Egypt's 12th annual National Theater Festival will feature a blatantly antisemitic play called "Christ Crucified in Palestine."
The play is the official entry from the Egyptian Orthodox Church for the youth competition within the festival.
The play is a mock trial between Pontius Pilate, the Roman ruler of Jerusalem in Jesus' time, and Caiaphas, the Jewish leader who is cast as a villain and stand-in for the evils of Jews throughout history, from "killing the prophets" through killing Jesus and on through Israel's crime of existence.
Jesus is characterized in the play as having called to destroy the idea of Jews as the "chosen people" while the Jews continue to act in this arrogant manner.
The play was originally written as a response to the 'Nostra Aetate' of the Second Vatican Council and the subsequent Six Day War. The 'Nostra Aetate' is characterized as being written "to absolve the Jews of the crimes committed against the prophets and unarmed Palestinian people." Egypt's president Gamal Abdel Nasser stood next to the Egyptian National Church and denounced the document in 1965, which is as good a proof as any of the antisemitism in the Arab world.
The performance has been updated with new "crimes" of the Jews, up to and including the US embassy opening in Jerusalem and the "Judaization of Palestine."
"Christ Crucified in Palestine" was staged last year in a number of Coptic venues, and its popularity prompted it to be revived for this year's festival.
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Palestinian diplomats are engaged in a full court press to convince European and Arab countries to continue UNRWA's mandate - a mandate that ensures a parallel infrastructure for education, healthcare and housing in areas under Palestinian control.
They are also trying to convince Latin American countries to vote to extend UNRWA's mandate.
The agency's mandate has been rubber stamped to be extended every three years for decades, but in light of the recent corruption scandal at UNRWA's highest levels and the US opposition to the group, this year the extension will be a little more visible. The chances that it will not be extended are still very small.
But under the leadership of Mahmoud Abbas and is foreign ministry, the PLO's diplomats worldwide and at the UN are initiating contacts with every country they can find to ensure that the vote remains overwhelmingly towards continuing the agency's operations.
UNRWA's model of providing free education, healthcare and housing to an ever-increasing number of descendants of refugees for ever is not sustainable. No one even pretends it is. But instead of having the agency curtail operations in areas where the local government can and should take over the role as any normal nation would, the "pro-UNRWA" crowd is not willing to even consider a change in its responsibilities to keep it financially viable.
In Jordan, the vast majority of those who receive benefits are full citizens, not "refugees" in any sense, and there is no reason the world must finance the schools and clinics of full Jordanian citizens.
For the Palestinians, insisting on maintaining UNRWA proves that they have no real desire for independence. After all, the "refugees" on Palestinian soil are not refugees by any definition either. The Palestinian Authority, if it truly wants independence, would actively want to take over UNRWA's functions in areas under its control to move more towards independence. If it truly wanted to be a state, it would ask to integrate UNRWA's operations into its own government and take the UNRWA budget during a transitional period.
It never even considers that. The PLO is not only willing but insisting on outsourcing a large part of its governmental responsibilities to the UN, forever.
That is not how nations striving for independence would act.
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Muhammed Desai, the director of one the world’s leading Boycott, Divest and Sanctions organizations, has found his group embroiled in a new Palestinian terrorism scandal after BDS South Africa last week tweeted a picture of Desai shaking hands with member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The US and the EU have both classified the PFLP a terrorist entity.
At the same time, The Jerusalem Post learned on Monday that BDS South Africa’s PayPal account is now not accepting donations. It is unclear if the online payment service PayPal closed the account due to BDS South Africa’s support and financing of a terrorist organization.
When the Post clicked on the electronic donation section of BDS South Africa, the entry by PayPal stated: “Things don’t appear to be working at the moment. Please try again later.” Post media queries to PayPal on Monday were not returned.
The now-deleted BDS South Africa tweet read: “A representative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) with BDS South Africa’s Muhammed Desai. The PFLP works closely with BDS SA in the global campaign against Apartheid Israel.”
The Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor retained a screenshot of the tweet.
More than a dozen United Nations workers in Yemen are under investigation for allegedly embezzling millions of dollars of humanitarian aid in the war-torn nation, according to a Monday Associated Press report.
The World Health Organization (WHO) conducted an internal investigation, drawing attention to unqualified people being paid excessively, the use of personal bank accounts for donated funds, suspicious contracts and the disappearance of essentials like food and medicine. UNICEF, another U.N. organization, is alleging one of their own may have protected a rebel leader, according to the AP report citing information from eight anonymous aid workers.
Houthi rebels from northern Yemen allegedly seized laptops and evidence from U.N. officials in 2018 as they were about to depart the country from an airport, according to six former and current aid officials.
Yemen is currently the poorest nation in the Middle East with one of the worst humanitarian conflicts in the world, a World Bank report details.
Chief of the U.N.’s Sanaa Office, Italian Nevio Zagaria, was alleged to have misappropriated U.N. finances, jumpstarting a reported probe in November. Six U.N. current and former employees. who requested anonymity, affirmed his tenure was “riddled with corruption and nepotism,” according to AP.
Zagaria reportedly brought in junior staffers and promoted them to extremely lucrative roles for which they were not qualified. It’s also alleged that two highly paid senior staffers were tasked with the sole responsibility of taking care of Zagaria’s dog.
The only people who could hate this idea are the people who hate Israel no matter what.
It benefits Israel, the Palestinians, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.
Egypt would be the main loser because this plan competes with the Suez Canal.
(h/t Irene)
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In Jerusalem, Bishara will meet with the director general of the Israeli Finance Ministry and discuss with him the deduction of Palestinian tax revenues and the deduction of IEC's debts from tax revenues .
This meeting is despite the announcement of President Mahmoud Abbas to stop all agreements signed with the Israeli occupation .
But Abbas got in the headlines for his latest lie, and that's all that really matters.
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A major component of US strategy to help Israel gain the victory necessary for peace should be a campaign of “assertive truth-telling.” Such truth-telling by Israel, the US, and eventually the European democracies can be the key to an ultimate Israeli victory because Palestinian policy is based, both internally and externally, on demonstrable falsehoods.
Usually, a country has to commit troops or get the support of other countries, or at least spend a large amount of money, if it is to achieve victory. But the US can help Israel achieve victory without any of these. A major part of Israel’s problem is that most of the diplomatic world accepts key falsehoods about Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians and the Arab world. By simply and boldly stating the truth, the US can end the reign of the now-dominant falsehoods and advance an Israeli victory. And the US has a unique ability to bring diplomatic attention to the error of these falsehoods.
The US can sharply strengthen Israel’s position in the world by explaining three facts so insistently that their truth can no longer be ignored:
1. There has never been any “Palestinian territory” anywhere. That being the case, there cannot now be “occupied Palestinian territory.” Nor can Israel have stolen “Palestinian land.”
2. There were Jewish kingdoms in much of what is referred to as “Palestine” for hundreds of years before the birth of Islam. The Palestinian belief that the Jewish people are European colonialists invading the area with no historic claim or right is entirely false.
3. There are not millions of Palestinian “refugees.” A just peace in the area does not require that Israel take in so many Palestinians that it cannot continue to exist as a democratic Jewish state.
Instead, peace requires that the Arab world let the descendants of refugees from the Israeli War of Independence be settled and live normal lives, rather than continue to treat them as stateless refugees in order to preserve their status as a threat to Israel.
While Israel has expressed these truths frequently, its diplomatic policy has been to put more emphasis on trying to appease the consensus by showing a willingness to negotiate, limiting settlement in the West Bank, and limiting criticism of the Palestinians and assertions of Israeli rights — as if those were useful ways to advance negotiations. It is time for Israel to challenge the international diplomatic assumptions more vigorously by assertive truth-telling.
According to Jonathan Spyer, director of the Middle East Center for Reporting and Analysis, "It's very important for Western policymakers to be aware that leaderships and elites throughout the Arab world today find a great deal of common ground with Israel on the issues of the Iranian and Sunni Islamist threats."
"To an increasing extent, they are also weary of Palestinian intransigence and see Israel as a model for successful development. Much of that, however, cannot be said openly by these leaders because this does not reflect the views of parts of the societies of the leaders in question, where Islamist and/or Arab nationalist sentiments continue to hold sway."
Despite some public lip service to the Palestinian cause, the Sunni Arab world knows that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at most a "side issue."
An Israeli military intelligence expert who had just returned from private meetings in Europe with Arab and EU officials told me that, behind closed doors, their analysis of the Middle East, including Iran, is often light years away from the public rhetoric offered by European and Arab Sunni government officials to their citizens.
The conflicts of the Middle East are primarily tribal and religious in nature, and the primary allegiance is not to modern states artificially constructed by the West 100 years ago. Insiders know that if there were no Israel, the Shiites would still hate the Sunnis, Iran would still aspire to hegemony, Turkey would still be an unreliable NATO ally, and Libya and Yemen would still be chaotic.
Some European officials, who vociferously defend the Iran nuclear agreement publicly, privately acknowledge the dangers of the Iranian revolutionary theocracy that acts against their values.
It seems, then, that for Islamic Jihad and Hamas, the ceasefire understandings, reached under the auspices of Egypt and the UN, are meant to give the Gaza-based groups a chance to continue building their military capabilities without having to worry about Israeli retaliatory measures.
Iranian media quoted Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as expressing satisfaction over the "progress" the Palestinians have made in the past few years. The "progress" Khamenei is talking about is not related to the building of a new hospital or school or a medical breakthrough in the Gaza Strip. Instead, the "progress" the Palestinians have achieved -- according to Iran's Supreme Leader -- is that "while the Palestinians used to fight [Israel] with rocks, today they possess precise rockets."
The Egyptian and UN mediators, in failing to call out the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad for their deception and conflicting messages, are permitting the two groups to deploy the ceasefire with Israel as a cover to prepare for the next war.
The leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and their patrons in Tehran... are dead-set on inflicting as much damage on Israel as possible. As per standard operating procedure, the biggest losers of all in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip will be the Palestinians.
J Street doesn't love Israel. Neither does Jeremy.
It is important to understand the difference between the ends and the means.
J Street's tag line is, "the political home of pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans". In other words, J Street is intended to be a political magnet for a certain category of Americans: those who are "pro Israel pro peace". (The whole "pro Israel pro peace" thing is nonsense anyway. Nobody who supports Israel opposes peace; what they oppose is buying short-term peace by agreeing to commit suicide. The term "pro Israel pro peace" implies that pro-Israel Jews who don't support J Street are war-mongers, which is a blood libel of sorts. But let's skip that for now.)
For J Street, the highest priority is most definitely NOT a safe, strong Israel; strong, flourishing Jewish communities; or safe, flourishing Jews. None of J Street's words or activities encourage or support any of these goals.
For J Street, the highest priority is to support "progressive" Democratic Party candidates in the US. The MEANS by which they achieve this end involve appealing to "progressive" American Jews by referencing their hot-button issue of Israel in ways that J Street thinks will harness their support for "progressive" Democrats.
Unfortunately, J Street views Israel's politics as an extension of US politics. It views events in Israel exclusively through the lens of "progressive" American politics, forgetting that Israel is a distinct country with distinct dangers, a distinct culture, a distinct history, a distinct political system and a distinct future.
On Israel, J Street is the political home of people who are mentally trapped in the early 1990s, people who view the Ashkenazi Israeli left – which has been eviscerated by its own naïve failure to predict or address the murderous backstabbing of Arafat and his successors – as a kind of extension of the Democratic Party in the US. These are people who don't see any differences between the situation of African Americans in US culture and Ethiopian Jews in Israeli culture. They are people who don't see why Israelis should be allowed to have needs that are different from their own.
J Street and its supporters do not understand Israelis, their culture or their concerns. They do not bother to try to understand these things, because what Israelis want, what Israelis have learned through personal experience, and what Israelis find dubious or ridiculous are simply not important to J Street and its supporters. It's all very patronizing.
J Street has treated successive Israeli governments and politicians like political opponents rather than legitimate friends and allies of world Jewry and of the United States. J Street views all non-leftist Israeli parties – and thus much of the Israeli mainstream – as "far-right" extensions of the US's Republican Party. J Street is not interested in listening to the majority of Israelis because it is not interested in listening to its political opponents. It views them as foils that it can attack in order to rally the troops at home to its real cause, which is the election of "progressive" candidates.
J Street has become so trapped by this mindset that it aligns itself with people who oppose Israel's right to exist and harbor deeply antisemitic sentiments; it continues to oppose efforts to fight BDS effectively, or to prevent other attacks on Israel and on Jews around the world.
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The Al-Quds and Al-Aqsa Committee of the Palestinian Legislative Council issued a statement about Jews who plan to visit the Temple Mount on Tisha B'Av Sunday, the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the Temples that were built on the site now dominated by several huge mosques meant to erase Jewish history.
In a time when Americans are upset over the terminology "invaders" referring to illegal immigrants, this official PLO committee refers to Jews who want to visit their holiest site as "Zionist rapists."
They wrote three bullet points:
First: This Zionist obsession, and disregard for the feelings of millions of Muslims in the world, stems from the state of humiliation and shameful normalization led by some corrupt Arab regimes.
Secondly: We call on our people in the West Bank, Jerusalem and inside the occupied territories to travel to the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the first day of Eid, and to consider it as a remarkable day in the days of Allah.
Third: We call on the Palestinian resistance to establish a new equation (i.e. balance of power vis-a-vis Israel) that will protect the holy places, and cut off any hand that is stretched out towards (the holy places) with evil (intentions)."
That third point sure sounds like incitement to terror.
The Mufti, Mohammed Hussein, said "our people will not stand idly by" as Jews visit the site.
Supreme Islamic Commission Sheikh Ekrema Sabri called on Muslims to go en masse to the site on Sunday and effectively called on them to fight any Jews who ascend there, saying "Whoever plays with fire will be burned by fire."
(h/t Ibn Boutros)
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Hey, Amnesty hasn't come out with a new video demonizing Israel for at least three weeks, so of course they are overdue.
Off the top of my head, here are only some of the lies and misrepresentations in the video:
1. Israel doesn't "transfer" people to the territories. People move there voluntarily. This is not a violation of the Geneva Conventions routinely invoked to target Israel that says "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."
2. Israel haters knew that invoking Geneva wasn't nearly as clear cut as they pretended, so the Arab states specifically wrote the Rome statute to mention "indirect" transfer - a law written only for Israel. European powers went along with this hijacking of international law to target a single state. This makes the Rome Statute a travesty of international law.
3. Even that travesty doesn't extend to travel companies working wherever they want to. That is Amnesty's own obsession. There is nothing illegal there, and in fact to demand that travel companies discriminate against Jews is far more immoral. (Israeli Arabs who live across the Green Line aren't considered "settlers" and there are thousands of them.)
4. Amnesty implies that Jewish settlements displace Arabs. Outside of Hebron, every settlement is in areas Arabs never lived. In Hebron, every single house that Jews live in was purchased legally.
Any displacement of Arabs because of them building houses illegally is done with permission of Israel's Supreme Court. I've never seen Amnesty (or anyone, for that matter) seriously counter the legal arguments that are in Supreme Court decisions.
5. Jews live under fear as well. Ever hear of suicide bombers? Amnesty never spent nearly as much time on Palestinian terror as on Jews building houses.
6. Gaza, and Area A, are not under military occupation in any legal sense. Occupation requires "boots on the ground" in every legal definition before people started making up new rules for Israel and Israel alone. Even Amnesty has admitted that the definition of occupation is only "as long as the occupying forces are still present in that territory and exercise final control over the acts of the local authorities." This does not at all apply to Gaza or Area A, which have their own local authorities who do not answer to Israeli military officials.
7. Amnesty's obsession with Israel means fewer resources on real human rights issues worldwide. It does not have unlimited resources, which means that Amnesty makes the conscious decision every day to divert money and time from the millions of people worldwide who actually have their lived threatened every day towards demonizing Israel. In short, Amnesty's obsession with Israel endangers untold numbers of other people worldwide who need the political support from a major human rights organization.
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Saudi journalist Sukina al-Hasayhas said in an interview with the Israeli Kan channel that there is no enmity between Israel and Saudi Arabia: "We do not have a political problem with Israel. Israel didn't even shoot a single bullet at us."
Hasayhas added that there is a very clear match between the positions of Israel and the Gulf states regarding the "Iranian threat, Iran's support of Hezbollah and the Houthis that threaten the Middle East completely".
About a potential future visit of Israel,she said, "My colleagues who visited Israel have benefited by seeing Israel from within, and I am prepared to visit Israel in the future, surely".
The Saudi writer added: "The chance to bring peace with Israel is an opportunity. Peace is important for stability, development, prosperity, and many positive repercussions. We are at a historic stage in which the demand for peace is rising, and in my view, peace with Israel is not a loss but a gain for all. I think this opportunity will be very close by Allah willing. "
This story is now all over Arabic media.
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The accusation made here is that the election of Jeremy Corbyn created a toxic environment that has radicalised members of the party and this led to a growth of antisemitism in the UK. There is no need to overthink this. We know that Corbyn comes from a faction that has existed for decades on the fringes of the party. There is ample evidence that *some* of the new membership that joined to support him was antisemitic and extremist. These people were not ‘outsiders’ who ‘infiltrated’, but elements of the leaders own faction who joined to support the new leader.
The new leadership sought to protect its own support base. New media was set up to shield the Corbyn project. Facebook groups proudly shouted out his name. An online environment was created that evicted the dissenters. ‘Zionism’ is Corbyn’s enemy – so ‘Zionists’ were swiftly expelled. Jewish people complained and key Corbyn allies all screamed ‘smear’.
How is a loyal Labour voter to react – especially those who joined Labour because they truly believed in Corbyn as a force for change? As the Labour Party came under attack, ‘Corbynism’ retreated into an ever-shrinking virtual bubble. With a near total rejection of ‘Zionist’ mainstream media, they were reduced to feeding from the scraps of the Canary, RT Today, Press TV or some racist conspiracy junk site from the United States.
Does anyone really believe the average supporter had the working knowledge of Judaism, Zionism and Israeli history necessary to withstand the ideological onslaught?
The Telegraph just ran an piece on this report. The Labour Party responded with a meaningless regurgitated mess that didn’t address the report at all. A wise man would ask how an anti-racist party could dismiss a report on racism that it hadn’t even read properly? But that is not the territory in which this argument is taking place. This message of ’empty smear’ is the one they are deliberately sending to the membership and to the support base beyond. Like a drumbeat – their supporters have been repetitively listening to the ‘Jews are smearing us’ excuse now for over four years.
WHEN WE allow for the election of an antisemite we tell the radicals exiled to their houses that their Jew-hatred isn’t to be ashamed of, but rather grounds to have you elected to the mother of parliaments. The actions and lack of action by Corbyn’s Labour Party with regard to antisemitism have acted as a catalyst for racists to seep out of their holes and regain platforms to further incite their hatred.
The consequences go far and wide, and the normalization of antisemitism has spread to our campuses. From Nottingham to Bristol and countless places in between, student union officers have been found to be antisemitic by their universities’ investigations yet no action has been taken. After telling a Jewish student to “be like Israel and cease to exist,” Omar Chowdhury’s apology that came as a recommendation of the investigation was accepted as sufficient for Chowdhury to continue in his role as the University of Bristol Students’ Union’s Black and Minority Ethnic officer. Ridiculous right? But this is just one example. There are hundreds of incidents taking place on campus that get no coverage whatsoever because antisemitism is expected, and universities are reluctant to act. And why should they take it seriously when our own electorate and political leaders do not?
Only when we start taking a genuine zero-tolerance approach to antisemitism not just in name, but with substance, will we be able to start undoing all the damage that Corbyn’s Labour Party has instigated. That means not accepting every apology for antisemitism, it means removing antisemites from any position where they can further their agenda, and it means restoring our political discourse to that of civility and fact-based dialogue as we have had with the once proud Labour Party.
For our campuses, there is some hope. Universities Minister Chris Skidmore wrote to vice-chancellors stating that universities must do more to stamp out antisemitism on campus and adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism. This is a necessary step in combating the atmosphere of antisemitism swamping our institutions, but this will ultimately depend on the innate nature of vice-chancellors and whether they choose to listen to such calls.
My own experience tells me that just like the cases at Bristol and Nottingham, our entrusted intellectual leaders will be reluctant to act and will hope for cases to blow over, mirroring the same action taken against the highest profile cases of antisemitism. Jeremy Corbyn’s platform to incite has made British society more hostile to Jews than at any other point in the modern era.
A small number of online social media accounts have driven the discourse on anti-Semitism in the British Labour party, a new study by a prominent Jewish watchdog group said.
According to the report, released on Sunday by the London-based Community Security Trust, which monitors anti-Semitism and provides security services for UK Jews, “the problem of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party over the past three years has been fueled by a flow of anti-Semitic tweets and posts on social media, done in the name of the Labour Party and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn.”
The report, entitled “Engine of Hate,” was conducted in conjunction with data science firm Signify.
The report identified what it said were 36 key pro-Corbyn Twitter accounts, which it collectively nicknamed the “engine room.” Each, it said, have “their own, overlapping, online networks that drive social media conversations about anti-Semitism” and “are responsible for encouraging the widespread belief that allegations of anti-Semitism are a smear against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party.”
Those accounts frequently use content from a network of alternative media sites that “consistently claim that anti-Semitism is being weaponized as a smear” and “provide the fuel for an atmosphere in which allegations of anti-Semitism are denied, while leading and encouraging attacks against anyone who criticizes the Labour leadership for their record on the issue.”
Jeremy Corbyn didn’t exactly fill the UK’s Jewish community with confidence when he appointed a Momentum activist and vocal Chris Williamson and Pete Willsman defender to his newly-created role of “Jewish Community Liaison Officer”. Heather Mendick claimed that anti-Semitism was being “weaponised against the Left” and joined the disgraced Chris Williamson for multiple events on his “democracy roadshow” – his campaign to deselect sitting Labour MPs. She also celebrated the notorious Pete Willsman’s re-election to Labour’s NEC, saying that the membership “aren’t buying the smears”…
So it wasn’t exactly a surprise when the CST’s latest report on the online networks behind Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis found that Mendick’s Twitter account was one of the 36 ‘Engine Room’ accounts most associated with online Labour anti-Semitism. Mendick has now deleted her account…
Guido has taken a closer look at some more of Mendick’s online history:
She also describes herself as a “paid up member of Jewish Voice for Labour” – the highly controversial Corbynista fringe group. Says it all that Corbyn thinks she’s the best person to build bridges with the Jewish community…
The "spontaneous" Friday riots, where we are told that ordinary Gazans just go on their own to protest (usually) Israeli policies, are being cancelled this week.
The reason given by the National Authority for Return and Breaking the Siege, which was published in Hamas newspapers, is because it is the day before Eid al Adha and they wanted their rioters to have a chance to prepare for the holiday.
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A website called United World International, run by a Turkish "expert in Foreign Relations" Koray Gürbüz, has an article on President Trump's major strengths and weaknesses.
In making foreign policy decisions, Trump acts on his own idiosyncratic logic – which just so happens to be consistent with Israel’s interests. This is why Trump recognized Jerusalem and the Golan Heights as part of Israel, his strong rhetoric around anti-Semitism, his the tough stance against Iran and his concerted attacks on Syria.
The problem is not that the senators are accusing him of being bought and sold by the Israeli lobby, as was the case during Trump’s debate with Ilhan Omar. Omar was switfly [sic] accused of anti-Semitism for her words.
The actual issue is that anti-Semitism has nothing to do with anti-Zionism. Zionist policy essentially denies Judaism, and violates the basic talmudic commandments — it is anti-religion. As long as a Zionist policy is in place in Israel, building a multipolar world will be a difficult task.
I love when self-declared experts tell Jews what Judaism is and isn't.
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Given UNRWA’s ties to Hamas, it is unsurprising that UNRWA-funded schools systematically expose refugee children to a litany of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda, with their staff often engaging in Holocaust denial and spreading graphic imagery of Jews as apes and pigs. The curriculum at UNRWA-funded schools foments hatred and protects terrorists, only perpetuating the conflict UNRWA ostensibly seeks to mitigate.
“UNRWA is an institutional embodiment of the U.N.’s anti-Israel bias: special organization dedicated to keeping the Palestinian refugee issue from 1948 perpetually alive as diplomatic tool against Israel, long after Palestinian refugees themselves have gone,” said Eugene Kontorovich, director of the International Law Department at Kohelet Policy Forum and head of the Center for International Law in the Middle East at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law.
Given that UNRWA was created in violation of general principles of refugee law and has helped promote lawless behavior, it is not surprising that the organization’s leaders consider themselves above the rules. And until Trump, this was all done at U.S. taxpayer expense.
When the Trump administration cut funding to UNRWA last year, it was widely criticized as part of a “dangerous” withdrawal from international institutions by a rogue, isolationist president. Now, given the recent allegations, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland have suspended payments to UNRWA also. The internationalists are now singing Trump’s tune.
As Ruthie Blum of Jewish News Syndicate retorted last week, “Nothing short of shutting down UNRWA will be satisfactory since its very existence is a criminal scam. But the likelihood of its closure in the near future is slim to zero. In the meantime, let us take some comfort in the agency’s well-earned public humiliation.” (h/t IsaacStorm)
You gotta feel bad for this couple. I mean, all they wanted to do was to personally thrive off the Palestinian cause the same way UNRWA had been doing institutionally for decades. One way was acceptable. One not. https://t.co/uyj2mprdtJ
On August 4, HonestReporting critiqued a feature in The Sunday Times by advocacy journalist Sarah Helm. Given her track record of lies and distortions, it was not surprising that the article focusing on Palestinians injured at the Gaza border fence took a distinctly one-sided and biased approach.
Upon further examination, the story is even more problematic than we initially realized. Helm focused on Bilal Masoud, a 29-year old Gazan who sustained crippling injuries after being shot during violence at the border fence at the Great March of Return.
Masoud, unable to live with his injuries and a lack of support from Palestinian authorities eventually commits suicide, setting himself ablaze with kerosene. Certainly a harrowing story and Helm clearly intends to elicit sympathy for Masoud who is consistently referred to by his first name throughout the piece.
Masoud is portrayed as someone who offered a very limited threat to Israelis or the IDF soldiers stationed on the other side of the border fence.
Bilal always took his slingshot: a piece of frayed nylon cord with a patch of Velcro for the stone, which Khalil now keeps. “It was part of him,” he says, demonstrating how Bilal, who was known as the “lion of the border”, would stand whirling the cord. I wonder whether “the lion” ever hit an Israeli soldier. Khalil shakes his head, saying he was lucky if he ever hit a watchtower.
This image of Masoud is taken from The Sunday Times article. This is how Sarah Helm wants you to picture Masoud before his injuries. A young man armed only with a simple slingshot.
This office put out an official message of condolence to the people of the United States as soon as we heard of the mass shootings in Texas and Ohio over the weekend, but gentlemen, that does not absolve us of the responsibility to ascertain the religious or ethnic affiliation of the victims. Remember, if any of them happen to be Jewish we must give serious consideration to paying the perpetrator a lifetime stipend. Or his family, if he died in the attempt.
Get on this immediately, gentlemen. It will not do to have such an important issue suffer neglect. We cannot claim commitment to the Palestinian cause, to vow that not a penny of the payments to killers of Jews will be cut even in the face of economic pressure, not even when we must cut the salaries of our own employees or welfare payments to the most needy – we cannot claim such a commitment and then ignore when heroes of the same magnitude step forward beyond the official boundaries of the Occupation. That would constitute discrimination.
The father of our movement, Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, would suffer grave insult if we leave this avenue of investigation unexplored. He spent years of his life building alliances with Nazis and like-minded supremacists, working toward the day when he could implement the Final Solution to the Jewish Question here in Palestine. Now that white supremacists have boldly asserted themselves in a manner with which we can identify as Palestinians, we dare not withhold gestures of solidarity and support. By his afternoon I want at least a preliminary report on my desk with an examination of which, if any, of the dead from these shootings might be Jewish. We must not commit any errors of omission when it comes to rewarding those who share our goals. Our longstanding affinity and alliance with Nazis demands it.
When people think of visiting Israel, few consider going to Hebron. The city is depicted as contentious, dangerous and unpleasant. It is associated with “Occupation,” poverty and apartheid. Who would want to go there? Even most Israelis don’t consider Hebron a place they would want to visit, much less live.
This reality ironic, considering the profound significance of this unique city.
Hebron is called the City of Patriarchs and Matriarchs. The name is literal rather than figurative and points out the burial place of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs of the Nation of Israel: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah.
Other nations have monuments and even mausoleums of their founding fathers. Can you think of any who have the mothers of their nation given the same amount of focus and respect? The founding fathers of America are perhaps the most famous group of men to be given that title – brilliant men who joined together to lay the guidelines for building a successful new nation. They were united by an idea. The patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel are united by family.
How many people know exactly where there great great grandparents are buried? Abraham bought the Cave of Machpela and surrounding field as a burial site for his wife Sarah 3,800 years ago. Since then Jews have not always been free to visit but we have always known that the parents of our People are buried there.
Jews were in Hebron even before Jews were in Jerusalem. Our first tie to this land is through family, even before taking on the law of God as a Nation, even before building the Temple and having a physical place where the People could visit the House of God on earth.
And perhaps the most critical element of this story is that although Abraham was offered the Machpela Cave as a gift, he refused, insisting on buying the field and the cave within it. This is land purchase is the first legal connection of the Nation of Israel to the Land of Israel – all of the land was later granted to the People by God but that is predated by the legal financial transaction between men.
Could it have been foreseen that foreigners would declare that the Nation of Israel usurped the Land, that we are “Occupiers”? There are three critical pieces of land whose purchase was documented in the ancient texts. Interestingly the enemies of Israel are most adamant in declaring that we have no connection to any of these:
1)Hebron - the resting place of our ancestors, the place that connects us to the land via family
2)Shechem - the resting place of Joseph who, before his death, made his brothers swear that they would carry his bones out of Egypt to be buried in Canaan. In Exodus we are told that Moses fulfilled the pledge and in the Book of Joshua we are told that: “The bones of Joseph, which the Children of Israel brought up out of Egypt, were buried in Shechem in a parcel of land Jacob bought from the sons of Hamor, father of Shechem, for a hundred pieces of silver.” In the Jewish texts repetition is a sign of significance therefore we would must understand from this that both the insistence on the location of burial (Israel, not Egypt) and the fact that the land was purchased by Jacob are important.
3)The site of the Temple Mount, the place that connects the Nation of Israel to the God of Israel.
These questions are crucial to ask:
Why do you think the enemies of Israel are most adamant about these three locations?
Why are there so many fights in the UN to pass resolutions denying Jewish connection to Jerusalem?
Why have the Arabs changed the ancient name of Shechem to Nablus, declaring that theirs is the “real” name of the city and Jews have no right to pray at Joseph’s Tomb (Jews who want to pray there have to do so with IDF escorts for fear of being lynched). Most of Israel’s cities have the same names in Hebrew and in Arabic, signifying their Hebrew origin. Why do Shechem, Hebron and Jerusalem have different names?
Why do organizations like “Breaking the Silence” spend so much money and effort to convince the world that Hebron is a place of Jewish “occupation” and Israeli apartheid against Arabs?
Why do so few people go to actually see for themselves what is real and what is not? These organizations deviously take kernels of truth and build fantastic lies around them, creating a narrative that is completely disconnected from reality. For example, the selective footage shown of Hebron is usually of 600 meters of a kilometer long road that is blocked off to Arabs (because too many Jews were murdered there). There is no mention that the Arabs who own the stores that were shut down on that section of the road still live in the buildings above the shops and that they simply leave there homes from the other direction, on to a parallel street. The Arabs are depicted as trapped in poverty because of this situation and no mention is made of the fact the Jewish population cannot enter 97% of the city where the Arab population runs a booming economy. No one mentions the apartment buildings, streets full of cars or the luxurious malls where you can shop – as long as you aren’t Jewish.
Walking the streets of Jewish Hebron is a very different experience than what is portrayed by the media. Yes there are soldiers on guard. Too many Jews have been murdered for there not to be. There are also commemorative plaques in places where citizens were murdered.
There are areas where there few people and closed shops but that does not convey the reality of Jewish life in the city of our ancestors.
Heroes walk the streets of Hebron.
They are men and women who lived through periods of daily sniper attacks – and still went and played outside with their kids. They are mothers and fathers who, although they owned the property, were not allowed to build homes suitable to the size of their families – so they made their small homes warm and beautiful knowing that lack of space would teach their children to learn how to share better. They are people determined to live, love, laugh and be as close to normal as possible in a place that is far from normal.
Most of all they are parents who brought free and fresh Hebrews into the world. Jewish children who know no other reality than growing strong in their ancestral homeland.
The modern day Hebrews of Hebron live across from (and above) an archeological dig which has uncovered 4,000 year old artifacts, including an Israelite house dating, 2,700 years old where there were seals bearing the impression of a bird, or a beetle, with the word "LeMelech Hebron" meaning "belonging to the King, Hebron" in paleo-Hebrew.
Were the ancient Hebrews of Hebron to suddenly appear, they would find their descendants living in their neighborhood, speaking the same language, connected to the same values.
This is what it means to be an indigenous People, returned to our ancestral homeland.
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Wednesday, August 07, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
