But this is nothing compared to those dragging kids to the Gaza fence, where people can get shot when they get violent. These kids are simply human shields.
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A Women's March leader, Tamika Mallory, attended a speech by Louis Farrakhan, notorious for antisemitic bigotry (which manifested itself in the speech). When called out on it, Mallory doubled-down with a remark ("If your leader does not have the same enemies as Jesus, they may not be THE leader!") that was less of a antisemitic dogwhistle than a bullhorn.
For the most part, the response of the other Women's March leaders has been to defiantly have her back (here's a particularly terrible intercession from Linda Sarsour). At the same time, there's been virtually no public justification as to why the rather obvious antisemitism of Farrakhan should be excused. There's been no effort to defend the things he says about Jews, no attempt to argue that his perspective on Jews is in fact in bounds.
This oddity -- defiant refusal to concede any ground on the antisemitism count, coupled with no attempt to actually rationalize the antisemitic content -- demands explanation. My hypothesis is this:
Leftists don't like thinking about antisemitism in their own ranks. At the same time, they'd never admit this is so. Fortunately, most antisemitism controversies that implicate the left relate to Israel in some fashion, and so they can respond with their favorite chestnut: "criticism of Israel isn't antisemitic." On face, this response assures the audience that they do care about antisemitism (the "real" antisemitism), but that the case at hand doesn't count as such (that it never seems to count as such is suspicious in its own right. But leave that aside.).
But Farrakhan's antisemitism isn't really tied to Israel. Which means that the stand-by response won't work. And these leftists are left flummoxed, because they don't really have another thought on antisemitism beyond "criticism of Israel isn't." Forced into a situation where it seems necessary to say something else, they find themselves at a loss. Suddenly, they can't play their get-out-of-talking-about-antisemitism-free card.
And this is revealing. If the problem really was Israel, the Farrakhan case shouldn't present any difficulty. But if the problem is that these leftists just don't want to have to reckon with antisemitism in their community (and Israel is a convenient but ultimately epiphenomenal factor), then Farrakhan presents a huge problem.
We're getting an excellent peek into who falls into which category here.
Schraub is understating the problem here.
The problem is not that the Left cannot "reckon with" or condemn outright antisemitism from Farrakhan. After all, Arabs have been making purely antisemitic statements that have nothing to do with Israel for a long time and the Left won't condemn that either. (Remember when Mahmoud Abbas literally accused rabbis of calling to poison Palestinian water to kill them all at the EU Parliament? He walked that back, but he was given a pass for his obvious antisemitism. And that was after he referred to Jews and their "filthy feet" visiting the holiest Jewish site.)
No, the Farrakhan issue shows that some on the Left not only condone antisemitism but espouse it.
The "anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism" argument is not an argument to support bashing Israel, but an argument to mainstream antisemitic thinking under the rubric of anti-Zionism. Saying that the Jewish people do not have the right to self-determination, yet Palestinians do, is antisemitic once you strip away the obfuscating arguments about settlements or refugees or whatever. Those arguments are meant to justify the underlying antisemitism of the position itself.
Leftist anti-Zionism is functionally identical with antisemitism. And the reason they cannot condemn Farrakhan is because they largely agree with him. Even if you consider that too strong, the difference between how they treat racist or sexist speech and how they treat antisemitic speech says volumes about their ethics. Only when the far Right makes antisemitic statements - statements that are identical with Farrakhan's - do they pretend to be against antisemitism. They love far-right antisemitism because it gives them political cover for their far-left antisemitism masquerading as anti-Zionism.
(h/t Yair Rosenberg)
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Every month at the Security Council we have a session devoted to the Middle East and every month this session becomes an Israel bashing session. This has gone on month after month for decades.
This was news to me. When I arrived it was actually shocking. I came out of the first session and publicly said if we want to talk about security in the Middle East we should talk about Iran or Syria or Hezbollah, Hamas, Isis, the famine in Yemen - there are probably 10 major problems facing the Middle East and Israel doesn't have anything to do with any of them.
Just about every month since then in the Middle East session I have spoken about something other than Israel. I can't say that we'd solve the problem but I can say that several other countries have followed our lead. What used to be a monthly bashing session now at least has more balance. But we're never gonna put up with bullying.
There's one more principal I knew before I arrived at the UN; like most Americans I knew what the capital of Israel was.
To be more clear I knew that Jerusalem was is and will always be the capital of Israel. This is not something that was created by the location of an embassy; this is not something that was created by an American decision. America did not make Jerusalem Israel's capital. What President Trump did to his great credit was recognize a reality that American presidents had denied for too long. Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. That's a fact and President Trump had the courage to recognize that fact when others would not.
Sometime in the future the day will come when the whole world recognizes that fact.
...You know our embassy decision caused a little bit of a stir at the United Nations in the Security Council almost exactly one year after the United States shamefully abstained when the council attacked Israel with resolution 2334. I had the great honor of casting my first American veto. When I was governor I used my veto power dozens of times. At the UN I never got to do it until the Jerusalem vote but I gotta say - it felt pretty good.
...Some people accuse us of favoritism towards Israel. First of all, there's nothing wrong with showing favoritism towards an ally, that's what being an ally is all about. But this is really not about favoritism.
In all that we're doing, whether it's the embassy decision or UNESCO or what we're doing with UNWRA -don't even get me started on that one - our approach on Israel is tied together by one major idea. The idea that runs through all of it is the simple concept that Israel must be treated like any other normal country.
We will continue to demand that Israel not be treated like some sort of temporary provisional entity. It cannot be the case that only one country in the world doesn't get to choose its capital city. It cannot be the case that the UN Human Rights Council has a standing agenda item for only one country. It cannot be the case that only one set of refugees throughout the world is counted in a way that causes the number to grow forever. It cannot be the case that in an organization with 193 countries the United Nations spends half of its time attacking only one country. We will not accept it any longer.
And you know what that demand is actually a demand for peace.The UN's bias against Israel has long undermined peace by encouraging an illusion that Israel will just simply go away. Israel's not going away. When the world recognizes that then peace becomes possible. It becomes possible because all sides will be dealing with realities not fantasies. And when we deal with realities then reasonable negotiated compromises can prevail over absolutist demands.
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During a panel at New York City’s New School in November, Sarsour defended Farrakhan by saying, “If what you’re reading all day long, morning and night, in the Jewish media is that Linda Sarsour and Minister Farrakhan are the existential threat to the Jewish community, something really bad’s going to happen and we’re going to miss the mark on it.”
We believe it is perfectly legitimate for Jewish organizations to call out so-called human rights activists for their hypocrisy. On one hand they claim to be fighting discrimination based on one’s race, gender ethnicity or other aspects of a person’s identity that are not chosen, yet at the same time they are willing to associate with crude antisemites like Farrakhan.
Farrakhan and his fellow travelers resolve the contradiction by claiming, for instance, that given the long history of racial oppression in the US and the Jews’ purported role in that oppression, attacking Jews and Jewish power is a completely legitimate as a form of affirmative action. But similar verbal attacks on blacks, Hispanics or members of the gay community are seen as racist or bigoted because these communities have been victims of oppression.
This point was illustrated when Mysonne, a rapper from the Bronx and left-leaning activist, attempted to defend the Women’s March movement’s Mallory. Yet, as the National Review’s Mairead Mcardle pointed out, Mysonne himself has in the past accused the Jews of oppressing black people, saying in a Twitter post that “Farakahn [sic] has a view of Jews based on the pain and harm that he can prove they’ve inflicted on blacks for hundreds of years!” “To disagree with farakhan [sic] is understandable,” he posted, “but to act as if the violence, pain, control and destruction that people he has evidence that are in fact Jewish have imposed on Blacks is not realistic.”
The twisted logic goes something like this: All Jews are fair game for being derided and lambasted because some Jews might have oppressed black people.
As long as movements such as the Women’s March don’t condemn the likes of Farrakhan and say any antisemitism is unacceptable, they should be kept out of the tent of peace-loving, conflict resolution-seeking organizations.
Their backhanded endorsement of Farrakhan’s views speaks volumes.
‘If your leader does not have the same enemies as Jesus, they may not be THE leader,” wrote Women’s March co-founder Tamika Mallory on Twitter on March 1. Her bizarre tweet came as she was under fire for attending a speech by Louis Farrakhan at the Saviour’s Day convention in Chicago. The ADL has condemned Mallory for attending and noted she received a special shout-out from Farrakhan. Now everyone is piling on Mallory and the Women’s March to denounce antisemitism.
“Memo to the Left: Denounce antisemite Louis Farrakhan,” wrote Elad Nehorai at The Forward.
Large numbers of people seem to agree that Mallory is in the wrong for her silence about antisemitism and for attending these kinds of events. But the focus on Mallory misses the forest for the trees. Mallory is just one person.
Her views of Farrakhan are shared by large numbers of people – including former US president Barack Obama.
In January 2005 a photo of Obama with Farrakhan emerged. Taken by Askia Muhammed at a gathering of the Congressional Black Caucus, the photo was buried for 13 years. An article by Vinson Cunningham at The New Yorker notes that “after some pressure from one of the caucus’s staffers, Muhammad agreed to bury it.” He writes that “Farrakhan is the author of vile, uncountable, unreconstructed, cause-derailing antisemitic slurs, but his Million Man March made him and the Nation a stubborn unignorable feature of the political landscape for black would-be public servants who came of age in the 1990s.” This includes Keith Ellison, the rising Democrat.
Connect the dots and what you get is not just one passionate Women’s March leader, but a whole forest of people who have hung out with Farrakhan. And it’s not really about Farrakhan. He’s just one person. It’s about his ideas, his words and the fact that people didn’t feel ashamed to be associated with him.
Democratic Illinois Rep. Danny Davis confirmed in an interview Sunday that he has a personal relationship with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a notorious anti-Semite, and said he isn’t bothered by Farrakhan’s position on “the Jewish question.”
Farrakhan has repeatedly denounced Jews as “satanic,” praised Hitler as a “very great man” and has said that white people “deserve to die.” (RELATED: Seven Louis Farrakhan Quotes On Jews, Gays And White People)
Davis previously told The Daily Caller that he considers Farrakhan an “outstanding human being” and said he regularly meets with Farrakhan. Davis’s office falsely told the Anti-Defamation League that the congressman had been misquoted.
The congressman wasn’t sure why the ADL wrote that he had been misquoted in his praise for the anti-Semite, and said he wasn’t sure if someone from his office had told the ADL he was misquoted, he told The Daily Caller News Foundation on Sunday. “I think that was what they wanted to write. Nah, I don’t have no problems with Farrakhan, I don’t spend a whole lot of my time dealing with those kind of things,” Davis said.
The Anti-Defamation League blasted on Sunday Rep. Danny Davis, an Illinois Democrat, for lacking the “courage” to condemn anti-Semitic preacher Louis Farrakhan.
“It is unfortunate that the congressman apparently can’t muster up the courage to denounce Farrakhan’s blatant anti-Semitism and instead chose to praise him,” an ADL spokesman told JTA.
Davis in a Daily Caller interview posted Sunday doubled down on an earlier interview in which he called the Nation of Islam leader “an outstanding human being who commands a following of individuals who are learned and articulate.”
The ADL had sought a clarification from Davis on the earlier interview, an ADL official said, and Davis said the remarks were out of context and he asked for more information about Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism. The ADL provided Davis with a compilation of Farrakhan’s virulent attacks on Jews over the decades.
The Antisemitism Problem of the Women's March Co-Founders
The adamant refusal of Women's March co-founders Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory to condemn the virulent antisemitism of Louis Farrakhan. An absolute disgrace to women's rights. Even (third) Women's March co-founder Sophie Ellman-Golan has condemned Farrakhan's antisemitism.
You can see some upcoming arts events in Lebanon in the BandsInTown webpage.
A British pyrotechnic troupe called FuelGirls and a popular Spanish DJ named Fabrizio Marra are scheduled to perform in Beitut in the next two months, along with other performers from Europe.
Why have we not heard a peep from the BDSers? After all, life for Palestinians in Lebanon is far worse than in Israel or in the territories (including Gaza.) They are banned, by law, from many jobs, they cannot buy land, most cannot live outside dilapidated camps - at least one of which is surrounded by a wall and watchtowers. They cannot expand their houses even within the camps. About half of the "registered Palestine refugees" in Lebanon have already fled because life there is unbearable.
Yet no one even considers boycotting Lebanon for how it treats Palestinians. No one even sends a single tweet to these artists demanding that they respect Palestinian rights by not performing.
If the "pro-Palestinian" crowd was really pro-Palestinian, then why the silence?
We all know the answer. And that answer is what proves that while there are many, many people who are enthusiastically against the existence of a Jewish state, there are very few people who give a damn about actual Palestinians.
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Mohammed Al Qadi has been getting publicity for running marathons worldwide as a representative of the Palestinians.
You can see him interviewed here on France24 where he claims to support peace, and also that he cannot return to "Palestine" because Israel would arrest him because of his support of Palestinian rights. When pressed about whether he attempted to return home, he said that he had been detained for hours at the airport but he never says that he was not allowed back.
Even so, he has supposedly applied for asylum in France because of his oppression. He does have residence there but as far as I can tell he never received asylum.
He told the Jerusalem Post in 2014 "“I have many Israeli friends from my work as a peace activist. ... I believe in peace and support peace, because violence begets violence.”
But he has posted on Facebook that he supports a Hamas terrorist named Mohammed Basset Al Harob, who murdered 3 people in a shooting and ramming attack on Nov 19, 2015. The victims were an 18 year old American Jew, an Israeli Jewish father of 4 and a Palestinian bystander.
This post has been taken down, apparently. But he has also compared Israel to Nazis more than once, which is pure antisemitism:
He also calls for Israel's destruction:
When he claims to be a peaceful man who is oppressed by Israel, he is not telling the truth.
(h/t Tomer Ilan)
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The Israeli military was forced last month to engage an Iranian drone launched into Israeli airspace from Syria. There will be more such incidents if Tehran is permitted to continue projecting force throughout the Middle East. North America and Europe must join Israel in stopping Iran.
Iran is a revolutionary theocratic state committed to spreading religious extremism throughout the Islamic world. It projects political and military power from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean and Red Seas. To support its ambition, Iran has illegally pursued nuclear weapons and fought wars using terrorist proxies.
Iran's leaders have threatened Israel time and again with total destruction, and now, Iranian power has arrived at Israel's border.
The first objective must be to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. The Friends of Israel Initiative, of which we are members, has always maintained that, rather than preventing Iran's nuclear ambitions, the 2015 nuclear agreement gave the regime a road map to achieving them.
Predictions that the agreement would de-escalate tensions and improve cooperation have proved wrong. Since signing the agreement, Iran's aggression and hostility have increased.
But fixing the agreement and stopping Iran from going nuclear would not eliminate the threat. The U.S. and its allies must also roll back Iran's aggression and influence throughout the Middle East. If left unchecked, Iran's aggression will ultimately threaten Europe and North America as well.
Mr. Aznar is a former prime minister of Spain. Mr. Harper is a former prime minister of Canada.
Today, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad are supported by Iran, the country abhorred by many Arabs who remember that airplane hijacking and the ensuing blackmail were invented by the Palestinian Arabs who hijacked an El Al plane to Algiers in 1968, fifty years ago, beginning a period of travail still being endured by the entire world.
Despite the 1989 Taaf agreement that ended the civil war in Lebanon and was supposed to lead to the de-weaponization and dissolution of all the Lebanese militias, Syria allowed Hezbollah to keep its arms and to develop its military power unrestrainedly. The repeated excuse was that the weapons were meant to "liberate Palestine" and would not be aimed at the Lebanese. To anyone with a modicum of brains, it was clear that the Palestine story was a fig leaf covering the sad truth that the weapons were going to be aimed at Hezbollah's Syrian and Lebanese enemies. "Palestine" was simply an excuse for the Shiite takeover of Lebanon.
Worst of all is the Palestinian demand that Arab countries refrain from any relations with Israel until the Palestinian problem is solved to the satisfaction of the PLO and Hamas leaders. However, a good portion of the Arab world cannot find any commonalities that could unite the PLO and Hamas. They have given up on achieving an internal Palestinian reconciliation, watching the endless squabbles ruin any chances of progress regarding Israel. To sum up the situation, the Arab world – that part of it which sees Israel as the only hope in dealing with Iran – is not happy at the expectation that it must mortgage its future and its very existence to the internal fighting between the PLO and Hamas.
And let us not forget that Egypt and Jordan have signed peace agreements with Israel, have moved outside the circle of war for the "liberation of Palestine" and have forsaken their Palestinian Arab "brothers," leaving them to deal with the problem on their own.
Much of the Arab and Muslim world is convinced that the "Palestinians" do not want a state of their own. After all, if that state is established, the world will cease to donate those enormous sums, there will be no more "refugees" and the Palestinian Arabs will have to work like everyone else. How can they do that when they are all addicted to receiving handouts without any strings attacked?
One can say with assurance, that 70 years after the creation of the "Palestinian problem," the Arab world has realized that there is no solution that will satisfy those who have turned "refugee-ism" into a profession, so that the "Palestinian problem" has become an emotional and financial scam that only serves to enrich the corrupt leaders of Ramallah and Gaza.
In a video posted on Facebook, Abbas' Fatah party takes pride in the murder of 10 Israelis. The video glorifies a terror attack carried out by terrorist Thaer Hammad in 2002, who shot and murdered 3 Israeli civilians and 7 soldiers one by one with a sniper rifle from a hilltop in Wadi Al-Haramiya between Ramallah and Nablus.
The video presents the attack as a successful mission and the terrorist murderer as a heroic agent:
In a video posted on Facebook, Abbas' Fatah party takes pride in the murder of 10 Israelis. The video presents the attack as a successful mission and the terrorist murderer as a heroic agent.
Read more here: https://t.co/jF9ztpl2sSpic.twitter.com/Iv6ISJE1ZE
"Date: Monday, March 3, 2002
Location: Wadi Al-Haramiya
The one who carried it out:
Thaer Kayed Hammad, from Silwad near Ramallah, born in 1980
Target: The Israeli army checkpoint in Wadi Al-Haramiya
Weapon used: A World War II M-1 rifle
At 04:30, Thaer set out in the direction of the checkpoint.
At 06:00, he fired the first bullet.
There were 6 soldiers at the checkpoint, and he killed them.
He hit them one after the other.
Thaer killed another 5 at the checkpoint, so the number rose to 11 (sic., he murdered 10 - 3 civilians and 7 soldiers).
After reaping the soldiers and settlers, his rifle blew up.
He fired just 24-26 bullets, and quietly left the place.
The operation lasted 20 minutes.
Thaer was arrested 20 months after he carried out the operation.
Thaer is serving 11 life sentences.
The Wadi Al-Haramiya operation
is one of the most famous operations carried out by the Palestinian resistance in the second Intifada.
Fatah TV production Montage: Ali Fa'our"
[Facebook page of the Fatah Movement - Bethlehem Branch, Feb. 10, 2018]
Hammad is serving 11 life sentences for these murders.
Continuing from last
week’s discussion of how to tell if we are winning or losing the fight
against BDS, you might think the best way to answer that question would be to
draw from numerical information. Numbers
don’t lie, after all. But do they always
tell the truth?
I thought about this several years ago when I read the exciting subhead
to this
story which explained we don’t need to worry so much about campus
anti-Semitism since BDS is absent from 97% of colleges and universities in
America.
Great news! one would first think in knowing that your cause is aligned
with a big number (97%) vs. a small one (3%) until you realize that this entire
analysis is an inadvertent, but still misleading, example of Proofiness.
That word comes from a 2010
book of the same name which is subtitled "The Dark Arts of
Mathematical Deception." The term
derives from Stephen Colbert's "truthiness," a word the comic
invented to describe "facts" that sound so good, they must be true
(especially if they confirm what you already want to believe).
Proofiness plays with the human tendency to treat quantitative data
more respectfully than we treat other types of information, which is why we
(for example) lap up the latest poll results, regardless of how wildly
divergent they are from one another, and despite the fact that their predictive
power has been shown to be minimal.
(Exhibit A-Z: Polls associated with the last US election.)
Because most people's desire to believe numerical data is coupled with
a lack of understanding of mathematical concepts (for instance, does that
"margin of error" reported in the last set of polls you read about
include potential systemic error – such as poorly worded survey questions – or
just statistical variance?), people can easily be deceived by different types of
mathematical deception.
My favorite of these is the unit
fallacy which you'll see frequently in discussions involving rates or
percentages. This is the one where a CEO
of a company whose profits have risen from 10% to 12% will express this growth
as "our profits have grown 20%," which is technically accurate (if
that 20% is applied to the original percentage, rather than the whole), but
misleading since most people think of "growing 20%" as implying
addition (which would make such a description more suitable for profits growing
from 10% to 30%).
Proofiness is a staple of election politics where candidates play all
kinds of fruity tactics, from cherry
picking data to comparing apples to
oranges. But in the case of the Times
of Israel headline, we are faced with inadvertent Proofiness based on the
seemingly remarkable statistic of only 3% of colleges dealing with anti-Israel
incidents.
On the surface, this certainly seems like a wonderfully positive
trend. After all, 97% is much, much
bigger than 3%, and if I wanted to think of myself as being on the winning
side, I'd far prefer to ally myself with that very large number vs. the very
small one (which explains the Occupy Movement’s "We are the 99%" slogan
– another "proofy" assertion).
But remember that there are over 4000 colleges in the US, which means
that 3% comes out to over 100 schools.
And if you heard a headline that said anti-Israel activity was prevalent
in more than 100 US college campuses, you'd probably react differently than you
would to that 97% vs. 3% figure. Further,
if you looked at a list of those colleges (which would go on for 2-4 pages,
depending on font size), you might not feel victorious at all, especially since
such a list would include some of the biggest and best known schools in the
country (including most of the Ivy League and the vast University of California
system).
But before panicking at a different packaging of the same data, a look
at the original
report the Times story was covering provides a more reasonable description
of the situation, one that will be familiar to most Divest This readers.
For, as that report analyzes (and the Times headline does actually
confirm correctly), US campuses are not aflame.
Anti-Israel activity is not constant, even on the 100+ campuses where it
is regular. BDS, while not a complete
wash out, is hardly on the march (and has yet to trigger even a dollar of
actual divestment from the Jewish state).
Most schools where loud protests, ongoing anti-Israel lectures and film
series, or hectoring professors are a problem, these anti-Israel partisans have
to compete with increasing numbers of pro-Israel students who long ago decided
they had every right to use their own free speech rights to counter Israel's
defamers.
Still, anti-Israel hate campaigns at 100+ schools is a problem
(especially if who is in that 100 changes each year, meaning we could be seeing
seeds planted at 200, 300 or more schools over the course of the decade). But figuring out what to do at a hundred
high-profile campuses is a much smaller (or at least a different) challenge
than having to deal with thousands of flaming campuses, which is why a dose of
reality can actually help our side make more effective decisions on where to
put time and resources.
So rather than panic that the campuses are turning against us, or take the
equally fallacious path of deciding the problem is solved (since it
"only" impacts 3% of schools), we should focus our attention on
ensuring that students on each of the campuses where anti-Israel activity
predominates have the knowledge, the tools and the arguments they need to ensure
the BDSers and other Israel haters continue to be defeated and ignored.
We must also realize that since the war against Israel is not something
we started, that we have no control over when it ends. And so we need to brace for campus (and
other) fights that will go on year after year after year, showing the same
level of persistence and resolve as Israel's foes, but bolstered by better
tactics and the fact that we are in the right.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will be replaced by his deputy, Mahmoud al-Aloul, if he becomes unable to fulfill his duties, Fatah's Central Committee decided in Ramallah on Saturday.
According to Palestinian media outlets, Fatah's Central Committee decided that should Abbas, 82, were unable to continue in his role, al-Aloul will be appointed "acting president of Palestine for a period of three months until elections can be held."
Al-Aloul was elected Abbas' deputy several months ago.
According to senior Fatah officials, the committee, also amended Palestinian law to facilitate the transfer of Abbas' presidential powers to his deputy if it becomes imperative, for the aforementioned three-month interim period.
"The amendment to Palestinian law on the matter of transferring Abbas' presidential authorities to his deputy Mahmoud al-Aloul, was made in light of rumors regarding Abbas' failing health," one council official said.
I think that the story got one detail wrong - it was a Fatah Revolutionary Party meeting, not a Fatah Central Committee meeting.
But why is Fatah, ostensibly a political party, making up laws for the Palestinian Authority? Shouldn't its cabinet, headed by prime minister Rami Hamdallah, be involved?
Who is in charge?
The answer is - Mahmoud Abbas is a dictator. He, and Arafat before him, has created the illusion of being democratically elected but in fact there is no democracy and no independence - it is all him.
The Palestinian Authority is not the government of the so-called State of Palestine. The Palestinian Legislative Council is the "parliament" of the Palestinian Authority but the PA is not the government, as has very limited responsibilities. (The PLC has more Hamas members than Fatah members, so it has effectively been nullified by Abbas.)
The Palestinian National Council is the "parliament" of the PLO, which is really the ruling government of "Palestine" as is recognized as such by the UN. Anyone who says that Abbas was democratically elected - even forgetting that his term expired many years ago - is an ignoramus or a liar. The PA reports to the PLO and it always has, and the UN recognizes the PLO as the government of the "State of Palestine."
Abbas leads the PLO Executive Committee and as such makes all the decisions for the PLO, and for the PA. And he of course leads Fatah, which includes the terrorist Al Aqsa Brigades that everyone likes to pretend don't exist even though they show their loyalty to Abbas.
Needless to say, there is no democracy in electing the leader of the PLO, even though its own Palestinian National Council pretends to have been elected by Palestinian Arabs both inside and outside the territories.
Since Fatah is the dominant party of the PLO, effectively Fatah makes the decisions. I had never seen Fatah claim to make the actual laws before, but in the end the distinction between Fatah and the PLO is artificial anyway. (There are non-Fatah members of the PLO, there to make it look more "democratic.")
I drew up this graphic in 2012 and it is still accurate:
The West, when funding the PA, pretends that the PLO doesn't exist and makes no decisions on how the money is actually spent. But the PLO controls everything in the PA.
Remember when the EU said that it won't pay money to the funds that pay terrorists and their families? The PLO simply moved that budget item from the PA to the PLO itself, so there would be an extra layer of obfuscation and the EU won't feel guilty anymore. But it is all a shell game.
Too bad the media has never caught on to the dictatorship of Mahmoud Abbas, complete with arrests of people who write anything against him.
The closing statement of the Fatah Revolutionary council meeting "reiterated its support for President Mahmoud Abbas and his political outlook." It sounds as comical as a Soviet press release No one bothers to notice how close Abbas really is to a Stalin, while the world media treats him like a Ghandi.
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J-Street placed a full page ad in the New York Times saying that Abbas has accepted a two state solution - but Netanyahu and Trump have not:
Here is a photo of Mahmoud Abbas from last Thursday - after he supposedly accepted a two-state solution at the Security Council - as he attended a Fatah Revolutionay Council meeting.
Note the logo on the folder he is holding. It is the Fatah logo, of the political party he heads. And it does not show a two-state solution. In fact, it urges a violent armed takeover of all of Israel.
There has never been any move to change the Fatah logo to indicate acceptance of Israel's existence, by Abbas or any of this people.
But J-Street knows that the head of the group whose logo boasts three weapons taking over the Jewish state is the peaceful party. .
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Robert Fisk of The Independent defended the idea of Mahmoud Abbas buying his own personal jet (equivalent to a 737-700), claimed that Israelis who criticized it are being hypocritical, and mentioned the parties involved in the transaction:
Buying private jets is a complicated business, and the documents studied by The Independent show that talks started for the purchase of Abbas’s aircraft last autumn – long before Trump’s threats – and that they involved buying the $50m plane from the Chinese Nanshan Jet company through Jetcraft Corporation of Minnesota in the US, and a “good faith” deposit of $500,000 with lawyers Donald H Bunker and Associates in Dubai. Several documents are signed by Wael Sobeih, the aviation portfolio manager of the Palestine Investment Fund, and acknowledged by Rasha Qawasmi, the head of finance. Other papers show that the transaction involved the United Overseas Bank of Singapore and Jet Aviation, a subsidiary of General Dynamics, and, intriguingly, a company called AGAMC of Aruba in the Dutch Caribbean.
Fisk doesn't bother to explain why buying private jets is so complicated, and his intrigue the the involvement of an Aruba company wasn't enough for him to check down that path.
The actual purchase seems to have been through this AGAMC company, as this document shows:
The AGAMC letter is signed by Wael Sobeih, who Fisk identifies as the "aviation portfolio manager of the Palestine Investment Fund."
Clearly, AGAMC is a front for the Palestine Investment Fund.
Its managing director is Mohammed Abdullah Mustafa, and he is also the managing director for another Aruba company, Avmax Group International.
Maybe there is a perfectly reasonable reason for the PLO to set up front companies through the PIF in Aruba, but it doesn't seem quite like the way a real government should act.
(h/t Bill P)
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Two Israeli soldiers and one civilian were wounded in a car-ramming assault in the northern city of Acre on Sunday. Police have confirmed that the incident was a nationalistically motivated terror attack.
The attack took place near the city’s central train station. The driver of the car was shot by a soldier at the scene and taken to a hospital in critical condition.
His name has not been released, but the Hebrew news site Mako identified him as a resident of the Israeli-Arab town of Shfaram.
Police official Benny Avaliya stated, “There is almost 100 percent — if not 100 percent — certainty that we are dealing with a terror attack.”
The driver apparently first struck a policeman, then proceeded to hit two young soldiers nearby. Eli Bin, an official with the Magen David Adom emergency service, told Israel’s Channel 2 that paramedics arrived at the scene and found that the victims were lightly wounded. They were quickly evacuated to a hospital in the nearby town of Nahariya.
Magen David Adom’s Dovi Richter, who was at the scene, said, “I saw two young people around 20 fully conscious. They lay at the side of the road and suffered from light wounds in the head and body. I gave them first aid. I put them in the ambulance and we brought them in good condition to the hospital in Nahariya. We also treated a man around 51 who was wounded in the legs.”
Paramedic Shai Markovitz of emergency service Hatzalah gave first aid to the attacker, saying, “I found a driver who was critically injured after having suffered multiple gunshot wounds.”
The Hamas terrorist organization praised Sunday’s ramming attack in the northern Israeli city of Akko, calling the attack “heroic and brave”.
Earlier on Sunday, an Israeli Arab terrorist rammed an Israeli Border Police officer and IDF soldiers at two different locations in the northern coastal city of Akko before being shot and neutralized. The terrorist was later taken into custody and evacuated for treatment. His condition is listed as moderate.
Police later confirmed that the incident was intentional, and that the attacker had acted out of nationalistic motives.
Later on Sunday, the Gaza-based Hamas terror group praised the attack, hailing it as “heroic and brave”.
A Hamas spokesperson further claimed that the attack was a testament to the “determination” of the “Palestinian people to continue in their use of resistance” to defend their land and holy places.
While glorifying the female terrorist murderer Dalal Mughrabi who led the most lethal terror attack against Israel, Abbas' Fatah Movement tried to hide the fact that the terrorists murdered children and adult civilians.
In a video on Facebook, Fatah lied, claiming the terrorists killed "soldier passengers," on the bus they hijacked, when in fact they murdered 12 children and 25 adult civilians, in what is known as the "Coastal Road Massacre."
These are 12 of those "soldier passengers":
The video assures that terrorist Mughrabi's name "will remain engraved in golden letters in the history of the Palestinian struggle":
Text in video: "When the woman carried a rifle to liberate the homeland
The date:
March 11, 1978
The place:
The Palestinian coast (i.e., the Israeli coast)
12 members of the Deir Yassin squad
The target:
The Israeli Parliament building
Abu Jihad visited the special forces and told the squad they have a task
The time: 18:40
The squad began to carry out the operation
The plan was
to take over an Israeli army bus and drive to Tel Aviv
Dalal Mughrabi - Military commander of the Deir Yassin squad
The squad took over the bus and all of its soldier passengers
Israel appointed a special military unit led by [Ehud] Barak to stop the bus
The squad confronted the Israeli forces. Dalal and her comrades died as Martyrs, and one fell into captivity.
Then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin admitted that 37 Israelis were killed and over 80 were wounded.
Dalal Mughrabi's name will remain engraved in golden letters in the history of the Palestinian struggle and the resistance to the occupation
Production: Fatah TV Montage: Ali Fa'our"
[Facebook page of the Fatah Movement - Nablus Branch, Jan. 29, 2018;
Facebook page of the Fatah Movement - Bethlehem Branch, Jan. 31, 2018]
Abbas has taken to reiterating his claim on behalf of all Palestinian Arabs that “we are the descendants of the Canaanites that lived in the land 5,000 years ago and continued to live there to this day.”
"We are the descendants of the Canaanites who lived in the land of Palestine 5,000 years ago, and continuously remained there to this day. Our great people remains rooted in its land. The Palestinian people built their own cities and homeland, and made contributions to humanity and civilization."
Abbas could just as well claim that Palestinian Arabs are descended from Jews as well. Maybe he just has not gotten around to it. Or maybe it's just that Joseph Massad has beaten him to it.
"I am a Palestinian Christian, and I know what Christianity is. I am a descendant of the first Christians in the world, and Jesus Christ was born in my country, in my land. Bethlehem is a Palestinian town. So I will not accept this one-upmanship on Christianity. Nobody has the monopoly."
this is how Bethlehem is geographically noted in the New Testament:
Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea... And they said unto him, In Bethlehem of Judaea...And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Judah... Matthew 2:1, 5-6 [emphasis added]
So much for Ashrawi's alleged knowledge about Christianity.
But what about this claim that Palestinians are descended from Jews?
Hillel Fendel writes about this claim of Palestinian Arabs descended from Jews in an article for Arutz Sheva. He writes that David Ben-Gurion and Yitzchak Ben-Tzvi wrote a book "100 years ago," apparently a reference to "The Land of Israel: Past and Present," which they wrote in Yiddish in 1918:
If we investigate the origins of the Felahim, there is no doubt that much Jewish blood runs in their veins.
Fendel writes that they imply there were Jews who loved the Land so much they were willing to give up their Judaism rather than leave the land. That may be a reference to an edict in 1012 by Caliph el-Hakim, who reportedly ordered non-Muslims to either convert or leave the Land of Israel. Fendel writes of an estimate that 90% of the Jews chose to convert. The decree was revoked 32 years later.
[13th Century Shafi'i Islamic scholar] Ibn Khallikan and others pointed out that the Jews of Khaybar the Khayabira, were exempt from these decrees. Ibn al-Athir conveys very briefly, without mentioning the year, that al-Hakim ordered (after the destruction of the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem, which he claims took place in AH 398, that is AD 1007/8) that all the churches in the realm be destroyed and this was done, and that the Jews and the Christians were then to accept Islam, or emigrate to Byzantine lands. They were also obliged to wear special distinguishing signs. Many converted. What [Arab or Kurdish historian and biographer] Ibn al-Athir has to say about the conversions evidently applies mainly to the Christians, for when speaking of the converts return to their former beliefs when he decrees were no longer valid, he only mentions the Christians. But there were also many Jews who converted to Islam, as Elhanan b. Shemaria [Jewish leader in Egypt at the time] explicitly wrote. However, the evidence of Yahya ibn Said is different. He states that the Jews 'generally managed to evade the decree to convert to Islam and only a few of them did convert.'" [emphasis added]
Fendel also writes about Tsvi Misinai, a former hi-tech pioneer who has researched what he claims are the Jewish roots of the Palestinian Arabs. Here is a video from Misinai's website, The Engagement:
In the video, Misinai points to the roughly 4,000 members of the Sawarka Bedouin, found in the Sinai and Negev. One of their tribal leaders claims, in Hebrew, that they "are all Jewish." The leader goes on to say:
They had no choice but to convert; this was centuries ago… I remember my mother and grandmother wouldn’t light fire on Sabbath, and they had a special mikveh…
Then there are the Arabs in a Bedouin village east of Hebron:
they remember burning a small piece of dough (reminiscent of the Mitzvah of taking challah)
they tear their clothes and sit shiva for seven days, instead of three as is Muslim practice.
they have ritual circumcisions after the seventh day of birth.
The video has pictures of homes in some of the Arab villages that have doorpost indentations for a Mezuzah, with a scroll placed in some of them.
By the same token though, it has to be admitted that the use of 6-pointed stars is not limited to Palestinian Arabs. Misinai himself mentions the use of "Solomon's seal" by Muslims, so it is not surprising to find those stars used in other Muslim countries.
The website Pak Tea House: Pakistan - Past, Present and Future features photos by Malik Omaid of mosaic tiles forming the star of David in the Wazir Khan Mosque Lahore in Pakistan. Omaid writes, "back then it was halal [permitted]. No one said its a Jewish conspiracy behind this mosque."
The Circumcision Room (Sünnet Odası) is thought to have been built during the reign of Kanunî Sultan Süleyman - Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. It is located on the palace grounds’ most spectacular segment facing the Galata district. This pavilion initially planned as the Sultan's summer kiosk (Yazlık Oda) is referred to as Circumcision Room, due to the fact that it was the venue used for the circumcision – a religious tradition in Islam for cleanliness and purity - ceremony of the princes-sons of Sultan Ahmet III (1703 -1730).
This does not refute Misinai, but it does show that more research is needed when it comes to common elements and customs. It is certainly likely that there are Palestinian Arabs that are descended from Jews, but it is not clear how many there are.
But as pointed out in Misinai's video, if there really are Palestinian Arabs who are descended from Jews, it should be possible to detect that by their genetic markers. The video features Dr. Oppenheim who was part of a group that did research resulting in a report apparently proving that connection. Here is an abstract from one report in 2000 from Hebrew University:
Y chromosome variation in the I&P Arabs was compared to that of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, and to that of North Welsh individuals. At the haplogroup level, defined by the binary polymorphisms only, the Y chromosome distribution in Arabs and Jews was similar but not identical. At the haplotype level, determined by both binary and microsatellite markers, a more detailed pattern was observed. Single-step microsatellite networks of Arab and Jewish haplotypes revealed a common pool for a large portion of Y chromosomes, suggesting a relatively recent common ancestry. The two modal haplotypes in the I&P Arabs were closely related to the most frequent haplotype of Jews (the Cohen modal haplotype). However, the I&P Arab clade that includes the two Arab modal haplotypes (and makes up 32% of Arab chromosomes) is found at only very low frequency among Jews, reflecting divergence and/or admixture from other populations.[emphasis added]
The report, as Oppenheim says in the video, show common ancestry -- but again, this is not conclusive.
Of course, when compared with people from Wales, Jews and Arabs indeed look quite similar. However, when they compared Israeli Jews with the same Arab sample, but this time included comparisons with Kurds, Armenians, Turks, Syrians, Jordanians, Lebanese, and Bedouin, the picture looked quite different. Although all of the Middle Eastern populations bore some similarities to each other (a fairly robust finding confirmed in other works), “Jews were found to be more closely related to groups in the north of the Fertile Crescent (Kurds, Turks, and Armenians) than to their Arab neighbors.” For some, this will evoke the biblical account of Abraham’s origins in Ur of the Chaldees, and raise the possibility that the story contains echoes of an ancient population movement. Alternatively, Jews, Kurds, Armenians, and Anatolian Turks may all carry the genetic markers of ancient indigenous populations of the Fertile Crescent, while Palestinian Arabs and Bedouin may largely descend from the Arab conquerors, with their distinctive genetic signifiers. [emphasis added]
But as the Appelbaum's see it, beyond genetics the problem is there are multiple possible ancestors for today's Palestinian Arabs:
o The Muslim Arabs who conquered the land in the 7th century o The conquered inhabitants of the land, who converted o The Arabs who later immigrated to the land when it was economically desirable
Even then, it is impossible to know what proportion of the Palestinian Arab population is descended from each group.
And that leads to the overarching problem that the Palestinian Arabs face, as formulated by the Appelbaum's:
Because Palestinian Arabs are part of an ethnic group historically proud of having arrived as conquerors, the question of how to claim historical primacy has been the source of some perplexity among Palestinian nationalists.
After all, how nationalistic can a Palestinian Arab be if he is descended from the Arab invaders who conquered the land while identifying with the people and religion of Arabia?
It just seems neater and simpler for the Palestinian Arab to just claim that in reality, they have been there all along.
There are some Palestinian Arabs who see and admit, just how absurd that approach is.
In 1997, Rashid Khalidi, then professor of Middle East history and director of the Center for International Studies at the University of Chicago who has also served as an adviser to various Palestinian delegations, put it bluntly:
There is...a relatively recent tradition which argues that Palestinian nationalism has deep historical roots. As with other movements extreme advocates of this view...anachronistically read back into the history of Palestine over the past few centuries, and even millennia, a nationalist consciousness and identity that are in fact relatively modern...Among the manifestations of this outlook are a ...predilection for seeing in people such as the Canaanites, Jebusites, Amorites and Philistines the lineal ancestors of the modern Palestinians. (emphasis added) [See Khalidi, "Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness," pages 33-4]
Such concerns apparently don't bother many others.
Bottom line, no one is challenging Abbas and he is free to lay claim to his Canaanite ancestors to his heart's content. And he is not alone in doing so. In a world where UNESCO can claim Hebron is a Palestinian heritage site, the silence of the UN and EU in face of Abbas's claims - any of his claims - is no surprise. What may be a surprise is the opportunity afforded by Misinai's claim of the Jewish ancestry of Palestinian Arabs.
How soon will it be before we can expect Palestinian Arabs to claim automatic Israeli citizenship based on Misinai's work?
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I am going to Israel later this week to attend a conference in Jerusalem on digital media.
I was hoping to find someone to host a last-minute Hasby Awards next Sunday, one of my few free days there, but so far, no luck. At this point it would be hard to pull it off, but I want to give it one last shot.
If any organization in Israel wants to host either the Hasbys or something similar (I could put together a sequel to my symposium last year on Trump, for example, or I could give a talk), please contact me!
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A UAE-based columnist from Egypt-based Al Shorouk News, Yousef Al Hassan, is upset at Turkish president Tayip Erdogan's bombing of parts of Syria and Iraq.
He is so upset that he won't mention Erdogan's name, instead referring to him as the "new Ottoman sultan" and complaining about how he is interfering in Arab affairs.
To buttress his anti-Turkish comments, the bulk of the article starts this way:
Under the policies of the ancestors of the new Ottoman Sultan, the first seeds of Israeli settlement were planted, and the nucleus of the Zionist movement and its legendary dream were formed by facilitating the emigration of Jewish communities residing in Turkey and Europe to Palestine. Sultan Abdul Majid gave these groups the first Palestinian lands in the middle of the nineteenth century, in Jerusalem. During the reign of Sultan Abdul Aziz, the Jews were given land to establish the first "agricultural" settlement, near Jaffa.
It is a false narrative which some say about Sultan Abdul Hamid that he said "Palestine is not for sale!" and that he tried to prevent Jewish migrations to Palestine! However, his practical policies, documented in his dealings with Herzl and European banks owned by wealthy Jewish families such as the Rothschild family, did not prevent these current settlement migrations, but increased under his reign. The first waves of Jewish immigrants formed the basic demographic and geographic base of the Israeli entity, A few decades, the same Sultan who gave a privilege and Ottoman "Permana" allowance to the Jewish communities to establish and settle in Palestine and issued legislation that responds to its wishes and plans that were not hidden from the subjects of the Ottoman state Arabs and Muslims, especially the Palestinians.
The meetings of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the frequent meetings of the Turkish deal with the leaders of the Zionist movement in Europe, so that the Sultan undertakes to facilitate Jewish migrations to Palestine in return for Herzl and the Rothschild Bank in London to provide funds to the Sultanate and the Sultan to save the Turkish state budget and recruiting Jews to work to make large investments in Turkey.
In the era of the late ancestors of the new Ottoman Sultan, the Jewish communities were told: "Enter this country, as businessmen and money, be friends, and then you can do what you want." In the sense that they can get what they want in Palestine, Sultan Abdul Hamid II, during his reign until 1909, the number of Jews multiplied several times, and the Sultan did not respond to calls from Arabs and Palestinians to close the gates of Jewish immigration to Palestine.
The ancestors of the new Ottoman Sultan were not entrusted with Palestine, but were also in agreement with the Zionist plans to colonize Palestine, obliterate Arab history, strip the Palestinians of their past and their rights, and invent the so-called ancient Israel.
It goes on from there. Most of his points are ahistorical. (Herzl met with the Sultan but, according to him, the meeting was unsuccessful.)
His main argument against Erdogan's actions today is that the Ottomans didn't prevent Jews from moving to their historic homeland, thereby associating him somehow with the early Zionists.
The only way the argument makes sense is if one assumes that the audience is thoroughly antisemitic.
To be fair, there is less of this sort of thing in Arab media in recent years, but there is still plenty of such overt Jew-hatred, associating one's enemies with Jews as a means to discredit them in the Arab mind.
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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
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Elder of Ziyon
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