Wednesday, June 27, 2018
Elder of Ziyon
Wednesday, June 27, 2018Elder of Ziyon
The Wall of ShamePapen decided to be provocative. But the actual photo reveals more about her than just her body.
First of all, ‘don’t judge a book by its title’… This purely implies the shame you, dear reader, (perhaps) will project on me because I have done something so disrespectful, I should burn in hell. I know my mailbox is about to fill up with threats and angriness again - to all the people typing down their furiosity right now, save your energy. I don’t even open them.
After my escapades in Egypt, I knew that I wanted to push the bounderies of regilion and politics even further. Breaking down the walls that have been build to keep all our wandering souls on this planet somehow under control.
With other words, showing my personal religion in a world where freedom is becoming a very luxurious thing.
Tuesday, June 26, 2018Elder of Ziyon
J StreetJared Kushner talks a good game about the Trump administration’s deep commitment to achieving peace in the Middle East.So the absence of Kushner's saying certain words is what proves to J-Street that the peace plan is worthless?
Last week, Kushner again traveled to the Middle East to talk with Prime Minister Netanyahu and with Arab leaders. While there, Kushner gave a rare interview to a prominent Palestinian newspaper. The aim was presumably to convince the Palestinian people to embrace his soon-to-be-released proposal -- but he spent the interview lambasting President Abbas and the Palestinian Authority’s leadership.
The interview exemplified all that’s wrong with this administration’s approach. While offering empty platitudes about the benefits of peace, Kushner refused to endorse the two-state solution or to promise that he is working toward full Palestinian statehood -- continuing President Trump’s disastrous walk-back of 25 years of US and international consensus.
And he failed to acknowledge that the actions of this administration have alienated Palestinian leadership, empowered Israel’s right-wing rejectionists and shattered American credibility as a good-faith mediator.
Britain cherishes its longstanding relationships with others in this part of the world — notably including the Jordanians, the Saudis, and others in the Gulf. The royal family has played a central symbolic role in strengthening those ties, with innumerable reciprocal visits. Those royal visits have gone ahead — and high-volume trade relations, including colossal arms sales, have been maintained through the decades — despite widespread criticism at home of the human rights records of some of these regimes.
Sensitive to the interests and concerns of its partners in this part of the world, and well aware that official royal visits to Israel would not sit well with them, the royals for decades steered clear of the Jewish state.
Today, however, those interests and concerns have started to shift. Britain’s other allies nearby are preoccupied with the threats posed by the rapacious regime in Tehran. And in that face-off, they and Israel are on the same side.
Prince William’s optimistically declared “non-political” visit has yet to enter its more complicated diplomatic phase, when he meets the Palestinians and, especially, when he visits Jerusalem’s Old City — in what Israel regards as its sovereign capital, and what the prince’s official itinerary, to Israel’s dismay, designates as part of the “occupied Palestinian territories.”
But for Israel, an argument over terminology is a very small price to pay for the endorsement of legitimacy provided by a young, well-liked, sensible, and very senior British royal.
The Saudis are being extremely careful in publicly acknowledging the improving nature of their links with Israel. But Prince William’s visit, a substantive milestone in its own right for Israel, is also assuredly a significant indication of a wider positive shift in relations hereabout.
Given all this, one might well ask why the British government sticks to these fictions of Israeli illegality. After all, Theresa May is sympathetic to Israel.Melanie Phillips: Crying children, Trump peace plan, Prince William visit
Earlier this week, the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, condemned the UN Human Rights Council for its institutionalised anti-Israel behaviour.
One principal reason is surely that the UK is part of a European progressive order for which international law is the expression of its ideology, elements of which are inimical to the security and even the existence of the state of Israel.
Out of the carnage of two world wars grew the core progressive belief: that the western nation state is the source of nationalism, prejudice and aggression, and so any war in its own defence is by definition unjustified.
In place of the nation state should come a new international order based on transnational institutions and laws representing the brotherhood of man: the UN, EU, international law and human rights law.
War must be replaced by law through negotiation, conflict resolution, peace processes. There can be no victory or defeat. Questions of right and wrong, who is the aggressor and who the victim, are irrelevant. In a fight between God and the devil, western progressives would split the difference and call that a triumph.
So the fact that Palestinian identity is a fiction invented solely to destroy the Jewish claim to Israel is ignored. The evidence that international law upholds Israeli actions is dismissed. The way the UN and international law have been hijacked to destroy Israel is denied.
In Mandatory Palestine, Britain betrayed its legal obligations to the Jews. The FCO has a history of Arabism and antisemitism. Progressive transnationalism seems to have allowed it to progress from all that straight into lawfare against Israel without even passing “Go.”
Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired the row over the “crying migrant children” at the Mexico/US border; whether the supposedly mould-breaking new Trump Middle East peace plan will turn out to be anything other than more out of the same old useless US Middle East peace plan mould; and the significance of Prince William’s trip to the Middle East, the first official visit to Israel ever by a member of the British Royal Family.
"We've heard for so many yrs stories that Israel is going face this diplomatic tsunami. So far, thats a tsunami spinning in Israel's favor." - my @i24NEWS_EN segment yesterday, on visit of Prince Williamhttps://t.co/AdiLIGCvvw
— Eugene Kontorovich (@EVKontorovich) June 26, 2018
Tuesday, June 26, 2018Elder of ZiyonIfNotNow, Noah Phillips, Opinion
Tuesday, June 26, 2018Elder of ZiyonForest Rain, Opinion
How is it that Hamas’ credibility is treated as equal to that of the IDF and Israeli authorities? Over the past few weeks, I’ve heard journalists complain about the way in which Israel has dealt with their needs in relation to the weeks of violence at the Gaza border. I’ve also heard the argument from at least one journalist that both Hamas and Israel have equal and competing narratives that should be reported equally.Caroline Glick: Europe Seeks to Pin Down President Trump – and America
One major difference between the two sides is that one actively lies.
The death of Palestinian eight-month old Leila al-Ghandour on May 14, reportedly as a result of Israeli tear gas, made global headlines. Doubts were raised at the time over the cause of death and Hamas eventually took the baby off its list of casualties of the Gaza border violence. Still, headlines such as the Daily Express’ “Mother’s agony as baby dies in Gaza gas horror” and “Drones drop deadly cannisters” contributed to the libel of Israel as a brutal baby killer.
Despite this framing of the incident, the media cannot be blamed for covering the story. They can, however, be held responsible for taking Hamas claims at face value, not only in this case but more widely.
Reports now suggest that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar paid baby Leila’s parents NIS 8,000 ($2,200) to tell the media that the infant had died due to tear gas inhalation at the Gaza protests. This information comes from a relative of the family arrested and questioned over terror activities at the Gaza border who told Israeli authorities that the baby had died of a fatal blood condition that runs in the family.
Perhaps the media might be skeptical of any information of this nature given that it was apparently obtained from a Palestinian held in Israeli custody. Nonetheless, surely those same media outlets that reported the baby’s death in such a damning manner even while questions remained, have a duty to report this latest development? After all, how can the media not give equal coverage to what they would claim to be equal and competing narratives?
But, aside from a few reports, this new revelation simply didn’t register on most of the international media’s radars. A blood libel, like most of the blood libels leveled at Israel over the years, has essentially become part of the accepted narrative even if it is subsequently proven to be fake news.
Hamas knows it can get away with it.
In light of Europe’s institutional hostility towards Israel, and given the collective Arab rejection of Israel’s right to exist, it is obvious that Johnson doesn’t want this meeting because he is keen to advance the cause of peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
He is working to set up a meeting where the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan gang up on the U.S. and tell the President’s son-in-law that they will not accept any plan that doesn’t reflect their animus towards Israel.
Kushner, for his part, reportedly responded to Johnson’s attempt to railroad the White House into giving the EU veto power over U.S. Middle East policy by saying that while he is open to outside input in the U.S. peace plan, the President will decide its contents.
Kushner’s response hit the proper note. But it bears pointing out that Johnson’s speech at the UNHRC, like his attempt to build a coalition to ensnare the White House in a Middle East policy predicated on hostility towards Israel, show that Europe’s refusal to back the U.S.’s positions at the UNHRC was not a simple disagreement about the best way to achieve common ends.
Rather, Johnson’s efforts reveal a much more basic and unbridgeable conflict between the U.S. and Europe about the proper ends of foreign policy, and the sovereign right of the U.S. to advance its goals in the international arena.
Bernard Lewis issued a startling prediction in 2010: Iran—the land of scowling ayatollahs and flag burnings—would abandon Islamism by the end of the decade, while Turkey—Washington’s stalwart Cold War ally—would turn away from the West and burrow deeper into its Muslim identity. Lewis is no longer with us, and there are still a few years left in his wager, but events in both countries are proving him remarkably prescient.
On Turkey, Lewis has already been vindicated. Witness the ballot-box triumph of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party, or AKP. In the presidential contest over the weekend, Erdogan thumped his opponent, Muharrem Ince of the Republican People’s Party, 53% to 31%. A smattering of pro-Kurdish and secular candidates divided the remaining ballots. Erdogan’s AKP and its allies also locked a majority of seats in Parliament.
The elections were not exactly fair. As the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe observed, the state of emergency imposed following a 2016 coup attempt constricted “freedom of expression and assembly” for the opposition. Erdogan has used the emergency laws to dismiss more than 100,000 soldiers, teachers, police officers, and journalists. And some 50,000 people have been jailed and are awaiting trial, according to rights groups.
With numerous opposition reporters languishing in prison, it came as no surprise that the ruling party dominated the media landscape, which led European Union officials to conclude that “conditions for campaigning were not equal.”
Tuesday, June 26, 2018Elder of Ziyonanalysis, Daled Amos
"The United Nations is the accepted forum for the expression of international hatred."
"Yes, Prime Minister" British TV show
Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region. [emphasis added]How much more?
Tuesday, June 26, 2018Elder of Ziyon
Tuesday, June 26, 2018Elder of Ziyonmedia bias, NYT
With the Trump administration providing diplomatic cover, right-wing ministers in Israel pressing to exploit that while it lasts and international support for the Palestinians focused for the moment on Gaza, a new ruling by a settler-majority panel of Israel’s Supreme Court appears to have freed the government to proceed with the removal of entire Bedouin communities on the West Bank. Advocates of the Bedouins say this would be a war crime: the forced transfer of a population under the protection of the military occupation.In one paragraph, the NYT is claiming that Israel's Supreme Court probably allows war crimes, and that its bias is because its panel members are mostly settlers.
On June 10, 2002, Charles Krauthammer delivered the Distinguished Rennert Lecture upon receiving the Guardian of Zion Award from Bar-Ilan University's Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies. Below is an excerpt from the lecture titled "He Tarries: Jewish Messianism and the Oslo Peace."Charles Krauthammer’s Reflections on Israel, Zionism, Judaism, and God
In the 1990s, America slept and Israel dreamed.
The United States awoke on Sept. 11, 2001. Israel awoke in September 2000.
Like the left and like the reverie that we had in the United States, secular messianism was intoxicated with the idea that history had changed from a history based on military and political conflict to one in which the ground rules were set by markets and technology. This was the infatuation with globalization as the great leveler and the abolisher of things like politics, war and international conflict. This kind of geo-economics was widely accepted in the early post-Cold War era.
It was Sept. 11th that abolished that illusion. It taught us in America there are enemies, they are ideological, they care nothing for economics and they will use whatever military power they have as a means to achieve their ideological ends. This is the old history, perhaps the oldest history of all, the war of one God against another. No new history, no break in history, no redemption from history.
The other source of this secular messianism in the Israeli context was the success of the European Union, which was seen as a model for peace in the Middle East. There was talk of Israel, Palestinian and Jordan becoming a new Benelux, with common markets, open borders, friendship and harmony.
Indeed, if you look at the Oslo Accords, of course there is page upon page of all of these ideas of cooperation on economics, on technology, on environment, all which in retrospect appear absurd. And indeed, this entire idea of the Benelux on the Jordan looks insane in retrospect, but I believe that it was insane from the very beginning, when it was first proposed 10 years ago.
Last week, Charles Krauthammer, one of America’s most incisive and influential political analysts and a profound thinker on issues pertaining to Judaism and the Jewish people, passed away at the age of sixty-eight. In 2016, Krauthammer engaged in an extended conversation with Roger Hertog based on his 1998 essay “At Last, Zion,” on the future of the Jewish people in American and Israel. At the conversation’s end, Krauthammer elaborates on a remark he once made that “I don’t believe in God, but I fear Him greatly.”Prince William lands in Israel for first-ever official visit by a UK royal
Long ago, when I was very young, I went from being a fervent believer to being not so much a non-believer as a skeptic. My theology can be summed up [thus]: the only theology I know is not true . . . is atheism. Everything else I’m unsure about. . . . The idea [espoused by] Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins that . . . there is nothing except what we see, and that’s it, is to me the most implausible, arrogant. It just can’t be, because things don’t create themselves. . . .
I have a deep belief in a transcendent “out there.” I don’t particularly believe in the mythologies that are told by any of the religions. I have an enormous attachment to the Jewish tradition and to the depth and the subtlety of its understanding of life, morality, and of metaphysics. I’ve always been interested in it, and to me . . . it is important for Jews to try to continue that tradition, to make sure it lives, and to make sure that culture is nourished. . . .
As to my own idea [that even if there is no God], “I fear Him greatly,” it’s because I believe in transcendence, some transcendence. [Since] I will never—we will never, as a species—be able to grasp what it is, there is a certain trepidation. In Judaism it’s called the fear of heaven. . . . I’m not really afraid, but in some ways you tremble when you look at the universe and you think, “I think I understand things.” . . . Human beings need to tremble when looking at the universe. If not, they don’t understand what’s going on. That’s sort of the key: to understand how little we can understand. . . .
Britain’s Prince William landed in Israel early on Monday evening, kicking off the first-ever official visit by a member of the royal family since the British Mandate ended and the State of Israel was founded in 1948.
William, the second in line to the British throne, was welcomed at Ben Gurion Airport by Tourism Minister Yariv Levin and MK Amir Ohana, both members of the ruling Likud party.
The Duke of Cambridge’s three-day stay, ending the royal family’s seven-decade unofficial boycott of Israel, is likely to be full of historical symbolism, though it was initially billed as a celebration of the unprecedentedly good bilateral ties between London and Jerusalem.
However, the trip is taking place under a minor cloud of controversy, as Kensington Palace’s official itinerary states that the prince’s visit to Jerusalem’s Old City — where he is likely to stop at the Western Wall and Muslim and Christian holy sites — will take place in the “Occupied Palestinian Territories.”
“We will receive today the Duke of Cambridge, Prince William, for the historic first visit in Israel of a representative of the British royal family,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier Monday at the start of the Likud faction meeting.
“I must say this is not exactly true because there is a representative, his great-grandmother Princess Alice, one of the Righteous of the Nations who saved Jews in Greece during the Second World War and requested to be buried in Jerusalem,” Netanyahu added.
Addressing Likud lawmakers, he joked that he would have invited all of the party’s MKs to meet the prince, but “it is a little cramped at the Prime Minister’s Residence, so we will welcome him on your behalf and on behalf of all the citizens of Israel — welcome!”
Monday, June 25, 2018Elder of Ziyon
MOSCOW, June 25. /TASS/. Issues of the Palestinian-Israeli settlement were in focus of a meeting Russian president’s special envoy for the Middle East and African countries and Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov had with a delegation of Hamas leaders led by Hamas Political Bureau member Mousa Abu Marzook, the Russian foreign ministry said on Monday.From official PA news agency Wafa:
"Key attention was focused on the problems of the Palestinian-Israeli settlement on the basis of the generally recognized international legal documents, including UN resolutions, and on efforts towards restoration of Palestinian national unity on the basis of the agreement signed between Hamas and Fatah in Cairo in October 2017," the ministry said.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will attend the final of the 2018 World Cup in Russia with a number of world leaders and heads of state, FIFA's foot Gianni Infantino.Something is brewing. Maybe Russia wants to break the Hamas/Fatah deadlock.
Al-Rajoub said in a statement to WAFA that his Excellency will meet with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin while in Russia, and will discuss bilateral relations and the latest developments.
Monday, June 25, 2018Elder of Ziyon
Too funny, from BDS South Africa:Keeping up with the spirit of the #FifaWorldCup2018— BDS South Africa (@BDSsouthafrica) June 25, 2018
Here is a soccer match of Palestine and Australia back in 1939. Hopefully sometime soon the Palestinian soccer team will participate in the tournament and Israel expelled from @FIFAcom just like Apartheid South Africa pic.twitter.com/CYyP49NaNo
Forces loyal to the regime of Syrian strongman Bashar Assad took control of an abandoned UN post in the no-man’s land between the Israeli and Syrian areas of the Golan Heights, Israel’s Kan public broadcaster reported on Sunday.
The post, abandoned by United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) troops on the Golan, is meant to be free of both Israeli and Syrian troops, according to the cessation of hostilities agreement between the two countries that followed the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
According to the report, UNDOF has identified ongoing infrastructure work at the site.
The IDF said in a statement that it was “aware of what is taking place, and views [the takeover of the site and] the infrastructure work at the post as a serious and flagrant violation of the separation-of-forces agreement.”
The IDF statement suggested Israel might act to remove the forces from the post by force. Officials told Kan that Israel “sees UNDOF as responsible for tracking and acting against military forces in the separation zone, and is determined to prevent military entrenchment in that area.”
It would almost be funny if it wasn't so absurd. The Palestinian Authority, whose leaders pay salaries to imprisoned terrorist murderers and to families of killed terrorists - including suicide bombers - participated in a conference in Paris called "No Money for Terrorism"!Terror victims protest Pay-to-Slay bill's delay
"The State of Palestine participated... in a ministerial conference against terror funding, which was held in the French capital Paris under the headline No Money for Terrorism. Palestine was represented at the conference by [PA] Minister of Foreign Affairs Riyad Al-Malki and Head of the [Palestinian] Central Bank Azzam Al-Shawa, accompanied by a Palestinian delegation." [WAFA, official PA news agency, April 26, 2018]
The PA was invited and included in the conference while the PA actively and openly uses its money and also donor countries' money to pay terrorists, while PA leaders ignore the condemnation by the international community.
The PA pays monthly salaries to around 6,500 imprisoned terrorists, as well monthly allowances to the families of tens of thousands of killed terrorists - who the PA calls "Martyrs" - to which the PA allocated over $350 million in its published 2018 budget. Despite international criticism, PA leaders vow to continue to pay these salaries rewarding terror.
Palestinian Media Watch has documented that the PA spends money on establishing monuments to terrorist murderers and the PA Ministry of Education has named 31 schools after terrorists, just to name a few of the many ways the PA spends money on terrorists and on immortalizing them.
Twenty family members of victims of terrorism from the Almagor organization demonstrated outside the Likud faction meeting at the Knesset on Monday after they were not permitted to address Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Likud MKs about the need to pass a bill meant to discourage the Palestinian Authority from continuing to pay terrorists.
The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee authorized legislation two weeks ago that requires the government to deduct the amount the PA pays terrorists from the taxes and tariffs Israel collects for the authority.
A final vote which would have passed it into law on Monday was postponed at the request of coalition chairman David Amsalem, who acts as the parliamentary arm of the prime minister. The Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee will meet either this Wednesday or next week to consider revisions of the bill that would water it down.
“I am worried the bill will be buried,” Almagor head Meir Indor said. “I try to respect the prime minister, but we have our limits. A similar bill already passed in both houses of Congress in the US, and we have been legislating it for a year. We would rather have the bill not pass at all than pass with half its power taken away.”
Netanyahu himself requested a delay in the voting from the heads of the parties in his coalition. Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman and Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon have created obstacles that have made it harder to pass the bill due to battles over credit, but the bill’s sponsor, Yesh Atid MK Elazar Stern, said on Monday that he blames only one man for the legislation not yet being law.
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PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
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