Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, February 05, 2017

Genghis Hitler (Michael Lumish)

This is the most pathological moment in US political history since 1968.

I come out of the progressive-left, but the movement lost me when I started noticing Nazi Swastikas entwined with Stars of David at anti-war rallies in San Francisco.

Once it became clear that anti-Zionists were making homes for themselves within the Obama administration, I knew that it was time for me to leave the party. Asking Jews to sit across the Democratic Party table from anti-Semitic anti-Zionists, such as Linda Sarsour, is something akin to asking black Americans to sit across the Democratic Party table in political kinship with the Klan.

It is suggesting common-cause with an anti-Zionist seeking to bring Sharia into the United States under the cover of feminism. (Of feminism, for chrissake.) This is not a criticism of Muslims as people, but it is very definitely a criticism of Sharia. Whatever else Sharia may be, it is a theological-political ideology and thus open to public scrutiny and criticism. This is particularly true when the head-chopping of non-submissive women or the throwing of Gay people off of rooftops is seen

as a moral imperative for so many within the Islamic faith.

Jewish people need to draw the line at anti-Semitic anti-Zionism of the type represented by Sarsour who once twittered that "nothing is creepier than Zionism."

In the meantime the progressive-left, the Democratic Party, and Clinton Incorporated have turned Trump into the Devil, but what they fail to understand is that their intense and overblown hatred immunizes the guy from their own criticisms.

Whenever they lambaste Trump as a "fascist," or something akin to Hitler, he garners quiet sympathy while making his accusers look malicious, ignorant, and untrustworthy in their conclusions.

The Accelerating Ideological Drumbeat

The intense hatred for Donald Trump is, in part, a result of the accelerating ideological drumbeat around issues of race, gender, and class as derived from the New Left and the Vietnam War. During the 1960s we saw the rise of Second Wave Feminism, the anti-war movement, Gay rights, environmentalism, Black Power, Brown Power and on and on. This churning political chaos blended progressive-left identity politics with socialism eventually resulting in the remarkable challenge by Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2016.

There are, quite obviously, very good historical reasons for all of this. Does anyone really need reminding of how long women in the United States were non-citizens? Or how long black people were slaves? Thus, the New Left take-over of the universities was a response to centuries of unjust marginalization and displacement of the allegedly inferior other.

The problem is not that in speaking up for women, or in opposition to war, or in favor of minority rights, that the Left had nothing to say. They clearly had plenty to say. The problem is that they refused to acknowledge their winnings on the table.

That is, the less racist and sexist the West became in recent decades the harder and faster the drumbeat of race, gender, and class became, eventually emerging, during the Obama administration, as the high-pitched shrill of identity politics that we know today.

And that really is the saddest part.

The faltering liberal West represents the most socially just and welcoming form of political organization in human history, yet it is lambasted by a significant portion of its own citizenry as among the very worst.

Instead of joining with the white American middle-class for the purpose of moving forward in relative harmony, the progressive-left demonized those people, particularly the conservatives among them, as precisely what is wrong with the West today.

One Reason Why Hillary Got Beat

In the months leading into te 2016 presidential election the tempo of progressive-left accusations of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, disaster capitalism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and generalized badness, approached a crescendo.

One of my favorite examples was when transgender Inside Edition reporter Zoey Tur (née Robert Albert Tur) threatened violence against Brietbart-associated writer and radio talk show host, Ben Shapiro, because Ben referred to her as a "Sir" during a panel discussion on Caitlyn "Bruce" Jenner.

The rather burly Ms. Tur subsequently threatened Shapiro with a "curb stomping" which anyone who has ever seen the movie History X can tell you is a rather unpleasant form of getting one's ass kicked... if not, more likely, dead. Shortly thereafter Shapiro suggested that such brutality might be considered a tad "unladylike" thereby revealing that someone obviously needs to give him a good mansplaining.

Shortly after the election, the MTV "2017 Resolutions for White Guys" video nicely summed-up the progressive-left, politically-correct, coastal zeitgeist that nudged Trump into the winner's box.

While no one ever accused the people over at MTV of being big thinkers, the truth is that during the brief historical moment between World War II and the present the West actually made tremendous gains in social justice. Yet it is precisely at this moment that the cries of racism and sexism and fascism dramatically increased in direct proportion, ironically enough, to the diminishment of racism, sexism, and fascism.

Never before was a society so free and, yet, so despised by so many for its alleged lack of freedom.

In retrospect, therefore, it is not particularly surprising that as the Clinton campaign conjured the "alt-right" as an object of hatred with which to smear Donald Trump that many less partisan Americans refused to buy into that hatred.

The more the Clintonistas pointed the trembling finger of accusation toward all those politically-incorrect heinous "deplorables" - otherwise known as their fellow Americans - the more those people either adopted that attribution as a badge of honor or dismissed the Left as a bunch of anti-white racist, anti-American hate-mongers.

In other words, each time progressives spit the notion that regular Americans from places like Lexington, Kentucky or Provo, Utah or Ottumwa, Iowa were essentially a bunch of bigoted, heteronormative, neanderthal, pig farmers another Republican-operative angel received its wings.

Immunization

By turning Donald Trump into "Genghis Hitler," as my friend Trudy put it, the Left leaves no room for negotiation, discussion, or even thought. By accusing Trump of anything and everything - up to and including "golden showers" in Russian luxury hotel rooms - it immunizes the guy from genuine criticisms.

It means that people who seek some reasonable objectivity in their understanding of what is actually happening must slog through an endless miasma of bullshit to get at a kernel of truth.

And what this means is that the kind of key honest criticisms that could sway the general American citizenry back toward a left-leaning direction are lost in the political swamp, thereby freeing president Trump to do damn near anything he wants. After all, if almost everyone left-of-center is willing to string the guy up for putting his shoes on in the wrong order, why should he not just go forward and do whatever he wants, anyway?

An important question is, will this hatred topple the guy or will it feed his strength?

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.

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

Four babies have been deposited in front of mosques and social assistance centers in Gaza so far this year, and Arab media is buzzing about it.

The latest was on Saturday morning when a baby was found in front of a mosque in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood. The week before, a baby was left in front of an orphanage in Gaza City.

Gaza Sheikh Samih Hajjaj said that these children were probably illegitimate. He blamed the problem on a number of factors, including young people not complying with Islamic Sharia law, young men and women mixing in universities and other public places without any controls and without regard to the consequences, and a Turkish soap opera named "Forbidden Love" may be responsible for an increase in incest.

This 2012 article describes how popular Turkish soaps are in Palestinian Arab homes:

Palestinians are in rapture with Turkish soap operas. They do not merely provide nightly entertainment but their influence shapes the image and style of the young viewers. Shirts, dresses, tights, styles of clothes, handbags, belts, and jewellery worn in the Turkish soap opera are highly coveted among Palestinian young women. The image: what and how to combine items of clothing, how to comport oneself, how to walk and what to talk is a style gleaned from Turkish televised dramas. Young men design their haircuts in emulation of their heroes; they put on stylish jackets, shirts, and pants whose styles fluctuate with the seasonal changes of Turkish fashions. The diversity, range of characters portrayed, and endless twists and turns of the plot attract a great cross-section of Palestinian devotees. Palestinians of all ages - grandparents, husbands, wives, young men and women, adolescents, children, and even toddlers - congregate nightly to see a mirror image of their “life” reflected on the screen and idealised into a polished legend; a surrogate reality.

And here is how "Forbidden Love" is described:

Al Ishq el Mamnu’ [Forbidden Love] is a contemporary social drama of love and incest. It is the story of one big extended family all sharing the same rambling house, buzzing with incestuous desires. Samar, the heroin, falls in love with the much younger handsome nephew of her husband, hence the title “Forbidden Love.”

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

Last week, Peter Beinart in The Forward asked why God forced Jews to endure slavery in Egypt and gave one answer based on a modern Haggadah commentary that most Jews never heard of, that it was meant:

to sensitize the People of Israel to the suffering of others, to teach them what it means to be alienated and oppressed, so that when they set up their own society, they will be sure not to impose such suffering on others.”

Slavery, in other words, was meant to ensure that Jews would remember powerlessness once they gained power. Jared Kushner is what happens when that memory fails.

Rae Kushner was the daughter of a furrier in the Belarusian town of Navahrudak. The Nazis murdered her mother, her elder sister and her younger brother. She survived, with her father and younger sister, by climbing through a tunnel out of the ghetto and then living in the forest for a year.

Jared Kushner, her grandson, has lived a very different life. He attended Harvard after his father gave the university $2.5 million; he bought a newspaper company when he was 25, and now he advises his father-in-law, the president.

Their lives illustrate the revolution in Jewish fortunes that has occurred over the past 75 years. In remarkable ways, modern Jewish history echoes the passage from powerlessness to power that begins in the Book of Exodus. Therefore, the challenge for Jared Kushner, and everyone in our extraordinarily privileged generation, is to remember our ancestors’ suffering and honor their memories by defending the weak, vulnerable and oppressed today.

How could Kushner — a Modern Orthodox golden boy — fail to internalize that? How could he invite Donald Trump’s Cabinet to his house for Shabbat dinner only hours after his father-in-law’s executive order banning refugees from entering the United States? How could he pose in a tuxedo alongside his wife, Ivanka Trump, on Saturday night as that executive order wreaked havoc on innocent people’s lives simply because they hailed from the wrong countries?

Kushner’s failure is not his problem alone; it should chill every Modern Orthodox educator, rabbi and parent in the United States. How could the Modern Orthodox community, a community that prides itself on instilling in its children Jewish knowledge and ideals, have failed so profoundly?

This little essay of Beinart's fails on multiple levels.

It is exactly because of Shabbat that the Kushners had no idea of the firestorm that Trump's executive order engendered last Saturday - one that is hugely out of proportion to the actual contents of the executive order Trump signed that was fully aligned with his campaign promises.

Moreover, the Kushners have not sought to be the poster children of modern Orthodoxy.

Furthermore, it is a family's responsibility to support each other. To expect Jared and Ivanka to speak out against their own family is the height of chutzpa.

But the part of this essay that bothers me the most is that Beinart, characteristically, takes a very small section of what being Jewish is about and magnifies it out of proportion to reality.

Being Jewish is not synonymous with "tikkun olam," "repairing the world." That is the view of people who are more liberal than they are Jewish.

Jews are more than a nation - we are a family. And families, like nations, prioritize each other over others.

I read an article over Shabbat by an immigrant to Israel and how she routinely gives rides to hitchhikers, as well as how she allows her daughters (under some conditions) to hitchhike themselves. This is because most Jews in Israel act like family, not only like mere citizens. They'll start loud arguments with strangers because they know that the other party is not likely to pull out a gun. They grieve as one when there is an attack and celebrate as one when there is a victory.

Families take care of each other before they take care of the rest of the world - and taking care of the rest of the world cannot happen at the expense of taking care of your own people. The same applies to how nations treat their own people and people who want to join.

When the Torah tells the Jew to love the stranger, it is not referring to the entire world. It is referring to the "ger" - in some cases, people who convert to Judaism, and in other cases people who choose to live in the Land of Israel as part of a social contract that they accept the basic laws of society.

It is reasonable to argue as to how much this applies to a sovereign nation and its immigration policies. A policy of unlimited immigration is national suicide; but a policy of no immigration allowed for anyone is cold-hearted. Any reasonable person knows that the correct policy is somewhere in between. And Judaism - real Judaism, not Beinart's faux liberalism-as-Judaism - says that allowing immigration is a two-way street; there are obligations on both the sovereign nation and on the would-be immigrant, for the latter must accept the social mores and laws of the society that they want to join.

That is the moral starting point for any discussion, let alone a discussion based on Jewish sensibilities.

Peter Beinart is not basing his critique on the Kushners on anything that Judaism has to say. He is twisting Judaism to fit his outrage over Donald Trump and at the same time throwing the Kushners - his supposed family - under the bus, in his zeal to show the world how damned moral he is.

So the question isn't how modern Orthodox Judaism could have produced Kushner, It is how modern Orthodoxy could have produced such a hateful, self righteous prig as Peter Beinart.

I wonder if the teachers and principals at Peter Beinart's Jewish schools are proud of him today as the leading critic of the Jewish state and the self-appointed smug arbiter of morality, or if his hateful writings in Haaretz and The Forward and appearances on CNN fill them with pain and embarrassment for being the product of their schools and environment?

UPDATE: Beinart belongs to a modern Orthodox shul and identifies with its community but does not define himself that way and grew up Conservative.

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

02/04 Links: Palestinians - We're sick and tired of you!; The Ramallah pressure cooker; The French Inquisition

From Ian:

Dr. Mordechai Kedar: Palestinians - We're sick and tired of you!

This article is not about how Israelis feel. It is about why the Arab world is not taking up the Palestinian Arab struggle.
I would like to raise a few pointed questions at the start of this article:
Why doesn't the Arab world make an all out effort to free "Falestin" from the Jews and give it to the Palestinian Arabs?
How come the Arab world, most of which has not recognized Israel's right to exist - goes on about its business, despite the fact that two major countries, Egypt and Jordan, have made peace with Israel? Why doesn't it boycott those two countries, except for the short period during which Egypt was ousted from the Arab League?
Why hasn't the Arab world waged a total war against Israel for the last 44 years - that is,since 1973?
Why did the Iraqis expel the Palestinians from Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003?
Why did the Egyptian regime persecute the Gazan Palestinians? Is it a political struggle against Hamas or does it signal something deeper?
Why did all the sides fighting one another in Syria - Assad, Hezbollah, the rebels, Islamic State - behave with such cruelty to the Palestinians living in refugee camps in Syria?
Why do the Arabs continue to keep the Palestinians in refugee camps?

The Ramallah pressure cooker

The moments of anticlimax that the Palestinians are currently experiencing -- the sharp turn from sky-high hopes and expectations to disappointment and dejection -- could lead to another wave of violence.
The Fatah leadership is talking openly about the possibility, and even laying the groundwork for it. Israeli officials have identified the U.N. Security Council's Resolution 2334 against the settlements as a high in the fight against Israel, whereas the first two weeks of Donald Trump's presidency in the U.S. are being seen by those same officials as nothing less than a nightmare for the Palestinians. But Barack Obama is gone, Trump is here, and the list of "blows" and "damage" to the Palestinians is growing.
The Americans have demonstrated virtual apathy in the face of Israel's announcement that it was recommencing settlement construction and the approval of thousands of new housing units in Jerusalem and the settlement blocs; the "threat" to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem -- a possibility that has not been dropped from the agenda and of which Trump associate Rudy Giuliani has said it's not a question of if but when; a suspension of Obama's "sucker punch" of transferring $221 million to the Palestinian Authority mere hours before he left office, a sum almost identical to that which the U.S. gave the Palestinian Authority for all of 2016; American orders freezing funding for U.N. organizations that give the PA or the PLO full standing; and even the first signs of a rapprochement between Israel and the European Union after two years of fraught relations in light of the new U.S. administration and the threat of terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists in Europe.
For dessert, the Palestinians got another present at the start of the week: New U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres made his first declaration that it was "completely clear that the Temple that the Romans destroyed in Jerusalem was a Jewish temple." After the delusional resolutions by UNESCO, which erased or ignored Jewish ties to the Temple Mount, words like these are refreshing to Israeli ears but scorching to those of the Palestinians. The Palestinians take care to refer to the Temple as "al-Mazoom" -- the false, imaginary, or pretender. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Trump sidelines Palestinians, as aide rules out building ties for now

Two weeks into his presidency, the administration of Donald Trump appears to be entirely ignoring Palestinian leadership.
On Friday, London-based Arabic-language newspaper A-Sharq Al-Awsat reported that Washington has not responded to overtures by the Palestinian Authority, reinforcing top negotiator Saeb Erekat’s claim to that effect earlier this week.
The Times of Israel has learned that Jason Greenblatt, the administration’s special representative for international negotiations, met on Friday with three Palestinian businessmen with close ties to PA President Mahmoud Abbas, and informed them that the administration does not intend to build relations with the PA at this juncture.
According to Palestinian sources, the three met Greenblatt in their capacity as businessmen, and not as formal representatives of the PA, although they did have Abbas’s blessing. The sources said the three told Greenblatt that they believed a strong Palestinian economy was essential for the two-state solution to become reality.

White House declines to voice support for two-state solution

The Trump administration on Friday declined to clearly throw its support behind a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying only that “the president is committed to peace.”
The two state solution — to which Israel is also officially committed — is viewed as the only real path to ending the conflict by much of the international community and the last three successive US presidents.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer was asked to follow-up on a statement he made Thursday on Washington’s position that new settlements in the West Bank or expanding existing settlements beyond their current borders “may not be helpful” to achieving peace.
Asked specifically to clarify if the two-state framework is part of President Donald Trump’s objective, Spicer told reporters Friday: “The president is committed to peace.” He added: “That’s his goal. I think when the president and Prime Minister Netanyahu meet here … that will obviously be the topic.”
The two leaders will meet on February 15, when the Israeli premier comes to Washington.

I've been reporting since at least 2008 that PA workers were getting salaries in Gaza even though they were doing nothing since Hamas took over. And those salaries were being funded by the West.

In 2013, the European Court of Auditors noticed that the EU was paying PA employees in Gaza for doing nothing.

In 2015, the EU issued a warning to the PA about this.

Finally, after nearly than ten years of this. the EU is going to cut the salaries for Gaza PA employees. But it is not cutting the amount of money it is giving to the PA.

From Middle East Monitor:

An official at the European Commission in occupied Jerusalem announced that the EU has adopted a new financial support policy regarding the Gaza Strip in 2017, in coordination with the Palestinian Authority (PA), but that it would no longer pay the salaries of PA employees in Gaza which is under Hamas control.

Chinese news agency, Xinhua, quoted the Communication and Information Officer at the European Commission in occupied Jerusalem, Shadi Othman, saying that the new policy involves the cessation of European funding being used to pay the salaries of PA employees in Gaza.

Othman explain that, instead, European funding for the Gaza Strip, amounting to 30 million euros, will be used to support poor families and projects related to economic development.

He added that 20 million euros will be transferred for the payment of social allowances to Palestinian families living in poverty in Gaza, which is issued by the PA’s Social Development Ministry.

The rest of the amount, 10 million euros, will be allocated to economic development and infrastructure projects in the Gaza Strip in order to create work opportunities, and will be coordinated in cooperation with the PA, according to Othman.

So the PA gets the exact same amount, Gaza gets the exact same amount, and the opportunities for theft and embezzlement remain exactly the same.

But the EU is not quite as embarrassed as it was before.

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

02/03 Links Pt2: Diaspora Jews lose the moral plot; Ayaan Hirsi Ali SLAMS Women's March Organizer

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Diaspora Jews lose the moral plot

The Diaspora Jewish world is terrified of asserting Jewish uniqueness and difference from everyone else.
Jews can and should make common cause with Muslims who really do reject not only Islamist extremism but also Jew-hatred. The problem, though, is that some Jewish leaders refuse to discriminate against Muslims who do not.
The chief rabbi, who said in 2015 that his visit to a refugee camp in Greece made him think of Auschwitz (even though he was advised to conceal his kippa in case it enraged the camp’s residents) has urged Britain and Europe to open their doors to more refugees.
But surveys suggest that some 13% of Syrian refugees support ISIS while 82% think it was created by the United States and its “allies” – in other words, Israel.
So the call by Jewish leaders to admit more Syrian refugees means importing many more who hate the West and hate Jews.
The demonization of those who take any action at all against Muslims to protect people against Islamist terrorism has become a collective madness which undermines the security of the West.
It is deeply troubling that so many Diaspora Jews can’t see they have put themselves on the wrong side of the most dangerous issue facing the free world.

The Palestinian narrative

In response to the Amona eviction, Abd Rahman Abu Salah, council head of the Palestinian village of Silwad managed to capture, in a few simple words, the essence of the 120-year-old Palestinian narrative. According to him, Amona's evictees should return to Europe, where they came from. To dispel any doubts, he did not mean just those 40 families that lived in Amona.
He, just like the late Jerusalem Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, is working to eliminate the Jewish entity in Israel and return all of us to Europe, where 6 million Jews were annihilated.
Make no mistake, the Israel-hating Palestinians do not only intend to deport right-wingers. Members of leftist organizations, who, using foreign funding, aid the Palestinians to expel Jews from their homes and to harm Israeli soldiers standing guard to defend their country, are also being targeted. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

'Fake Feminist': Islam Critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali SLAMS Women's March Organizer

On Wednesday, Islam critic and human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali called out "fake feminist" and "defender of Sharia" Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York and organizer of the January 21 Women's March on Washington.
Ali, who was tragically a victim of female genital mutilation (FGM), was viciously threatened with violence and told she didn't "deserve to be a woman" by Sarsour in a vile resurfaced tweet:

Sarsour, a defender of Sharia Law, was not only a co-chair of the "feminist" march; the Women's March officially backed her after being confronted with the tweet.
Ali finally had an opportunity to respond while speaking with Fox News host Martha MacCallum on Wednesday night, where she slammed Sarsour's "fake" feminism and asked why these women at the march haven't activated to march against "mass rape," attacks on religious minority Yazidi women, mass gendercide in China or for the victims of FGM, which she rightfully categorized as being part of the "real war on women."

Palestine Press Agency reports that Gaza smugglers have gingerly managed to re-open the tunnels under the border with Egypt.

They are being much more careful not to be caught by Egyptian security. The tunnels are deeper and longer than before - up to 2.5 kilometers long and 20 meters deep. The Egyptian tunnelers send lots of varied goods through and immediately seal up their side of the tunnel.

Smuggled items include fish, bicycle parts, motorcycles, and sheep. Gaza fisherman are complaining that the smuggled fish are undercutting their prices.

Hamas heavily taxes the smuggled goods; cigarettes are taxed at a 100% rate.

The article doesn't mention it, but if consumer goods are being smuggled and Hamas is involved, this means that weapons are also being smuggled through the tunnels.

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

02/03 Links Pt1: Obama sent $9.2B to UN; US slaps new sanctions on Iran following missile tests

From Ian:

Obama sent $9.2B to UN, related groups in 2016

In its last year in office, the Obama Administration showered at least some $9.2 billion on the United Nations and its sprawling array of organizations, according to a document recently posted on the State Department website.
The total is gleaned from a document that summarizes U.S. government spending for international organizations, and is about 20 per cent higher than the $7.7 billion figure given out by State for 2010, before the Obama Administration abruptly quit providing any overall tally for its U.N. support.
The overall U.S. bill for international organizations of every stripe is just under $10.5 billion, meaning that U.N. organizations absorb about 88 per cent of such U.S. government spending.
The new tally includes nearly $360 million for the controversial United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, which is regularly accused of inculcating violent anti-Israel attitudes and even abetting terrorist attacks on Israel, which it strongly denies.
That is nearly a 50 per cent jump over the $238.3 million UNRWA got from the U.S. in 2010.
The UNRWA numbers, along with all the rest of the U.N. donations, are likely to come under fierce scrutiny in the weeks ahead, both from the Trump Administration, which wants to take a tough look at aligning its U.N. spending with national interests, and from Congress, which is frustrated by U.N. bloat and inefficiency, and often maddened by its anti-Israel biases.

Lawmakers look to get tough on UN

Lawmakers at a hearing Thursday called on the U.S. to get tough with the United Nations in response to a recent Security Council vote condemning Israeli settlement activity.
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) called the U.N. a "politicized tool" at a hearing on Israel, Palestine and the U.N. before the House Foreign Affairs subcommittees dealing with the Middle East and international organizations.
Ros-Lehtinen, the chairwoman of the Middle East and North Africa subcommittee, said she would reintroduce legislation to bring about tougher U.S. oversight of the world body.
Her bill — the United Nations Transparency, Accountability, and Reform Act, first introduced in 2015 — demands greater oversight of U.S. contributions to the U.N. and affiliated organizations.
"We now have the opportunity to grow and strengthen our alliance with Israel and show the world that we support our friends — we don't leave them out to dry," added Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), who chairs the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations.

Hillel Neuer Opening Statement at US Congress Subcommittee Hearing

Hillel Neuer's opening statement at the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Joint Subcommittee Hearing on Israel, the Palestinians, and the United Nations: Challenges for the New Administration. February 2, 2017

UNRWA Schools Exposed as Hotbed of Extremism in New 130-Page Report

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach: Beinart savages Kushner on refugees but gives Obama a pass

Indeed, herein lies the crux of Beinart’s hypocrisy. His condemnation of Kushner centers on his support for his father-in-law’s executive order for a temporary ban of refugees. For the record, I happen to agree that even a temporary ban should not be implemented – even to simply introduce new vetting procedures – without the simultaneous creation of safe zones in Syria to protect innocent life.
But Beinart forgets that the Syrian refugee crises did not begin under Trump or Kushner, who have been in office for just two weeks. Rather, it came about through the callous and indifferent foreign policy of Beinart’s hero, Obama, who refused to intervene in Syria, even as the slaughter there turned to genocide. Sunni Muslims, including children in Damascus and Aleppo, were being slaughtered by Shi’ite militias and Bashar Assad’s Alawite government, with the active support of Hezbollah and Iran.
Obama did nothing.
Only after Trump’s executive order did Beinart suddenly spring to life to protect the innocent citizens of Syria whom president Obama and his national security team had abandoned. President Obama also finally found his voice – post-presidency and from the vacation comfort of Palm Springs – against the Trump administration’s immigrant ban. This while Obama didn’t even lift a finger to save the children of Syria after Assad violated Obama’s self-declared red line and gassed Arab children. Where was Beinart’s condemnation of Obama’s violation of his own warning to Assad not to gas innocent Arabs?
The immigrant crisis, which is absolutely tragic, resulted in large part from American inaction and Obama’s retreat in the Middle East and beyond. There might never have been an immigrant crisis if Obama had instituted a no-fly zone, safe zones, or supported moderate Syrian rebels against Assad from the outset.
Countless people called on president Obama to pursue policies that would rescue the innocent people of Syria. But not Peter Beinart. Obama refused to listen, and the result was not only the murder of 500,000 Arab men, women and children, but the displacement of millions of refugees, which is the crisis we now face.
But amid this unprecedented humanitarian failure, there was no column by Beinart asking how Christianity could have produced Barack Obama.

Meet the "Palestinian refugee" who is also a member of Congress

UNRWA defines Palestine refugees this way:

Persons who meet UNRWA’s Palestine Refugee criteria
These are persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict. Palestine Refugees, and descendants of Palestine refugee males, including legally adopted children, are eligible to register for UNRWA services.

It also says:

The descendants of the original Palestine refugees are also eligible for registration, but only refugees living in one of UNRWA’s five fields of operations receive Agency services.

Al Awda says:

There are about 7.2 million Palestinian refugees worldwide... More than half the refugee population lives in Jordan. Approximately 37.7% live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, comprising about 50 percent of the population in those areas. About 15% live in almost equal numbers in Syria and Lebanon. About 355,000 internally displaced Palestinians reside in present-day Israel. (!) The remaining refugee population lives throughout the world, including the rest of the Arab world.

Meet one of these "refugees" by the UNRWA and Palestinian definition.

This is Member of Congress Justin Amash. American politician, Palestinian "refugee."

“My father became a refugee in 1948. They lived in [Ramallah] until 1956 when a pastor and his wife from Muskegon, Michigan sponsored my dad’s family to come to the United States. They arrived in New York City like a lot of immigrant families and started a new life here. Now, my parents have a son in Congress. It’s really the American Dream,” he said.

Yet Justin is eligible to register as a Palestinian refugee with UNRWA today. He, his father and their non-Palestinian wives are eligible to get aid from UNRWA as refugees if they move to the West Bank or Jordan or other UNRWA areas of operation. His three children, born and raised in Michigan, are also "Palestinian refugees," as will the children of any of his sons. Forever.

It is impossible for Palestinians to lose "refugee" status unless they die - and even then only if the death can be proven with documentation or testimony that would rarely be given if the alternative is more free benefits for that family. (See first link above.)

There can be no more absurd example concerning the official, UN-approved definition of a "Palestinian refugee" than Justin Amash.

(h/t Irene)

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

Iranian Space Agency accidentally shows "Am Yisrael Chai" and Israeli flag

The Iranian Space Research Center has an article about the Lunar X Prize contest where international teams are competing to send a spacecraft to the moon that perform various tasks.

Israel's SpaceIL is one of the teams, and the article mentions the name without saying what country it is from, unlike its reporting on the other teams.

However, the illustration accompanying the article comes from the SpaceIL entry - and it includes the words "Am Yisrael Chai" and an Israeli flag on the two visible legs of the spacecraft.

Obviously the Iranian Space Research Center is filled with closet Zionists!

(h/t Judah Ari Gross)

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

Following the news media is a frustrating exercise lately - because the amount of lies and spin is off the charts. All that can be trusted are primary sources (and sometimes they are iffy.)

It started off yesterday with a leak reported to the Jerusalem Post:

The White House warned Israel on Thursday to cease settlement announcements that are “unilateral” and “undermining” of President Donald Trump’s effort to forge Middle East peace, a senior administration official told The Jerusalem Post.

For the first time, the administration confirmed that Trump is committed to a comprehensive two-state solution to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict negotiated between the parties

The official told the Post that the White House was not consulted on Israel’s unprecedented announcement of 5,500 new settlement housing units over the course of his first two weeks in office.

“As President Trump has made clear, he is very interested in reaching a deal that would end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and is currently exploring the best means of making progress toward that goal,” the official said.

"With that in mind, we urge all parties to refrain from taking unilateral actions that could undermine our ability to make progress, including settlement announcements,” the official added. “The administration needs to have the chance to fully consult with all parties on the way forward.”

How accurate is this? It is unclear. But this leak seems to be what prompted the White House Press Secretary to issue an official statement that is being heavily spun as a slap at Israel:

The American desire for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians has remained unchanged for 50 years. While we don’t believe the existence of settlements is an impediment to peace, the construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing settlements beyond their current borders may not be helpful in achieving that goal. As the President has expressed many times, he hopes to achieve peace throughout the Middle East region. The Trump administration has not taken an official position on settlement activity and looks forward to continuing discussions, including with Prime Minister Netanyahu when he visits with President Trump later this month.

The Washington Post headline is typical:

Trump warns Israel that new settlements ‘may not help’ achieve Middle East peace

The New York Times claimed that Trump embraced Obama's foreign policy principles and that this was an "abrupt turnaround" in Trump's policy towards Israel.

But while the White House has not given Israel carte blanche to build settlements anywhere, this is the first official White House statement on the issue - and unlike the media spin, it is a massive sea change from what the Obama administration has stated.

It explicitly says that settlements are not an impediment to peace. This goes against US policy for decades. (Reagan said they weren't illegal but he never went this far.)

It says that new settlement construction may not be helpful - not that it is an obstacle to peace.

It implies that there is absolutely no problem with Israel building within existing settlement borders. Which accounts for essentially all the building in Judea and Samaria in nearly two decades.

It implies that Israel can build all it wants in Jerusalem, since all that building is within the municipal borders.

The news media, as usual, is reporting this versus a perception of a Trump White House that was more pro-settlements than Netanyahu is. But Trump has made clear from the start that he would love to find a way to make peace between Israel and the Arab world as well - he never implied a hands-off policy. The reason the news media is spinning this as a slap at Israel is because they falsely spun the Trump position beforehand.

But when you remove the spin, this is the most far reaching statement condoning settlement activity in US history.

Things might still change, of course. Netanyahu will meet Trump soon and things will become clearer then.

However, this White House statement is remarkable not for its supposed slap at Israel but for its huge break with the official position most previous presidents, and it is 180 degrees from the position of President Obama.

If the media wants to spin this otherwise, let them. What matters are facts, not reporters' wishful thinking.

UPDATES: I added the NYT quote.

Also The Guardian, in reporting this, suddenly admitted that its reporting on settlements for two decades has been lying : "Settlement construction since 1991 has been within existing blocs."

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

2 out of every 3 Palestinians believe in demons/"jinn" (update)

A Pew poll from 2012 asked Muslims in many countries a lot of questions about their beliefs.

While 14% of Palestinian Muslims believe in sorcery and witchcraft, the lowest percentage of any Middle East sector surveyed, 59% of them believe in the "evil eye" and 67% believe in "jinn," demons or genies.

14th century Islamic depiction of Jinn

A column in The Telegraph noted in 2013:

Although the pamphlet, called Feeling Stressed, was subtitled “A leaflet for Muslims”, I took a look at it, and found something surprising. One of the questions addressed was: “What if my problem is caused by jinn possession?”

“People can mistake mental illness for jinn possession,” the answer began. “So, even if you feel that you may be possessed, it is important that you see a doctor.”

The leaflet I picked up is approved by the Muslim Council of Britain and the Royal College of Psychiatrists. I hope it proves helpful.

UPDATE: A majority of Americans believe in demon possession as well. And more young people do than older people.

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

02/02 Links Pt2: UNRWA teachers incite terrorism; The Cautionary Tale of Samantha Power

From Ian:

UN Watch: 130-page report: UNRWA teachers incite terrorism & antisemitism

Before a joint subcommittee hearing today of the U.S. Congress concerning the U.N., Israel, and the Palestinians, the director of the independent monitoring group UN Watch will testify and present a new report showing 40 alarming new cases of UNRWA school teachers in Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria whose Facebook pages incite to Jihadist terrorism and antisemitism, including by posting Holocaust-denying videos and pictures celebrating Hitler.
UN Watch sent letters this morning to U.N. chief António Guterres, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and U.S. envoy to the U.N. Nikki Haley, urging them to take action and demand U.N. and UNRWA condemnation of the incitement, and the immediate termination of the implicated employees.
“We need to see zero tolerance in the U.N. for terrorism and antisemitism,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based UN Watch.
Click here for the PDF of the report.

The Cautionary Tale of Samantha Power

T here are two situations in the world that should shame Power, the anti-genocide activist. The first, and less obvious one, is Burma. The Obama administration cites this country as one of its foreign-policy successes, because the ruling junta took steps toward liberalization in return for lifting some sanctions against it. But then everybody seems to have forgotten about it, and in doing so forgot about the Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority currently being subjected to an unmistakable genocide—among the clearest examples ever to emerge in real time. This is genocide on Power’s watch, and we don’t hear a peep about it.
The other, of course, is Syria. Whether or not the Assad regime has fully crossed over the line to having committed genocide, America’s inaction already flunks Power’s test. As longtime Levant correspondent Michael Totten has written, we’ve seen the warnings. The first was Assad’s use of chemical weapons, a chilling callback to Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds. Another was the credible reporting of Shiite Iranian militias’ ethnically cleansing Sunni Arabs in core cities, atrocities that were then repeated in other strategic areas.
If Power would station troops in Israel because she worries the Palestinians could plausibly be victims of genocide in the near future, what could she possibly say about Syria? Well, she’d likely say, “We tried.” President Obama declared that Assad’s use of chemical weapons would be a “red line” that, once crossed, would earn American military intervention. When it became public that Assad had deployed chemical weapons, Obama put the word out: As the Germans used to say during World War II, the Amis are coming.

Daniel Pearl was murdered 15 years ago today

“My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish. I am Jewish.”
In my memory, there are certain place markers in the history of terrorism that led to where we are today.
The 1972 Munich Massacre of Israeli athletes (1972); the bombing of the Beirut Marine Barracks (1983), the World Trade Center attacks (1993 and 2001); the Jerusalem Sbarro Pizza bombing (2001) and the videotaped beheading of Daniel Pearl, February 1, 2002.
I don’t diminish the significance and horror of other attacks, it’s just that these are memory reference points for me.
In searching our archives, I can’t find a post we devoted to providing what happened to Daniel Pearl, though we have mentioned him. Shame on us.
This article from The Telegraph in May 2004 relates some of the basic details, Daniel Pearl ‘refused to be sedated before his throat was cut’

Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

Tuesday afternoon we started to hear that the IDF was preparing to remove the 40 families that live in the community of Amona, in the Binyamin region of Judea. Just now, a few moments ago, I heard on the radio that the evacuation (some prefer “expulsion”) is beginning. It doesn’t look like it will go smoothly.

To explain the situation in the fewest possible words, the community was built 20 years ago. A portion of it, about one half acre out of a total of 125 acres, is owned by Palestinian Arabs who were given title to the land by the King of Jordan, during the 19-year Jordanian occupation. About 15 more acres are registered in the names of Arabs who apparently do not exist.

The Supreme Court of Israel decided that the only acceptable remedy was to bulldoze the entire community. The Court did not accept the suggestion that the Arab “owners,” who had never utilized the land, could be paid compensation for it. The government developed a compromise that would have provided an alternative location nearby for some of the families, which the community agreed to. But this was stymied when additional Palestinians petitioned the court claiming to own that land. The residents were only told that the deal was off a few days ago.

The Palestinians have been assisted in their legal proceedings by the Israeli organization “Yesh Din.” Yesh Din received more than $4.6 million from foreign government bodies between 2012 and 2016. Foreign sources accounted for 93.5% of their total donations. Yesh Din specializes in “lawfare” against Israel and the IDF.

This raises, yet again, a very fundamental question for the State of Israel. In a sentence, what are we?

Are we the nation-state of the Jewish people in its historical homeland, which derives its right to the land from both the biblical promise made to us by Hashem and the modern promise made by the international community in the Palestine Mandate, a right that we defended more than once by force of arms? Are we a Zionist state, in other words?

Or are we something else – a multinational state which exists at the pleasure of today’s post-nationalist, anti-Jewish international establishment?

It would seem that the answer should be obvious, and it is to the great majority of Israeli Jews. But the state has not acted as though it believes in its own Zionist principles.

When the Jordanian occupation and its illegal annexation of land set aside for the Jewish people was ended in 1967, Israel did not annex Judea and Samaria, because its leadership was forced by its “friends” in Europe and the US to accept the idea of “land for peace.” Israel would give Judea and Samaria “back” to Jordan, for example, and Jordan would give us a peace treaty.

The injustice inherent in this is obvious. Who gave Jordan the right to take that land in violation of international law and to ethnically cleanse it of Jews? How can we be asked to give something “back” that was ours in the first place? But this was our policy until King Hussein decided in 1988 that he didn’t want the hassle of trying to control the PLO, and transferred his “ownership” of the land to the PLO. And shortly thereafter, the Israeli government tried to continue the “land for peace” process with the PLO via the Oslo accords.

Israel never annexed the land it regained in 1967 (except for Jerusalem) and it even retained Jordanian law in Judea and Samaria. Because Israeli governments believed that some or all of the territory would ultimately be returned to Arab control, it treated it as occupied territory, despite the fact that, by the most reasonable interpretation of international law, for the first time since 1948 it was not under occupation.

24 years later and several wars and intifadas later, Israelis have finally come to realize that an exchange of land for peace won’t bring peace. Anyone with half a brain who looks at recent history (especially the results of the withdrawal from Gaza) and listens to what the Palestinians themselves say and do, understands that.

It’s often said that “surveys show that a majority of Israelis favor a 2-state solution.” That is correct, if the survey question is something like “Do you favor giving up the territories in return for peace and security?” The unfairness of this question is manifest if we rewrite it as follows: “If giving up the territories would bring peace and security, would you favor it?”

Since giving up the territories would put a terrorist entity next door to Tel Aviv, and since the Arabs won’t even pretend to agree that they would give up their claims on Israel in return for the territories, and since the PLO is unstable and easily overthrown, the “if” clause of the conditional statement is certainly false. And virtually every Israeli knows this.

A religious Zionist also understands the importance to his or her spiritual life of the places mentioned in the tanach, like Hevron and many others. But even a secular Zionist appreciates the first words of the Declaration of Independence:

ERETZ-ISRAEL was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

Virtually every Israeli knows this as well – except possibly much of our leadership and our legal establishment.

If the lessons of history, international law, and Zionist ideology (both religious and secular) were translated into action, the courts would find a way to legalize Amona and other communities that would also be fair to the Arabs. Ultimately, we would annex all of Eretz Israel.

Unfortunately, the government has yet to get clear of the “land for peace” mentality; and the legal establishment seems dedicated to beating us into the mold of the multinational, secular democratic state that former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak so much admired.

This needs to change. Fear of the international community is not a reason to deny our own birthright. Politicized institutions like the UN and the International Criminal Court have no moral authority, and no practical way to punish Israel. And there is absolutely no reason we must allow foreign agents like Yesh Din to continue to subvert our country.

In fact, now, while there is an American government that for the first time may itself be able to shake off the ideas of land for peace and the 2-state solution, is the perfect time for Israel to finally become the truly Zionist state that Jabotinsky, Begin and Ben-Gurion dreamed of.

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