
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.

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.
- Prohibition against building new churches, places of worship, monasteries, monks or a new cell. Hence it was also forbidden to build new synagogues.This is in exchange for being "protected."
- Prohibition against rebuilding destroyed churches, by day or night, in their own neighborhoods or those situated in the quarters of the Muslims.
- Prohibition against hanging a cross on the Churches.
- Muslims should be allowed to enter Churches (for shelter) in any time, both in day and night.
- Christians were forbidden to show their religion in public, or to be seen with Christian books or symbols in public, on the roads or in the markets of the Muslims.
- Palm Sunday and Easter parades were banned.
- Funerals should be conducted quietly.
- Prohibition against telling a lie about Muslims.
- If a Muslim wishes to sit, non-Muslim should be rise from his seats and let the Muslim sit.
- Prohibition against riding animals in the Muslim custom, and prohibition against riding with a saddle.
- Prohibition against any possession of weapons.
- Non-Muslims must host a Muslim passerby for at least 3 days and feed him.
- Prohibition against non-Muslims to lead, govern or employ Muslims.
- The worship places of non-Muslims must be lower in elevation than the lowest mosque in town.
- The houses of non-Muslims must not be taller in elevation than the houses of Muslims.
- Houses of the non-Muslims must be short so that each time that they would enter or exit their houses they would have to bend, in a way that it would remind them of their low status in the world.
The Benedictine convent is also unique because it is a semicloistered convent in the midst of one of the most impoverished and crowded East Jerusalem neighborhoods. Next door to the convent is a contentious Jewish settlement called Beit Hoshen, run by the group the City of David Foundation, whose ideological agenda is to purchase land in Arab neighborhoods and build heavily fortified Jewish residences, in an attempt to "Judaize" the area. Beit Hoshen is a single building with about 30 people.Oh.
"One year before I arrived, the [Beit Hoshen] building was sold," said Penka. "The [Palestinian] farmer owner lost his life. People don't like when you sell to Jews" in this neighborhood, she explained.
The location of the Jewish building means the road is now a flash point for riots whenever the political situation becomes shaky. Additionally, the sisters are located on the road toward the Mount of Olives, the holiest place for Jews to be buried, because it is believed that the arrival of the Messiah will come from the Mount of Olives and those buried there will be the first dead to be resurrected. But many Arab residents resent the endless traffic jams from funerals. Angry children and teenagers protesting the Israeli occupation sometimes throw stones at the Jewish people's cars exiting the cemetery.Because stoning Jewish mourners is a perfectly valid expression of anger at "occupation."
Critics of Israel love to exploit Jewish fears and anxieties. The most extreme resort to Holocaust inversion, boycotts, blacklists, and other singling-out methods reminiscent of Europe's anti-Semitic past. Secretary of State John Kerry likes to wave around the threat of Israel's demographic extinction.Israel Shows How to Stop Terrorists
Acute Israeli sensitivity on this matter came to the fore in the late 1960s, when Israeli rule over the newly won Gaza Strip and West Bank was thought by many to be untenable owing to much-higher Palestinian birth rates. If Israel chose to annex the territories, it would be obliged either to disenfranchise their Palestinian inhabitants, making Israel undemocratic, or extend the vote and watch Israel's Jewish majority turn into a minority. For Israel to remain both a democratic and a Jewish state, according to the conventional wisdom, it would have to give the territories up. "The womb of the Arab woman," the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat famously said, was his "best weapon."
Fast-forward five decades. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), the number of (non-Jewish) Arabs living in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem (4.62 million) and in Israel (1.68 million) for the first time matches the number of Jews (6.3 million). Taking into account still-higher Palestinian birthrates, as neatly graphed out in a September 2016 full-page New York Times advertisement by a pro-Palestinian group, the Jewish population in the expanse of territory "from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River" is projected to decline to 44 percent in 2030.
In his drive to wrest Israeli concessions he believes will break the Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic logjam, Secretary Kerry has repeatedly warned of a demographic doomsday for Israel. "How does Israel possibly maintain its character as a Jewish and democratic state when from the river to the sea, there would not even be a Jewish majority?" he warned last December. Time is "running out" for Israel, Kerry maintains, insinuating that Arabs will be even less likely to accept a Jewish state as part of the former Palestine mandate once they become an overall majority, instead returning to their demand for a "one-state" solution. Israel then winds up "either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens — or ... a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state."
Build a wall, secure the border, and vet Muslims to stop the infiltration of terrorists. This is not Donald Trump speaking – it is what has actually been done in Israel. Americans can take a page from Israel's Border Guard to protect themselves.Douglas Murray: The Guilty Verdict Dutch Politicians Wanted So Much
American Thinker interviewed author Samuel M. Katz regarding his book The Ghost Warriors, about Israel's elite force of undercover operatives. They are drawn from the nation's diverse backgrounds and ethnicities, united in their ability to walk among the enemy as no one else dared. They are called Ya'mas and use many undercover tactics.
Katz wrote the book to emphasize how "Israelis learned about using counter-terrorism inside city, street, and neighborhoods. The United States now realizes it is also something they will have to contend with, a struggle of civilizations. The book covers a period of Israeli history and is relevant to Americans because both nations must battle terrorism on a daily basis. It is a warrior's tale of a select group of individuals who accepted the challenge of going daily, nightly into enemy-controlled territory, usually in disguise. The enemy wonders who to trust or where the Israelis are lurking.
"Part of the Border Guards' strategy is to inflict 'terror' on the terrorists. They had to spend just as much time in watching their backs as planning terrorist attacks. Part of the Border Guard's duties is to capture the extremists to ensure the flow of information continues."
Members of the Netherlands' Labour Party, who never of course were prosecuted, have wielded incomparably more damning icepicks than "fewer Moroccans".
The irony cannot have been lost on the wider world that on the same day that news of Wilders's conviction came out the other news from Holland was the arrest of a 30 year-old terror suspect in Rotterdam suspected of being about to carry out 'an act of terrorism'.
Internationally it will continuously be used against Wilders that he has been convicted of 'inciting discrimination' even though the charge is about a proto-crime – a crime that has not even occurred: like charging the makers of a car chase movie for 'inciting speeding'. As with many 'hate-crime' trials across the free world, from Denmark to Canada, the aim of the proceedings is to blacken the name of the party on trial so that they are afterwards formally tagged as a lesser, or non-person. If this sounds Stalinist it is because it is.
In the long-term, though, there is something even more insidious about this trial. For as we have noted here before, if you prosecute somebody for saying that they want fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands then the only legal views able to be expressed about the matter are that the number of Moroccans in the country must remain at precisely present numbers or that you would only like more Moroccans in the country. In a democratic society this sort of matter ought to be debatable.
If there is one great mental note of which 2016 ought to have reminded the world, it is how deeply unwise it is to try to police opinion. For when you do so you not only make your society less free, but you disable yourself from being able to learn what your fellow citizens are actually – perhaps ever more secretly – feeling. Then one day you will hear them.
"Morally bankrupt." — Salman Rushdie, author with a $600,000 bounty from Iran's regime on his head, speaking of Amnesty International.What a Real Civil Rights Hero Thought of Jews, Zionism and Anti-Semitism
Amnesty sponsored a rally in Brussels, where Islamist speakers celebrated the 9/11 attacks, denied the Holocaust and demonized gays and Jews.
It seems that Amnesty turned its back on the battle of human rights in favor of a grotesque anti-Western bias. The Economist accused Amnesty of "reserving more pages to human rights abuses in Britain and the United States than in Belarus and Saudi Arabia."
Amnesty's secretary general compared Soviet forced-labor camps, where millions died of hunger, cold and executions, to a US military base where no prisoner has died, and which has prevented countless innocent civilians from being blown up.
"Canada is obliged to arrest and prosecute Bush for his responsibility for crimes under international law including torture", said Susan Lee, Amnesty International's Americas programme director. Amnesty also charged Obama of "war crimes."
Alan Dershowitz summarizes Amnesty's definition of Israel's "war crimes": "Whatever Israel does to defend its citizens."
A report by NGO Monitor detailed Amnesty's "systematic flaws in the reporting of human rights abuses; limited understanding of armed conflict leading to erroneous claims and incorrect analysis; and violation of the universality of human rights, including a consistent institutionalized bias against Israel through double-standards." There are even Amnesty's officials who called the Jewish State "a scum state."
The real measure of a Civil Rights Leader is how he reacts to the persecution of others. On this crucial responsibility Bayard Rustin — the Civil Rights leader and strategist who worked as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s right hand man and organizer of the 1963 "March on Washington" — was always a step ahead.
A great test of Rustin's commitment to fighting anti-Semitism came during the 1968 School-Teachers' Strike in New York City. As Paul Berman wrote in The New Republic:
"In that strike, a social democratic trade union was pitted against a wave of neighborhood black nationalists demanding community control over the schools (and over the teachers' contracts). To support the teachers' union was, for Rustin and [A. Philip] Randolph, too, the obvious choice to make. Rustin became a top aide to Albert Shanker, the teachers' leader. ... Unfortunately the strike broke down into tribal warfare -- Jewish schoolteachers verses black neighborhood activists -- and Rustin, as a result, found himself in the novel and horrible circumstance of opposing an aroused black citizenry. Leaders more timid than himself, and more crafty, looked for ways to avoid taking sides during those very nasty months."
"But", writes Berman, "Rustin was incapable of drawing back." He had found "the Jewish rank and file" of the union "subjected by their opponents to all sorts of anti-Semitic vilification," and "he made a point of standing up against anti-semitism" — and did so very publicly, railing against "these young Negroes spouting material directly from Mein Kampf" in a 1968 speech to the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League.
Rustin was not an unbiased observer of these events. Not long after the Yom Kippur War was brought to a close, Rustin wrote in the Chicago Defender that "Israel, as a progressive and democratic nation, is the ultimate reflection of traditions which run throughout Jewish history and culture. Wherever Jews are, they stand firm for the extension of human rights for all people."
Sunday, Dec. 11, the Boston Chamber Symphony inaugurates a residency at Brookline’s Temple Ohabei Shalom with a program including Sergei Prokofiev’s “Overture on Hebrew Themes.” It was composed in 1919, while Prokofiev was living in New York City, but commissioned by colleagues from St. Petersburg who had formed a sextet — clarinet, string quartet, and piano — called the Zimro Ensemble. Dedicated to Zionism, Zimro performed Jewish-themed repertoire and raised funds for a proposed “Temple of Art” in Palestine. The group left St. Petersburg in 1918, touring Siberia, the East Indies, and Japan before coming to America. Clarinetist Simeon Bellison asked Prokofiev for a piece to anchor Zimro’s Carnegie Hall debut, providing the composer with a number of musical themes (which, in fact, Bellison may well have written himself). Prokofiev played the piano at the premiere.Most online versions of the overture are from the original 1919 version, but here is one of the rarer orchestral versions:
...Prokofiev, though, left America, eventually returning to the Soviet Union. He sometimes dismissed his Zionist overture (the work’s almost relentless parade of four-bar phrasing struck him, in retrospect, as graceless) but nevertheless orchestrated it in 1934. Largely, Prokofiev remembered, while sitting in artist Pyotr Konchalovsky’s garden, having his portrait painted. “How are the Jews coming along?” Konchalovsky would ask, before suddenly, brusquely instructing the composer not to move.
The Overture on Hebrew Themes was the first work to witness Prokofiev’s unexpected interest in Jewish music. It was also the first independent work (excluding arrangements) written by him in the United States. And Prokofiev was the first known Russian composer to base a Jewish score not on Jewish liturgical chants, but on klezmer tunes.(11) The history of this work is described in detail in his autobiography:There is much more at that link about Prokofiev and his relationship with Jews.In the fall of 1919 the Jewish “Zimro” ensemble came to America. It consisted of a string quartet, clarinet, and piano, all of them fellow students of mine at the Petersburg conservatoire. The official purpose of their concert tour was to raise funds for a conservatoire in Jerusalem. But this was merely to impress the Jewish population of America. Actually they barely made enough to keep themselves alive. They had a repertoire of rather interesting Jewish music for diverse combinations of instruments: for two violins, trio, etc. They asked me to write an overture for a sextet, and gave me a notebook of Jewish themes. I refused at first on the grounds that I used only my own musical material. The notebook, however, remained with me, and glancing through it one evening I chose a few pleasant themes and began to improvise at the piano. I soon noticed that several well-knit passages were emerging. I spent the next day working on the themes and by evening had the overture ready. (12)
People will only fight and die for nations to which they feel proudly attached. No one will willingly fight and die for the EU.Caroline Glick: Israel’s first project with Trump
Current prospects, however, are alarming.
The erosion of national identity has created vicious group politics. These fights will probably escalate both verbally and physically. Here’s how this is likely to play out.
Muslim extremists will fight Jews and Israel in particular and Western society in general. The fascists will fight Muslims, Jews and liberals.
Liberals will support Muslim extremists because the fascists are fighting them, will continue to demonize Israel and Jews and will attack conservatives – who will thus vote in ever greater number for the far Right.
The more Islamist violence there is, the more the reaction against Muslims will increase; the more the Left will then support Muslims and demonize all who oppose them, thus encouraging more Muslim violence.
Jews will want to fight nobody at all but will get it in the neck from all sides.
Trump and Brexit offer some hope that this can be avoided. Restoring pride in Western national identity and the defense of the nation unifies rather than divides people. But if Trump or Brexit are seen to fail those who voted for them, all bets are off. The extremes of both Left and Right will be waiting, with their hobnailed boots on.
Israeli officials are thrilled with the national security team that US President-elect Donald Trump is assembling. And they are right to be.Vic Rosenthal: The Third Lebanon War will be the Last Lebanon War
The question now is how Israel should respond to the opportunity it presents us with.
The one issue that brings together all of the top officials Trump has named so far to his national security team is Iran.
Gen. (ret.) John Kelly, whom Trump appointed Wednesday to serve as his secretary of homeland security, warned about Iran’s infiltration of the US from Mexico and about Iran’s growing presence in Central and South America when he served as commander of the US’s Southern Command.
Gen. (ret.) James Mattis, Trump’s pick to serve as defense secretary, and Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Michael Flynn, whom he has tapped to serve as his national security adviser, were both fired by outgoing President Barack Obama for their opposition to his nuclear diplomacy with Iran.
During his video address before the Saban Forum last weekend, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said that he looks forward to discussing Obama’s nuclear Iran nuclear deal with Trump after his inauguration next month. Given that Netanyahu views the Iranian regime’s nuclear program – which the nuclear deal guaranteed would be operational in 14 years at most – as the most serious strategic threat facing Israel, it makes sense that he wishes to discuss the issue first.
But Netanyahu may be better advised to first address the conventional threat Iran poses to Israel, the US and the rest of the region in the aftermath of the nuclear deal.
But today Hezbollah is entirely different from Hamas. Tehran has built it into an existential threat. If war breaks out we will have to unleash as quickly as possible the most powerful conventional weapons at our disposal against the rocket launchers. Look at the map! Perhaps such an attack would kill tens of thousands in Lebanon. But there’s no alternative. Israel is a tiny country with a concentrated population. We can’t absorb hundreds of missiles an hour, especially accurate ones with heavy payloads. We can’t afford to wait, not even a few minutes, once it starts.
Incidentally, if Hezbollah and Iran want to reap the benefit of the human shield strategy, then now is the time to do it. I suspect that Trump and his advisors would be less biased against Israel than the present administration, and therefore less likely to interfere with Israel’s response. Our enemies probably agree with me, and this means war is more likely in the next two months than at a later time. Maybe that’s why our officials have made the effort just now to ensure that Iran and Hezbollah understand the consequences of their possible actions.
It only makes sense to threaten Iran as well. The regime would be happy to sacrifice Lebanon and its people to destroy Israel, and the regime is pulling the strings, not Nasrallah. There need to be consequences for Iranian leaders too.
Evil is growing stronger and good is retreating. Deterrence may put off the reckoning for a time, but unless something completely unforeseen happens, the day will come when our PM will have to give the order to save one nation by destroying another. I’m glad I’m not the one to do it.
The British have spied on Israeli diplomacy both in Jerusalem and abroad. They have also targeted private firms in the defence sector, State agencies responsible for international cooperation and university research centres known for their excellence in scientific matters. These targets appear in the form of email addresses or telephone numbers in the interception reports of the GCHQ technicians, pleased to demonstrate that they had succeeded in identifying them in the flow of satellite telephone communications between the African continent and the rest of the world. At the end of each report, they state that the collection of this data can now become automatic.
In 2014, the Wall Street Journal showed that the NSA could both support its Israeli partner, the ISNU (Israeli Sigint National Unit or Unit 8200) and monitor the telephone calls of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahou. In 2013, the German daily Der Spiegel observed that in January 2009 the email addresses of the then Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, and the Minister for Defence, Ehud Barak, had both been spied on by the GCHQ.
According to our information, the spies cast their nets much more widely. Their aim is the State services and, in particular, its diplomats. Among this user account information we thus find the telephone number of the second in command of the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry or the email addresses of the current ambassadors in Nairobi, Kenya, andAbuja, Nigeria. These capitals, considered to be strategic by the Israelis are also considered by the British to be their backyard since they are former colonies.
One of the defence firms under surveillance, Ophir Optronics, set up in 1976 in Israel, is known to be one of the outstanding firms in optic fibre and laser, two key elements in modern armaments and leading industries. Another email address, to which is appended the key word ‘Israeli UAV’ – the English acronym for drones (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) – is a reminder that the Israelis were amongst the forerunners in the production of planes and other pilot-less vehicles in the world. Along with the United States, they are the leading exporters of this expertise in civil and military fields and the British would, it seems, like to know all the secrets.
The surveillance of Israeli interests by the GCHQ has also extended to the MASHAV – the Israeli state agency responsible for international cooperation and development. Suspected by the British of playing a double game by supporting weak countries to consolidate the influence of Israel, this agency is established and operates all over the world. Finally, the British secret services have concentrated their attention on the work of certain advanced research centres in the top-level Hebrew University of Jerusalem They have also targeted the Racah Institute for Physics where theoretical and practical research is carried out in highly sensitive areas, in particular in nuclear physics.
This is a paradox which illustrates the nature of the relationship between allies, even those who are very close. The GCHQ was cooperating very closely with Israel in 2009, at the very time when Israel launched a new attack against Hamas in the Gaza Strip; at the same time, the GCHQ stepped up its espionage operations on the Hebrew State. In its top-secret internal newsletters, the GCHQ congratulates itself on its good relations with the ISNU, the Israeli technical secret service. One can actually read that the British have spied on email addresses and telephone numbers at the request of the Israelis: ‘They thanked us on many occasions.’
The Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Secretariat is a joint funding mechanism of Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and, until recently, Norway. The Secretariat is managed by the Institute of Law at Birzeit University (IoL-BZU) in Ramallah and the NIRAS consulting firm. The Secretariat has been providing $6 million in 2013-2017 to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) active in BDS campaigns (boycott, divestment and sanctions) and other forms of demonization. Some of these NGOs have also promoted antisemitic rhetoric and have apparent links to terror.Keith Ellison’s Views on Israel Reflect the Democrats’ True Colors
The following document summarizes the recent activities of Secretariat-supported NGOs:
B’Tselem (Received $710,000 between 2014-2016)
14 October: Hagai El-Ad, head of B’Tselem, spoke at a highly publicized Arria-formula UN Security Council session, where he described Israel as committing “invisible, bureaucratic, daily violence” against Palestinians that occurs from “cradle to grave.”
Defense for Children – Palestine (DCI-P) (Received $738,000 between 2014-2016)
31 October: Released an article claiming that the Gaza wars “propel child labor for Palestinian kids” due to “Israel’s blockade and repeated military offenses.” In its repeated demonization of Israel, DCI-P referred to the Gaza blockade which, they alleged, “perpetuates and worsens an entirely man-made humanitarian and economic crisis,” entirely removing the context of terrorism.
17 November: In a meeting with the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations with Palestine, held with Addameer (see above), DCI-P “urged the European Union during a meeting on Thursday to pressure Israeli authorities to end ill-treatment of Palestinian children in the Israeli military detention system.” In accusing Israel of violations, Khaled Quzmar, general director of DCI-P, erased Palestinian stabbing and other terror attacks against Israeli civilians that were perpetrated by minors.
Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) (Received $710,000 between 2014 and 2016)
31 October: Director Raji Sourani spoke at an event sponsored by the World Council of Churches. Sourani asserted that Israel’s blockade of Gaza was “illegal” and “criminal,” and that the Palestinians are living “in one of the biggest manmade disasters.”
22 November: Sourani was quoted in the press release promoting the 145-page communication to the ICC falsely claimed that “The siege on Gaza is unprecedented and is a form of collective punishment. The aim of the closure and the occupation is to de-develop Gaza, to strip Palestinians of their dignity and send Gazan society back to the Middle Ages.”
Haim Saban is wrong when he says Minnesota’s US Rep. Keith Ellison is unqualified to head the Democratic National Committee. Ellison’s anti-Israel and antisemitic lineages do not disqualify him from the position. They more than qualify him.Crazy About Keith Ellison
It is Ellison, not Saban — the Israeli-American mega-donor to both the Democratic Party and pro-Israel causes — who represents the Democrats’ true colors. The party has been abandoning support for the Jewish state for well over a decade. Recent studies by Brookings, Gallup and Pew reveal a growing gap of support for Israel between Democrats, Independents and Republicans. Israel — an issue that should never be partisan — is strongly supported by Republicans and independents. Democrats? Not so much.
When there are anti-Israel demonstrations and antisemitic activities on our college campuses, it is not the Young Republicans declaring allegiance to the US-designated terrorist group Hamas. Progressives are chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” This call for the destruction of Israel and murder of the Jewish people comes from Leftist groups, not Christian organizations.
Democrats generate more sackcloth and ashes over a Jew building an extra bathroom in eastern Jerusalem than an Iranian building a nuclear device in Tehran. This is the party that remains silent over the murder of gays in Iran and inhumane treatment of women in Saudi Arabia, while condemning Israel when they defend their citizens from rocket attacks launched from Gaza.
In one of the comments that the ADL said was disqualifying, Ellison described the Jewish state as having a stranglehold on U.S. foreign policy.Crazy About Keith Ellison SUPERcuts!
“The United States foreign policy in the Middle East is governed by what is good or bad through a country of 7 million people,” Ellison said in 2010. “A region of 350 million all turns on a country of 7 million. Does that make sense? Is that logic?”
Ellison is no stranger to making controversial statements.
Back in 2010, the same year of his comment on Israel, Ellison called Arizona’s immigration laws “fascist” and “racist.”
He also compared anti-terrorism surveillance policies to Japanese internment during World War II.
In 2013, Ellison said the National Rifle Association supports people who “traffic in death” and the following year said he wished the Democratic Party would come out against the Second Amendment.
Ellison is running against South Carolina Democrat Jaime Harrison, who spent the last eight years as a lobbyist for the Podesta Group, and New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman Ray Buckley to head the DNC.
[I]t is clear that it was not only Israel's political leadership that was held hostage by the chimerical conception that an era of peace with the Palestinian Authority had begun: M[ilitary] I[ntelligence] and the Shin Bet security service had trouble liberating themselves from the same feeling. The intelligence officials were not always willing to let facts disturb a rosy perception of reality.[33]
To the extent that Arabs were sold on the Oslo process, it was as a Trojan horse, not as a humiliating concession. |
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PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
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The Apartheid charge, the Abraham Accords and the "right side of history"
With Palestinians, there is no need to exaggerate: they really support murdering random Jews
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