Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, December 18, 2016

The reporters who falsely claim J-Street is equivalent to "liberal Jews"

There are plenty of liberal Jews who support Israel. There are plenty of Zionists who support a two-state solution. I might disagree with the specifics of what they believe and how they want to see peace in the Middle East, but their love for Israel and support for Israelis is unquestioned.

Then there is J-Street.

J-Street is an anti-Israel organization that has been artificially boosted by the White House and the media as the home for liberal Jews, even though its positions are outside the mainstream of the majority of Jewish Zionists, including liberals.

So while the overwhelming majority of American Jews support Benjamin Netanyahu - the democratically elected leader of Israel - J-Street does everything they can to undercut him, and Israeli democracy.

Liberal Jews like Alan Dershowitz advocate for a two-state solution. AIPAC supports a two state solution. The Jewish Agency supports a two state solution. And the Israeli government does, too.

As long as the security of Israel is not compromised by that solution.

J-Street has no such caveats. They have opposed essentially everything Israel has done over the Green Line even in areas that are undoubtedly going to be part of Israel under any conceivable peace plan. They have lobbied for the US not to veto one-sided, anti-Israel resolutions. They refuse to say that they support Israel as a Jewish state as part of any peace deal. They oppose tax deductions for even ambulances and medical clinics over the Green Line.

And that, in a nutshell, is both why J-Street is anti-Israel and why they do not represent liberal American Jews who support Israel.

But when the designated American ambassador to Israel called J-Street "worse that kapos" - a term I would not use personally, but one that indicates the depth of how J-Street uses its pretense of being "pro-Israel" as a screen to hide its anti-Israel activities - the media that has boosted J-Street beyond its actual importance is now trying to claim that there is no daylight between J-Street's positions and that of most liberal Jews.

So we see these tweets from the New York Times writer Matthew Rosenberg pretending that J-Street represents "dovish Jews" and "Jews who support two-state solution:"

Next Amb to Israel: More Settlements? Done. Annex West Bank? Sure. But dovish Jews? Worse than Jews who aided Nazis https://t.co/kg5a3x9mg8
— Matthew Rosenberg (@AllMattNYT) December 16, 2016

Trump Chooses Hard-Liner as Ambassador to Israel — said Jews who support two-state solution "are not Jewish" https://t.co/stII3meNpt
— Matthew Rosenberg (@AllMattNYT) December 16, 2016

That's not all. Look at this lying headline from New York magazine:

As if "liberal Jews" and "J-Street" are synonymous.

And the worst example of a Jew who tries to pretend that J-Street's positions, and therefore his own, are mainstream for American Jews, is Rob Eshman of the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, who wrote an entire absurd article on this theme:

All of these tweets and headlines are purposeful lies meant to mainstream an anti-Israel organization as somehow being pro-Israel.

And all these examples prove is that one cannot trust reporters who cannot distinguish between reality and their wishful thinking.

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Time magazine has an article that pretends to be a backgrounder on the legal status of Jerusalem, and it gets it quite wrong in a number of respects. Every single thing it gets wrong is against Israel, showing that this is a lesson in media bias.

After the Second World War, the State of Israel was established and gradually recognized ‘de jure’ — or lawfully — by most of the world’s countries. However, although the U.N. recognized the state of Israel in 1948, allowing it to become a member state, it placed the whole city of Jerusalem under international control (a ‘corpus separatum’) on Dec. 13 1949. Despite this, most governmental offices moved to the city.

UN General Assembly resolution 303(4) was passed on December 9, not December 13th. It did not place Jerusalem under international control - General Assembly resolutions cannot do that - it merely said "its intention that Jerusalem should be placed under a permanent international regime."

Time is lying.

Crucially, the United States voted against this resolution.

Here is what happened on December 13th: David Ben Gurion said in unmistakable terms that Jerusalem is and always will be the capital of Israel:

As you know, the General Assembly of the United Nations has in the meantime, by a large majority, decided to place Jerusalem under an international regime as a separate entity. This decision is utterly incapable of implementation - if only for the determined unalterable opposition of the inhabitants of Jerusalem themselves. It is to be hoped that the General Assembly will in the course of time correct this mistake which its majority has made, and will make no attempt whatsoever to impose a regime on the Holy City against the will of its people.

...For the State of Israel there has always been and always will be one capital only - Jerusalem the eternal. So it was three thousand years ago - and so it will be, we believe, until the end of time.

Time goes on:

But in 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israel captured the eastern section of Jerusalem, which Jordan presided over, and declared Israeli law, jurisdiction and administration would be applied to the whole city. Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem has been considered illegal under international law and was condemned by the U.N., as well as other states.

The link that Time gives to claim that Israel's rule over the part of Jerusalem that Jordan had annexed is illegal says no such thing. It is an article by legal scholar Eyal Benvenisti that argues that even if Israel annexed "East Jerusalem" it would still be considered an occupier (a controversial theory) but in no way does his article claim that such occupation is illegal. In fact, there is no such thing as "illegal occupation" - the laws of belligerent occupation simply reflect that an occupying country has certain responsibilities, but the state of occupation is not illegal. The most that anyone can claim is that some Israeli actions violate the laws of occupation, not that the occupation itself is illegal.

Time is lying.

Time goes on:

In 1980, the Knesset declared that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel,” but this law was declared null by the U.N., which called for the removal of the remaining embassies in the city.

Here's what Time doesn't bother to say: Even though the US abstained on that Security Council resolution, it considered the demand that states abandon their diplomatic missions to be null and void. From Secretary of State Edmund Muskie:

The status of Jerusalem cannot simply be declared; it must be agreed to by the parties. That is a practical reality. It will remain so. despite this draft resolution or a hundred more like it....
The Council calls upon those States that have established diplomatic missions in Jerusalem to withdraw them from the Holy City. In our judgement this provision is not binding. It is without force. And we reject it as a disruptive attempt to dictate to other nations. it does nothing to promote a resolution of the difficult problems facing Israel and its neighbours. It does nothing to advance the cause of peace.

Time goes on:

Countries continued to locate their foreign embassies in Tel Aviv, Israel’s second largest city, situated on the Mediterranean coast, and the refusal to recognize Jerusalem as Israeli territory has become a near-universal policy among Western nations.

Not really, since Western nations recognize the Green Line (falsely) as a border. Their diplomats and heads of state routinely travel to Jerusalem to speak to Israeli diplomats. If pre-1967 Jerusalem was considered controversial, none of these national leaders would ever step foot in the city as guests of Israel.

Then Time contradicts itself:

The U.N. still maintains its position on Jerusalem. In October 2009, the U.N.’s Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that Jerusalem must be the capital of both Israel and Palestine—living side-by-side in peace and security, with arrangements for the holy sites acceptable to all—for peace in the Middle East to be achieved.

If the UN maintains its position of Jerusalem as a corpus separatum, then how can it also call for Jerusalem to be divided into becoming a capital of two states?

The UN Secretary General even realizes that the idea of Jerusalem as an international city is dead, yet Time says its position hasn't changed since 1949.

This is really a poor article, and its bias and lies show that Time isn't trying to explain the facts - it is trying to hide them.

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Four articles in the NYT against David Friedman in one day

Friday's New York Times had four articles against Donald Trump's choice to be the US ambassador to Israel.

Yes - four articles in one day. Two "news" articles, one editorial, and one op-ed.

The main news article on Friedman was "David Friedman, Choice for Envoy to Israel, Is Hostile to Two-State Efforts."

David M. Friedman, an Orthodox Jewish bankruptcy lawyer from Long Island, is Donald J. Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel, despite his lack of diplomatic experience and frequent statements that flout decades of bipartisan American policy.
“Bankruptcy law and involvement with settlements are not normally seen as an appropriate qualifications for the job,” one of its former occupants, Martin S. Indyk, said on Friday. “But then these are not normal times.”

Nah, no bias there, to quote Indyk first. As if no American president has ever appointed an ambassadorship to someone with no diplomatic experience before. Oh, wait - Obama and previous presidents have done so routinely, handing out ambassadorships to fundraisers fortheir campaigns, sometimes with good results and sometimes with embarrassingly bad results.

The next NYT story takes some quotes of Friedman's from his writings at Arutz-7:

David Friedman, Trump's Ambassador to Israel, on the Issues

David M. Friedman, the bankruptcy lawyer nominated by Donald J. Trump to become ambassador to Israel, has for at least a year regularly contributed columns to Arutz 7, a right-leaning Israeli news site.

Interestingly, while they published excerpts of eight of his articles in Arutz-7, they didn't excerpt this one:

While a student of American and Israeli foreign policy, I am no expert. I have little to add to the disgust already expressed by the experts with regard to the horrific agreement reached between the P5+1 and Iran – undoubtedly the worst international accord since Neville Chamberlain conceded Eastern Europe to Hitler. But I am an expert in negotiations, especially with difficult and often dishonest counterparties. And in that context, I would like to weigh in on how utterly inept Obama and Kerry proved to be.
A phrase commonly used for a negotiation where everything is up for grabs and there are wide swings between the bids and the asks is a “Persian Bazaar.” In a Persian Bazaar, the overriding rule is caveat emptor – let the buyer beware – and there is not even a pretext of honesty, integrity or good faith.
The Iranian nuclear negotiations were a prototypical Persian Bazaar. The Mullahs repeatedly spoke out of both sides of their mouths, professing, simultaneously, a desire for world peace and for death to America and Israel, making supposed concessions and then taking them back, refusing to consider new issues and then adding new conditions of their own. What would you expect? They are Persians playing a game they invented. And the United States was badly outplayed.
There are some basic rules to negotiation in such an environment. Simple and obvious rules that America flubbed at every opportunity.

Because it shows that in at least one aspect, Friedman knows a hell of a lot more than all the editors at the New York Times combined.

Then comes the op-ed from former ambassador Daniel Kurtzer:

Donald Trump’s Israel Ambassador Pick Is Hazardous to PeaceThrough his other appointments thus far, Mr. Trump has made it clear that he wants to take American policy in an abruptly new direction. In the Middle East, especially in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mr. Trump’s approach is a prescription for trouble and the loss of American credibility.
The consequences of acting upon Mr. Friedman’s public suggestions are clearly dangerous. Moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem — not a pressing issue for most Israelis — will inspire riots across the Islamic world.

So to this diplomat, doing the right things always takes a back seat to the veto power of the fear of Muslims. Good to know.

Finally, the editorial itself:

A Dangerous Choice for Ambassador to Israel

There are other reasons to question Mr. Friedman’s fitness for the post. He has accused President Obama of anti-Semitism, absurdly, and called supporters of J Street — a liberal American Jewish organization that has lobbied for a two-state solution and the Iran nuclear deal — “far worse than kapos — Jews who turned in their fellow Jews in the Nazi death camps.” American ambassadors to Israel traditionally maintain close contacts with American Jews, as well as Israeli officials, but Mr. Friedman reportedly told a closed-door forum in Washington earlier this month that he would refuse to meet with J Street, effectively ostracizing a significant part of the community.

J-Street isn't a significant part of the Jewish community. It is a significant part of the White House strategy to split the Jewish community. Too bad the NYT doesn't know the difference.

In a further sign of Mr. Friedman’s apparent zeal for confrontation rather than diplomatic finesse, he has announced that he expects to have his office in Jerusalem, rather than Tel Aviv, where the American Embassy has been for 68 years, along with the embassies of most other countries. Both Israelis and Palestinians claim Jerusalem, which has sites that are sacred to Muslims, Christians and Jews, as their capital. Like the crucial questions of borders, Israeli security and the fate of Palestinian refugees and their descendants, the contested status of Jerusalem should be resolved by negotiation, not by American fiat. Unilaterally relocating the embassy to Jerusalem would be interpreted as tipping the scale for Israel, further eroding America’s role as an honest broker.

I still have not seen a decent argument against moving the embassy to Jerusalem within the Green Line, and the NYT is not adding any. It obfuscates the issue, making it sound like the Arabs have a valid claim on Israel within the Green Line. US diplomats visit Jerusalem routinely without any Arab objection, because after all it is where Israel's leaders live and work. It is a silly fiction that the 45 minute drive between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is needed for peace.

This isn't a reasoned objection to Friedman. This is an obsession.

And, as the Free Beacon notes, the NYT derangement over Friedman spills over into Twitter.

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12/17 Links: Danon: UN hypocrisy against Israel has broken records; Gove: 'Anti-Zionism Is Anti-Semitism, Impure and Simple'

From Ian:

Danon: UN hypocrisy against Israel has broken records

Outgoing United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Friday admitted that the international body is biased against Israel.
In a statement to the Security Council summarizing his ten years in office, Ban said that "we must never accept bias against Israel within UN bodies."
The Secretary General then admitted that the UN has a "disproportionate volume of resolutions, reports and conferences criticizing Israel" and that "in many cases, rather than helping the Palestinian cause, this reality has hampered the ability of the UN to fulfill its role effectively."
At the same time, Ban criticized Israel over the Regulation Law, which recently passed its first reading in the Knesset and would legalize the status of some communities in Judea and Samaria.
"I strongly urge legislators to reconsider advancing this bill, which will have negative legal consequences for Israel and substantially diminish the chances for Arab-Israeli peace," Ban said, according to the Reuters news agency.
Israel's Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, reacted to the Secretary General's statement with regards to Israel and criticized the UN.
"The Secretary General admitted the clear truth; the UN's hypocrisy towards Israel has broken records over the past decade. During this time the UN passed 223 resolutions condemning Israel while only eight resolutions condemning the Syrian regime as it has massacred its citizens over the past six years. This is absurd," said Danon.
"With a new Secretary General set to take office next month, we look forward to the possibility of a new era of fairness at the UN," the Ambassador added.

Ban condemns West Bank outpost bill, admits UN biased on Israel

Ban said that if the bill is passed by the Knesset, it “would for the first time apply Israeli law on the status of Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank” in clear violation of international law.
“I strongly urge legislators to reconsider advancing this bill, which will have negative legal consequences for Israel and substantially diminish the chances for Arab-Israeli peace,” he said.
The South Korean secretary-general called for Palestinian unity, an end to Palestinian terrorism and incitement to violence, and a halt to Israeli settlement construction if the two-state solution were to yield fruit.
“The framework for peace remains unchanged: the establishment of two states, on the basis of the principle of land for peace, and a just and comprehensive regional peace consistent with relevant Security Council resolutions as well as with existing agreements signed between the parties,” he said.
Ban didn’t refrain from acknowledging and criticizing his own organization’s bias against Israel in recent years.
“Decades of political maneuverings have created a disproportionate volume of resolutions, reports and conferences criticizing Israel,” he said. “In many cases, rather than helping the Palestinian cause, this reality has hampered the ability of the UN to fulfill its role effectively.”
“At the same time, Israel must realize that the reality in which a democratic state, governed by the rule of law, keeps the Palestinian people under military occupation will continue to generate criticism and calls for accountability.”
Ban called on the Security Council to issue a commitment to the two-state solution, saying “the status quo entrenches a one-state reality of perpetual occupation and conflict.”
“We must not give up on the right of Palestine to exist, just as we must protect the right of Israel to exist in peace and security with its neighbors,” he said.

Prominent British MP: Anti-Zionism Is ‘Simply Antisemitism Minding Its Manners So It Can Sit in a Seminar Room’

Anti-Zionism is “simply antisemitism minding its manners so it can sit in a seminar room,” a prominent British Conservative politician said on Friday.
In an op-ed published in the Times of London, Michael Gove — the MP for Surrey Heath and a former secretary of state for justice — wrote, “Antisemitism has moved from hatred of Jews on religious or racial grounds to hostility towards the proudest expression of Jewish identity we now have — the Jewish state.”
“No other democracy is on the receiving end of a campaign calling for its people to be shunned and their labour to be blacklisted,” he continued. “This is antisemitism, impure and simple. It is the latest recrudescence of the age-old demand that the Jew can only live on terms set by others. Once Jews had to live in the ghetto, now they cannot live in their historic home.”
Antisemitism, Gove emphasized, “deserves to be called out, confronted and opposed.”
Furthermore, Gove noted, “the fate of the Jewish people, and the survival of the Jewish state, are critical tests for all of us. The darkest forces of our time — Islamic State, the Iranian leaders masterminding mass murder in Aleppo — are united by one thing above all: their hatred of the Jewish people and their home. Faced with such implacable hatred, and knowing where it has always led, we should not allow antisemitism any space to advance, or incubate.”
Gove ended with a call for the UK to mark the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration — in which Britain announced its support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” — by moving its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Gove: 'Anti-Zionism Is Anti-Semitism, Impure and Simple'

Britain should move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and have the Queen open the new premises in a show of solidarity with the Jewish state, senior Conservative Michael Gove has said.
The former Education and Justice secretary has called for the move as a marker in opposing the rising tide of antisemitism, which he says is being dressed up as antizionism.
The gesture would prove that Britain was “not going to be intimidated by those who want to treat Israel as a second-class state,” Gove said.
Israel is the only country in which the British embassy is not located in the nation’s capital, and the only British ally which the Foreign Office has steadfastly refused to let the Queen visit.

Moroccan King Mohammed VI visited a newly rehabilitated synagogue and a new Jewish museum in Casablanca on Friday, part of a program to rehabilitate the old city of Casablanca.

The Jewish community held a ceremony in the king's honor, which included a prayer for the monarch.

The king also visited other sites in the city, such as a new health center for women.

Here is a video in Arabic on the event.

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12/16 Links Pt2: PA claims it got no US aid in 2016 but State Dept. gave them $357m; Terrorists Angered by Trump’s Election

From Ian:

Mossad blamed as Tunisian scientist ‘with Hamas ties’ killed near his home

Mohammed Al-Zoari, an aviation scientist and engineer with links to Palestinian terror group Hamas, was shot dead at point-blank range on Thursday in the Tunisian city of Sfax, Hebrew outlets quoted Arabic media as saying Friday evening.
According to reports on Israel’s Channel 10 and Army Radio, unknown assailants shot Zoari multiple times when he was sitting in his car near his home.
The reports said between three and seven bullets were found in his body.
According to Channel 10, a senior Tunisian journalist said the Israeli spy agency Mossad had been tracking Zoari for quite some time, and was responsible for his assassination.
Israel’s Channel 2 news said Zoari was reported to have received death threats because of his Palestinian terror links.
However, Channel 2 also quoted Tunisian security officials as saying that the investigation of the death did not currently suggest an assassination by a foreign intelligence agency.

PA claims it got no US aid in 2016. In fact, State Dept. gave Palestinians $357 million. And that’s not all

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah claimed last week that his government has received no aid from Washington in 2016, accusing the US of imposing a “financial siege” on the Palestinians. But the State Department has in fact provided Ramallah with over $357 million in financial assistance in the past year, according to information given to The Times of Israel by a US State Department official on Thursday.
Additionally, in 2016 alone, the US contributed $355,177,827 to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNWRA), of which $95 million was earmarked for the West Bank and Gaza. UNWRA also operates Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
In total, therefore, the US gave around $712 million in aid to Palestinians in 2016, and is the world’s largest supplier of such aid.
Hamdallah told the official PA radio station the Voice of Palestine on December 8 that his government has not seen any of the aid money approved by the US in 2016. He described this as part of a “financial siege” on the Palestinian government. That allegation against the US of failure to pay, according to figures and explanations received by The Times of Israel, is a cynically skewed misrepresentation of the reality.
“Since last year, there is a financial siege on the Palestinian government… For example, let’s speak frankly, the US approved $263 million in 2016 as aid to the government. Look, 2016 is about to end, no shekel or agora, or dinar or dollar has been paid, if we speak frankly. We hope that this aid money will be paid,” he said, according to a translation by Palestinian Media Watch.
Hamdallah then listed and praised countries that he said have given aid to the PA in 2016, and excluded the US.

Israel Can Be Jewish, Democratic, and Committed to Human Rights, Without Contradiction

Looking to Israel’s Declaration of Independence for guidance, Ruth Gavison addresses the polarization within Israeli society that has resulted from fierce debates over identity, the status of the Palestinians, religion, and the like:
We [in Israel] have forgotten that democracy, human rights, and the Jewish state, [all of which are enshrined in the Declaration], go together very well. Jews used to understand this. Not only do they go together well, they are required for each other. The people who struggled to establish the Jewish state knew that they were going to have a democracy and they were very responsive to the idea of human rights. . . . But these three interlocking elements . . . are today viewed by many as totally distinct, with either major tensions or even outright contradiction among them.
So, increasingly, we find people who want to take one element of the complex vision . . . and make it primary. They give their primary ideal a very expansive interpretation. They demand that the other two elements be operative only within the constraints of the broadly-defined primary element. And this happens from all sides of the political and cultural spectrum. . . .
The “wisdom” of the Declaration, and of the decisions that the founding fathers and mothers made in the first decades of Israel, was their agreement to disagree. . . . The Declaration itself [thus] left many ideological questions open. . . . Who is a Jew? What role does the Jewish religion play in the new state? What is the relationship within Judaism among nationalism, culture, and religion? What is the status of the Arab minority and what are its rights? . . .

At first glance, this series of photos of beautiful Israeli women looks like an ad for tourism in Israel.

But in fact they are what accompanied an article about women in the Mossad in Arabic Cedar News.

(Yes, my headline is clickbait. Might as well take a chapter from "fake news". Shabbat Shalom!)

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12/16 Links Pt1: Glick: A Trumpian Israeli initiative; France Humiliated by Abbas but Israel Remains Focused

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: A Trumpian Israeli initiative

Then of course, there is Jerusalem. Since 1948 the US has refused to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital – or even as part of Israel. This policy of nonrecognition – embodied by the US refusal to transfer the US Embassy to Jerusalem – has been maintained by a bipartisan consensus despite the fact that for the past 20 years, US law has required the State Department to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the embassy to Jerusalem.
When Trump promised to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, his words were greeted with cynicism.
But then this week his senior adviser Kellyanne Conway said Trump is serious about moving the embassy to Jerusalem.
In one fell swoop, the 68-year-old consensus is gone.
Thirty-five years ago, on December 14, 1981, Israel took a Trump-like step. Israel took a wrecking ball to received wisdom.
That day, the Knesset passed the Golan Heights Law. Then-prime minister Menachem Begin decided on the initiative the day before. In less than 24 hours, the law went from an idea in Begin’s head into the law books.
The Golan Heights law canceled the Military Government and Civil Administration that had governed the area since 1967 and replaced them with Israeli law and administration.
The Reagan administration was livid. Begin had neither asked Ronald Reagan for permission nor given Reagan a head’s-up on what he was about to do.
Begin was clearly operating on the basis of the “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than for permission” protocol.
In the event, the Americans weren’t really mad.
Reagan prevented the UN Security Council from sanctioning Israel for its action.
The Syrian regime did nothing. The Arab world yawned.
Israel was spared international condemnation in large part because of the way Begin explained the purpose of the law.

Israel Thrives: Obama’s Post-Newtown Release of Child-Murderers from Israeli Prisons

Early in 2013, when the nation was still in shock over the December 14, 2012 Newtown massacre, President Obama decided that one of his administration’s top priorities would be to pressure Israel to release scores of convicted terrorists, including the killers of children. The result would turn out to be a grotesque foreign-policy “success” that the media virtually ignored.
While political leaders, including presidents, are expected to flip-flop occasionally, this might be the first administration in history to flip-flop on the issue of child massacres. The first anniversary of the Newtown killings was preceded by two other noteworthy anniversaries of child murders that the Obama administration reacted to in chillingly conflicting ways, apparently based on the victims’ nationality and religion.
To observe the 50th anniversary of the 1963 firebombing murders of four African-American girls in Birmingham, President Obama solemnly paid tribute to the victims, who were also posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for “major achievement in the recipient's field.”
One month later, Israel marked a similar tragic milestone—the 25th anniversary of the firebombing murders of the nine-months pregnant Rachel Weiss, a 26-year-old second-grade teacher, and her sons—Netanel, 4; Rafael, 2; and Ephraim, 21 months. Israeli soldier David Delorosa also died in a heroic attempt to save them. Israel considered imposing the death penalty for the first time since Adolf Eichmann was put to death in 1962.
Unfortunately, the Weiss brothers did not look like Obama’s own imagined sons; and unfortunately, they and their mother (a victim of a real war on women) were citizens of the nation Obama’s mentor Jeremiah Wright referred to as “that dirty word.” And so, using Secretary of State John Kerry as his point man, Obama began pushing for the release of their killers, along with scores of other terrorists convicted of murder or attempted murder.
The two perpetrators of the 1988 bus firebombing and their fellow terrorists were apparently freed simply because Palestinian officials requested it—reportedly the same reason Obama’s Internal Revenue Service began persecuting pro-Israel organizations.

J-Street sinks into irrelevance, one outraged statement at a time

J-Street tweeted:

Trump's pick of Friedman for Israel Amb is anathema to values that underlie US-Israel relationship. We'll fight this with all we've got.
— Jeremy Ben-Ami (@JeremyBenAmi) December 16, 2016

And what, exactly, does J-Street have?

They no longer have a White House that artificially boosts them up deliberately to split the US Jewish community and make it appear that far more Jews oppose Israel's policies than actually do.

All they have are the anti-Israel members of Congress that they gave money to that happened to win despite J-Street's attempts to make the Iranian nuclear deal a positive reason to vote for them.

I was struck by this statement that J-Street made in reaction to the appointment of John Bolton as Deputy Secretary of State:

Bolton has shown little understanding for the challenges that Israel faces if it is to remain a secure and democratic homeland for the Jewish people.

If resistance to a pro-terror Palestinian state at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Jews who live in their ancestral homeland is an example of "little understanding," then J-Street must also believe that Benjamin Netanyahu's understanding of Israel's challenges, and the understandings of most of the Knesset, are also woefully inadequate compared to the genius of Jeremy Ben Ami.

This isn't reasoned argument. This is J-Street lashing out as it is sinking in a sea of its own irrelevance.

I imagine that Ben-Ami also believes that the vast consensus of Israelis who want the US to move its embassy to Jerusalem - which J-Street opposes - are also lacking in understanding of Israel's challenges. Only Americans like Ben Ami understand Israel (plus, of course, Meretz voters and Haaretz columnists.)

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The Palestinian group which fought with Assad, Hezbollah and Iran in Aleppo

As the world looks on in horror at the horrid attacks on civilians in Aleppo, and as UNRWA tries to portray Palestinians in Syria as innocent victims of the civil war, there are a number of Palestinian militias who are enthusiastically supporting the atrocities of Assad, Hezbollah and Iran.

Liwa al Quds was created in 2012 made of Palestinians who lived in two UNRWA camps near Aleppo. As this March 2015 profile states,

A new organization has appeared alongside the Syrian army in Aleppo fighting the armed takfiris, for after the entry of Hezbollah onto the line of battle and the appearance of ‘Quwat al-Ridha‘, which is considered the core of Syrian Hezbollah, in addition to the National Defence Forces and the Iraqi military formations, a Palestinian faction has appeared fighting under the banner of the Syrian state.

Information indicates that the new formation adopted the name of the Palestinian capital al-Quds as its banner, while it is formed of Palestinian fighters who have lived and live in Syria, having expressed their support for the Syrian state and its army.

The formation, which was established in October 2013 by the engineer ‘Muhammad al-Sa’id’ who is considered its real leader, held the bond of silence and thus its activities were not advertised in media, until the recent battles of north Aleppo countryside where an important military role for them became apparent.

Here is a poster recruiting members from the age of 15:

The Liwa al-Quds leadership announces the opening of a military session: physical fitness, military tactics, martial arts and self-defence, blitz. The length of the training session is 30 days. All who wish to register from age 15 and above should head to the Liwa al-Quds base in the al-Nayrab camp and register from 6 p.m. till 9 p.m., beginning from Wednesday 24 April.

Iranian propaganda has used this Palestinian group and others as proof that Assad is not anti-Sunni, in this report from September when the battle for Aleppo was starting:

The Palestinian pro-Assad, anti-Takfiri Resistance group Liwa al-Quds is among the fighters in Syria that have debunked the myth and propaganda against the Syrian Army is a predominantly Alawiite force. This group has been operating in Aleppo and has been to deal a major blow to Takfiri terrorist groups especially ISIS.

The presence of Liwa al-Quds in the recent victories at Handarat Refugee Camp and al-Kindi Hospital as well as the rapid, lightning-like advancement in other key Aleppo City districts, has dispelled enemy propaganda that the Bashar al-Assad government is anti-Sunni.

Indeed, apart from Liwa al-Quds, other Sunni Palestinian groups are also active in the battlefield against foreign-backed Takfiri terrorist groups. Some of the groups here include Qouwat al-Jalil, the PFLP-GC, Fatah al-Intifada, the Palestine Liberation Army (Palestinian wing of the SAA) and the Palestinian members of the NDF.

Another pro-Assad group is Jaysh al-Tahrir al-Falastini:

Jaysh al-Tahrir al-Falastini is the ‘Palestinian Liberation Army.’ This militia in Syria is led by one Muhammad Tariq al-Khadra’, who characterizes the civil war in Syria as follows: “The vicious barbaric international conspiracy against Syria and the Arab nation aims to redivide and repartition this nation to form weak madhhabist, sectarian and racist entities in conflict with each other, to justify the establishment of the racist entity on the Jewish foundations of the Zionist state, dominating over the Arab nation.”

To be sure, not all Syrian Palestinians support Assad; Hamas famously left Syria when it refused to support him. But there are plenty who not only support Assad's atrocities, but enthusiastically participate in them.

It is worth a reminder that PA President Abbas had the opportunity to save thousands of Palestinians in Syria nearly four years ago, when Israel said they would be allowed into the West Bank, as long as they don't demand to move to Israel itself. Abbas responded coldly, "It's better they die in Syria than give up their right of return."

So far, over 3300 Palestinians have indeed died in Syria, most of them innocent, but hundreds of them fighting with Assad.

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In the same interview where Hamas leader Fathi Hammad offered to give rockets to Arab countries to attack the Jews, he said:

Gaza was liberated under the watch of Hamas, through the Jihad of Hamas, with its men, its plans, and its leaders. Gaza has become the first Palestinian area to be liberated in this era, Allah be praised. (Hamas) has proven itself through its rule - the Jihadi, political, progressive rule of Gaza. Allah be praised, nobody has died of hunger or anything. On the contrary, following the liberation of Gaza, our Jihadi, 'Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam units have become an army, Allah be praised

Gaza is "liberated" and he contrasts it with the PA-controlled areas, which he would obviously consider to be occupied."

The UN, ICRC, Amnesty and HRW all claim, falsely, that Gaza is still occupied - when even its own leaders brag about how they are completely independent and liberated.

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The US Embassy in Jerusalem and proleptic dhimmitude

Professor Richard Landes coined a wonderful phrase, "proleptic dhimmitude." It refers to the actions of Westerners who take what they believe to be pro-Muslim positions in anticipation of supremacist Muslim threats and demands.

Real dhimmis under Muslim rule live in fear that their Muslim leaders will target them if they do not act in a subservient manner. Proleptic dhimmis act as if Muslims are their leaders, too, and they go beyond Muslim demands in their zeal to appease them ahead of time.

There is no better example of proleptic dhimmitude than the gnashing of teeth over the possibility (which seems more and more likely) that Donald Trump will move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews sputtered on Tuesday:

Why are we moving the embassy to — to Jerusalem at a time that the whole place over there could blow up? Why do we something that's right in the face of the Palestinians, right in the face of the Jordanians, the Saudis, the Egyptians. The one thing they say is leave you know, the Dome of the Rock alone, leave are — the hopeful capital of a Palestinian state alone. Don't desecrate it by saying it's the capital of Israel at this point?

Matthews is not arguing that there is a legal reason not to move the embassy. He is not arguing that such a move would violate even Islamic law.

In fact, Matthews is showing incredible ignorance because any embassy move would occur in the part of Jerusalem that was under Israeli control since 1948.

(The only possible argument against it is if you accept the fiction that Jerusalem would become an international city in a final peace agreement, which was the official - if absurd - US position for the past 68 years. But Muslims cannot hold that position, because it would mean that they would not have control over Jerusalem either.)

Matthews, and other critics of the idea of moving the embassy, are not basing their objections on any rational reason. They are anticipating that Muslims will act like crazed animals if the US does this, and they want to appease these subhuman Muslims who cannot control themselves (by their estimation, not mine) ahead of time. They want to head off what they believe would be the inevitable Muslim riots and terror that would result from the US respecting Israel's right to define its own capital, a right that every other nation has.

I just did a quick search in Arabic news sites to see if there is any anger over this possible move of the embassy. There is very, very little. For the most part, this is not even a story, although some Arab news outlets are covering it dispassionately.

Of all the things for Arabs and Muslims to worry about in an impending Trump administration, moving the US embassy from one part of Israel to another part within the Green Line is not even on their radar.

But some Americans like Chris Matthews are proleptic dhimmis. They are worried about what they think Muslims might do, and therefore they are held hostage by their own predictions, even when there is precious little evidence that they are right.

However, the Muslims are very attuned to this phenomenon of Western anticipatory dhimmitude. If an American rants on TV about how angry Muslims are going to be when someone does X, then this creates an environment where some Muslims feel compelled to protest X - otherwise they lose political power. Muslim supremacists are being handed a gift by these dhimmis. Their power in the West is due in no small part to the constant threat of terror when they don't get their way, and if the West is willing to give them leverage with that fear, they would be stupid not to take advantage of it. (Westerners have had a fear of Muslim jihad for a very long time.)

Matthews and those like him, without realizing it, are creating the exact situation that they believe they are trying to avoid. They treat Muslims like they are irrational, crazy people who must be handled with kid gloves or else they will turn deadly - and too many Muslims embrace that role because it gives them power over the dhimmis.

This same logic is used by some Western leaders to demand that Israel act in certain ways - because of the anticipatory violence of Muslims against Western targets if Israel doesn't adhere to the proleptic dhimmi demands. Don't build in Jerusalem, don't enforce zoning laws, don't perform archaeological digs - all of these are demands on Israel by proleptic dhimmis of the West in far greater volume than by Arab leaders in recent years.

And there are no dhimmis as dhimmified as proleptic dhimmis.

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12/15 Links Pt2: Chris Matthews Claims Moving U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem Will 'Desecrate' Capital and Future 'Palestinian State'

From Ian:

Chris Matthews Claims Moving U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem Will 'Desecrate' Capital and Future 'Palestinian State'

Chris Matthews is deeply concerned that moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem will "desecrate" the holy city and "hopeful capital of the Palestinian state."
Speaking to Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, Matthews fretted over President-elect Donald Trump's vow to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem as a symbol of America's recognition that an undivided Jerusalem is and will remain the eternal capital of the Jewish State. Matthews couldn't possibly understand Trump's motivation here, and expresses as much in the following segment, via Newsbusters:
Why are we moving the embassy to — to Jerusalem at a time that the whole place over there could blow up? Why do something that's right in the face of the Palestinians, right in the face of the Jordanians, the Saudis, the Egyptians. The one thing they say is leave you know, the Dome of the Rock alone, leave our — the hopeful capital of a Palestinian state alone. Don't desecrate it by saying it's the capital of Israel at this point?
Murphy attempted to explain that Trump could go the way of George W. Bush and decide not move the embassy upon taking office. However, Matthews wasn’t buying it: “But you don't do it. You say you're going to do it to pander a little bit. Fine, that's politics. But you don't actually do it. Doesn't Trump know this?”
At another point in the program, Matthews spoke with talk radio host Hugh Hewitt about Trump's choice for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, whom Matthews fears will be too pro-Israel and work too well with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (God forbid, right?):

Michael Lumish and Cinnamon Stillwell: Trump terror within Middle East studies

Nowhere was the hysteria, panic, and fear-mongering attending Donald Trump’s win in the 2016 presidential election felt more strongly than on college campuses – and Middle East studies academics were no exception. Rather than acknowledging that justified concern over increasing terrorism in the U.S. was a strong factor, they dismissed Trump voters as angry, fearful, ignorant, “Islamophobic” white supremacists.
This despite Trump’s receiving more minority votes than did Mitt Romney in 2012, and the support of the same white working-class population that twice voted for biracial President Barack Obama.
It was not millions of American voters, but the professors themselves who exhibited bigotry, fear, and anger.
Admitting that the “segment of society” who voted for Trump “frightens me,” Muqtedar Khan, director of the University of Delaware’s Islamic Studies Program, ascribed his win to “myopia” and “cultural insecurity.” Accordingly, he announced that he was “frightened for the future of minorities in this country.” No word on whether Khan is frightened of his own shadow.

Honest Reporting: EXCLUSIVE: HR Exposes Accredited Journalist as BDS Activist

Did Loewenstein gain his official press card by claiming to be a Guardian writer? If so, then it looks like this may be one avenue that could be cut off. HonestReporting contacted The Guardian directly, pointing out that hiring Loewenstein was the equivalent of hiring a corporate lobbyist to be the newspaper’s business correspondent.
Did Loewenstein misrepresent himself at the FPA event to Yair Lapid as working directly for The Guardian? Given the reactions of both Peter Beaumont and Harriet Sherwood, has Loewenstein just been caught dishonestly burnishing press credentials in an effort to present himself as a credible journalist?
This could well be the case. The Guardian’s Head of International News Jamie Wilson responded to HonestReporting by stating that Loewenstein was contracted to write comment pieces for Guardian Australia and remains an occasional comment contributor but he “is not a news correspondent for the Guardian in Israel.” It was also relayed to us that Loewenstein has now been told to in future make sure he does not reference The Guardian at press conferences unless he is working on a direct commission.
HonestReporting Managing Editor Simon Plosker said:
The Guardian’s distancing itself from Loewenstein is a welcome development. We now call on the Foreign Press Association to revoke his membership of the organization as his BDS activism is incompatible with reporting on Israel in a professional manner. Having been exposed as a BDS activist, Loewenstein’s Government Press Office accreditation should be immediately revoked and questions asked as to how a BDS activist was able to acquire a press card in the first instance.
Ultimately, the exposure of Loewenstein is a wakeup call for the mainstream media when it comes to journalistic ethics and the use of freelance reporters. All too often the grey area between journalist and activist is ignored and professional and objective reporting on Israel is the victim. This time, there is a clear line and Antony Loewenstein has crossed it.
We await responses from those involved as well as further developments concerning Loewenstein’s status. We will, of course, keep our readers updated.

A few months ago I was asked permission by Likud Netherlands to use a graphic I once made for a book they were preparing called 150 Palestinian Tales. I of course gave them permission, asking to see the book when it was released (and translated to English.)

I just received my copy, and it surpassed my expectations.

You can see it for yourself. Here is a preview of the book, a mini-encyclopedia of answering anti-Israel lies.

Preview of 150 Palestinian Tales

This book is an invaluable reference. It should be handed out to every student going to college. If Jewish Federations want to make a real impact, they would order thousands of these and provide them to local Hillels.

Buy it.

By the way, the graphic they used of mine was this one:

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Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

I have avoided writing about Amona until now. This is because the legal issues surrounding the notion of land ownership in Judea and Samaria are so arcane that one legal scholar (email correspondence) wrote that “the number of people who have a good understanding of West Bank property law can be counted on one hand.” And I don’t want to add to the noise by writing yet another amateur legal brief about it. There are, though, some things that are clear and worth saying.

First of all, let me state my prejudices: I do not believe Jews living in Judea and Samaria are an “obstacle to peace,” nor do I think that Jewish communities there are illegal or even “illegitimate,” whatever that means. Indeed, I think that Jews settling anywhere in the land of Israel are performing a religious and Zionist mitzvah, and I’m all for it. Those who find this position offensive can stop reading now.

The last time I mentioned Amona, someone took me to task for advocating “land theft.” It’s private Palestinian land, he said. What more do you need to know? Well, actually there is a great deal to know. Some of the complexities are discussed here. It’s worthwhile reading if you care about more than slogans.

My take on the legal part is that the draconian decision by the Supreme Court to destroy all of Amona and uproot its residents because of what turned out to be a claim on about one half acre of the 125 acres on which it is built, and which ultimately rested on the illegal actions of the Jordanian king, was highly unjust.

How does it happen that a Jewish court would punish Jews for settling in the land of Israel? How does it then happen that alternatives to expelling these families from their homes are opposed by the Court and the government’s legal advisor (who is hand-picked by the Court)?

The answer isn’t legal, but is connected to international politics. Israel is the only country in the world whose real estate laws and transactions are scrutinized by the US State Department, the UN and the European Union’s Foreign Ministry. The Obama Administration, for example, recently weighed inopposing an attempt to move the Amona families to a nearby unused location that was listed as property abandoned by Arabs in 1967. And the EU opposed the Regularization Law (as did the UN), which is intended to legalize outposts built on land claimed by Palestinians by compensating the claimants.

I should add that the EU seems to see nothing wrong with directly financing illegal Palestinian construction in the territories, while vehemently opposing any Israeli building there – all this in “Area C,” which under the Oslo accords is supposed to be under full Israeli control. But their concern for legality apparently doesn’t include obeying Israeli laws.

The Palestinians who claim ownership of the land on which Amona was built didn’t decide to sue the state by themselves. Indeed, the petition to the Supreme Court was filed on their behalf by an “Israeli” NGO called Yesh Din (“there is justice”), an organization which claims to work on behalf of “human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT),” which it does by

collecting and disseminating reliable and updated information regarding systematic human rights violations in the OPT; conducting public and legal advocacy in order to pressure Israel’s authorities to cease violations; and raising public awareness to human rights violations in the OPT.

I put “Israeli” above in quotation marks because although its staff and directors are mostly Jewish Israelis,  the organization receives almost all of its funds from foreign sources. According to NGO Monitor, which examines annual reports filed by Israeli-registered NGOs, 93.5% of its funding from 2002 through 2014 came from foreign sources. Total donations between 2002 and 2016 were about 18 million Israeli Shekels, or about US $4.73 million. Sources (see link above for a breakdown) include individual European countries and the EU, and the US-based New Israel Fund.

When Yesh Din is not petitioning the Supreme Court to throw Jews out of their homes, it is falsely accusing the IDF of war crimes. How patriotic.

I think it’s safe to say that the  international community, led by the Obama Administration, the UN, and the EU, with the support of the great majority of the world media and its academic establishment, wish to force Israel to abandon Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. It is also an article of faith of the international “progressive” movement – including the Israeli Left – that “The Occupation” is the greatest source of evil in the world. This is shown by the fact that far more effort and money appears to be expended on combating it than on fighting Da’esh or nuclear proliferation.

I won’t speculate what the next step would be if Israel were to leave the territories. But I doubt that would be the end of the pressure.

There are historical reasons that we find ourselves in opposition to so much of the world: Oil, the KGB, victim-blaming from European Holocaust guilt, cowardice in the face of Arab terrorism, Stockholm syndrome, anti-nationalism, Arab grants to educational institutions, bribery of politicians and public figures, old-fashioned Jew-hatred, and our own anti-genius for public relations all had a part in it.

On our side, too, there is a huge expenditure – of effort and money (how much time have the Knesset and ministers spent on issues connected to Amona?), but also of national spirit. How many times can we send our police and soldiers to drag Jews out of their homes in the middle of the night? How many times before we lose our national soul?

To be honest, I think the answer is “no more times.” We spent all we could afford at Yamit and Gush Katif.

It’s time to decide.  Do we care about Judea and Samaria and the Jews that live there? If so, we need to commit, to act as though we truly are the sovereign power; as Annika Rothstein wrote, to make a marriage and not just an extended engagement. Zionism demands it.

If not – well, I don’t want to think about the alternative.

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