of dating texts. He concludes:

In short, to those wishing to declare that the letters on this papyrus inscription are ancient, I would say: ‘Not so fast!’ Ultimately, I believe that there is a fair chance that although the papyrus itself is ancient the ink letters are actually modern…that is, this inscription is something that I would classify as a possible modern forgery.

Rollston is writing a book on modern forgeries of ancient Biblical-period texts, so he is an expert on forgeries. However, he has not examined this scroll itself; his caution comes from seeing other examples of sensationalist finds that ended up being forgeries. He is saying to be cautious, not that the papyrus is "likely" to be forged.

(Rollston also has a history of casting doubt on ancient Hebrew texts in other contexts, garnering criticism from other scholars.)

Haaretz, after making this false claim, then buries the responses from the scholars who actually studied the texts at the very bottom of the article, where the critics are answered:

Ahituv, however, rejected the critics’ arguments. First, he said, the papyrus was folded up when it was found, which makes forgery seem unlikely. “Would a forger buy an ancient, dry, fragile papyrus, write text on it that’s typical of the seventh century, and then fold it up and tie it with a cord and thereby endanger all his work?” he demanded.

The text itself also suggests it’s not a forgery, he continued. He and his colleagues read the text as “[me-a]mat. ha-melekh. me-Na’artah. nevelim. yi’in. Yerushalima,” meaning “From the king’s maidservant, from Na’arat, jars of wine, to Jerusalem.”

But both “Na’artah” and “Yerushalima” are very rare words, and thus unlikely to occur to a forger, “even if he’s an expert in Bible,” Ahituv said. “If I were a forger, I’d choose a more impressive text,” he added.

Ganor also rejected the criticisms. “We tried in every possible way to check the papyrus,” he said. “We used the methods used to check the Dead Sea Scrolls. If someone has an additional method, he’s invited to apply it. We, as a country, were obligated to get our hands on this, and I’m certain it’s authentic.”

There is nothing wrong with asking the Israel Antiquities Authority to be more cautious before publicizing bombshell finds. But Haaretz is simply lying in its headline claiming that the papyrus has already been debunked. Which tells you a lot about Haaretz' journalistic integrity.

(Of course, idiot anti-Israel bloggers are seizing on the Haaretz headline as proof that the papyrus is fake.)

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Israel-haters claim PayPal discriminating against Palestinians

The "US Campaign for Palestinian Rights" and other anti-Israel activist groups are now going after PayPal for not supporting payments to Arabs under PA or Hamas rule.

It is true - PayPal doesn't support payments to PA- and Hamas-controlled territories. But it isn't because of "discrimination," as the haters pretend.

PayPal also doesn't support payments to Lebanon, Afghanistan. Iraq, Iran, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Cote D'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), North Korea, Haiti, Liberia, Libya, Myanmar, Pakistan, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Timor-Leste, and Uzbekistan.

According to this 2013 article, the likely reasons for PayPal not to support a country are simple: "insufficient regulation and security in a country's banking system, failure of a country to comply with U.S. tax law, or a U.S. trade ban affecting a country."

In this case, the reason is almost certainly because most or all Palestinian banks do business with Hamas, and Hamas is an internationally recognized terror group, which puts their assets at risk from lawsuits. This makes the Palestinian banking system inherently unstable, and therefore a risk.

It isn't discrimination - it is business. PayPal would love to expand their offerings in a safe manner - why wouldn't they? They operate in Egypt, Jordan and plenty of other Arab states. If they thought could make money from Palestinians, they would.

If the Israel-haters cared so much about Palestinian Arabs having access to PayPal, they would insist that Palestinian banks cut off all ties to Hamas in Gaza.

But I don't think they care that much. After all, these supposedly pro-Palestinian groups will never say a word against Hamas or terrorism.

It hurts their credibility, you know.

(h/t/ Spotlighting)

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10/29 Links: Papyrus Speaks Louder Than UNESCO; China, Israel, and a return to the cloverleaf world

From Ian:

Muslim Imperialism Reaches the United Nations

UNESCO has joined forces with Islamic State. The fundamentalists now have a new weapon: resolutions passed by servile international bodies.
An earlier delay and the opposition of UNESCO's chief, Irina Bokova, had raised hopes that this act of jihadist, barbaric, unjust, and, frankly, arrogant supremacism might be voted down. It was not. Now a new lie was given the sanction of the world's largest and most unaccountable body whose reason for being is to preserve significant sites, not to bowdlerize them.
Lies by UNESCO to rewrite history, erasing all traces of Judaism and Christianity to favour a jihadist Islamic fancy, were already under way in 2015. UNESCO fraudulently renamed two ancient Biblical Jewish sites, Rachel's Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs, as Islamic sites. Historically, Islam did not even exist until the seventh century.
This is the history of Islam, how it takes over -- with both hard jihad (violence) and soft jihad (usurping history, migration [hijrah], political and cultural infiltration), and intimidation (soft jihad with the threat of hard jihad underneath it). What is even more saddening is that often, as with this vote, it is done with the West's cooperation and voluntary submission.
Before the United Nations, with its authoritarian, anti-democratic voting blocs, finishes eradicating Western, Judeo-Christian civilization, as it is clearly trying to do, it is high time for Western democracies to run, not walk, away, before further harm comes to them too, as it surely promises to do.

Papyrus Speaks Louder Than UNESCO

This week the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization—UNESCO—voted yet again to validate Palestinians claims that deny Jewish ties to the holiest places in Judaism. But an unexpected announcement that some of Israel’s critics consider suspiciously fortuitous made clear the ignorant and vicious nature of the Palestinian campaign. On the day of the latest UNESCO vote, the Israel Antiquities Authority unveiled the discovery of an ancient papyrus fragment that has been scientifically dated to the 7th century B.C.E. that mentions Jerusalem in Hebrew. The artifact, which predates the birth of Islam by 1,400 years, is the most effective response imaginable to a UNESCO stand that treats the Temple Mount and the Western Wall as exclusively Muslim shrines.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu made a point of triumphantly mentioning the archeological find this week in his denunciation of the UNESCO vote. But while the timing of the two events ought to be particularly embarrassing for the Palestinians and their European and Third World enablers, it’s not likely that this will cause any of those nations that have stuck to their absurd position to change their votes.
After all, does anyone at the United Nations really doubt that Jerusalem was the capital of a Jewish nation many centuries before the Muslim conquest of the country? Or that Hebrew was the language of the ancient Jewish kingdoms? Do even many Palestinians think the site of the Temple Mount mosques isn’t where the Jews built both of their ancient shrines or that the Western Wall is not the last remnant of that structure? Not likely.
Nor is the point of the Palestinian push at the UN an effort to protect the status quo on the Temple Mount whereby the ancient site is administered solely by a Muslim religious authority (which has carried out construction projects that trashed ancient artifacts), and Jews are forbidden to pray there. Accusations by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas that the Israelis intend to harm the mosques is a brazen lie intended to stir up hatred and violence against Jews. The point of this agitation is that denial of Jewish history is required to justify a Palestinian political culture that continues to see the war on Zionism as intrinsic to their national identity.

British Jewish Leaders Outraged by London University Anti-Israel Protest Which Required Police Intervention

Leaders of Britain’s Jewish community expressed outrage on Friday after a lecture on Thursday night by a former IDF soldier at a London university was stormed by protesters, resulting in the arrival of the police.
Marie van der Zyl, vice president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said in a statement, “We deplore the aggressive and intimidating protests which disrupted a student event in UCL (University College London)…It is disgraceful that in a society which values free speech, students at a top UK university cannot host an open event without being harassed.”
Van Der Zyl also referred to the anti-Israel protesters — who trapped students and visitors inside a lecture hall during the talk by Israeli peace activist Hen Mazzig — as a “hate-filled mob supporting the worst kind of extremism in the Middle East,” who “serve only to bully and threaten.”
The Board said it will be taking its concerns to the government and called on UCL “to initiate a strong disciplinary process against the perpetrators.”
That message was echoed by the Israeli Embassy in London, writing in a statement posted on Twitter: “We are concerned by the shameful violence recorded at last night’s event at UCL aimed at preventing an Israeli speaker from engaging students. We are confident the university will be investigating those responsible.”

Anti-Israel extremists on British university campuses

Last night police were called to rescue Jewish students from anti-Israel thugs at University College London, at the same time SOAS PalSoc had invited notorious Hamas apologist, Tareq Radi, to speak at the campus.
Universities must do more to keep extremists off British campuses.

10/28 Links Pt2: BDS thugs attack Israeli speaker at University College London

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: The New Anti-Racist Racists

There is a trait campaigning groups have that is well known. Once they have achieved their objective, they continue. Usually it is because there are people with salaries at stake, pensions, perks and more.
Suddenly the SPLC seemed to spy a new fascism. The SPLC saw this new fascism in people who objected to people flying planes into skyscrapers, decapitating journalists and aid workers and blowing up the finish line of marathons.
One got the impression that it had become immensely useful for some people to be able to smear those concerned about Islamic fundamentalism, and try to make them akin to Nazis. The only other movements who find this equally useful are, of course, Islamic extremists.
Here is this "anti-racist" organisation, largely made up of white men who present themselves as being anti-racists, and yet who spend their time attacking Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a black immigrant woman. At the top of any list of "hate-groups," the SPLC must in future be sure to place itself.
The SPLC's list of "anti-Muslim activists" also includes a practising Muslim, Maajid Nawaz, one of the most principled and courageous people around calling out the extremists in his faith for their bigotry and hatred. He does so, like Hirsi Ali, at no small risk to himself.

Maajid Nawaz an “Anti-Muslim Extremist” according to Southern Poverty Law Center

Long term readers of this blog may recall Mohammed Shafiq tried to accuse Maajid Nawaz of criminalising the veil. At the time I called this a dangerous game of accusing people, that may be more liberal than yourself, of things which fundamentalists are prepared to kill you for.
“Nawaz tweeted out a cartoon of Jesus and Muhammad — despite the fact that many Muslims see it as blasphemous to draw Muhammad.”
Being “blasphemous” makes you an extremist it seems. The Southern Poverty Law Centre is devoid of context that Maajid Nawaz said he did not find a cartoon picture of Mohammed and Jesus saying hello together to be blasphemous or a challenge to his faith. Two students at a London School of Economics student freshers fayre were ejected for wearing them to advertise their Atheist Humanist Secular society, and this was discussed on a BBC show. Hence Maajid Nawaz tweet.
A reminder that this lead to death threats for Maajid Nawaz. No mention of that by the SPLC.

Pro-Palestinian protesters trap attendees of Israel event in London university hall

Police officers were called on Thursday to an on-campus Israel event at University College London after pro-Palestinian demonstrators were seen trapping attendees in the room where the talk was being held and preventing others from going in.
Israel advocate Hen Mazzig was to speak at the event hosted by the Friends of Israel at UCL in London and CAMERA on Campus, but the protests led by the Friends of Palestine Society began just as he began talking.
In a series of videos from the event, the protesters can be seen banging on the windows and the door to the hall, shouting “Free, free Palestine,” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Outside the room, one attendee confronts a group of protesters who refuse to let him and others into the room to hear the speech.
Mazzig, a former StandWithUs education director who is being sponsored on his campus visits by CAMERA, tries to get through his lecture but the tension is palpable, as is clear in the footage.

Anti-Israel Protesters Assault Jewish Students at UCL

Please answer this question, Roger Cohen

Roger Cohen writes in the New York Times about how awful Israel is for its policy of "occupation":

There is agreement on very little in the fractious Holy Land, but on one issue there is near unanimity these days: A two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is more distant than ever, so unimaginable that it appears little more than an illusion sustained by lazy thinking, interest in the status quo or plain exhaustion.

From Tel Aviv to Ramallah in the West Bank, from the largely Arab city of Nazareth to Jerusalem, I found virtually nobody on either side prepared to offer anything but a negative assessment of the two-state idea. Diagnoses ranged from moribund to clinically dead. Next year it will be a half-century since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank began. More than 370,000 settlers now live there, excluding in East Jerusalem. The incorporation of all the biblical Land of Israel has advanced too far, for too long, to be reversed now.

Greater Israel is what Israelis know; the smaller Israel west of the Green Line that emerged from the 1947-49 war of independence is a fading memory. The right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with its contempt for Palestinians and dissenting voices in general, prefers things that way, as the steady expansion of settlements demonstrates.

Cohen - and every liberal columnist in the world, plus the leaders of the EU and the US - are so sure that Israel's steady expansion of settlements is the major problem in the region that they should be able to answer a simple question:

How much new land has been taken from Palestinians since the Clinton parameters in Taba in 2000?

You can answer in dunams or acres.

Everyone is so sure that Israel is expanding the settlements beyond the point of no return, but nobody is putting out any numbers in terms of land that has been given to Jewish Israelis.

Because it is minuscule.

The amount of land taken up by the settlements was less than 2% in 1993 and it remains less than 2% today, as of the latest information I can find. There are essentially no new facts on the ground that make a two-state solution any more difficult today than it was in 2000.

Now, I can tell you what has changed since the 2000 peace plan was rejected by Palestinians.

Palestinians started a terror war that killed thousands, using suicide bombing, shootings and other means. They raised a generation of children to hate Israel, teaching them that eventually and inevitably Israel will disappear. They encouraged knife attacks against Jewish grandmothers. Israel withdrew from Gaza and was rewarded with a terror statelet that shot thousands and thousands of rockets and mortars to civilian areas in Israel itself.

All of those facts tend to make Israelis a little less enthusiastic about peace. But that doesn't mean they don't desperately want it.

If the Palestinians would accept the Clinton plan today, along with true peace between the two states, the supposedly right-wing Israeli public would overwhelmingly support it.

Roger Cohen knows this. But he prefers to blame Israel for the bullheadedness of the Palestinian leadership.

Why are these facts so hard to understand?

Because of "good Jews" like Roger Cohen and Peace Now and J-Street and Tom Friedman, who give cover for Palestinian crimes and intransigence by always primarily blaming Israel and Likud for the lack of peace.

Open your eyes, Roger.

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From Palestinian Media Watch:

The Palestinian Authority often assures its people that among its top priorities is the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel - most of whom are convicted for terrorist crimes including murder.

Chief PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat recently reiterated this, terming actions of terrorist prisoners as "acts of heroism", and stating that Palestinians "bow [their] heads in admiration and honor of the prisoners' sacrifices, for their acts of heroism":

[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Oct. 19, 2016]

"Our brave prisoners, who gave and sacrificed their freedom for Palestine and its freedom, are worthy of aid, support, and constant activity by us in order to release them and put an end to their suffering. The prisoners' cause is a national and central cause, and we bow our heads in admiration and honor of the prisoners' sacrifices, for their acts of heroism, and for their ongoing battle with the occupation."

Too bad CNN won't bother asking him about this the next time they let him spew his lies on international TV.

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10/28 Links Pt1: Phillips: Palestinians step up the jihad of the lie; Glick: Checkmating Obama

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Palestinians step up the jihad of the lie

The claim that Britain gave a Palestinian country to the Jews is a lie.
On July 24 1922, the League of Nations unanimously gave its recognition to “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.” As a result, it gave Britain a mandate to settle the Jews there as of right.
In 1917 the Arabs living in Palestine did not identify themselves as Palestinians. They were either nomadic or identified with Arab countries, such as Syria. When people referred to Palestinians in the first half of the last century, they meant the Jews.
The Jews are the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever their national kingdom. It is the Arabs who are bent upon a colonialist crime, seeking to steal the Jews’ land from them once again.
As ever, though, Israel’s government, with its swaggering, macho refusal to deal strategically and forensically with the cognitive war being waged against it, has responded merely with sarcasm and outrage.
Israel needs instead to educate the world in quite how unhinged these lies are.
For many in the West themselves don’t know the true facts and so don’t understand that the Palestinians are motivated by a madness.
These lies prove unequivocally that the real agenda of even so-called “moderate Palestinians” is to eradicate Israel. Their hostility to the Jewish homeland is so pathological they perpetrate the most ludicrous falsehoods to write the Jews out of their own history.
The Palestinians think their big historical lie will finish Israel off. In fact it could rebound on them badly and finish off their own cause – but only if Israel recognizes the opportunity it should now seize.

Caroline Glick: Checkmating Obama

In one of the immortal lines of Godfather 2, mafia boss Michael Corleone discusses the fate of his brother, who betrayed him, with his enforcer.
“I don’t want anything to happen to him while my mother is alive,” Corleone said.
Message received.
The brother was murdered after their mother’s funeral.
Last week it was reported that the Obama administration has delivered a message to the Palestinian Authority. The administration has warned the PA that the US will veto any anti-Israel resolution brought before the UN Security Council before the US presidential elections on November 8.
Message received.
Open season on Israel at the Security Council will commence November 9. The Palestinians are planning appropriately.
Israel needs to plan, too. Israel’s most urgent diplomatic mission today is to develop and implement a strategy that will outflank President Barack Obama in his final eight weeks in power.
Lobbying the administration is pointless. Obama has waited eight years to exact his revenge on Israel for not supporting his hostile, strategically irrational policies. And he has no interest in letting bygones be bygones.
Before turning to what Israel must do, first we need to understand what Israel can do.
A good place to begin is by considering what just transpired at UNESCO, where twice in a week, UNESCO bodies resolved to erase 3,000 years of Jewish history in Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.
The fight that Israel waged at UNESCO is not the fight it needs to wage at the Security Council. The stakes at the Security Council are far higher.

Charles Krauthammer: Is Obama preparing a parting shot at Israel?

There is a reason such a move has been resisted by eight previous U.S. administrations: It overthrows the central premise of Middle East peacemaking — land for peace. Under which the Palestinians get their state after negotiations in which the parties agree on recognized boundaries, exchange mutual recognition and declare a permanent end to the conflict.
Land for peace would be replaced by land for nothing. Endorsing in advance a Palestinian state and what would essentially be a full Israeli withdrawal removes the Palestinian incentive to negotiate and strips Israel of territorial bargaining chips of the kind it used, for example, to achieve peace with Egypt.
The result would be not just perpetual war but incalculable damage to Israel. And irreversible, too, because the resolution would be protected from alteration by the Russian and/or Chinese veto.
As for the damage, consider but one example: the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, destroyed and ethnically cleansed of Jews by its Arab conquerors in the war of 1948-1949. It was rebuilt by Israel after 1967. It would now be open to the absurd judicial charge that the Jewish state’s possession of the Jewish Quarter constitutes a criminal occupation of another country.
Israel would be hauled endlessly into courts (both national and international) to face sanctions, boycotts (now under color of law) and arrest of its leaders. All this for violating a U.N. mandate to which no Israeli government, left or right, could possibly accede.
Before the election, Obama dare not attempt this final legacy item, to go along with the Iran deal and the Castro conciliation, for fear of damaging Clinton. His last opportunity comes after Election Day. The one person who might deter him, points out Hannah, is Clinton herself, by committing Obama to do nothing before he leaves office that would tie her hands should she become president.
Clinton’s supporters who care about Israel and about peace need to urge her to do that now. It will soon be too late. Soon Obama will be free to deliver a devastating parting shot to Israel and to the prime minister he detests.

The New York Times reports:

The leaders of the two main Palestinian factions met on Thursday in the latest attempt to reconcile after a nine-year schism that has divided their people and complicated efforts to negotiate peace with Israel.

Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, run by the Fatah faction, met in Qatar with Khaled Meshal, the political chief of Hamas, and Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader in Gaza. A photograph of the three men smiling was posted online.

The meeting was the first between Mr. Abbas and Mr. Meshal in two years. Fatah operates primarily in the West Bank under Israeli occupation while Hamas controls Gaza, which is partly cordoned off from the outside world by Israel. Repeated efforts to bridge the divide between the factions have collapsed.

The rival leaders agreed that it was time to repair the rift, establish a national unity government and prepare for elections, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported. But it was not clear whether the meeting would lead to an actual agreement, or that such an agreement, even if reached, would prove any more enduring than at least five others sealed over the years.

In other words, nothing happened and nothing is going to happen. We've seen this movie before. Hamas isn't interested in giving up Gaza even though it solemnly promised not to turn Gaza into an independent state.

The official Wafa news agency of the PA didn't even bother reporting this on its English site.

Abbas is acting the way he does with Israel. He has no interest in any agreement, but when there is enough pressure on him to make one (in this case, from other Arab nations and his own people) he will do a photo-op to take the pressure off.

Yet even though his intransigence is consistent across the board, he is still regarded as a moderate and everyone he talks to is an extremist, judging from Western media accounts.

The Arab world knows better that the starry eyed US and European and Israeli leftist "experts" who insist that he is a swell guy even as he arrests any West Bank Arab who dares disagree with him.

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EoZTV: Interview of scholar Manfred Gerstenfeld, part 1

In July, I interviewed antisemitism expert and prolific author Manfred Gerstenfeld in his Jerusalem home.

Here is part 1 of the interview where he gives an overview of the three main stages of antisemitism over the past 2000 years.

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Official "moderate" Fatah logo, complete with weapons, hand grenade and map of all of Israel

Fatah is planning to hold its Seventh Congress sometime next month.

These rare meetings are very important because Fatah is what dominates the PLO, which the Palestinian Authority answers to. So who controls Fatah controls the Palestinians.

During the Sixth Congress in 2009, Mahmoud Abbas violated all rules of transparency to hold onto power and marginalize any Fatah groups - like the Mahmoud Dahlan faction, the Marwan Barghouti followers, and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades - that disagreed with him. There was corruption in the voting process to ensure that Abbas loyalists would win.

Moreover, the final platform released by the "moderate" Abbas-dominated party still supports terror. and the destruction of Israel ("liberation of the homeland.")

The Seventh Congress already has been pushed back more than a year. Even so, Abbas is moving to consolidate his hold on the movement.

From Ma'an:

The Palestinian Authority's (PA) preventive security service arrested former spokesperson for the Jerusalem office of the Fatah movement on Tuesday night, shortly after he gave a televised interview commenting on his removal from office days earlier.
Raafat Elayyan was arrested in his home in the village of Anata in the Jerusalem district of the occupied West Bank.
He was the second Fatah official to be removed from office over participation in a meeting attended by hundreds of local Fatah leaders on Saturday, which was dispersed by Palestinian security forces.
Former senior Fatah leader and lawmaker Jihad Tummaleh, who was also dismissed following the meeting, said on his Facebook page that the meeting was held to discuss "Fatah unity and awakening."
Anonymous Fatah sources at the time said that the meeting was considered “illegal” and that its participants were accused of “delinquency” by Fatah’s Anti-Delinquency Committee.He said there were also internal disputes over the membership of the upcoming seventh congress, expected to be held in November, and over the movement's strategies and priorities regarding international and local relations. "The Fatah movement has reached a point of unclear vision on how to manage relations with Hamas and Israel," Elayyan said.
Amid growing dissent within Fatah, the PA has come under fire for cracking down on Palestinians for criticizing the government, while the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) found in a 2016 poll that at least 64 percent of the Palestinian public are in favor of the resignation of Abbas.

The Fatah members who are being marginalized are generally more militant than Abbas and are just as unlikely to be interested in genuine peace as Abbas is. This is one reason why the West ignores his dictatorship, and pretends that there is some sort of democracy under the PA. And it is also why the West ignores the pro-terror messages from Abbas' official Fatah media.

It doesn't take much digging to see the corruption that Abbas is responsible for. It is a continuation of Arafat's corruption and two-faced nature, but without Arafat's charisma.

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Possibly the first film of the Kotel, and other Jerusalem scenes, 1911 (update)

I saw this as part of a 1963 documentary on Jerusalem directed by David Perlow. It is an interview with a cinematographer who filmed scenes from Jerusalem in 1911, including the Kotel.

(h/t Mike)

UPDATE: Entire film here. (h/t EoL)

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10/27 Links Pt2: Collier: The Jew, the Zionist and antisemitism at the House of Lords; Balfour 100 years later

From Ian:

Abraham Bell & Eugene Kontorovich: Palestine, Uti Possidetis Juris, and the Borders of Israel

Israel’s borders and territorial scope are a source of seemingly endless debate. Remarkably, despite the intensity of the debates, little attention has been paid to the relevance of the doctrine of uti possidetis juris to resolving legal aspects of the border dispute. Uti possidetis juris is widely acknowledged as the doctrine of customary international law that is central to determining territorial sovereignty in the era of decolonization. The doctrine provides that emerging states presumptively inherit their pre-independence administrative boundaries.
Applied to the case of Israel, uti possidetis juris would dictate that Israel inherit the boundaries of the Mandate of Palestine as they existed in May, 1948. The doctrine would thus support Israeli claims to any or all of the currently hotly disputed areas of Jerusalem (including East Jerusalem), the West Bank, and even potentially the Gaza Strip (though not the Golan Heights). View PDF

100 years later

Next week will mark the beginning of the 100th year since the Balfour Declaration. On Friday, Nov. 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour announced in a short letter to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild that "His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."
Five years later, the Balfour Declaration was included in the League of Nations resolution to mandate Palestine to the British government, and another sentence was added to it: "Whereas recognition has been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country." Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, who, with the assistance of his colleague Nahum Sokolow, worked persistently and wisely on behalf of the World Zionist Organization to obtain the documents, aspired to a clearer commitment, but the modest version was still an important tier in building the State of Israel.
Arab leaders in Palestine opposed the Balfour Declaration as soon as it was made public. They protested the use of the terms "the Jewish people" and "national home" as well as the reference to the Arabs as one of the "communities" with civil and religious -- but not national -- rights. It is for these reasons that the Palestine Liberation Organization determined in article 18 of its 1964 charter, three years prior to "the occupation," that "the Balfour Declaration, the Mandate system and all that has been based upon them are considered fraud." In keeping with his organization's charter, PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas recently stated at the United Nations General Assembly (Sept. 21, 2016): "One hundred years have passed since the notorious Balfour Declaration, by which Britain gave, without any right, authority or consent from anyone, the land of Palestine to another people. This paved the road for the Nakba of Palestinian people and their dispossession and displacement from their land." (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Bedouin family: We will continue to serve Israel

President Reuven Rivlin visited the home of Nimer Abu Amar, the 15-year-old youth from the Negev Bedouin town of Lakiya who was killed by fire from an Egyptian soldier at Israel's southern border Tuesday, to express his condolences to the boy's family.
"We are all citizens of the same country." Rivlin told the boy's father. "We have come to share in your profound grief."
"We are all equal in this country, and there is no difference between a child in Lakiya and a child in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, or Haifa." he added. The Defense Ministry treats a child from Lakiya exactly the same way as it treats every other child, and we will do our utmost to investigate the circumstances which led to this tragedy."
The boy's father, Bassam Abu-Amar, said "I expect the Defense Ministry to act justly in investigating the matter. Our pain is immeasurable. He was our first born son."
The boy's uncle said "We will continue to work with the Defense Ministry. Generation after generation will work for the nation and at the border. We know that the Defense Ministry will investigate and learn the appropriate lessons. He is our child, he is your child and he is my child, and there is no argument about that."
Rivlin the family members present and promised that the relevant officials at the president's office would continue to follow up on the investigation into this tragic incident.