Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Chanukah video night 1: 8th Day - Miracle Of Light

Nice production and (seemingly) original music.

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Hanukah is not a holiday of the Jewish religion, it is a holiday of the Jewish people. Although not really considered a religious holiday, it is a holiday of miracles.

We’re complicated that way.

The Hanukah miracle most people focus on is that of the oil that lasted eight days when it should only have lasted one. This is the reason we light the Hanukiah for eight days, each day lighting an additional candle or oil lamp so that, as time goes by, the light grows stronger rather than diminishing as it would normally do when the oil runs low.

The larger miracle is actually that of the victory of the Maccabees over the Greeks, the few against the many that ultimately led to the re-establishment of a Jewish kingdom with Jerusalem it’s capital. Hanukah is about freedom from an occupying foreign power and Jewish sovereignty in Zion.

Although a symbol for the miracle of light, the tradition of lighting the Hanukiah is also a direct reminder of the miracle of victory and sovereignty.

Hanukah candles are supposed to be lit in a place that can be seen by the public, to remind all who see the lights of the miracle of Hanukah.

The question is, what is public?

In the diaspora, candles are normally lit in a public place within the home so that all members of the family can see the Hanukiah. Some light candles close to a window, so that they can also be seen from outside.

In Israel many religious families use a Hanukkiah that burns oil, placing it in a special glass box outside their home. Weather cannot disturb the lights and everyone passing by can see them.

It seems that the differences in tradition are a function of Jews living in places where it was unsafe and thus unfeasible for a Jewish family to declare to their non-Jewish neighbors: “Look at the miracle that God created for my people!”

The Hanukiah in this image was photographed outside an apartment building in Haifa. It looks lovely but it also declares a message of sovereignty and defiance no Jew can truly express in any other land:

“A great miracle happened HERE, in THIS land, for MY people and I am free to declare it proudly for all to see!”

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12/12 Links Pt1: Glick: Europe’s war against the Jewish state; Trump’s actions have confirmed historical truth

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Europe’s war against the Jewish state

Europe is the epicenter of the political war against Israel. Europe fights Israel on the streets of Europe. Europe fights Israel in the corridors of power in Brussels, other Western European capitals and the UN. Europe fights Israel in Israel itself.

Europe’s war against Israel is a passive-aggressive campaign fought and denied simultaneously. But in recent years, the mask has fallen over and over again.

In the days that have passed since US President Donald Trump’s dramatic announcement that the US recognizes that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital and is beginning to take concrete steps to move its embassy to the city, Europe’s war against Israel has again become impossible to deny or ignore. Europe’s response to Trump’s announcement has been extreme, violent and more outspoken than the response of the Arab world.

The EU-funded Palestinian Authority reacted to Trump’s move by exhorting its subjects to riot and attack Israelis.

Sunday, Yassin Abu el-Qura heeded his call. Qura stabbed Asher Elmalich in the heart and critically wounded him. Elmalich was a security guard at Jerusalem’s central bus station.

According to Channel 2, Qura is a member of a prominent family of Fatah members with close ties to the PA and its EU- and US-funded and trained security forces. His father is the commander of one of the security forces in Salfit, in Samaria. Two of his brothers are also PA security officers.

Around the same time Qura was stabbing Elmalich, the British government announced it was providing the PA with 20 million pounds in supplemental budgetary funding.

Qura’s attack was notable because it took place against the backdrop of lackluster attendance at PA-organized protests. As former US Middle East mediator Aaron David Miller tweeted on Sunday, the low attendance at these demonstrations, like the low attendance at anti-US and anti-Israel demonstrations in the Arab world is an “indication of how much the region has changed [in recent years] and the loss of centrality of [the] Palestinian issue. [The] Palestinian street is exhausted; the Arab street has disappeared.”

But while the Arab street was indifferent to Trump’s declaration, the European street went berserk. Thousands of protesters assembled in London and Paris, in Berlin and Stockholm. They burned Israeli flags and called for the annihilation of Israel and the murder of Jews.

Ben Shapiro: No, Protests And Violence Against Israel Aren’t Trump’s Fault. They’re Just Anti-Semitism.

On Monday, a would-be suicide bomber failed at killing Americans in the same way he failed at life: self-implosion followed by utter shame and humiliation. But Ayaked Ullah, 27, still garnered a hint of media sympathy by stating that Israel’s recent bombings of the Gaza Strip had driven him to action. According to CNN:
Recent Israeli actions in Gaza compelled Ullah to carry out the attack, a law enforcement source said. The suspect was upset, in his words, with the "incursion into Gaza," the source said, but did not elaborate on what incursion he may have been alluding to. Israel launched airstrikes this weekend against what it said were Hamas targets in Gaza after several rockets were fired out of Gaza towards Israel. This came amid widespread protests over President Trump's move to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

This is asinine. The attack was planned for a certain amount of time; the only incursions into Gaza happened this weekend. But this is the constant lie from Islamist sympathizers: that it’s Israel that lies beneath their evil. That’s not true. It’s hatred of Jews.

In Malmo, Sweden, a synagogue was firebombed, supposedly in retaliation for President Trump’s announcement that Israel’s capital is Jerusalem. What does the synagogue have to do with Trump’s announcement? Nothing. But Jews are Jews, and must be attacked. Protesters in Malmo chanted, “We want our freedom back, and we will shoot the Jews.” A second synagogue was firebombed in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Meanwhile, in London, protesters chanted, “Khybar, khybar,” a Koranic call to violence against Jews. And in New York, Imam Mohammad Qatanani of Passaic, New Jersey chanted, “With our souls and our blood, we will redeem you, oh Aqsa!” Nerdeen Kiswani, representing the New York City Students for Justice in Palestine, shouted that all of “Palestine” should be liberated, including Tel Aviv. Demonstrators chanted “Khybar” as well.

Does any of that have to do with Jerusalem? Does any of it have to do with Israel? Or does all of it have to do with religious hatred of Jews?

Trump Did Not Bring Jerusalem Crashing Down

On Friday, it seemed that every journalist in Jerusalem was waiting for something to happen at the Damascus Gate in the Old City—one of the most popular entrances Muslims use to reach the famous Al-Aqsa mosque for Friday afternoon prayers, and a common site for big protests. Yet the resulting melee was not the massive demonstration everyone seemed to be waiting for.

Israeli soldiers stood in dozen-person groups at the entrances Muslims use to reach Al-Aqsa, and in frequent smaller clumps all along the way. I asked one soldier stationed at the corner of Al-Wad, the street leading to the mosque, whether this Friday was any different from others, and whether he expected any problems. He smiled, and said it was the same as any other day. A few feet away, a man selling bread concurred. “Every day is a day of rage,” he told me in Arabic.

The divided city is one claimed by both Israelis (in West Jerusalem) and Palestinians (in East Jerusalem) as their capital, and American presidents have typically treated its status as an issue to be resolved through negotiations. In the wake of Trump’s announcement, people in the Palestinian half of the city are angry, but few seemed eager for the new intifada, or uprising, that some Muslim leaders are calling for.

Crowds of men began streaming into the city for midday prayers. A few older women obligingly shouted things like “Trump is bad!” when they saw the waiting crowd of foreign journalists. All was quiet for about an hour, and then the same giant crowd streamed back out, many people stopping to shop on their way back to the Damascus Gate, where the cameras were conveniently waiting.

The area outside Damascus Gate is literally set up like a stage: Big steps lead down on three sides to the lowered platform where people emerge from the Old City. A few dozen people stood on the steps and chanted in Arabic, holding a sign featuring a truck that called on America to “dump Trump” and another sign showing Trump’s lips as urinals. A throng of journalists surrounded this group, outnumbering them roughly three-to-one. As protesters moved, the cameras shifted around them, moving like a flock of birds near a power line. Most Palestinians, however, went home.

It has been a week now since Trump's announcement last Wednesday that the US recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

You might have expected the media to present a biased, distorted view both of what Trump was actually doing and of what followed, considering how highly charged the issue of Jerusalem is.

If so, you were not disappointed.

Here, in no particular order, are some of the examples of what the media reported.

At The Algemeiner, Ira Stoll regularly writes about media bias at The New York Times. This time was no exception when Stoll pointed out Four Ways The New York Times Botches Coverage of Jerusalem. One of the examples is a New York Times self-contradiction, reporting on the one hand that “Israel stopped short of annexing East Jerusalem, a move that would most likely have drawn international outrage,” while The New York Times reported earlier this year that “Israel later annexed East Jerusalem and Golan in moves that were not internationally recognized.”

UK Media Watch noted that The Economist falsely claimed

Ever since his election in 2005, Mr Abbas has rejected violence and called upon his people to pursue statehood through diplomacy. Now the calls from within the Palestinian national movement for a return to intifada, ie, a violent uprising, are growing.

Does The Economist really have that short a memory?

UK Media Watch also points to an article in The Telegraph, which pulls out all the stops:

For more than 20 years, Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian’s chief peace negotiator, has chased the dream of a two-state solution and the hope of an independent Palestinian state.

He followed it to the White House under four different US presidents, haggled over it in secret and public negotiations with hard faced Israeli negotiators, and defended it against sceptical Palestinians on the streets of Jericho.

But in the minutes after Donald Trump’s announcement that the US was recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Mr Erekat stood in front of the television cameras and concluded that his dream of two decades was finally dead.

“Unfortunately, President Trump just destroyed any possibility of two states,” he said in a quivering voice.

Left out is that Erekat was the chief negotiator in both 2001 and 2008 when the Palestinian Arabs rejected Israeli peace offers.

The other point, of course, is that Trump deliberately made a point of not taking a position on “specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem.” He left that open to negotiations, no doubt as soon as Erekat regains his composure.

Honest Reporting came up with a number of "Media Muckups." The Daily Mail scored a hat trick, incorrectly describing Judaism, Islam and Christianity, before making the necessary corrections.

Here is the Honest Reporting snapshot of the original reporting before it was corrected:

And here are the errors HonestReporting pointed out:

It’s the Western Wall, not “West Wall.”
The Temple Mount is Judaism’s holiest site, not the Western Wall.
The Al-Aqsa mosque, not the Dome of the Rock, is Islam’s holiest site in Jerusalem (its third holiest site in the world).
The holy sites mentioned are not all on the Temple Mount as written in the first paragraph. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is in another part of Jerusalem’s Old City.

A followup article of "More Media Muckups", included a novel interpretation of the status of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv by The History Channel that has since been fixed:

CAMERA notes that New York Times Downplays Judaism's Ties to Jerusalem, when it claims Jerusalem is not so important to Israel after all:

"It was for the British that Jerusalem was so important – they are the ones who established Jerusalem as a capital," said Prof. Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, a historical geographer at Hebrew University. "Before, it was not anyone's capital since the times of the First and Second Temples."

Of course, a capital would only be important to a country -- a fact that puts the quote in context, while raising the question that since Jerusalem has never been the capital of a Muslim country, why do Palestinian Arabs suddenly want Jerusalem now. The article leaves out the close ties Jews in the Diaspora have had with Jerusalem and the fact they became a majority in Jerusalem towards the latter part of the 1800's.

Another CAMERA article points to an error by The New York Times' Max Fisher. In his article, Fisher gets the history wrong:

Both Israelis and Palestinians claim the city as their political capital and as a sacred religious site. Israel controls the entirety of the city. Any peace deal would need to resolve that.

The city's status has been disputed, at least officially, since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Before that, the United Nations had designated Jerusalem as a special international zone. During the war, Israel seized the city's western half. It seized the eastern half during the next Arab-Israeli war, in 1967.

Actually, when the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181 in 1947 in favor of the partition of the land between a Jewish and Arab state, the resolution would make Jerusalem into a "corpus separatum" under UN trusteeship for up to 10 years. But as a General Assembly resolution, it was only a suggestion, not binding and definitely not an official designation of any kind. The Jews accepted it but the Arabs rejected it and attacked after the British left. And that was the end of that.

Social media also pointed out examples of when the media messed up:

This passage in today's @nytimes editorial is stunningly cynical: "East Jerusalem was exclusively Arab in 1967." It was indeed exclusively Arab. Because 19 years earlier, Jews, long a plurality in the area, were forced out.
— Gilead Ini (@GileadIni) December 6, 2017

The Swedish reaction to #Trumpjerusalem announcement is odd,calling it a "catastrophe" and "dangerous",as #Sweden unilaterally recognized #Palestine 4 years ago and called it a "step toward peace".Why the double standard from Swedish FM @margotwallstrom ? #JerusalemEmbassy
— Annika H Rothstein (@truthandfiction) December 7, 2017

Key detail: Palestinian violence isn't spontaneous and organic, as western media presents it. It's orchestrated & controlled by the PA and Fatah as a form of political blackmail. And Trump refused to be blackmailed. https://t.co/6Ghnoxm6gs pic.twitter.com/4yisQSTPeS
— Noah Pollak (@NoahPollak) December 7, 2017

Of course, we have seen another error made by the media across the board, namely predicting major violence as predicted (threatened) by the Palestinian Arabs.

On that issue, Mitchell Bard writes:

After decades of threats intimidated Trump’s predecessors and other world leaders to pretend Jerusalem is not Israel’s capital or face violent consequences, it turned out the blackmailers were bluffing. Even the Palestinians couldn’t manage much fury during the three days of rage declared by Mahmoud Abbas. Sure, there were a few demonstrations, but most seemed to be orchestrated for the benefit of journalists who flocked to the area in hope of a conflagration. The demonstrations in Jerusalem were more severe after Israel installed metal detectors at the entrance of the Temple Mount than they were after the U.S. announcement.

The press has already moved on to other issues after the disappointing lack of bloodshed, but there should be a reckoning for all the supposed experts and officials who predicted an apocalypse.

When all is said and done, what happened?
Why the vast range of media mistakes on the facts surrounding Trump's announcement, the history of Jerusalem and the predictions about the fallout?

Matti Friedman has written extensively on media bias, as an insider in the media. He has written about What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel, about an alliance of forces that focus on Israel:

This alliance consists of activists and international staffers from the UN and the NGOs; the Western diplomatic corps, particularly in East Jerusalem; and foreign reporters. (There is also a local component, consisting of a small number of Israeli human-rights activists who are themselves largely funded by European governments, and Palestinian staffers from the Palestinian Authority, the NGOs, and the UN.)

That bias accounts for some of the media misrepresentation of events.
There may be another.

Last year, Khaled Abu Toameh wrote that in addition to bias, there is an issue of Western media ignorance as well.

He relates stories about

The eager young journalist who tried to arrange an interview with Arafat -- years after the terrorist had died.
Two western journalists who wanted to go to Gaza -- to interview Jewish settlers
A British reporter who reported on the assassination of Ahmed Yassin from a bar, though his byline claimed that he was in the Gaza Strip and had interviewed relatives of the slain leader of Hamas.
Newly arrived journalists who believed that before 1948, there was a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
A journalist who wanted to visit Jenin where "thousands of Palestinians had been massacred by Israel in 2002."

Toameh explains:

But when it comes to covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ignorance apparently is bliss. Misconceptions about what goes on here plague the international media. The binary good guy/bad guy designation tops the list. Someone has to be the good guy (the Palestinians are assigned that job) and someone has to be the bad guy (the Israelis get that one). And everything gets refracted through that prism.

Apparently, the media bias against Trump, the already existing anti-Israel bias and the ignorance of some in the media has resulted in a perfect storm of horrendously inaccurate stories.

And it has only been one week.

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Before you even bother to read this review, just order the book, now. Do not waste a second.

In fact, order more than one. If you have any liberal friends who are not so far gone as to have closed their minds off about Israel, send them a copy of this book.

Industry of Lies: Media, Academia, and the Israeli-Arab Conflict, by Ben-Dror Yemini, is the best book to debunk anti-Israel lies bar none.

For one thing, it is a well-researched piece of scholarship that methodically dismantles the claims of the anti-Israel crowd. Yemini not only goes after the lies but also the decontextualization of things that Israel is involved with.

For example, in chapter 3, Yemini shows that mass population exchanges have happened many times in the 20th century, and that it was universally regarded as a humane way to end conflict at that time, to keep warring groups separated and to minimize slaughter of the minority population. The population exchange between Jews in Arab countries and Arabs under Israeli rule followed the pattern of India/Pakistan, for example.

But moreover in the specific context of Palestine, the people advocating transfer of populations in the 1920s and 1930s were Arab leaders themselves! And other proponents of transfer of Arabs out of a potential Jewish state include not one but two Nobel Peace Prize winners, Norman Angell and Christian Lange. The Zionists were hesitant about transfer, the rest of the world thought it was a great idea.

This is but one small example of how Ben Dror Yemini takes the major anti-Israel talking points - in this case, the lie that Zionism was based on the idea of ethnic cleansing - and reveals the true context for what happened behind the Arab flight from Israel-controlled areas.

The book is literally filled with incredible nuggets of historical as well as current information. The idea of returning refugees to Israel was opposed by Palestinian leaders like Haj Amin Husseini and Emil Ghouri in 19498 and only a fraction of the 25,000 refugees Israel offered to allow to return actually took advantage of the offer in 1949 and 1950. He shows how the "right of return" was always meant to destroy Israel, using quotes from Arab leaders - and how the Arabs refused to integrate Palestinian refugees in their own countries in defiance of UN resolutions. Even though the ideas that Israel engages in "genocide" or "apartheid" are absurd on the face of it, Yemini actually crunches the numbers and shows how such charges cannot possibly come from any honest researcher.

Yemini takes on the charlatan historians, academic frauds, glory-seeking washed up rock stars. He shows dispassionately how small the Israel-Arab conflict is in comparison with other conflicts around the globe - and how those other conflicts, and their victims, are ignored while Palestinian victims are given financial and moral support far out of proportion both to their suffering and to their actual actions.

But the book is more than just a list of facts. Yemini is throwing the gauntlet to the leftists and liberals who think that their anti-Israel obsession is based on justice and not hate.

Yemini is no right-winger. He supports a two-state solution, he is against settlements and at one point he shows that he favored an Ehud Olmert peace plan that would have gone beyond any other with the holy places of Jerusalem under international control. But he is under no illusions about the peacefulness of the Arabs nor about the crazed accusations by Israel's enemies to Israel. He shows that the Palestinians have been the ones to reject peace, over and over again, and that their goals appear to be against any real peace.

Yemini is happy to criticize Israel. He will insult the far right in Israel. But he will not stand still while Haaretz makes up complete lies about Israel and offers them to the world as evidence of how reprehensible Israel supposedly is.

While most other books that make the case for Israel appeal only to committed Zionists, Ben Dror Yemini's Industry of Lies is meant to be read by Israel's critics. Its blurbs are written by Ari Shavit (who is the target of some of Yemini's criticism) and Ehud Barak.

Critics of Israel who are willing to have an open mind should be encouraged to read this. Accomplished liars like Roger Waters or Ilan Pappe or Judith Butler will never deign to allow any of his arguments to go past their armor of hate, but college students who only hear a fourth-hand regurgitation of lies about Israel should read this book.

But beyond that, the book is still a goldmine for the pro-Israel crowd. Yemini's arguments are often novel and different. The book has thousands of footnotes, of which many can become expanded into full articles. (Disclaimer: I am referenced several times.)

In short, this book is a must read for people who love Israel, people who think they love Israel but who have been convinced that it has become evil incarnate, and people who still can think for themselves about Israel and the Middle East.

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From Iran's Tasnim News:

Iran’s minister of defense said the US administration’s provocative decision to recognize the city of al-Quds (Jerusalem) as the new capital of Israel is going to accelerate the demise of the Zionist regime.

The White House’s move to declare Quds the capital of the fake Zionist regime will bring closer the end of the Israeli regime and strengthen Muslim unity, Brigadier General Amir Hatami said in a gathering of Defense Ministry officials in Tehran on Monday.

Slamming the US president for his “provocative and unwise” decision about al-Quds, the general said the Israeli occupiers would never experience calm and have no way but to leave the Palestinian territories.

He further held the US and Israel accountable for the escalation of tensions and bloodshed in the region, saying the US president should accept responsibility for his “anti-security decision.”

Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei has described the US controversial move as a sign of “weakness and incompetence”, saying, “The Islamic world will definitely stand against this plot and the Zionists will receive a bigger blow.”

Hold on: Don't the Iranians want to hasten Israel's destruction?

Don't they want more Muslim unity?

Aren't they pining for more bloodshed?

Don't they like when the US makes stupid mistakes?

Why aren't they happy? They should be celebrating!

To increase their happiness at hastening Israel's demise, we should definitely have other Western nations move their embassies, too.

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Muslims threatening Jews with "Khaybar Khaybar Ya Yahud" all over the world

The expression "khaybar, khaybar ya yahud, jaish muhammad saya’ud," "Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, Mohammed’s army will return" is a thinly disguised call to murder Jews today, referring to a battle when Mohammed slaughtered scores of Jews.

And we are seeing it being chanted literally all over the world.

Algeria

Egypt (Many of them)

Jordan

Morocco

Sudan:

New York:

Antisemitic Chants, Calls for New Intifada at a Times Square Demonstration Protesting Trump's Jerusalem Declaration pic.twitter.com/HE3EXEHPpS
— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) December 11, 2017

Sweden:

London:

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Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Israel sign MoU for East Med gas pipeline

This is a story that would be considered important in a sane world. It happened last week and was barely covered.

On December 5, Greece, Cyprus, Italy and Israel signed a memorandum of understanding for constructing an underwater gas pipeline from the Eastern Mediterranean region to Greece and Italy, which will allow the transportation of newly discovered Cypriot and Israeli gas reserves to mainland Europe.

At an energy summit in Nicosia, Cyprus’ Energy Minister Yiorgos Lakkotrypis and his Greek and Israeli counterparts Giorgos Stathakis and Yuval Steinitz as well Italian ambassador in Cyprus Andrea Cvallari, who represented Italy’s Energy Minister Carlo Calenda, signed the document for the promotion of the East Med pipeline in Cyprus on December 5.
...
For his part, Steinitz was quoted as saying that the East Med pipeline is “very realistic” and could help secure Europe’s energy future.

EastMed will connect Israel’s Leviathan and Cyprus’ Aphrodite gas fields to Greece and Italy. The initial estimate of the cost of the pipeline, which will be able to transport 12-16 billion cubic metres of gas per year, is around $6 billion.

The next step will be the signing of an intergovernmental agreement in Crete in the spring of 2018.

(h/t MB)

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12/11 Links Pt2: 100 years later, Allenby returns to Jerusalem; The Middle East 'Peace Process' meme: What peace process?

From Ian:

100 years later, Allenby returns to Jerusalem

British conquest was hailed by Jews as a Hanukkah miracle
The Old City's Tower of David Museum launches an exhibit in honor of the centennial of the capture of the Holy City from the Ottoman Turks by British forces
Viscount Henry J. H. Allenby of Megiddo and Felixstowe and John Benson are not typical Jerusalem tourists.

The great-great nephew of Field Marshal Edmund Allenby and the great-grandson of Major General John Shea, respectively, Allenby and Benson are currently in Israel to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the capture of the Holy City from the Ottoman Turks by British forces led by their military leader ancestors.

Benson and Lord Allenby, along with Lord Allenby’s mother Sara Viscountess Allenby, are in the capital at the invitation of The Tower of David Museum, which on Monday will stage a public reenactment of General Allenby’s proclamation delivered from the front of the ancient citadel inside the Old City’s Jaffa Gate on December 11, 1917.

The special guests received a preview on Sunday of the museum’s new exhibition, “A General and A Gentleman: Allenby at the Gates of Jerusalem,” which officially opens on Monday. The exhibition focuses on the events of three pivotal days in December 1917, from the the moment the Ottomans surrendered to Britain’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force on December 9 to Allenby’s proclamation of martial law on December 11.

The proclamation, issued in seven languages (English, French, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, and Greek), promised protection for the holy places and assured freedom of religious practice for all the city’s inhabitants:
However, lest any of you should be alarmed by reason of your experiences at the hands of the enemy who has retired, I hereby inform you that it is my desire that every person should pursue his lawful business without fear of interruption…Therefore do I make known to you that every sacred building, monument, holy spot, shrine, traditional site, endowment, pious bequest of customary place of prayer, of whatsoever form of the three religions, will be maintained and protected according to the existing customs and beliefs of those to whose faiths they are sacred.

Barry Shaw: December 11, 1917: The Liberation of Jerusalem

That door began to close by 1919 when Jew hating British administrators, brought up to Jerusalem from Egypt, reneged on their duty to carry out orders. In a treasonable act of defiance and anti-Semitism, they ignored official British policy.

General Money, the Chief Administrator, ordered that “The walled city of Jerusalem is placed out of orders to all Jewish soldiers from the 14th to the 22nd April inclusive.” It was no coincidence that this period was the pilgrim festival of Passover. This outraged Colonel John Patterson, the commanding officer of the Jewish Legion, who wrote, “I cannot conceive a greater act of provocation to Jewish soldiers, or a greater insult. Not since the days of Emperor Hadrian had such a humiliating decree been issued.”

The Balfour Declaration stipulated that His Majesty’s Government would use their “best endeavours to facilitate the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

Instead, in 1920, they defied British policy, ignored their duty to implement the terms of the Declaration, and duplicitously colluded with anti-Jewish Arab rabble-rousers, including Haj Amin al-Husseini, later to meet with Adolph Hitler to plan the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem in the Middle East, to incite violence against Jews. They chose the annual Nebi Musa festival to riot in the Old City while the British stood aside.

With cries of “Death to the Jews!” Jewish women were raped, men were killed, and Jewish property destroyed. This British and Arab anti-Semitic collusion and violence was the first major Palestinian act of terror attack against Jews.

With typical British “even-handedness,” Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who had been an officer in the British army, was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment for illegal possession of firearms, namely three rifles and two pistols, despite the fact that the Governor, Colonel Ronald Storrs, was aware that he possessed them. This was the same sentence imposed in absentia on Al-Husseini who had fled Palestine, following the Arab murder and rape of Jews and the destruction of Jewish property.

The rest is history.

As Jews evacuated from Aden bloodbath, a daring mission to rescue a Torah scroll

In June 1967, the fury of the Arab world at Israel’s lightning victory over its enemies hit Aden, a tiny British colony at the southwestern tip of today’s Yemen on the Arabian peninsula. The once-thriving Jewish community — already much depleted — was once again a target.

“I have never seen such hatred and deliberate destruction,” one survivor later recalled. “Even the young Arabs were screaming out that they wanted to kill us. It was terrible.”

Three Jews trapped in the Crater district of the port city were attacked by an armed mob; two were brutally murdered, the third was found alive but barely able to breathe.

For those old enough to remember, history appeared to be repeating itself.

Twenty years previously, in the wake of the UN vote to partition Palestine, Jewish businesses, stores, and homes had been attacked in Aden. Two Jewish schools were burned down. At the end of three days of violence in December 1947, more than 80 Jews were dead.

“There were not riots but murder,” Joseph Howard, a child at the time, later remembered.

A British commission of inquiry into the disturbances later found that “trigger happy” firing by soldiers of the Aden Protectorate Levies — an Arab military force trained and armed by the UK to protect its colony — were responsible for many of the Jewish deaths. These local forces, the inquiry concluded, were sympathetic to the rioters, and did not attempt to control them. The inquiry recommended British troops be permanently stationed in the colony.

An age-old Palestinian craft that goes all the way back to 1922 - when the British imported Armenian families

One of the examples given of Palestinian crafts is the creation of hand-made ceramic tiles.

If you look at Shop Palestine, you can see the description of the handmade ceramics they sell. But something about it is interesting:

Fakhoury Pottery and Karakashian Pottery in Hebron and Jerusalem respectively supply our beautiful handpainted ceramics. The Fakhoury’s come from a long line of potters and, in fact, the name Fakhoury even means “potter” in Arabic. Their shop is located in the old city of Hebron where Israeli soldiers and settlers routinely physically and verbally harass Palestinians. Despite the difficulties, the family is determined to keep their store open and their craft alive. The Karakashian studio in Jerusalem continues the family tradition that began in 1922 when Megerditch Karakashian came to Jerusalem to help renovate the Dome of the Rock.

You can read a bit more detail about the history of this craft from the webpage of Armenian Ceramics in Jerusalem, whose Balian family were the original partners of the Karakashians mentioned above.

The Balian Family of Jerusalem has been producing exclusive hand painted ceramic tiles and pottery since 1922.
This makes us one of the oldest-if not the oldest- business in existence in Jerusalem.
The studio is currently being run by Neshan Balian Jr, whose grandfather Neshan Balian Sr came to Jerusalem in 1919 from Kutahya, Turkey.
Neshan Balian Sr. and Megerditch Karakashian- a master potter and artist respectively- were brought over to Jerusalem by the British government and David Ohanessian , who was a ceramist, linguist and head of the Kutahya Ceramic Association, to renovate the ceramic tiles of The Dome of the Rock.
Before the arrival of the Three Armenian families to then Palestine, the production of decorative ceramic tiles and pottery in this region did not exist at all. It was Neshan Balian with his partner the Megerditch Karakashian and David Ohanessian,, who established this unique form of world famous art known presently as the Armenian Pottery of Jerusalem.

So there is no "Palestinian" tradition of decorative ceramics. It is an Armenian tradition.

And the Arabs were not the ones to import the Armenians to renovate the Dome of the Rock - the British colonialists were!

The very people who falsely claim that Jews are recent 20th century immigrants to the region wholeheartedly embrace a "Palestinian" three families who were also recent 20th century immigrants to the region.

Why? Because they aren't Jews!

(h/t Irene)

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Seven decades of fake NYT news about reforms in Saudi Arabia (Petra Marquardt-Bigman)

By Petra Marquardt-Bigman

A few weeks ago, the NYT published a widely criticized article by Thomas L. Friedman, who excitedly reported that the “most significant reform process underway anywhere in the Middle East today is in Saudi Arabia.”

I think it would be really wonderful if things turned out as glowingly rosy as Friedman presented them. But as countless critics have pointed out, that’s not very likely.

One of the most widely noted critiques came from Abdullah Al-Arian, who is not only an assistant professor of History at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar, but also a regular Al Jazeera contributor – which is to say that he’s not exactly unbiased.

Take for example a column from last June, where Al-Arian complained bitterly: “For its perceived role in promoting the Muslim Brotherhood, hosting members of Hamas' political bureau, and taking a softer line on Iran, Qatar became a central target of the Saudi-Emirati-Israeli joint lobbying efforts.”

Another truly sickening example is a column Al-Arian penned just a few days after the murderous terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo’s staff in January 2015, where he blames the West for “Islamophobia” and a long list of other evils that all but explain Islamist terrorism.

And unsurprisingly, when it comes to Israel, it can’t be biased enough for Al-Arian: veteran Israel-haters and Hamas fans like Ali Abunimah and Max Blumenthal deliver the kind of news the Georgetown professor and Al Jazeera columnist wants everyone to read.

So while there’s no reason to trust Al-Arian, his response to Friedman’s NYT column is still worthwhile noting because he provided screenshots to support his claim that for almost 70 years, the NYT has been “describing #Saudi royals in the language of #reform.” Or, to put it differently: for about seven decades, the NYT has been getting the Saudis wrong.

The thread is long and a bit difficult to read because it also includes some responses to Al-Arian. He starts out quoting an article from 1953 that “describes King Saud as ‘more progressive and international-minded than his autocratic father.’” An article in 1960 asserted that “King Saud has increasingly assumed the role of liberal champion of constitutional reform.” In December 1963, the NYT reported on “Crown Prince Faisal’s ‘burst of social reform and economic development.’” A year later, the NYT described Faisal as “a man who has gained nearly absolute power without really wanting it.” Another article from the same year is entitled “Saudi Arabia: Major Changes Due;” Faisal was “described as ‘ascetic, with only one wife, who lives on grilled meat and boiled vegetables and makes a fetish of moderation.’” An obituary from 1975 presented Faisal as having “Led Saudis Into 20th Century,“ and a subsequent article described Faisal’s successor, King Khalid, as a “moderating force.”

After all this reform and moderation, NYT readers learned in 1982 that the new Saudi King Fahd “has been depicted as the leading figure in a progressive, modernizing faction within the tradition-minded monarchy.” A decade later, NYT readers were told that “King Fahd is following previous generations of Saudi rulers who had also moved toward modernization since King Abdelaziz united a vast territory populated by feuding tribal leaders into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 60 years ago.”

In 2000, the NYT described Crown Prince Abdullah as “an advocate of domestic reform;” five years later, the NYT wrote: “For Abdullah, who has fashioned himself as a reformer in a land where conforming to tradition is a virtue, the challenge now is to make good on longstanding promises for change.” In 2007, there was a piece entitled “Saudi King Tries to Grow Modern Ideas in Desert;” two years later, a NYT editorial saw “A Promise of Reform in Saudi Arabia.” Maureen Dowd opined in 2010 that “by the Saudi’s premodern standards, the 85 year-old King Abdullah, with a harem of wives, is a social revolutionary.”

In November 2013 – i.e. exactly four years before his recent column on Saudi reforms – Thomas Friedman asserted that Saudi King Abdullah was “in Gulf Arab terms … a real progressive;” Abdullah’s 2015 obituary describes him as “a cautious reformer amid great changes in the Middle East,” and by April 2016 the NYT editorial board saw “A Promising New Path for Saudi Arabia.”

At the end of his thread, Al-Arian denounced Friedman’s recent column as “a hagiographic ode to royal reform that represents seven decades of strategic policy objectives barely concealed beneath recycled cultural tropes.”

That’s of course rich coming from a regular contributor to a media company funded by the government of Qatar, but perhaps Al-Arian has never heard the proverbial warning that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Yet, while his quotes are obviously cherry-picked from articles that, in their entirety, may give a more nuanced picture, it is still unsettling to see that the NYT has felt for some seven decades that reform, moderation and modernization were somehow in the hot Saudi air.

It is interesting to note in this context that Friedman acknowledges in his column that “this virus of an antipluralistic, misogynistic Islam … came out of Saudi Arabia in 1979,” prompted by “the three big events of that year: the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Saudi puritanical extremists — who denounced the Saudi ruling family as corrupt, impious sellouts to Western values; the Iranian Islamic revolution; and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.” The result was according to Friedman “a worldwide competition” between the Saudis and Iran’s ayatollahs “over who could export more fundamentalist Islam.”

You’ll note that none of these events has anything to do with Israel, which has been blamed so often for Muslim extremism and fanaticism.

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12/11 Links Pt1: Murray: President Trump: The Courage to Act; Red Crescent drives Arab rioters; Explosion Rocks Times Square

From Ian:

Explosion Rocks Major Manhattan Transport Hub, One Suspect in Custody

An explosion rocked New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, one of the city’s busiest commuter hubs, on Monday morning and police said one suspect was injured and in custody, with three other injuries reported.

Police were not yet identifying the device used. Local television channel WABC cited police sources as saying a possible pipe bomb detonated in a passageway below ground and WPIX cited sources as saying a man with a “possible second device” has been detained in the subway tunnel.

The fire department tweeted there were four injuries, all non-life threatening. One of the injured was a Port Authority police officer.

The bus terminal was temporarily closed, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said in a Twitter statement.

A large swathe of midtown Manhattan was closed to traffic, between 45th Street to 40th Street and 7th Avenue to 9th Avenue, police said. Subway trains were bypassing the Times Square station, the city’s busiest.

“There was a stampede up the stairs to get out,” said Diego Fernandez, one of the commuters at Port Authority. “Everybody was scared and running and shouting.”

Douglas Murray: President Trump: The Courage to Act

President Trump's announcement on the status of Jerusalem last week was both historic and commendable. Historic because it is the first time that an American president has not just acknowledged that the Israeli capital is Jerusalem but decided to act on that acknowledgement. Commendable for breaking a deceitful trend and accepting what will remain the reality on the ground in every imaginable future scenario. As many people have pointed out in recent days, there is not one prospective peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians in which Tel Aviv becomes the capital of the Jewish state.

Yet, the Palestinian leadership, much of the mainstream media, academia and the global diplomatic community take another view. They believe that the American president should have continued with the fairy tale and should never have said "That the United States recognises Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel and that the United States Embassy to Israel will be relocated to Jerusalem as soon as practicable." They claim that this is not a simple recognition of reality and not simply the American President granting the State of Israel the same right every other nation on the planet has -- which is to have their capital where they like. Such forces claim that this is a "provocative" move. Amply demonstrating the illogic of this position, the first thing the Turkish Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan did after the American president made his announcement was to threaten a suspension of Turkish relations with Israel.

The reaction around the world in recent days has been a reminder of the one central truth of the whole conflict. Those who cannot accept that Jerusalem is the capital of the State of Israel tend to be exactly the same as those who cannot accept the State of Israel. Consider the expert whom the BBC's flagship current affairs programme Newsnight chose to bring on to receive soft-ball questions on this issue. Dr. Ghada Karmi, from the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, a notorious opponent of Israel, was inevitably given the sort of respectful interview style that Newsnight presenters generally reserve for when they are interviewing Madonna or some other mega-star they cannot believe their luck at having gotten to speak with.

Firebombing Jewish Children in Sweden

It is not just European Jewish leaders who, in such cases, feel driven to draw a sharp distinction between European Jews and the Jewish state. In an interview with Expressen, Jonas Ransgård, a member of the Gothenburg city council, lamented the fact that "Jews in Sweden are held responsible for what Israel thinks is right or wrong." Such remarks, of course, imply:
1. that Swedish Jews, being Swedes, are surely too sensible and humane to agree in any large numbers with Israeli (or pro-Israeli) policies or actions, and
2. that Israel, by virtue of its supposedly provocative behavior, is at least indirectly responsible for anti-Jewish attacks in Europe.

If the firebombing of the Gothenburg synagogue was motivated by Trump's decision on Jerusalem, it was not the only notable response to that decision in Sweden this weekend. On Friday night, an anti-Trump rally in Malmö drew about 200 people, many of whom shouted anti-Jewish remarks and threatened to "shoot the Jews." On Saturday, anti-Trump protesters marched in Stockholm and set fire to the Israeli flag. A search through the major Swedish online media did not yield any details about the ethnic or religious backgrounds of the participants in any of these incidents.

What, sadly, is hardly ever acknowledged by Europe's establishment media is that Jews -- and Israel, the only openly pluralistic country in the Middle East -- are under constant assault by Western European leaders, citizens, and (especially) so-called "new Europeans," as well as by the governments of no fewer than 21 Arab and Muslim countries in the Middle East.

The attack on the Gothenburg synagogue may have been immediately triggered by Trump's recognition of Israel's capital, but it is part of a pattern of persecution and savagery that has been in place, and that has been systematically ignored, denied or played down by the news media and public officials, ever since the Islamization of Western Europe began.

Red Crescent drives Arab rioters

The pantograph (shown above) is a centuries old mechanical device used to create enlarged images. When an artist uses a pen attached to one end of the pantograph to draw a sketch or illustration, the device automatically draws a larger version of the same image on another piece of paper.

A friend once noted how this ancient gadget reminded him of Israel’s relationship to the rest of the world. A curious observation, I thought, which he fleshed out by noticing that many of the tragedies we are dealing with today, including the mass murder of civilians across the Middle East, or the killing of Europeans for the crime of walking the streets or taking the subway, were first enacted (albeit on a slightly smaller scale) within the Jewish state.

This export of innovative methods of cruelty such as the suicide bomber from Israel to the rest of the planet is no accident. For tyrants or tyrannical wannabees have a habit of singling out the Jew (or, in today’s world, the Jewish State) in order to determine just how far humanity can be pushed to abandon its humane principles.

The threat of Europe’s fascists WAS ignored when their repression was limited to “merely” putting the full force of the state behind the suppression and eventual murder of its Jewish minority. It was only after the Nazis had sharpened their claws on the Jews that the world realized a nation steeped in such brutality was a threat to the entire planet and dealt with the problem at a cost of fifty million lives.

Today’s dictators have similarly used Israel as a staging area to determine just how far they can push a brutal agenda, hoping that the non-Jewish powers (i.e., the other 6+ billion people in the world) will avert their gaze until it is too late.

The suicide bomber, whether in London, Tel Aviv or Thailand, needs more than explosives to do his or her job. He or she also needs a culture that glorifies death (so long as it accompanies mass murder) to create the people willing to strap on the belt and push the button.

Most importantly, they need the intricate web of explanation, toleration and apologia that always manage to justify mass murder with that critical “but” (“Of course subway bombings in London were a crime, BUT shouldn’t they be expected given British actions in Iraq?” “9/11 was certainly awful, BUT didn’t America’s support for Israel make it a target?” “I condemn the ninety-ninth blowing up of an Israeli bus, BUT what else can the Palestinians do to ‘defend’ themselves in the face of Israeli might?”).

Such apologetics have only ramped up as the bombs started (and continue) to go off in the streets and subways far from the Levant (and as of today, show no signs of ending), trying to find “root causes” for turning worshipers, commuters and other “non-combatants” into ash. Yet if the leaders of nations now facing plagues of terror contributed anything to their own situations, it was in trying to put as much distance as they could between Israel’s plague of terror and the terror that afflicts the rest of the world. Not only are the two linked, but the former is the proving ground for the latter, the small pen on the pantograph.

The BDS movement is founded on the hope that they can twist the language of human rights and confuse the uninformed enough to get principled outsiders (preferably from respected institutions) to condemn the Jewish state for the “crime” of defending itself against murderous attack. Yet in trying to get others to join in condemning a victim for not allowing himself to meekly be killed, they are trying to justify the notion that no person, no group, no nation has the right to defend itself against indiscriminate terror. If that is the new rule written on tiny Israel by the small end of the pantograph, one does need to think hard to guess to whom the magnified version of such a rule will apply.

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Whenever there is a tempest in a teapot, the Arab and Muslim Jew-hate comes out

When things get stirred up in the Middle East, the (sometimes) latent antisemitism shows its ugly head.

Three examples, all prompted by the US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

Egypt's Al Masry al Youm has an article that pretends to argue that Israel isn't a state to begin with, but is akin to Al Qaeda - a "base" [Al-Qaeda's literal meaning] that exists only from US support but has no long term chances. But until that happens, the author says, "we can only boycott the political base of the American base Israel and its Jewish inhabitants."

No boycotting Israeli products, but only Israeli Jews.

An article in the pro-Erdogan Yeni Safak Turkish newspaper includes this section:

Zionism is a pathology that emerged from the special historical conditions of the relationship between Judaism and the West. This is what the social psychoanalysis of Judaism shows us. Here, political Judaism turns, along with a distorted Jewish faith, into a cursed organization, a utopia, a goal and ties. Efforts are made to solve the problem of pariahdom with domination formed around the awareness of supremacy. The historical and sociological grief, massacres, deprivations and grudges that come with pariahdom are tried to be overcome with the response of supremacy. This is the fantasy to turn Jews into masters who command the whole world. The ideology of eliminating enslavement through the enslavement of others. The obsession of solving enslavement by producing slavery. This is what Zionism is in the complete sense.

Of course, the intelligentsia would call this merely "anti-Zionism."

Finally, a bar association in Egypt decided to protest the Trump decision with a protest:

The lawyers who participated in the protest rejected the American decision and chanted, "Khyber Khyber, oh Jews .. Mohammed's army will come back."

A threat to eradicate the Jewish presence in the Middle East.

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