Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, April 13, 2017

04/13 Links Pt2: Quantifying the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict; Turkey, where are your Jews?

From Ian:

Camera: Quantifying the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict's Importance to Middle East Turmoil

For decades, attention has been lavished on the Palestinians, bestowing upon this small segment of the Arab world an exaggerated importance. As a result, in media, academic and diplomatic circles, addressing Palestinian grievances was elevated to the status of the most urgent political and humanitarian cause in the Middle East.
At the United Nations, Muslim and European blocs apply a harsh and unfair double standard to the actions and policies of the Jewish state. In 2016, the Human Rights Council (HRC), over which some of the worst human rights abusers preside, passed 20 anti-Israel resolutions and only 6 against all other countries (UN Watch), even as mass atrocities –including the use of chemical weapons - continue unabated just north of Israel's border, in Syria. This lopsided record in 2016 is typical for the HRC. Taking their cue from the Council's agenda, compromised human rights watchdogs, like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and numerous media and academics that cite reports produced by these groups, raise a clamor whenever Israel vigorously responds to cross-border attacks by terrorist organizations.
The upheavals that shook the Arab world from one end to the other starting in 2010 should have discredited the erroneous perception of the central role of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the region's problems. Yet, for many observers, events of the past six years have not altered their priorities.
In 2013, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was determined to make restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process the signature achievement of his Middle East policy. In December 2016, after three years of fruitless effort, a frustrated Kerry and President Barack Obama, helped shepherd the United Nations Security Council into passing a resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank as illegal in what many saw as a parting shot at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Wildly distorted perceptions of the magnitude of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict prevail even among those who should know better, like foreign policy officials of the EU and its constituent states. Ron Dermer, Israel's ambassador to the United States, in a speech to the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) in April 2016, recounted his dismay to discover that some of his fellow European ambassadors believed the conflict to have cost millions of Palestinian lives, orders of magnitude greater than the actual toll which he estimated at 20,000.

Turkey, where are your Jews?

The Turkish newspaper Milliyet published a news report on March 20 entitled “Synagogues from the era of Byzantium are about to disappear forever!”
“Among the historical and cultural heritage of Istanbul that is on the verge of extinction are Byzantine synagogues which belong to the Turkish Jewish community,” said the report. “Most of the historic synagogues which numbered in dozens in the early 20th century are located in the Balat and Hasköy areas. Many run the risk of disappearing forever”.
“A lot of historic monuments belonging to the Jewish community and built during the Byzantine era are in ruins,” said Mois Gabay, a columnist for the Jewish weekly Salom, and a professional tourist guide. Gabay added that Turkish Jews who lived in the region of Golden Horn, also known by its Turkish name as Haliç "left Turkey a long time ago”.
When there are no more Jewish congregants, it becomes almost impossible to preserve synagogues.
Jews in Turkey are mostly known for being the descendants of the immigrants who moved to the Ottoman Empire after being expelled from Spain. However, Jews have been living in Asia Minor since antiquity. Professor Franklin Hugh Adler explains: “Jews, in fact, had inhabited this land long before the birth of Mohammed and the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, or for that matter, the arrival and conquests of the Turks, beginning in the eleventh century. On the eve of the birth of Islam, most of world Jewry lived under Byzantine or Persian rule in the lands of the Mediterranean basin.
“At the beginning of the Turkish Republic, in 1923, the Jewish population was 81,454. In Istanbul alone there were 47,035 Jews, roughly thirteen percent of a city that then numbered 373,124.”
Today, there are fewer than 15,000 Jews in Turkey, whose entire population is almost 80 million. What happened?

Sean Spicer’s Holocaust Boo-Boo Was Stupid. Obama’s Foreign Policy Promoted A New Holocaust. Guess Which One The Media Cared About.

The furor over Spicer’s comments is even dumber when we consider that President Trump’s predecessor actively forwarded the most genocidal anti-Semitic regime on earth in their goal of wiping Jews off the planet. President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal resulted in billions of dollars flowing into a regime that openly calls for the annihilation of the Jews – dollars that the Obama administration itself recognized could be used for terrorism. The Iran deal also left most of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure in place, got rid of sanctions on the state, ensured the growth of malignant anti-Semitic radical Islam across the Middle East, and openly embraced a nuclear Iran within a decade. The mullahs have made clear that their big problem with Hitler was that he didn’t go far enough.
Yet the media ran point for Obama on the Iran nuclear deal.
The media also covered for Obama’s lies about Syrian weapons of mass destruction. Obama handed control over the WMD issue in Syria over to the Russians, claiming that the problem of WMD had been solved by doing so. Then Assad gassed his own people. Again.
So before we throw Sean Spicer to the wolves as some sort of covert neo-Nazi, let’s remember: Spicer works for the most pro-Israel president in recent history, he was clearly not trying to undermine the importance of the Holocaust, and the media cheered Trump’s predecessor as he paved the way for a new Holocaust.

Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

In September of this year, Israel plans to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the liberation of Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and the Golan heights. The main event will be held at Kibbutz Kfar Etzion, in the Gush Etzion area of Judea, south and slightly west of Jerusalem.

Zahava Galon, the leader of the Meretz party, which represents approximately 4% of Israeli voters with its 5 Knesset seats, and Chemi Shalev, writing in the left-wing Ha’aretz newspaper expressed their outrage that anyone would celebrate what they consider an oppressive and evil occupation of “Palestinian” land, and that Israel would add insult to injury by holding the ceremony in what they insist on calling the “West Bank.”

I know it’s a little thing and that most of my readers already know this, but I can’t say it too often: it was called Judea and Samaria from biblical times until 1948 when Jordan occupied it, ethnically cleansed it of Jews, and renamed it the “West Bank.” We really ought to stop calling it that.

Let’s talk a little about the Gush Etzion area, and specifically Kibbutz Kfar Etzion. Here is a summary of its early years by Ami Isseroff, z”l:

The Etzion Bloc, or Gush Etzion as it is called in Hebrew, is located on the main road from the south to Jerusalem, northwest of Hebron. The Etzion bloc was settled and resettled three times, on land purchased by the Jews, beginning in 1927. Each time, residents were forced to abandon their homes in the face of Arab violence. The final saga of the Etzion bloc included two separate massacres and a prolonged and stubborn defense against hopeless odds. The bloc was finally overrun by soldiers of the British armed and officered Jordan Legion, who were responsible for the final massacre of surrendered defenders, a war crime.

The first settlement in this area was called Migdal Eder, built on land purchased from local Arabs by the Zichron David Company. It was founded in 1927. The pioneers included orthodox Yemenite Jews. During the Arab riots of 1929, Migdal Eder settlers were evacuated to the Russian Orthodox monastery and thence to the Arab village of Beit Umar, from which they were evacuated to Jerusalem by British mandate police. The British made no attempt to guard the settlement or safeguard property, and it was completely destroyed.

Additional lands were purchased by the El Hahar Company, which founded a kibbutz called Kfar Etzion in 1934. Like Migdal Eder, Kfar Etzion was abandoned during the Arab violence of 1936-1939 and destroyed by the Palestinian Arabs.

A third settlement attempt was made beginning in 1942 under the auspices of the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet). Kfar Etzion was re-founded in the Spring of 1943. In October 1945, a second kibbutz, Massuot Yitzchak, was added. Its members were Holocaust survivors from Eastern and Central Europe. A third Kibbutz, Ein Tzurim, was founded in 1946 by Israeli members of the Bnei Akiva religious Zionist movement. All three kibbutzim belonged to the religious Zionist movement, but in February 1947, a fourth kibbutz, Revadim, was established by the Marxist Hashomer Hatzair Youth Movement.

On May 13, 1948, the area was overrun by the Jordanian army. The remaining defenders of Kfar Etzion surrendered to the Jordanian Legion, who together with Arab irregulars, massacred some 128 (all but five) of them. The defenders of the other three kibbutzim surrendered in the presence of the International Red Cross, and were taken to Jordan as prisoners of war.

After Israel liberated the Gush in 1967, Kfar Etzion was rebuilt yet again. The other three, Revadim, Ein Tzurim and Massuot Yitzchak were reestablished within the Green Line shortly after the original kibbutzim were destroyed. I lived in Revadim in 1980-82 and worked in the musach (garage), where my boss told me about being forced to repair Jordanian military vehicles as a war prisoner.

There are many stories of heroism around the area, including the “lamed hay” (thirty-five), members of the Palmach (an elite force part of the Hagana) who were massacred trying to bring supplies through hostile Arab villages to the kibbutzim of the Gush.

So the complaints about holding a celebration in the “Palestinian West Bank” ring false to me. The land upon which Kfar Etzion stands was purchased dearly, with Jewish money and not a little Jewish blood.

It is true, as the kapos of +972 Magazine write, that the area of today’s Gush Etzion Regional Council is larger than that of the original land purchased in the 1920s and 30s. But they accept – as they did in the case of the settlement of Amona – the fanciful ownership claims of Arabs without verification, and do not accept Israel’s right to adjudicate land as state land.

Their uncritical acceptance of Arab claims is why they object to any celebration of the liberation of Judea and Samaria (they are quiet about the Golan and about Gaza, for different reasons), no matter where it is held. They believe that all land outside of the 1949 lines belongs to the Palestinians, simply because the Palestinians and their supporters say so, and despite the fact that the armistice agreements explicitly declare that the Green Line is not a political boundary.

They will tell you over and over that it is forbidden to acquire territory by war, as Israel did in 1967, but apparently do not object to Jordan’s conquest and annexation of Judea and Samaria in 1948 – areas that had been designated in the Mandate as the site of a future Jewish national home.

They will ignore the geostrategic imperative that says that our state cannot be defended without the high ground and the Jordan Valley. They will forget or ignore the fact that the hills and deserts of Judea and Samaria are the place where our people became a people. They will talk about the need of the newly-created “Palestinian people” for self-determination, but abandon the Jewish people.

Legal and political arguments may go on forever, but what will ultimately determine the ownership of the land will be who lives in it – who settles it and controls it. The original settlers of Gush Etzion, who put their bodies on the line for the land understood that.

The strategic and spiritual value of these lands is more important today than ever. Celebrating their liberation is appropriate, because they both make our country defensible and give us something important to defend, the historical heartland of the Jewish people.

And what better place to celebrate it than Kfar Etzion?

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04/13 Links Pt1: PA suspends ties with UNRWA; Dershowitz: Spicer's Mistake and the Democrat's Over-Reaction;

From Ian:

PA suspends ties with UNRWA over planned curriculum reform

The Palestinian Authority Education Ministry on Thursday announced it was suspending ties with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) over plans by the international agency to reform its curriculum.
The Palestinian ministry, in a statement published on its official website, called the possible revisions to the curriculum an “affront to the Palestinian people, its history and struggles,” and said the suspension would continue until the UN agency’s “positions are corrected.”
UNRWA has over 312,000 students in its schools across the West Bank and East Jerusalem (together, 50,000) and the Gaza Strip (262,000).
The UN agency has not formally published any plans to alter its curriculum, but leaks to the Arab press of possible changes have led to outrage over recent weeks in Gaza and the West Bank.
The changes, according to Arab media reports, include revisions to maps of Palestine to exclude references to cities inside Israel as Palestinian cities, a practice that numerous studies of Palestinian textbooks have labeled as “incitement.” Other changes were reportedly planned to tone down praise for Palestinian prisoners and improve Israel’s image.

Palestinian School Textbooks Poison Minds

The PA’s willingness to come to terms with Israel through diplomatic means, however, is belied by its counter-productive policy of exposing Palestinian students in its West Bank schools to inflammatory textbooks.
According to a report released recently by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, an organization headquartered in Jerusalem, the latest textbooks approved by the PA for first to fourth grade students demonize Israel, reject its existence, glorify “martyrdom” and uphold the notion of an exclusively Palestinian homeland.
These texts, containing maps of the Middle East that exclude Israel and describe Israeli cities such as Tel Aviv, Haifa and Ashkelon as Palestinian, are a fundamental source of incitement. They inspire a philosophy of rejectionism toward Israel and drive terrorism, which Palestinians have often resorted to since the beginning of serious Arab-Jewish tensions in the early 1920s in Mandate Palestine.
In general, Palestinian texts engender anger, resentment and hostility rather than promote and nurture a climate and culture of coexistence and peace. This is especially true in the Gaza Strip, which has been controlled by Hamas for the past decade.

UNRWA does not have any intention of changing their school textbooks

UNRWA is now running a campaign in which it shows itself demanding specific changes in the textbooks used in UNRWA schools, as circulated by some pro-Israel organizations, even though UNRWA cannot make any changes in their school books.
Yet UNRWA has contracted its schools in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and Gaza to require these schools to only use the school books given to the schools by the Palestinian Authority, which means that UNRWA cannot unilaterally mandate or direct any changes in UNRWA school books used for 492,000 school children in its schools in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and Gaza
However, UNRWA is being praised by Israeli gov’t officials for their intentions, even though UNRWA cannot make any changes in their school books.
At no time does UNRWA say that they will remove members of terror groups from payroll of UNRWA in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and Gaza.
Nor is anyone currently asking UNRWA to remove terrorists from their schools.

Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas gave a speech to a meeting of PLO ambassadors in Bahrain on Wednesday.

One part of his speech is very telling:

What is even more important is that Israel stops the settlements. The demand to stop the settlements does not mean that (Israel) can legalize what has already been built – all settlement ever since 1967 is void. We know that when they signed a peace agreement with Egypt, they uprooted a number of settlements, and when Ariel Sharon got out of Gaza, they uprooted 18 settlements.

Abbas is telling his diplomats that he will demand that Israel dismantle the homes of hundreds of thousands of people, without compromise. And he is confident that Israel will do that because Israel uprooted a few thousand Jews from the Sinai and from Gaza, leaving none behind.

Abbas is saying that the official PLO line is that there will never be any compromise with Israel on borders or people. "Palestine" would not consider having Jews living inside, even though there are hundreds of Arab villages in Israel.

And the reason Abbas believes he has no reason to negotiate over this is because Israel has shown in the past that it will make hard choices for peace. Israel's desire for peace has made Abbas less interested in working on a solution, and more confident that Israel is weak and will give up without a fight. His entire strategy of refusing to negotiate and instead use international pressure on Israel is based on his assumption of Israeli political weakness that he perceives in Yamit and Gaza.

It is another manifestation of how Arabs respect strength and show contempt for compromise. They play a zero-sum game while Israelis try to find win-win solutions.

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

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PLO politicizing Easter to make Christians hate Israel

The PLO released a paper called "Celebrating Easter: 50 Years of Israel’s Colonization of Occupied East Jerusalem."

As can be expected, it is filled with half-truths in order to turn the world's Christians against Israel.

The paper has three sections: a timeline of Jerusalem, the Palestinian position on the political status of Jerusalem, and "case studies" of how awfully Arab Christians are supposedly being treated by Israel.

In the timeline, because it cannot find too many anti-Christian activities done by Israel, it makes up a few and adds Muslim complaints to make it sound like the Old City is less open to all religions than it used to be.

So for 1948 it claims " Most of the Christian population of Jerusalem is forced to leave the city by Zionist gangs." While it is true that the Christian population of Jerusalem went down by more than 50% from 1948 to 1967, most of them fled under Jordanian rule in the 1950s.

For 1969, "Destruction of the ancient Minbar (prayer platform) of Salah ad-Deen al Ayyubi and interior al Al-Qibli Mosque in Al Aqsa Mosque / Haram Al Sharif Compound." as if that was done by Israel. Of course, it was done by a Christian.

The timeline doesn't say a word about how Jews were ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem under Arab rule from 1948-1967. Nor does it mention the many other cases of Muslim persecution of Christians in the region.

In the second section, the PLO asserts, without any evidence, " It is pivotal to establish East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine. Without this, there can be no viable Palestinian state, and without a viable Palestinian state, there will be no lasting peace in the Middle East on the basis of the two-state solution." This is a veiled threat, not a statement of fact.

The PLO also claims every inch of "east Jerusalem" saying "all Jewish, Christian and Muslim
sites that lie within Palestine’s territory are under Palestinian sovereignty and protection." Yet in the map of "settlements" provided in the paper, the entire Jewish Quarter is considered an illegal Jewish settlement.

Finally, the "case studies" are filled with unverifiable and likely false assertions, like "there have been many cases where Israeli soldiers simply deny entry to the children [coming to Jerusalem for Easter] under the pretext of having no permit. This means the whole family is forced to turn around and go back.”

Or “When it comes to Jewish celebrations, the Israeli authorities make sure that every single Jewish
person can reach the Old City. But when it comes to Christian or Muslim celebrations, it is totally
the opposite: They treat us like strangers in our own city, to the extent of disrupting a religious
celebration that we have held for centuries”.

In fact, there are far more Christian pilgrims visiting Jerusalem today for Easter than there were under Arab rule. It isn't even close. And Arabs are discouraging Arab Christians from visiting Jerusalem, not Israelis.

This is yet another piece of hateful propaganda that the PLO freely publishes, knowing that the media will not call them on it. In this case it subtly plays on latent Christian antisemitism as well in order to make it look like Jews are anti-Christian while Muslims are tolerant - the exact opposite of the truth.

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Why American Jewry is disappearing

Pew Research Center has an analysis of the differences between the American Jewish community and Israeli Jews. While it doesn't come to any conclusions about the futures of both communities, some of the specifics in the differences between the surveyed Jews points to a very worrying picture of the future of American Jewry.

To put it bluntly, far fewer American Jews have any idea of what being Jewish means.

This graphic should be a huge warning sign for the future of American Jews:

As we have observed before, American Jews have increasingly embraced liberalism or "progressivism" as their religion, and twist Judaism into this new religion. Worse, their views of what is progressive and liberal is at odds with what the terms really mean, as the antisemites of the Left - mostly coming from the socialist side - have managed to poison the terms with the idea that self-determination for Jews is not a liberal idea.

This idea of a profoundly flawed pseudo-intellectual liberalism as the basis of a "Jewish" identity all but ensures that American Jewry is not going to last for very long.

There is a deep gap in one's life once God is pushed out of religious life, and American Jews are filling that gap, according to this poll, with Woody Allen and Adam Sandler. They are pretending that attending college is a substitute for attending synagogue.

The people who self-righteously describe themselves as Jews when attacking Israel are the ones who are represented by this graphic:

This poll doesn't talk about intermarriage, but it doesn't have to. American Jews are more interested in being able to discuss the latest New York Times piece than they are in ensuring the future of Jews in America for the next few generations. (Based on this statistic, more American Jews get their ideas of Judaism from the media than from the Torah.)

The poll isn't all sunny from the Israeli side either, but Israeli Jews are not in danger of disappearing.
Yossi Klein Halevi makes some cogent points about the differences between American and Israeli Jews here, saying that much of the difference comes from American Jews being part of a community and Israeli Jews being part of a people:

It may be optimistic to call the American Jewish community a community. Conservative Jews, who have been traditionally very Zionist, are disappearing, and Reform Jews are increasingly non- or anti-Zionist. Only among the Orthodox American Jews is there an increase in population but most have little in common with the rest of American Jewry.

If this poll points to anything, it is that the growing Orthodox Jewish population in America need to do more outreach towards the non-observant - not necessarily to make them religious but to widen their perspectives as to what Judaism means. In Israel, there are innovative programs for Jewish education that blur the lines between religious and non-religious; this survey shows that America desperately needs the same.

(h/t Jewess)

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Twitter shut down terrorist Ahlam Tamimi's acccount

From Arnold Roth, whose daughter was murdered by Ahlam Tamimi:

Thank you @Jack @Support @anthonynoto @vijaya
and thank you to the many who retweeted our message asking @Twitter to #ShutDownAhlamTamimi pic.twitter.com/KwUvF7ETZB
— This Ongoing War (@ThisOngoingWar) April 12, 2017

Tamimi used her account to spread hate and to pretend to be a martyr.

Her Twitter profile promoted the Hamas Qassam Brigades terrorist group as well.

This is excellent news!

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04/12 Links: Fatah: "Promised Land" = Land where Jews will be exterminated; Turkey, where are your Jews?

From Ian:

PMW: "Promised Land" = Land where Jews will be exterminated

When Fatah-run Awdah TV asked Palestinians about their views regarding US President Donald Trump's "rise to power", one woman explained that "Jews" mistakenly understand the term "the Promised Land" as "a promise to them," however, the real promise is that Allah will "gather" and "exterminate" them:
Fatah-run Awdah TV host: "Dear viewers, our question today is: Are you optimistic about the rise to power of American President Trump?"
Palestinian woman: "We always put our hopes in Allah. This is the promised land. The Jews think it is promised to them, but what was promised was to gather them in order to exterminate them by a divine decree."
[Fatah-run Awdah TV, Pulse of the Homeland, Feb. 19, 2017]
Palestinian Media Watch has documented Fatah leader Abbas Zaki expressing the same belief that Allah will bring together all the Jews/Israelis in Israel so that Palestinians can kill them:
"I believe that Allah will gather them so we can kill them. I am informing the murderer of his death."
[Official PA TV, March 12, 2014]

France's War to Delegitimize Israel

Officially, France prohibits any form of boycott against Israel. In 2015, the Court of Cassation confirmed a 2013 decision regarding the illegality of boycotts and the call for boycotts in France. Under the law, in 2013, BDS France was fined €28,000 (USD $30,000) by a local French court, after a call made in 2010 by 14 activists to boycott Israeli products in a supermarket. In addition, each of the 14 activists was fined €1,000.
However, according to a report recently released by NGO Monitor, the French government continues to fund NGOs openly hostile to Israel and to fund NGOs that support and promote boycott campaigns against Israel.
France, while its Ministry of Foreign Affairs is officially claiming the necessity of peace and secure borders for Israel, is discreetly financing organizations and NGOs openly hostile to Israel. NGO Monitor's meticulous report reveals that France is no friend of Israel but more and more of a prime mover in the war against Israel to delegitimize it. The masks already fell when French government supported the shameful UNESCO resolution to deny any tie between Jews and Jerusalem and the more than shameful UNESCO resolution saying that Western Wall of the Jerusalem's Second Temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE was "occupied territory." Now it is clear, France is at war with the Jewish state.

MEMRI: Jordanian Researcher Ironically Compares 10 Western Scientific Breakthroughs In 2016 With 10 Arab World 'Breakthroughs' In Killing And Destruction

Muhammad Abu Rumman, a researcher at the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan and a writer for the Jordanian daily Al-Ghad, published an article highlighting 10 notable Western scientific achievements from 2016, including the detection of gravitational waves, which were predicted by Albert Einstein, and the discovery of a ninth planet in the solar system, and compared them to 10 notable "achievements" in the Arab world during that year, including the perfection of the car bomb, the "development" of the concept of lone wolves and barrel bombs, and the destruction of archaeological sites. Abu Rumman implicitly invites readers to compare these achievements and draw their own conclusions.
The following are excerpts from the article:
"The BBC website published the 10 biggest scientific achievements of 2016, which include: the discovery of the gravitational waves that Einstein discussed 100 years ago; the arrival of the [Juno] probe to Jupiter; the discovery of a ninth [planet] in the solar system nicknamed 'Nine';[2] the discovery of a 99 million-year-old dinosaur tail preserved in amber; the finding of the largest prime number [yet discovered], which has 22 million digits; the development of a tiny disc that can store 360 terabytes of data and last for 14 billion years; stem cell injections for patients who suffered [a stroke due to] blood clots in order to restore motor function; the discovery of a new type of blind cave-dwelling fish that can climb walls; the first landing by a rocket [at sea after completing its mission]; and transplanting a chip in a paralyzed patient's brain, enabling him to move his fingers.
"Now, let us think of the prominent Arab achievements, both scientific and non-scientific, during 2016:
"1. The car bomb tactic, which ISIS and Jabhat Al-Nusra excel at, which transforms basic primary materials into a devastating mechanism of killing, without the need to develop inventions and carry out complex scientific research as is done in the West. It is enough to pack a large amount of explosives into a car, don an explosive vest, and embed yourself in the ranks of the 'enemy' in order to injure and kill dozens and cause horrid destruction. ISIS has announced that, according to a recent study [it conducted], in the recent period there have been 1,112 martyrdom operations, all of whose perpetrators obviously died, and that during that period, they killed a large number of people on the other side.

Chag Sameach!

Wishing everyone a wonderful Pesach/Passover!

I will not be blogging from Monday evening through Wednesday night.

Have a great holiday!

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04/10 Links Pt2: Politico: Chabad Is Nexus Of Putin-Trump Conspiracy; JVP Haggadah: “Next Year in al-Quds!”

From Ian:

Isi Leibler: This Passover, Israelis Have Reasons to Rejoice

In the coming days, most Israelis, secular and observant, will celebrate Passover — the festival of freedom in which we recount our life of slavery and exodus from Egypt, and how we became a nation. The Haggadah that we read at the Passover Seder also carries a universal theme of human rights, but its focus is the Jewish people, stressing our shared past and our aspirations for a renewal of Jewish sovereignty during 2,000 years of harrowing exile, endless persecutions, expulsions and attempted genocide.
We read in the Haggadah that “in every generation, they rise against us to destroy us. But the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from them.” We appeal to the Almighty to “pour out Thy wrath” against the wicked and destroy them.
The Haggadah recounts the Egyptians’ pattern of Jew-hatred: They envied the prosperity of their Jewish minority, enslaved them and ultimately engaged in genocide, with Pharaoh’s decree to drown all newborn Jewish males. This pattern has recurred throughout the generations with those who’ve tried to destroy us: the pagans, the church, secular racist Jew-haters, Nazis and communists.
Today, there is a global tsunami of antisemitism, especially in Europe, where Jews are being transformed into pariahs. The current threat emanates from the bizarre combination of Islamists and radical leftists, who are renewing the vicious antisemitic propaganda of the 1930s that was a precursor to the Holocaust. In its current manifestation, this campaign is also directed against the Jewish national homeland — the only nation-state in the world whose right to exist is under threat.

Gil Troy: Cowards fear celebrating Jerusalem’s ‘Jew-bilee’

It’s reassuring to smell cowardice in opponents, but depressing to see it in friends: the quivering lips, the darting eyes, the sweaty palms. Alas, many American Jews are emitting the stink of the scaredycat these days. Too many are dodging the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the Six Day War, and especially of Jerusalem’s reunification – or burdening what should be festive celebrations with craven equivocations and politically correct genuflections about Palestinian suffering that obscure Israel’s extraordinary June 1967 triumph.
Seeking to avoid war is noble; apologizing for winning is disgraceful. I am proud that Jews sing songs of peace, crave reconciliation and regret killing. However, true peaceniks are realistic optimists, not naïve masochists.
Had Israel lost in 1967 there would be no Israel.
“Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel,” Egypt’s dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser vowed that May. Those were the stakes: Jewish women would have been raped then slaughtered; Jewish men would have been tortured then butchered. Jerusalem would sit atop one more layer of ruins – from the 19-year failed Jewish state. Tel Aviv would be a mass tombstone, reduced to rubble like the Jewish towns Palestinian radicals destroyed after the 2005 Gaza Disengagement, but this time with corpses rotting underneath.
In 1967, barely 22 years since the Nazis had finished transforming their rantings into mass murder, every reasonable person had to take the Arabs’ genocidal threats seriously. That is why Israel had young recruits digging mass graves in Tel Aviv. And that is why American Jews finally, belatedly, rallied around their homeland, under the gun, that May.

Daily Wire: Politico: Chabad Is Nexus Of Putin-Trump Conspiracy

Politico has written an indictment of an entire sect of Judaism, getting basic facts wrong and making wild implications about a Jewish conspiracy in Russia tied to the Trump family.
On Sunday, Politico published an article casting Chabad (a Jewish organization dedicated to increasing religious observance among global Jewry) as an interlocutor of political power connecting President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Against a backdrop in which 2016's presidential election is suggested to have been compromised by "interference" from the Russian government at the direction of Putin (with possible "collusion" from Trump and his political teams), Politico portrays Chabad as another brick of intrigue in its narrative wall.
“Some of the shortest routes between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin run straight through [Chabad],” alleges Politico.
As an example of the “piling up” of “links between Trump and Chabad,” Politico points to Trump’s hosting of a wedding at Mar-a-Lago between the daughter and son of two separate Chabad-connected Jewish Soviet emigres.
Politico alleges the existence of an “affinity” between “Chabad enthusiasts” and Trump, describing Chabad’s Jewish membership as “Trump’s kind of Jews.” No mention is made by Politico of long-term political support across observant Jewish denominations - and religious Jews and Christians, more broadly - for Republican and broader conservative values.
Chabad’s relationship with the Russian government is framed as a function of the organization’s political ambition, rather than a function of political necessity given the nature of Russia’s politics. No consideration is offered by Politico of political realities in Russia that would compel Chabad to develop and maintain relationships with Putin in order to best serve its mission.

Bethany Mandel: Who Needs Alt-Right Conspiracy Theories About Jews When You Have Politico?

Imagine for a moment the outrage that would (rightfully) erupt if a mainstream publication wrote an indictment of an entire sect of Islam, while getting basic facts like the name of the sect wrong, and hit publish the night before Ramadan began. Or the outrage that would (rightfully) erupt if Breitbart or an alt-right site published the same about Jews. The latter did happen over the weekend, only it wasn’t Breitbart writing a diatribe against a secret web of shadowy Jews, but instead, Politico Magazine.
This is, unfortunately, becoming a bit of a tradition at the publication. On the eve of another major Jewish holiday, Rosh Hashanah, Politico published a piece accusing politically conservative Jews of remaining silent on Donald Trump’s ascension. Because of the rules regarding work and technology on major Jewish holidays, many Jewish writers and publications were unable to respond to the smear in a timely manner, although Tablet Magazine’s Yair Rosenberg took the time to do so, pointing out for both the writer and editor of the publication just how Jew-y the anti-Trump camp of the conservative movement was and is.
Now Politico is accusing Jews of the opposite: working in a secretive, highly-funded conspiracy to put Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin in power, and keep them there. Or something. Truthfully, I didn’t really understand the crux of the piece, despite reading it several times.

Max Blumenthal-fan Reza Aslan worries about Israel (Petra Marquardt-Bigman)

By Petra Marquardt-Bigman

Some two years ago, I wrote about Reza Aslan’s gushing praise for a book by Max Blumenthal under the title “No Truth in Advertising: Max Blumenthal’s New Book on Gaza.” But now Aslan is involved in a major project that has actually been advertised quite truthfully, because the way CNN has promoted their new series “Believer” reveals right away that it is just a sensational show intended to boost ratings: “In this new spiritual adventure series, renowned author and religious scholar Reza Aslan immerses himself in the world’s most fascinating faith-based groups to experience life as a true believer.” While I’m not religious, I don’t know any sincere “true believer” who would like to see his or her deeply-held faith presented in a “spiritual adventure series” featuring a “religious scholar” who “immerses himself” for every episode in another – preferably exotic – “faith-based group.” It’s a bit like making the now fashionable donning of a “hijab for a day” into a lavishly produced series, and the message is inevitably: just dress up appropriately and participate in some rituals, and voilà – you’ll “experience life as a true believer” of whatever beliefs are deemed telegenic enough to be featured by Reza Aslan on CNN.

An excellent critique under the very appropriate title “Reza Aslan’s Cynical Careerism and CNN’s ‘Believer’”, written after Aslan’s first (truly atrocious) episode on Hinduism, notes that “creating controversy seems to be all part of the plan too; during the premiere of Believer Aslan tweeted a link to an interview on the Huffington Post entitled ‘Every Episode of Reza Aslan’s ‘Believer’ Will Piss Somebody Off (And It’s Awesome).’ It is essentially click-bait for TV.”

However, originally Aslan apparently didn’t think that “every episode” will “piss somebody off,” because when he was busy filming the episodes some two years ago (i.e. not long after he had warmly endorsed Blumenthal’s glorification of Hamas), he tweeted: “Just wrapped episode 3 in LA (which everyone will love) and off to Israel for episode 4 (which everyone will hate).”

Apparently, Aslan still feels that this episode will be particularly controversial; his pinned tweet at the time of this writing reads: “No matter what I say, no matter what I do someone is going to get pissed off in this episode;” an embedded short clip shows him in Jerusalem with the same message.

I’m writing this before the episode is airing on Sunday evening (conveniently at a time when most Jews will be very busy preparing for Passover), but the promotional material shows already that, as usual, Reza Aslan will dress up to ‘immerse himself’ in Judaism…

But I’ll also admit that I don’t need to watch the episode to be pissed off – just reading the title of Aslan’s CNN article promoting this installment is enough for me: “Reza Aslan: Why I worry about Israel’s future.” Well, when people who cheer Blumenthal and other antisemitic Israel-haters profess “worry about Israel’s future,” it usually means they’re worried that Israel has a future.

To be sure, Aslan focuses on an issue that actually also worries me and many secular Israelis: fundamentalist tendencies among ultra-orthodox Jews and their political influence. But with his trademark superficiality, Aslan dramatizes what serves his agenda and ignores whatever doesn’t fit his desired “narrative” – after all, while he likes to describe himself as a “scholar of religions,” he is “a tenured Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.” So it is hardly surprising that Aslan claims to have spoken “to a number of secular Jews in Israel who openly worried that the ultra-Orthodox are on the verge of turning Israel into a Jewish version of Iran;” but if he really found people who worry “that the ultra-Orthodox are on the verge of turning Israel into a Jewish version of Iran,” he perhaps mingled with the same people Max Blumenthal met with when he was in Israel.

From Aslan’s Twitter timeline, one can see that he greatly appreciates Ha’aretz as a source of material for denigrating Israel, but for once, I have good tidings from Ha’aretz for Reza Aslan: he doesn’t have to lose sleep over his worries for Israel’s future – as Anshel Pfeffer concluded in a recent article under the title “In Israel the Age of the Rabbis Is Ending”: “No, Israel isn’t becoming more religious. It’s actually becoming more flexible as the lines that used to divide among the secular, traditional, religious-Zionist and ultra-Orthodox − and clearly demarcate the sects and streams − have become blurred.” Pfeffer even threw in a line criticizing the media for overlooking the trends he described: “The media as usual is finding it hard to drop its old habits.” Looking at you, Reza Aslan…

So here’s how Aslan concludes his article:

“Whether the ultra-Orthodox are in fact able to one day transform Israel into a religious state remains to be seen. But what cannot be denied is that their influence over Israeli society and the Israeli government is only growing. And as someone who lost his own country to a small but powerful group of religious zealots, I genuinely worry about the future of Israel.”

But Aslan is genuinely lying when he claims to worry about the future of Israel, because he doesn’t want Israel to have any future. As he said in a Twitter exchange with notorious Israel-haters some two years ago, he rejects a two-state solution “as a fantasy;” at the same time, he indulges the fantasy that the Arab-Muslim majority state that should replace Israel can work out swell if there’s “1to1 interaction thru art/culture.”

Yeah, maybe Reza Aslan will do his part by teaching a free workshop on creative writing?

But the truth about Aslan is that he has for years promoted antisemitic Israel-haters. Here’s a selection of his relevant tweets and statements from the past few years.

In fall 2013, Aslan promoted Max Blumenthal’s antisemitic screed “Goliath.”

Less than two years later, Aslan endorsed Blumenthal’s next book, which glorified the Islamist terror group Hamas; Aslan’s praise is downright obscene: “Max Blumenthal has spent the last decade transforming himself into one of the most vital voices in journalism today, always speaking truth to power with fearlessness and integrity. As with his previous books, The 51 Day War is sure to be talked about for years to come.”

Astonishingly, Aslan didn’t think that, given his new role as a CNN star, it might be prudent to tone down his ardent support for the Israel-hating fringe. A few weeks ago, he backed Rania Khalek, who – just like Blumenthal – had come under severe criticism from erstwhile fans for her whitewashing of the murderous Assad regime. Together with notorious anti-Israel activists like Ali Abunimah and several other contributors to the Electronic Intifada and various other anti-Israel sites, Aslan even signed a statement in support of Khalek. Among several other notorious Israel- and Jew-haters, Aslan’s co-signatories also include the cartoonist Carlos Latuff, the proud winner of a prize in the 2006 International Holocaust Cartoon Competition sponsored by the Iranian regime, who is well known for using “’Judeophobic stereotypes’ in his attacks on Israel.”

That’s the kind of company Aslan chose when he endorsed Blumenthal a few years ago, and that’s the kind of company Aslan chose now when he backed the notorious Khalek. Apparently, CNN has no problem with that, but to provide a person with this record a prominent platform to claim that he worries about Israel’s future is utterly misleading: like the Israel-haters Aslan has repeatedly endorsed, his main worry about the world’s only Jewish state is clearly that Israel has a future.

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04/10 Links Pt1: The Myth of the Palestinian Mandela; Rocket from Sinai hits greenhouse hours before Passover

From Ian:

Dexter Van Zile: The Myth of the Palestinian Mandela

I got a clear sense of just how far Palestinian elites are from following Mandela’s example during the first night of the 2014 Christ at the Checkpoint Conference in Bethlehem. More than 400 Christians from Europe and North America attended the event, which is held every two years at the Bethlehem Bible College. On the day the conference began, Amnesty International published a report saying the inhabitants of a Palestinian refugee camp in Yarmouk, Syria had “been brought to the brink of starvation, forced to forage for any food that they can find” as a result of a siege imposed by the Assad regime. Despite the differences I had with the organizers and speakers at the CATC event, I was glad that Palestinian leaders who addressed the crowd would get an opportunity to draw attention to the plight of their fellow Palestinians in Yarmouk.
But they said nothing, not one word about their compatriots starving to death less than 200 miles away. No responsible group of leaders truly interested in the welfare of the people it leads would miss an opportunity to draw attention to what was happening to Palestinians in Yarmouk, but that night they did. Organizers of the event spoke about the unfolding catastrophe the next day, after I drew attention to their failure about the issue. Mandela would have addressed the suffering in Yarmouk up front, not as an afterthought. By failing to ask for aid to their countrymen, Palestinian political and religious leaders chose to demonize Israel to the exclusion of pursuing the welfare of the people they lead.
This has been a problem for decades. Instead of following the example of Mandela, who demanded that his followers think seriously about their future and what they needed to do to prosper as a community, Palestinian elites promote a backward-looking revanchism that has condemned several generations of Palestinians to death and suffering. By making themselves opponents of Jewish efforts to flourish in their homeland, Palestinians throw away any hope of flourishing in a state of their own. That is the choice they have made.
Clearly, Mandela’s great accomplishment was to turn violence and hatred into the generous desire for peace and reconciliation. A Palestinian Mandela would have to do the same. He would have to show the willingness and the ability to get Palestinians to abandon their efforts to murder, demonize, insult, humiliate, and intimidate Israeli Jews into leaving their homeland or, barring that, submit to Arab and Islamic dominance over their lives. Thus far, the Palestinian leadership has shown an unwillingness, to say the least, to do so, and Barghouti is no exception.
It is time to stop using the image of Nelson Mandela as a club to beat Israel and start using it as a yardstick to measure Palestinian efforts for peace.

Daniel Pipes: The Israel-Palestinian Peace Process Has Been a Massive Charade

Daniel Polisar of Shalem College in Jerusalem shook the debate over Palestinian-Israeli relations in November 2015 with his essay, “What Do Palestinians Want?” In it, having studied 330 polls to “understand the perspective of everyday Palestinians” toward Israel, Israelis, Jews, and the utility of violence against them, he found that Palestinian attackers are “venerated” by their society—with all that that implies.
He’s done it again with “Do Palestinians Want a Two-State Solution?” This time, he pored over some 400 opinion polls of Palestinian views to find consistency among seemingly contradictory evidence on the topic of ways to resolve the conflict with Israel. From this confusing bulk, Polisar convincingly establishes that Palestinians collectively hold three related views of Israel: it has no historical or moral claim to exist, it is inherently rapacious and expansionist, and it is doomed to extinction. In combination, these attitudes explain and justify the widespread Palestinian demand for a state from “the river to the sea,” the grand Palestine of their maps that erases Israel.
With this analysis, Polisar has elegantly dissected the phenomenon that I call Palestinian rejectionism. That’s the policy first implemented by the monstrous mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, in 1921 and consistently followed over the next near-century. Rejectionism demands that Palestinians (and beyond them, Arabs and Muslims) repudiate every aspect of Zionism: deny Jewish ties to the land of Israel, fight Jewish ownership of that land, refuse to recognize Jewish political power, refuse to trade with Zionists, murder Zionists where possible, and ally with any foreign power, including Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, to eradicate Zionism.
The continuities are striking. All major Palestinian leaders—Amin al-Husseini, Ahmad al-Shukeiri, Yasir Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and Yahya Sinwar (the new leader of Hamas in Gaza)—have made eliminating the Zionist presence their only goal. Yes, for tactical reasons, they occasionally compromised, most notably in the Oslo Accords of 1993, but then they reversed these exceptions as soon as possible.

Would Palestine Fail?

This underlines the paradox inherent in the international community’s policy on this issue: The world calls for Israel to negotiate the creation of a Palestinian state, but according to its own data and statements, the PA lacks the foundations for viable statehood. The UN warns, “The full socio-economic development of the [occupied Palestinian territory] … will only take place when there is an end to the occupation.” But the urgent need for such development is precisely why ending the occupation would be so dangerous. Israel cannot expect a fragile Palestine to bear these risks by itself. Given its small size and proximity to Israel, any destabilizing fallout would inevitably spill over into Israel and provoke renewed conflict.
If the international community wants Palestinian statehood to be a success, it should focus on investing in the foundations for a viable state, while urging the parties not to take any steps incompatible with the two-state vision. If Israel is serious about Palestinian statehood as an ultimate goal, it needs to demonstrate how rapid development can be achieved without a military withdrawal. Israel is not a passive spectator, but a key actor in shaping what a Palestinian state would look like. And if the Palestinians face the painful conclusion that Israel cannot allow itself to withdraw in the short run, and be given meaningful guarantees that the hope of statehood is not extinguished, they can cooperate in building these foundations, instead of postponing difficult decisions like refugee resettlement to a later date.
A Palestinian state needs transparent institutions, functioning infrastructure, the rehabilitation of refugees, the disarmament of militias, a sustainable economy, and robust human rights. The assessment that a state without these fundamentals risks endangering international peace and security does not require a fortune teller—only a political scientist.

How did I miss that ISIS head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is a rabbi!

I was just reading a conspiracy column in Ammon News by Asaad Aezzona where he says that he is 100% convinced that there was no Muslim or Arab behind the church bombings in Egypt, but Jews from the Mossad.

All of that is barely worth reporting, since stupidity like that is as predictable after a terror attack as night follows day, but he also claimed that ISIS head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is really Rabbi Elliott Shimon.from Israel!

Now, this was interesting.

So a little searching found that a rumor started in 2014 from Veteran's Today "according to sources reputed to originate from Edward Snowden, an actor named Elliot Shimon, a Mossad trained operative" as Veterans Today reported. They buttressed it with a supposed article that claimed that Iranian intelligence traced al-Baghdadi to this "Elliot Shimon."

No less than National Vanguard debunked this story (I'm not linking to VY or NV but they are easy to find.)
The neo-Nazi site said that while finding Jews in power is important, unfounded rumors hurt their cause.

Aezzona seems to have added the "rabbi" part, in the time honored tradition of the Arab conspiracy theories that keep getting more and more absurd with each retelling.

Wikipedia tells that Baghdadi was born in Iraq and includes sources, plus a quote from friends who knew him growing up in Iraq.

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Found here:

10. Passover Knight--He's always different from all other knights.

9. MatzahMatzahMan--Within 18 minutes, this superhero can flatten himself and escape anything, even Pharaoh!

8. KarpasGirl-She makes any veggie taste as good as ice cream--primarily because you're so hungry.

7. Betty Catwoman--her elliptical pupils open and close so quickly, she can see the tiniest speck of hametz in the dark.

6. Man-ishtanah--His Wi-Fi enhanced brain links him invisibly to the Internet so he can "google" the answer to all FAQs.

5. Eli-yahoo--An invisibility cloak allows him to enter any home he chooses without being seen.

4. Napkin Nelly--Every cell in her brittle body absorbs stray liquid, especially wine and food stains on fancy tablecloths.

3. The Bitter Herb--This is your uncle Herb who never stops asking, "When do we eat?"

2. Wonder Woman-This is what we call your mom after doing so much work for the Seder!

1. AfikoMan-He disappears instantly, but when you find him, you've got all the power in the world!

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Yemen news says Israel benefits from Arab problems, implying Israel is behind them

Yemen-24 says that Israel is the beneficiary of all Arab problems. It doesn't make the next logical leap to say that Jews are behind all those problems, but of course its readers are familiar with the Protocols - they don't have to be told.

Here are the Arab problems that supposedly benefit Israel:

The chemical weapons massacre in Idlib: Israeli politicians protested the chemical weapon attack very publicly, therefore making Israel look moral by comparison.

Wow.

Next: Israel benefits from the split between Fatah and Hamas. Obviously.

Third: The Islamic State in the Sinai. "The existence of terrorists in the Sinai to serve Israel's interest directly, but also indirectly ..because Israel wants to wear down the Egyptian army."

Fourth: Chaos in Yemen. This "created an opportunity for Israel to exploit the situation in order to smuggle 17 Jews from Yemen to the Jewish state."

Fifth: Iraq. Israel is supposedly helping Kurds "massacre Muslims" and export oil to Israel.

Oh, here's the picture to illustrate the story, although it came from an Illuminati conspiracy theory site.

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