Yes, Fatah has turned Theresa May into an honorary Jew!
See more from PMW.
A short interview (with Tom Gross) while yet another anti-Israel protest takes places in London, with buses organized by the trade unions and others bringing in protestors from all around Britain.
Meanwhile there have been no protests for the 600,000 Rohingya Muslims made refugees in recent weeks by the military in Burma, which has had British arms and training and like Israel is another former British colony, and has been carrying out systematic ethnic cleansing and a scorched earth policy against Rohingya.
Nor for the 160,000 Kurdish men, women and children forced from their homes in the last two weeks by Iranian-controlled Shia militia in Kirkuk.
For over two years now, partly using British weapons, the Saudis and other gulf Arabs have been bombing civilians in Yemen, leading to mass starvation and malaria inflicting millions of people there. There hasn’t been a single protest in London. And the list goes on...
BBC presenter Andrew Marr has claimed in an interview with the visiting Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that “a lot of Jewish friends” and “a lot of Jewish community leaders have said that Israeli government policies are feeding antisemitism in Britain.IsraellyCool: Binyamin Netanyahu Handles ‘Hostile’ Andrew Marr Interview Like a Boss
Mr Marr asked Mr Netanyahu: “Can I ask you about the condition of Jews in this country because I’ve got a lot of Jewish friends and there are a lot of Jewish community leaders who are very worried about your government and they say that particularly the settlements issue has made it much, much harder to defend Israel in this country.” However, Mr Marr then added: “We have always had antisemitism in Britain but it has been quite quiet for a long time and it is back on the rise.”
Mr Netanyahu correctly answered: “Well, you know, I wouldn’t blame Jews for antisemitism any more than I would blame blacks for racial hatred stirred against them, or anti-gay hatred. It’s because of what they are.” Mr Netanyahu appeared to have more to say, but Mr Marr interjected: “There’s a distinction between Jews and policies.” Mr Marr was correct to draw such a distinction, which makes his suggestion that many Jews think that rising antisemitism in Britain has been fuelled by the political positions adopted by the Israeli government so extremely clumsy.
There is no evidence that Israeli government policy, which has not changed terribly markedly in recent years, has had any impact on rising hate crime against British Jews, nor is there any evidence that there is any policy that the Israeli government could adopt to stem the tide of hatred aimed at British Jews by the neo-Nazis of the far-right, the extremists of the far-left, or Islamists inspired by groups such as ISIS.
I am not sure if it just me, but BBC television presenter Andrew Marr comes across as both goofy and smug. And he would not be out of place in a James Bond film as Q, showing Bond the latest gadgets.Benjamin Netanyahu on the Israeli Palestinian "conflict".
Be that as it may, he recently had Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on to discuss the Middle East conflict. He tried to play “bad cop” – much like Tim Sebastian used to do on HARDTalk, and still does on DW’s Conflict Zone.
Bibi always give a good account of himself but I’d venture to say this was one of his most masterful performances.
Let us remember, there are 2 halves of #Balfour, 2nd of which has not been fulfilled. There is unfinished business. @AmbassadorAllen #Israel
1. His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people
2. nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine
3. or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
The association of the policy of the Balfour Declaration with the Mandate System implied the belief that Arab hostility to the former would presently be overcome, owing to the economic advantages which Jewish immigration was expected to bring to Palestine as a whole.The entire idea of partition is antithetical to Balfour who anticipated the Jewish National Home on all of Palestine. Peel attempted to change the rules.
Guarantees as to the rights of the Holy Places and free access thereto (as provided in Article 13 of the existing Mandate), as to transit across the mandated area, and as to non-discrimination in fiscal, economic and other matters should be maintained in accordance with the principles of the Mandate System. But the policy of the Balfour Declaration would not apply; and no question would arise of balancing Arab against Jewish claims or vice versa. All the inhabitants of the territory would stand on an equal footing. The only official language" would be that of the Mandatory Administration. Good and just government without regard for sectional interests would be its basic principle.Balfour implies the the Jewish national home would administer the holy places and allow full access (as Israel does today.) Peel wrests that right away.
Two million people in Gaza have been held hostage to political power struggles for far too long, while their most basic needs and rights have been trampled or overlooked. The parties responsible for this ongoing reality include the feuding Palestinian authorities in Gaza and Ramallah, as well as the Egyptian government, but first and foremost Israel, the only party that has maintained extensive control over the Strip for the past 50 years.(Gisha never said a word against Hamas' role in restricting people's movement until this blog shamed them a few years ago.)
Leader’s Advisor, Ali Akbar Velayati, said certain countries of the region were obsessed with normalization of relations with the Zionist regime.If Arab countries don't consider Israel an enemy, then Iran's desire to lead the Islamic world is a failure. But it has no cards to play to make the Arab nations turn towards Iran, especially given how it is acting in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.
Iranian Leader’s Aide Ali Akbar Velayati made the remarks while addressing the second International Union of Resistance Scholars on Thursday in Beirut.
The official said the opening ceremony of the meeting had been accompanied a message by Leader of Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, who called for continued fight against Israel; “the issue reveals the great importance attached to the Palestinian issue by Iran’s Leader.”
“Gathering of great scholars of the Islamic world in one place indicates that resistance, and not compromise, remains as the only path to freedom of Palestine,” he continued.
The secretary general of the Islamic Awakening Assembly said that some of the countries in the region were unashamedly after normalizing relations with Israel.
He emphasized that, driven by the Iranian Leader’s guidelines, Palestine will always remain the first issue of the Islamic world.
To mark the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Mahmoud Abbas, the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority published an op-ed in the British Guardian newspaper. After castigating Lord Balfour for promising "a land that was not his to promise" he went on to describe the Palestinian people as "a proud nation with a rich heritage of ancient civilisations, and the cradle of the Abrahamic faiths." [The Guardian, Nov. 1, 2017]
Contradicting Abbas' historical revision, just a day before, PA official TV broadcast an interview with the historian Abd Al-Ghani Salameh, who explained that in 1917 there was no Palestinian people.
During the broadcast, the host of the program asked:
"There always was a historical struggle over Palestine, and many wanted to rule it. How did the aspirations to rule affect the Palestinian existence, the Palestinians' options, and the Palestinians' possibilities of development?"
Salameh responded:
"Before the Balfour Promise (i.e., Declaration) when the Ottoman rule ended (1517-1917), Palestine's political borders as we know them today did not exist, and there was nothing called a Palestinian people with a political identity as we know today, since Palestine's lines of administrative division stretched from east to west and included Jordan and southern Lebanon, and like all peoples of the region [the Palestinians] were liberated from the Turkish rule and immediately moved to colonial rule, without forming a Palestinian people's political identity." [Official PA TV, Nov. 1, 2017]
When it comes to terrorism emanating from the Gaza Strip, most public attention usually focuses on Hamas, the group that rules the coastal enclave. But Israel’s latest discovery and destruction of a cross-border attack tunnel has brought to light the role of Gaza’s second-largest terror faction, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
The IDF is on high alert for the possibility of revenge attacks from PIJ following Israel’s destruction of the tunnel on October 30. PIJ dug the tunnel, which had crossed into Israeli territory, and the terror group reportedly sustained most of the 15 casualties that resulted from the IDF’s explosion of the tunnel.
The Israeli defense establishment believes that PIJ has around 10,000 armed members, as well as its own rocket arsenal and tunnel network. It has a unique religious affinity with the Iranian Shia regime, and may be receiving messages from Tehran to escalate the Palestinian conflict with Israel.
Hamas, on the other hand, is likely pressuring PIJ to avoid sparking a renewed round of violence at this time, due to Hamas’s desire to avoid endangering its agreement to form a Palestinian unity government with the Fatah faction by December 1.
Dr. Ely Karmon, a senior research scholar at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel, noted that from its inception, PIJ “acknowledged the importance of the Iranian revolution and its influence.” He said that PIJ — not Hamas — has been the “real proxy of Iran.”
[W]hile all the pro-Palestinian organizations from around England had been talking the [anti-Balfour London] rally up and planning it for months, it was hard to ignore the disappointment of many involved that only a few thousand people attended. In corners of Grosvenor Square, opposite the U.S. Embassy, where the march began, there were piles of signs that had been prepared but remained unused.
The organizers boasted afterward that 15,000 had taken part, but it was clear the actual number was much lower, probably no more than a third of that.
Over the last decade and a half, during Israeli operations in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, tens of thousands had assembled for angry rallies in central London. But then, large numbers of young Muslim protesters – inflamed by social media and television footage of the carnage – had swelled their ranks. An event that took place 100 years ago clearly doesn’t excite the same passion.
This time, the majority of protesters were relatively elderly white Britons, members of far-left groups and veteran protesters.
Many of the marchers were also trying to draw attention to a variety of other causes: the condition of social housing in Britain; nuclear disarmament; workers rights; and the global struggle against capitalism. Balfour and Palestine were mentioned only in the back pages of the array of “revolutionary” newspapers on sale. One of the vendors, who complained he had yet to sell a single copy, was flying the Palestinian and Cuban flags together, and seemed much more knowledgeable about Marxist-Leninist communism than the Palestinian cause.
Passions were so low that even when a group of pro-Israel protesters blocked the march for a few minutes on Oxford Street, the marchers were happy to wait while police asked them to move, and only some shouted “Zionist pigs!” before being hushed by others.
Many British people will not know of Sir Arthur James Balfour, an early 20th century foreign secretary. For 12mn Palestinians, his name is all too familiar. On the 100th anniversary of the Balfour declaration, the British government should take the opportunity to make things right.No, Balfour said "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object." It wasn't a promise and the declaration was not to give land to the Zionist Federation but to the Jewish people.
At his desk in London, on 2 November 1917, Balfour signed a letter promising the land of Palestine to the Zionist Federation, a recently established political movement whose goal was the creation of a Jewish state. He promised a land that was not his to promise, disregarding the political rights of those who already lived there. For the Palestinian people – my people – the events this letter triggered have been as devastating as they have been far-reaching.
In 1948 Zionist militias forcibly expelled more than 800,000 men, women and children from their homeland, perpetrating horrific massacres and destroying hundreds of villages in the process. I was 13 years old at the time of our expulsion from Safad. The occasion on which Israel celebrates its creation as a state, we Palestinians mark as the darkest day in our history.Abbas himself described his family's leaving Safed in 1948 - and they never saw a single Jewish soldier. They left on their own. In his words:
"We left on foot at night to the Jordan River... Eventually we settled in Damascus... My father had money, and he spent his money methodically. After a year, when the money ran out, we began to work. "People were motivated to run away... They feared retribution from Zionist terrorist organizations - particularly from the Safed ones. Those of us from Safed especially feared that the Jews harbored old desires to avenge what happened during the 1929 uprising. This was in the memory of our families and parents... They realized the balance of forces was shifting and therefore the whole town was abandoned on the basis of this rationale - saving our lives and our belongings."This was the experience of most Palestinians who left in 1947-8 - a small number were indeed expelled, a larger number voluntarily left on their own, and most fled out of fear. (Note also how Abbas has inflated the number to "more than 800,000" - another lie, the real number was about 600,000.)
A lie on top of the other lies.
The Balfour declaration is not something that can be forgotten. Today, Palestinians number more than 12mn, and are scattered throughout the world. Some were forced out of their homeland in 1948, with more than 6mn still living in exile to this day. Those who managed to remain in their homes number roughly 1.75mn, and live within a system of institutionalised discrimination in what is now the state of Israel.
Approximately 2.9mn live in the West Bank under a draconian military occupation-turned-colonisation, with 300,000 of that number being the native inhabitants of Jerusalem, who have so far resisted policies to force them out of their city. Some 2mn live in the Gaza Strip, an open prison subjected to regular destruction through the full force of Israel’s military apparatus.Are 300,000 Jerusalem Arabs in danger of being forced out of the city? Of course not.
The Balfour declaration is not something to be celebrated – certainly not while one of the peoples affected continues to suffer such injustice. The creation of a homeland for one people resulted in the dispossession and continuing persecution of another – now a deep imbalance between occupier and occupied. The balance must be redressed, and Britain bears a great deal of responsibility in leading the way. Celebrations must wait for the day when everyone in this land has freedom, dignity and equality.Abbas himself has rejected peace proposals - as the Palestine Papers and Haaretz have shown. Any of these would have given his people a state. He, and his blood-soaked predecessor Arafat, are the ones responsible for their not having reached that alleged goal, not Great Britain.
Despite the horrors we have endured in the past century, the Palestinian people have remained steadfast. We are a proud nation with a rich heritage of ancient civilisations, and the cradle of the Abrahamic faiths. Over the years we have adapted to the realities around us – the chain of events triggered in 1917 – and made deeply painful compromises for the sake of peace, beginning with the decision to accept a state on only 22% of our historical homeland while recognising the state of Israel, without any reciprocation thus far.Try to find any record of a specifically Palestinian Arab heritage or civilization in any newspaper or book written before 1950. I've tried. There isn't any.
Buy EoZ's book, PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
If you want real peace, don't insist on a divided Jerusalem, @USAmbIsrael
The Apartheid charge, the Abraham Accords and the "right side of history"
With Palestinians, there is no need to exaggerate: they really support murdering random Jews
Great news for Yom HaShoah! There are no antisemites!