Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, November 01, 2017

Egyptian court says that Jews have not contributed to world culture or knowledge

Jews praying at the tomb of Yaakov Abuhatzeira before the ban by Egypt

Israeli Ambassador to Egypt David Govrin visited the tomb of Yaakov Abuhatzeira in the Beheira governorate’s city of Damanhour, a security source in Beheira said on Tuesday.

The Israeli ambassador’s visit came amid tight security, and then he left the tomb after 30 minutes, heading to the embassy’s premises.

In December 2014, the Administrative Court of Alexandria banned the annual festivities, previously attended by hundreds of Jews at Abuhatzeira’s gravesite in the Nile Delta city of Damanhur, where the rabbi was buried in 1879 en route to Israel.

Times of Israel reported in 2015 about Egypt's ban on the celebrations of Rabbi Abuhatzeira's birthday:

In December 2010, the last time a large group of 550 Israelis traveled to Egypt, they were met with signs reading “death to the Jews.”

Egypt’s Nasserist party launched a campaign titled “You shall not pass on my land,” calling on the government to disallow any “Zionist” presence in Egypt.

Reports at the time about the Egyptian court case to ban the celebrations noted that the decision mentioned "outraged local sensibilities over the annual festival, saying villagers objected to the mingling of men and women and celebrants' drinking of alcohol."

Egypt's Al Masry al-Youm notes with sadness that the Egyptian court only banned the marking the anniversary of Rabbi Abuhatzeira's birth (which usually falls in January), so they legally couldn't do anything to prevent Govrin's visit.

However, the Al Masry al-Youm article adds some details about the Alexandria court decision that had never been reported in English before:

Among its considerations in the verdict, the court mentioned that the Jews had no influence that is worth mentioning on Egyptian civilization/culture, and they have not contributed at all to human knowledge of the history of civilization/culture.

This isn't a judicial determination of facts. This is raw antisemitism in an official Egyptian court ruling.

Moreover, the court ruling overturned a 2001 Egyptian decision to consider the site a protected Egyptian antiquity and instructed the state to inform UNESCO not to consider the site to be special any more.

In addition, it said that it is forbidden to move the rabbi's remains to Israel.

At the time of the decision in 2014, human rights groups in Egypt were notably silent about the obvious antisemitism around the verdict.

A number of heads of Egyptian human rights organizations and others concerned with religious freedoms refused to comment on the verdict, requesting time to consider it and examine the extent of its contradiction in regard to the religious freedoms of the Jewish comunity in Egypt. Article 64 of the 2014 Egyptian Constitution covers the freedom to hold religious rites.
Some human rights groups have remained silent about the verdict because of social and cultural pressures. Their silence is to prevent the new government from possibly being accused of favoring Israel or allowing the entry of Israeli tourists into Egypt under the pretext of celebrating Abu Hasira's birth should their objection to the court decision force the executive to overturn the ruling.
Ali el-Samman, president of the International Union for Intercultural and Interfaith Dialogue and Peace Education (ADIC), told Al-Monitor, “Everyone is required to respect the judicial verdict and not to comment on it.”

It isn't that human rights organizations don't believe that Jews have human rights. It's just that, by sheer coincidence, in any case where they might be asserted, any Jewish human rights must always take a back seat to some other more important considerations - like the Jew-hating attitudes of the locals and the political situation that makes the topic of Jews touchy.

(h/t Ibn Boutros and Abdallah Mashaallah)

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Haaretz, apparently thinking it cannot find enough Israel haters on its staff, has a guest op-ed from Donald Macintyre who used to cover Gaza for The Independent:

Mahmoud al-Bahtiti, who has been fixing car and truck engines in Gaza City for the past 50 years didn’t vote in the 2006 Palestinian elections because he trusted neither Fatah nor Hamas.

But on Britain, he has definite opinions – or at least, about Britain circa 1917. He doesn't need a centenary commemoration to bring up the Balfour Declaration with a British visitor.

Last year, his business struggling for lack of customers, he asked me a question. Given that "We [Palestinians] are still suffering as a result" of the Declaration, wouldn’t an apology from the British government be in order?

Mahmoud wasn’t trying to get back what is now Israel. In his words: “The Jewish people took their rights after Hitler committed massacres against them. But who will give us our rights? Britain gave our lands to the Israelis and they never cared to give us our rights."

Obviously, Macintyre thinks that Mahmoud is speaking some deep truth here.

But guess what? The Palestinians could have had a state in 1937. And 1947. And 2000. And 2001. And 2008. And even under the Netanyahu government in 2014!

They have rejected every single peace plan. But hateful pseudo-experts like Macintyre know that the Palestinians are without any blame. Let's blame Great Britain for their plight. (News flash, Donald: If there was no Balfour Declaration and the Zionists weren't successful, there would still not be a "Palestinian state." It would have been gobbled up by Jordan, Egypt and Syria. You know this is true because in 1917 there were essentially no such thing as Palestinian nationalism.)

Macintyre isn't done with his idiocy and hate, though:

If the British government wanted, 100 years after Balfour, to rethink its historic role in the conflict, it could begin by persuading its EU partners (while, pre-Brexit, it still has any) to reinforce the one initiative currently in play: The attempt at Hamas-Fatah reconciliation. To commemorate a point in history when the conflict deepened with support for a process of unification, at least on the one, weaker side.

He writes this a day after Hamas was discovered to be building a tunnel into Israel to perform war crimes. War crimes which Fatah condoned. So, Macintyre is saying the best chance for peace is to allow two terrorist groups to unite - and for Britain to encourage it.

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Iraqi Parliament criminalizes display of Israeli flag

From Voice of America:

Following the display of the Israeli flag in pro-independence Kurdish rallies, the Iraqi parliament, known as the Council of Representatives, voted Tuesday to ban the Israeli flag, describing it as a Zionist symbol.

"A dangerous phenomenon, representing the hoisting of the Zionist entity flag during public rallies in front of the media, has recently appeared that breaks the basic constitutional principles of Iraq," Salim al-Jabouri, Speaker of the Iraqi parliament, said while announcing the law that vows criminal prosecution against those who raise the Israeli flag in the country.

"This is an exercise that damages the reputation of Iraq and its nation and the law punishes it by the maximum penalties," the speaker added.

The law was introduced by the parliamentary bloc of the Shiite Supreme Islamic Council and was unanimously approved by other members of the Iraqi parliament. It ordered law enforcement to pursue criminal charges against "those who promote Zionist symbols in public rallies in any form, including the hoisting of the Zionist flag."

Is there anyone more insecure than these people? The idea that Kurds might be Zionist is such a threat to Iraq (whose parliament Shiite bloc are puppets of Iran) that they have to criminalize the Israeli flag?

They sound like 7 year olds who are afraid of "cooties."

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10/31 Links Pt2: Calling Out the Tellers of Anti-Israel Lies; When old and new anti-Semitism come together

From Ian:

Calling Out the Tellers of Anti-Israel Lies

Media coverage of, and academic writings about, Israel routinely betray the intellectual integrity that should govern both. Israel has paid a steep price; the Palestinians perhaps even more so.

It would be difficult to quantify precisely the damage inflicted by the omissions, distortions, and accusations that routinely disfigure portrayals of Israel. Still, the steady flow of malicious propaganda posing as news and scholarship poisons the debate about a complex and tragic clash between two peoples. The frequent characterizations of Israel as a moral and political monster — a state supposedly guilty of colonialism, apartheid, and all manner of war crimes and crimes against humanity including forced population transfer, ethnic cleansing, and genocide — reinforce Palestinian expectations that their demands be met immediately and in full while bolstering Israeli suspicions that they can’t get a fair hearing in the court of public opinion and can’t secure a just deal under the international community’s auspices. Gross untruths about Israel drive the parties further apart, not only defaming Israel but also setting back the legitimate interests of the Palestinians, whose cause they are contrived to advance.

Emphasizing your side’s merits and the other side’s defects is only human, and partisan reporting is an old story. The new story is that in service, for the most part, to progressive political goals, Western journalists and professors have flouted their professional obligations in order to erect an edifice of falsehoods about Israel.

To catalogue the falsehoods, expose their authors, and set the record straight requires prodigious research and painstaking documentation, a grasp of contemporary political realities, and a synoptic, historically informed understanding of the larger Israeli-Arab conflict. With the 2014 publication in Hebrew of “Tasiyat Hashkarim,” which became a bestseller in Israel, journalist Ben-Dror Yemini established that he was the man for the task. His “Industry of Lies: Media, Academia, and the Israeli-Arab Conflict,” just appearing in English translation from Hebrew, will prove indispensable to those politicians and policy makers, journalists and professors, and members of the general public who believe that getting the story right in the Middle East is inseparable from advancing the cause of peace.

Ben-Dror Yemini: When old and new anti-Semitism come together

The Jews in the United States, we are told again and again, are in a wonderful state. Indeed, in most Jewish communities, especially in New York, the number of anti-Semitic incidents is infinitesimal. The Jews are living a good life.

But something is simmering below the surface. During Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and over the past year as well, the radical right wing has been the main star of incidents anti-Semitic in nature. This Right should not be discounted. It was dangerous in the past, and it could be dangerous again.

Something else is happening, however, and not just below the surface. Within several days, three things happened in the United States that were completely unrelated, apart from the fact they likely won’t be recorded as anti-Semitic incidents, although I doubt anyone thinks otherwise.

Let’s start with Alan Dershowitz, a well-known figure, who has been visiting campuses. It’s worth noting he isn’t right-wing. His worldview, in Israeli terms, would classify him somewhere around the Zionist Union. He is affiliated with the Democratic Party, and he is perhaps the finest speaker against the campaign to demonize Israel.

About two weeks ago, he gave a lecture at Berkeley. A week later, the local student-run newspaper, The Daily Californian, published a cartoon showing Dershowitz addressing an audience as a liberal presenting his case for Israel, but all the audience can only see is his face. In the hidden part, Dershowitz has an IDF soldier on his palm shooting a Palestinian boy, and another Palestinian boy is being crushed under his foot.

One can cry out “freedom of speech” of course, but it’s kind of difficult to hide the image of child-murdering Jews. Old anti-Semitism and new anti-Semitism in a joint performance. And it’s happening in the stronghold of progress, Berkeley.

Iraq bans Israeli flags after Kurds wave them at independence rallies

The Iraqi parliament voted on Tuesday to criminalize the flying of Israeli flags after the banners were held aloft at a number of Kurdish independence rallies ahead of a referendum in September.

The vote to ban the flags from public spaces came at the request of Ammar al-Hakim, the Shiite leader of the Citizen Bloc, the Iraqi news agency AlSumaria reported.

Israel has been among the only countries to openly support an independent Kurdish state, and many Kurds have welcomed the support, drawing accusations from Arab leaders that the referendum was a Zionist plot.

Turkey fiercely opposed the referendum and has threatened sanctions against the region, reflecting its worries about its own sizable Kurdish minority.

Iran and Iraq’s central government in Baghdad also expressed alarm over the referendum and have refused to recognize its validity.

Say that "peace" means "destroy Israel" enough times, soon people will believe it

An apparel company called "Wear the Peace" just came out with their newest collection: a line of clothing with a map of "Palestine" as a folded keffiyeh - and no Israel.

But they want peace! They say it right in their very name! Why should anyone think that a peace organization that calls for ethnically cleansing Jews from Israel is anything but peaceful?

(h/t Mitchell)

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1915 encyclopedia describes the characteristics of Jews

From the New International Encyclopedia, 1915 edition, published by Dodd, Mead, Volume 12, under "Jews:"

Besides the obvious antisemitic stereotypes - all the more striking because this was written to be the 1915 equivalent of "politically correct" - there is one other striking part of this description.

In may ways, it describes the exact opposite of the Zionists who were starting to rebuild Israel.

They reveled in physical labor to build their homeland. They were soldiers and pioneers rather than martyrs. They didn't care about social position. (And the Zionists of the time were not religious.)

No one in 1915 could have imagined the Jews, of all people, would build a vibrant nation only 33 years later.

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10/31 Links Pt1: Israeli deterrence in a new Middle East; Year Zero: The Palestinians and the Balfour Declaration

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Our crazy world this week

Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Video Network the Democrats’ Russian boomerang (which of course has been generally ignored or scorned), VP Mike Pence’s initiative to support the persecuted Christians of the Middle East, and the Catalan crisis that has erupted in Spain.

Year Zero: The Palestinians and the Balfour Declaration

For the Palestinians, the year zero is not 1948, when the State of Israel came into being, but 1917, when Great Britain issued, in the November of that year, the Balfour Declaration — expressing support for the establishment of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine.

So central is the Balfour Declaration to Palestinian political identity that the “Zionist invasion” is officially deemed to have begun in 1917 — not in 1882, when the first trickle of Jewish pioneers from Russia began arriving, nor in 1897, when the Zionist movement held its first congress in Basel, nor in the late 1920s, when thousands of German Jews fleeing the rise of Nazism chose to go to Palestine.

The year 1917 is the critical date because that is when, as an anti-Zionist might say, the Zionist hand slipped effortlessly into the British imperial glove. It is a neat, simple historical proposition upon which the entire Palestinian version of events rests: an empire came to our land and gave it to foreigners, we were dispossessed, and for five generations now, we have continued to resist.

Moreover, it is given official sanction in the Palestine National Covenant of 1968, in which article 6 defines Jews who “were living permanently in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion” as “Palestinians” — an invasion that is dated as 1917 in the covenants’ notes.

As the Balfour Declaration’s centenary approaches on November 2, tes theme is much in evidence. There is now a dedicated Balfour Apology Campaign in the UK, seeking both British government contrition and British taxpayer-funded reparations for the supposed handing of Palestine, in the words of one British Mandate-era Arab organization, into “the claws of the Jews.”

'The criminal Balfour Declaration'

The Palestinians - an invented people - have not only tried to deny the rights of Jews to the land they were promised, they have also tried to trace their roots to the Canaanites; they claim Jesus was Palestinian; the Jewish Temple was built in Sinai, not in Jerusalem; the ancient Israelite kings were actually Muslims, and the Jews are just a melee of people that will forever endure God's wrath; they are actually of Khazar origin, they are not entitled to a homeland, but perhaps they can live as second-class citizens under Islam.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has stood fast in the face of the annoying Palestinian efforts to extract an apology. Instead, she has voiced pride in the declaration and said there were no grounds to walk it back.

The Balfour Declaration is not the basis for Israel. The state was founded based on the historical and religious rights of the people of Israel on this holy soil.

Because the promise of a Jewish national home is anchored in the three monotheistic religions, the Palestinians who are fighting the facts must also sue the biblical prophets, Jesus, and especially Allah and the Prophet Muhammad, who promised this land to the people of Israel and never mentioned the Palestinians.

Thursday is the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, yet after 100 years people still argue over it and Abbas is still asking Great Britain for an apology.

What did the Balfour Declaration actually do?
And what did the Balfour Declaration recognize?

The second question is no more settled than the first.

Arthur Balfour. Credit: Wikipedia

We all are familiar with the language of the declaration:

His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

But while the declaration seems to be talking about the future, in The Case For Israel, Alan Dershowitz writes that by the time the Balfour Declaration was published in 1917, that national home already existed:

Even before the Balfour Declaration of 1917, there was a de facto Jewish national home in Palestine consisting of several dozens of Jewish moshavim and kibbutzim in western and northeastern Palestine, as well as in Jewish cities such as Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Safad. The Jewish refugees in Palestine had established this homeland on the ground without the assistance of any colonial or imperialist powers. They had relied on their own hard work in building an infrastructure and cultivating land they had legally purchased.

This was an area under Ottoman control until the end of WWI. Even before WWI, there was no sovereign state, just a collection of districts under the control of foreign Ottoman control.

Dershowitz's interpretation is not his own. In the British White Paper of 1922, Winston Churchill wrote about the Jewish National Home that had already been established in Palestine:

During the last two or three generations the Jews have recreated in Palestine a community, now numbering 80,000, of whom about one fourth are farmers or workers upon the land. This community has its own political organs; an elected assembly for the direction of its domestic concerns; elected councils in the towns; and an organization for the control of its schools. It has its elected Chief Rabbinate and Rabbinical Council for the direction of its religious affairs. Its business is conducted in Hebrew as a vernacular language, and a Hebrew Press serves its needs. It has its distinctive intellectual life and displays considerable economic activity. This community, then, with its town and country population, its political, religious, and social organizations, its own language, its own customs, its own life, has in fact "national" characteristics. When it is asked what is meant by the development of the Jewish National Home in Palestine, it may be answered that it is not the imposition of a Jewish nationality upon the inhabitants of Palestine as a whole, but the further development of the existing Jewish community, with the assistance of Jews in other parts of the world, in order that it may become a centre in which the Jewish people as a whole may take, on grounds of religion and race, an interest and a pride. But in order that this community should have the best prospect of free development and provide a full opportunity for the Jewish people to display its capacities, it is essential that it should know that it is in Palestine as of right and not on the sufferance. That is the reason why it is necessary that the existence of a Jewish National Home in Palestine should be internationally guaranteed, and that it should be formally recognized to rest upon ancient historic connection. [emphasis added]

Sir Winston Churchill, by Yousuf Karsh. Source: Wikipedia

The Balfour Declaration was not addressed to a foreign group, giving them permission to enter the land. On the contrary, it was recognition of what Jews -- who have an indigenous connection to the land -- had already accomplished and would continue to develop.

As Dershowitz puts it:

The political and legal seeds were were thus sown for a two- (or three- ) state solution to the "Palestinian problem." This was a perfect example of self-determination at work.

This is more than an abstract theory.

The 1925 Larousse French dictionary had an entry for "Palestine":

Here is a closeup view of the beginning of the entry:

This translates as:

PALESTINE, the land of Syria, between Phenicia in the North, the Dead Sea in the South, the Mediterranean in the West, and the Syrian Desert in the East, watered by the Jordan. It is a narrow strip of land, narrowed between the sea, Lebanon, and traversed by the Jordan, which throws itself into the Dead Sea. It is also called, in Scripture, Land of Chanaan, Promised Land and Judea . It is today [in 1925] a Jewish state under the mandate of England; 770,000 inhabitants. Jerusalem capital.

Already in 1925, before WWII and before the Israeli War of Independence, there was a recognition of a Jewish state called Palestine, a state of 770,000 inhabitants that included both Jews and Muslims. It's capital was Jerusalem, which did not have that designation under Ottoman rule.

Not everyone may have recognized Palestine as such, certainly the Arabs did not, but the ideas expressed by Churchill were more than abstract and had gained a certain acceptance.

Even US President Woodrow Wilson, who was a champion of self-determination and opposed British-French plans on dividing the Ottoman Empire after WWI, saw a Jewish state in Palestine as self-determination:

I am persuaded that the Allied nations, with the fullest concurrence of our own government and people, are agreed that in Palestine shall be laid the foundations of a Jewish commonwealth.

Woodrow Wilson. Library of Congress.
Source: Wikipedia

The culmination of that self-determination -- with a state for the Arabs -- was prevented by war and a refusal to accept even the presence of Jews on the land.

So, what were the Jews doing in Palestine before the Lord Balfour came out with his famous declaration? They were not waiting around to enter as invited guests. Instead, they worked on a land to which they have a 3,000 year history. Jews with indigenous roots to the land worked to re-establish it as a sovereign state, something it had never been since the time of the Romans.

Jews made a choice.
The Arabs made their own choice too.

Hat tip: EG

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Even Palestinian academics admit that it is impossible to sue Britain for Balfour

A surprising article in Al Quds -in fact, its top story, this morning, discusses whether there is any possible legal basis to sue Great Britain over the Balfour Declaration, as the Palestinian leadership has been threatening since an Arab League summit last July.

The verdict? There is no possible way that the ICC or ICJ would hear such a case.

According to Bir Zeit University international law professor Yasser Al-Amouri, there is no possibility of litigation before the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, since the Balfour Declaration is not within the jurisdiction of either court. The International Court of Justice considers legal matters on the basis of the consent of the parties to the dispute to resolve the case, which is highly unlikely that Great Britain will consent to being sued there. The International Criminal Court, is unlikely to say that it has jurisdiction over a case like the Balfour Declaration, for more than one reason, including the fact that it was written in 1917 and that it seems highly unlikely that Balfour is a war crime or genocidal.

However, Amouri says, the PLO can use diplomatic means to pressure Britain to issue an apology, which would be considered a great victory.

An Al Monitor article last summer described a possible (albeit also unlikely) path for diplomatic pressure on Britain:

Expert in international law Hanna Issa told Al-Monitor...“I expect the PA to follow these successive steps; it should first resort to the [UN] Security Council to adopt a resolution condemning the Balfour Declaration — which will [most probably] be vetoed by Britain since it is a permanent member of the Security Council. [In this case], the PA should then address the UN General Assembly and demand it to consider the case in accordance with the Uniting for Peace resolution [No. 377] issued in 1950, which gives the UN [General Assembly] the right to intervene if the Security Council fails to exercise [its responsibility] should one member [Britain, in this case] use its veto. The resolution gives the UN the right to review the case and make recommendations to take collective measures aimed at maintaining peace and security, and these measures include the formation of a special court to look into the case.”

That is sort of insane. The Uniting for Peace resolution to override the Security Council has been rarely invoked, and it sure won't be for something as stupid as this.

In the end, this is another stunt by Mahmoud Abbas, who has a history of preferring stunts than actual leadership and working for peace. One can only hope that Great Britain and the rest of the West will not only not be influenced by such threats, but would learn from them how unserious the Palestinians are about actual peace.

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Today's funeral for some of the terrorists killed in the tunnel

Once again, the most striking unreported story about Palestinians isn't what some of them are saying, but what none of the are not.

The only purpose of a tunnel reaching under the Gaza border into Israel is to perform war crimes. Whether the crimes are to kidnap civilians, kidnap soldiers, or to pop out of the tunnel and shoot everyone on sight, there is no justification from a human rights or international law perspective to these tunnels.

Looking through Palestinian media this morning, however, and you cannot find a single person who is against such tunnels.

Palestinian leaders rail about "international law" and "justice" at the UN and international forums all the time. They say that they want Israel to be treated as pariahs because of an alleged lack of "justice."

While there is no shortage of Israeli and Western leftists who happily adopt this narrative, there is an absolute (or near-absolute) dearth of Palestinians who are writing op-eds or Facebook posts or tweets who say, you know what? Tunnels are a violation of international law too, just sayin'?

Fatah's own Al Aqsa Brigades issued another statement saying "the occupation wants to drag the resistance to the square of direct escalation by performing ugly crimes and new massacres against our people. The resistance today fully aware of the behaviors of the occupation and therefore will respond to the crime with harsh consequences that will be painful to the occupation."

Ma'an, the independent press agency, refers to the dead terrorists as "martyrs" and describes the attack on the tunnel not as occurring in Israel but "east of Khan Younis" to inflame passions of Palestinians as if this was an attack on Gaza.

The Gaza Ministry of Health is claiming that Israel used poison gas in the tunnels, and is calling for an international investigation. Because, of course, they care so much about international law.

Of course, Islamic Jihad and Hamas and the other terror groups all issued statements about how this "crime" will not go unpunished. No Palestinian is decrying this "cycle of violence" that they are threatening to start.

The head of the secular and pro-democracy Palestinian National Initiative, Mustafa Barghouti, described the bombing as "a crime aimed at reconciliation and aimed at provocation. It shows the criminal and provocative nature of the Netanyahu government and its ministers who want to use Palestinian blood for their internal rivalries."

Not a word against the idea of terrorists building tunnels into Israel to perform kidnapping and massacres.No chiding Islamic Jihad for provoking Israel to defend itself. Israel's actions, across the board, are portrayed as aggressive and unwarranted.

The media reports Palestinian claims. It never reports the tacit Palestinian support, across the board, for terror, by the absence of even mild criticism for terror in cases like this.

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Mahmoud Abbas' "moderate" Fatah praises dead tunnel terrorists

Fatah has condemned Israel's blowing up a terror tunnel that reached into Israel from Gaza, killing at least 7 Islamic Jihad and Hamas terrorists.

Count the lies from the PA's official news agency Wafa (Arabic)::

RAMALLAH, 10-30-2017 (WAFA) - The Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah) condemned the Israeli crime that targeted our people in the Gaza Strip, killing 7 civilians and injuring 14 others.

Fatah said in a statement issued Monday evening that their blood would not be wasted and that the perpetrators would not escape justice.

It wasn't a crime. The tunnel was targeted, not people. Israel didn't attack Gaza, the explosion was on Israeli territory. And Hamas/Islamic Jihad admit freely that the dead were "militants."

Wafa in English adds:

Some apparently died from inhaling poisonous gas reportedly fired by the Israeli air force at the tunnel.

Yeah, the IAF shoots poison gas rockets. In Israeli territory.

The Fatah terrorist wing, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, celebrated the "martyrdom" of the terrorists and said:

We affirm that the blood of the martyrs will not be wasted and that the Zionist enemy bears the consequences of this sinful crime. We also affirm that the blood of the martyrs will be the fuel for the continuation of the resistance until the occupation is defeated from all of Palestine.

The Fatah Facebook page showed a picture of the dead "martyrs" saying that they are alive in paradise, and claiming that they are smiling in death.

Mahmoud Abbas' party, and his government's official news agency, supports terrorism and lies as easily as they speak.

These are the moderates that Israel is supposed to make peace with.

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10/30 Links Pt2: Human rights or racketeering?; Celebrating Israeli-Australian friendship

From Ian:

UN Watch: Human rights or racketeering?

In what one human-rights activist characterizes as blackmail, the United Nations Human Rights Council is reportedly pressuring a major Israeli telecom to cease operations in disputed areas of the Jewish state or face the possibility of being designated a human-rights abuser.

It's part of a broader effort — referred to as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement — to chill businesses serving Israelis in West Bank settlements, according to The Washington Free Beacon.

The CEO of Bezeq received a letter from the Human Rights Council, accusing the company of providing services for Israelis in presumably Palestinian territory. Up to 30 U.S. companies were similarly contacted by the council, according to Anne Bayefsky, senior editor of Human Rights Voices.

The council is threatening to add the companies to a database of presumably human-rights-abusing businesses working with Israel.

“The database is to include companies that ‘directly or indirectly' are connected to Israeli settlements,” Ms. Bayefsky told The Beacon. “It is nothing short of an assault on the economic welfare of the state of Israel, period.”

UNHRC to discuss Israeli women's exclusion

Supposed exclusion of women in Israel will be one of the main items on the agenda of the United Nations Human Rights Council—tasked with implementing the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women—when it convenes in Geneva on Tuesday.

A delegate headed by Ministry of Justice Director-General Emi Palmor headed to Geneva to counter the claims, as the ministry is part of implementing the international convention to which it acceded in 1991.

The UN Human Rights Council, which received information about women's exclusion in Israel, forwarded some preliminary questions to the delegation, which was instructed to obfuscate nothing as to the problem's breadth.

The delegation will be reporting to the UN on tackling women's exclusion in public transportation, the issue of "decency" on billboards, attitudes of the religious establishment and Haredi parties towards women and the situation in cemeteries, clinics, hospitals, public libraries, public functions, the Western Wall, the media and academia.

The Human Rights Council, whose members currently include Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, will also deal with exclusionary aspects relating to domestic abuse and women's access to the courts system, an area in which Israel has made significant progress with pending legislation for criminalizing clients of prostitution, providing legal assistance to victims of serious sexual assault and fighting human trafficking.

“Where They Have Burned Books, They Will End Up Burning People”

Heinrich Heine’s chillingly prophetic statement that where books had been burnt people would eventually be too is now engraved on the “Bibliotek” memorial in the Bebelplatz square on the Unter den Linden boulevard in Berlin. This memorial commemorates the infamous May 10, 1933 book burning of more than 25,000 volumes there, which was presided over by the most intellectual of the Nazi leaders, Dr. Joseph Goebbels. Authors whose books were thrown into the flames by university students included such “enemies of the German spirit” as Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and, of course, Heine himself. The memorial, designed by the Israeli artist Micha Ullman, derives its considerable power from its mute depiction of library shelves emptied of their books. Heine’s remark is a powerful and oft-quoted warning about the connection between barbarism and human evil, but its literary context has been almost entirely forgotten.

Heine’s aphorism appears in one of his earliest works, Almansor, a play written during 1820–1821 and published in 1823, when he was only 26. It takes place in Granada, after the Andalusian city had been conquered by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. The title character is a young Muslim who fled the city before its occupation by the Christians and has now clandestinely returned to try to rescue his beloved Zuleika, who has been forcibly converted to Catholicism and is now called Donna Clara. He meets with the remnants of the Muslim population in the city, who tell him about the atrocities perpetrated by the conquerors: killings, forced conversions, the introduction of the Inquisition. His friend Hassan laments how many young Muslims converted, some of them even willingly, “as the new heavens beckoned to many sinners.” Finally, Hassan tells Almansor that the Grand Inquisitor Jimenez had also ordered the burning of the Qur’an in the town’s square, to which Almansor responds, “Where they have burned books, they will end up burning people.”

Thus, in a play aimed at a German, mainly Christian, audience, Heinrich Heine, born to a Jewish family in Düsseldorf, criticizes Christian Spain for the burning of the Qur’an. Modern German poets did occasionally show admiration for Islamic culture, as, for instance, did Goethe in his West-Eastern Divan, but Heine’s lamentation stands out. It is emblematic not only of his empathy and his unusual insight into human affairs, but also, perhaps especially, of his conflicted identity as one of the first German Jewish intellectuals to enter the Republic of Letters.

Abbas still trying to hitch his wagon to Arafat's horse

One of the consistent themes of the Fatah Facebook page is the constant posters and videos of Yasir Arafat.

The reason is obviously because Arafat was a charismatic leader who unified the always-fractious Palestinians, a leader that has never been replaced.

But the secondary, and hilarious, theme of the Fatah page is that Abbas is that successor.

At every opportunity they will show Abbas and Arafat together to confer legitimacy on Abbas that he clearly doesn't have - because if he did, they wouldn't have to keep doing this.

For the past week or so the Fatah page has been obsessing on the 13th anniversary of Arafat's death, complete with a logo that shows exactly how much respect they have for the two-state solution.

But they have to make sure that Abbas gets some of the reflected glory:

"Staying true to the covenant"

All while they claim that Israel - the state that would disappear in every one of their maps - is the one that is killing peace:

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Which means, of course, that their concept of "peace" is one where there is no Israel.

Abbas' party's support for terror, their obvious lies and their pathetic attempts at propaganda are public and obvious even without knowing Arabic. The Western world chooses to be blind.

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

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When an antisemitic picture is worth a thousand words: Michael Chikindas and Linda Sarsour (Petra Marquardt-Bigman)

By Petra Marquardt-Bigman

Most of you have probably already heard about Michael Chikindas, a professor at Rutgers’ Department of Food Science. His research interests sound professional and include “Bacillus subtilis and lactic acid bacteria spp. as a host for overproduction of biomolecules,” but the professor’s problem is an acute and apparently untreated overproduction of bigotry. His numerous vile posts on Facebook were first exposed on Israellycool and then reported by many other sites, including The Algemeiner and Tablet. The writer John-Paul Pagano, who authored the Tablet piece, also posted an archive with screenshots of the Facebook posts Chikindas shared with the world – though he apparently didn’t have many Facebook “friends” who noticed. (As I am writing this, I see that John-Paul Pagano keeps finding more.)

While most of the material is shockingly vile, I was particularly struck by one image – because it could have served as the perfect illustration of one of Linda Sarsour’s tweets that I documented earlier this year. As I noted back then, Sarsour wrote several tweets with a similar message, but the one I immediately recalled when I saw the Chikindas post is: “Homeless on the streets, Americans who haven’t recovered from natural disasters, unemployment, and we have extra $$$ for Israel. Smh. [Shaking my head].”

The interesting thing is of course that the image Chikindas posted will be recognized by most people as antisemitic, while the text Sarsour posted will be widely justified as legitimate criticism of US support for Israel. Some people will also argue that Sarsour didn’t blame Jews – not even “Zionists” – for the “extra $$$ for Israel” and that it is therefore entirely unfair to compare her tweet with the vile image posted by Chikindas.

However, this argument works only if you look at this one tweet in isolation, because Sarsour posted plenty of tweets suggesting that Israel was either controlling or corrupting US lawmakers. As I pointed out in my documentation, Sarsour repeatedly insinuated that American politicians who back strong bonds between the US and Israel must be suspected of dual loyalties or corruption. Echoing the “Israel-firster” slurs – which caused much controversy a few years ago and were widely considered as reflecting antisemitic tropes – Sarsour suggested in July 2014 that “Israel should give free citizenship to US politicians. They are more loyal to Israel than they are to the American people.” She also asserted that there was an “awkward moment when the White House goes off AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] script and says ‘Israel must end the occupation;’” according to Sarsour, this meant for the White House that “#theyareintroublenow.” Sarsour apparently also believes that AIPAC lobbies to get the US to “revolve around Israel;” she therefore demanded in 2012: “Our country’s future should not revolve around #Israel. #aipac2012.” Referring to Hillary Clinton, Sarsour wondered last year, “What was in Hilary’s goodie bag at AIPAC. Had to be real nice after that speech that almost bought her a prime minister seat in Israel.” And at the end of last year, Sarsour reacted to a statement by Senator Lindsey Graham with the question “Are you a US Senator or do you work for Israel?”

It is hard to imagine that someone who is as hyperactive politically as Sarsour would not know that US support for Israel enjoys broad backing among Americans because Israel is widely regarded as “a clear strategic asset to the United States,” and the bilateral relationship is therefore widely seen as based on “tangible, steadily increasing security and economic interests.”

Seen in this context, the message conveyed by Sarsour in her repeated efforts to suggest [http://archive.is/kZpAj] that US military assistance to Israel comes at the expense of health care, education funding and various other social benefits for US citizens is not that much different from the message Chikindas tried to convey with the vile image of a greedy Jew stealing money from an American family begging on the streets.

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10/30 Links Pt1: UNRWA demands end to tunnel building under its schools; Iran: weapons-grade uranium only 4 days away

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The malevolent guest at London's Balfour dinner

When Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn refused to attend this week’s dinner in London to mark the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, a dinner to which Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been invited as the guest of Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May, Corbyn said Labour’s shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry would attend in his place.

Now remarks made by Thornberry inescapably imply that, like Corbyn, she too regrets the fact that Israel was ever created. Instead she supports its mortal enemies whose agenda remains Israel’s destruction.

In an interview published today with the Middle East Eye news site, Thornberry said the UK should not celebrate the Balfour Declaration, which pledged Britain’s support for a Jewish national home, because there is not yet a Palestinian state.

“I don’t think we celebrate the Balfour Declaration but I think we have to mark it because I think it was a turning point in the history of that area and I think probably the most important way of marking it is to recognise Palestine.”

And she went on to blame Israel for the fact that there was no state of Palestine.

The fact that she paid the usual lip-service to “two viable secure safe states” cuts no ice whatsoever. If she believes that the original commitment by the British government to restoring the Jewish people to their own rightful homeland is not something to be celebrated in itself, the deep hostility to Israel as a Jewish state that this inescapably implies vitiates any pious backing for “two viable states” side by side.

Her support for the existence of Israel is, by her own lights, conditional on the existence of a state of Palestine. She thus displays her profound ignorance of Jewish, Arab and Middle Eastern history by assuming that people called the Palestinians were entitled to the same promise of a national homeland.

Balfour was height of our diplomacy, Oren tells Christian audience

The 1917 Balfour Declaration viewing the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine was the high-water mark of the Jewish people's diplomacy, deputy minister Michael Oren said.

"It was the first time the international community recognized the right of a Jewish people to a homeland in our tribal lands, the Land of Israel," he told Erick Stakelbeck on the Trinity Broadcasting Network's “The Watchman” show presented by Christians United for Israel, over the weekend. "It was the height of our diplomacy."

Stakelbeck, the host of the 30-minute weekly show on issues of national security and the Middle East, which is geared toward an Evangelical Christian audience, asked his guest to comment on the "modern-day miracle" of the State of Israel and the reasons behind the New York-born Oren decision's to realize the prophecy of immigrating to Israel.

"I grew up in a working-class neighborhood where I was the only Jewish kid, and I was often the victim of antisemitism," he said. After his father and brother returned from Europe after fighting on Normandy Beach and liberating Nazi concentration camps, they would remind the young Oren of the importance of a strong Jewish state.

"It had a big impact one me" he said. "And I just always thought of myself as being extraordinarily fortunate to be alive at the time in my people's history where we did have this state, where we can sit in [the Knesset] here – and have a sovereign flag that represents a strong people with a formidable army."

Discussing Israel's strengthening relationship with the US and how it's gaining the upper hand in its struggle against anti-Israel forces around the world, the former ambassador to the US said the difference between the Trump and Obama administrations is glaring.

Boris Johnson: I Am Proud of Britain's Part in Creating Israel

On November 2, 1917, my predecessor Lord Balfour sat in the Foreign Secretary's office and composed a letter that laid the foundations of the State of Israel.

On the Centenary, I will say what I believe: the Balfour Declaration was indispensable to the creation of a great nation. In the seven decades since its birth, Israel has prevailed over what has sometimes been the bitter hostility of neighbors to become a liberal democracy and a dynamic hi-tech economy.

In a region where many have endured authoritarianism and misrule, Israel has always stood out as a free society. Like every country, Israel has faults and failings. But it strives to live by the values in which I believe.

I served a stint at a kibbutz in my youth, and I saw enough to understand the miracle of Israel: the bonds of hard work, self-reliance, and an audacious and relentless energy that hold together a remarkable country.

Most of all, there is the incontestable moral goal: to provide a persecuted people with a safe and secure homeland. So I am proud of Britain's part in creating Israel and Her Majesty's Government will mark the Centenary of the Balfour Declaration on Thursday in that spirit.

I am also heartened that the new generation of Arab leaders does not see Israel in the same light as their predecessors. I trust that more will be done against the twin scourges of terrorism and anti-Semitic incitement.

In the final analysis, it is Israelis and Palestinians who must negotiate the details and write their own chapter in history. A century on, Britain will give whatever support we can in order to close the ring and complete the unfinished business of the Balfour Declaration.