Hyperbole from Palestinian officials is a given, but this one seems to be a new record.
In Elkana, Bibi Netanyahu made a vague campaign promise:
Israel will apply sovereignty to all West Bank settlements, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday morning as he celebrated the first day of school with first graders in the Elkana settlement.
"There won't be any more uprooting [of settlements]," Netanyahu said. "With God's help, we'll apply Jewish sovereignty on all the settlements, as part of the land of Israel and as part of the State of Israel."
He's said this before, also in context of a political campaign. No timeframe or details are given.
Erekat considered that Netanyahu's public statement of annexation of all settlements on the West Bank posed not only a threat to the Palestinian people but a threat to the entire international system. And it would open the horizons in alliance with the Trump administration to completely overthrow the international system and create a system of power and hegemony.
Locusts and pestilence can't be far behind.
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A 21-year-old Palestinian woman died on Thursday in suspicious circumstances that have caused massive outrage among activists and social media users across the Middle East and North Africa. Israa Gharib, a makeup artist from Bethlehem, died in a coma due to head trauma, in what activists and sources close to the victim are saying was a brutal honor killing. The culprits are believed to be her father, her brother-in-law, Sheikh Mohamed El Safy, and her two brothers, Bahaa and Ihab, a resident of Canada.
It all began when Gharib went to meet a potential suitor in a public place and posted a video of the outing on her Instagram page. According to a friend of the victim’s, Gharib’s mother was fully aware of the meeting and the suitor’s sister was also in attendance.
According to sources online, Gharib’s cousin then showed the video to the victim’s father and brothers, allegedly urging them to act to prevent scandal and accusing Israa of dishonoring herself and bringing shame to the family by being seen in the company of a man outside the bonds of marriage.
Gharib’s friend claims that upon seeing the video, her brothers and brother-in-law began beating and torturing her, and proceeded to terminate the engagement. Other sources claim she fell from the 2nd floor while attempting to flee the brutal assault. She was later hospitalized due to a fractured spine.
Gharib’s father, brothers, and brother-in-law followed her to the hospital, her friend alleges, and resumed the beating, telling hospital staff they were performing an exorcism on the victim whom they believed was possessed by a demon. A harrowing audio recording of the assault was leaked by one of the nurses at the hospital that purportedly features Gharib’s repeated horrified screams.
She was then released from the hospital, after which she returned home where she reportedly suffered a head injury at the hands of her brother, Ihab, whom eye witnesses say was seen threatening to kill her, prompting some on social media to call on the Canadian government to take legal action against him. Gharib went into a coma, before her heart stopped.
In a Facebook statement, the victim’s family denied any wrongdoing, claiming she suffered mental and psychological disorders that led to her fall from the 2nd floor of their Bethlehem house.
Here's the video where you can hear Israa's screams in the hospital as she was being beaten.
What kind of hospital allows a family to mercilessly beat a patient under the excuse of doing an "exorcism"?
And what kind of hospital would release her afterwards after seeing her family treat her this way?
The good news is that this story is all over Arabic social media since Friday, and in regular Arab news media as well. Years of feminists in the Arab world and coverage by Western media of "honor" crimes has shamed most Arabs into accepting that the old way of treating women is unacceptable and the outrage is a sign that things can change in the Arab world - but it requires the West to shame the Arabs into doing something to change.
The bad news is that there is still a long way to go. This interview with Palestinian human rights activist Dr. Omar Rahhal from late 2018 describes the issue:
The laws enacted in our country, by which I mean the Jordanian Penal Code No. 16 of 1960 deals with women as inferior whereby the perpetrator can marry his victim. What’s more, the perpetrator of crimes that fall under the category of “honor” can get a mitigated punishment. While it’s true that the President cancelled this article, in reality things are still the same. We have dozens of examples of this, the most recent one last night when a few brothers killed their sister and her husband in Ya’abad in the Jenin district even after the two families had reconciled. The reconciliation even happened under the supervision of the Palestinian intelligence services.
Palestinian laws are discriminatory in terms of gender-sensitivity. In addition, the laws enacted in Palestine are lacking in terms of respect for women; instead they treat them like second-class citizens. There is no equality. Socially, it is not such a big deal to kill a woman. Unfortunately, in some districts, the mourning for a women who is killed only lasts for one or two days instead of the traditional three days accorded to men.
We need amendments or a Palestinian penal code. The Ministry of Justice in addition to women’s institutions, civil society organizations and rights and academic institutions were able to draw up a draft law which is progressive and humane and that respects women’s dignity. Unfortunately, the President does not regard this as a priority and does not consider it a necessity. Hence, we have laws that not only do not respect women but almost encourage their punishment...
The entire interview is enlightening, showing how worthless the Palestinian justice system is as a whole. These are issues the media studiously avoids talking about out of some fear of looking "Islamophobic" or anti-Arab or racist. As a direct result of the media ignoring these issues, people like Israa Gharib will continue to die. Because reform is not going to come from inside; the PA has already had 25 years to do something and it hasn't.
Reform will only come when Westerners make a stink. Unfortunately, the very people who should be in the forefront of doing exactly that - the self-styled progressives and feminists - are the ones least likely to take a stand on this in public, because their solidarity with those that hate Israel is considered more important than the lives of actual Palestinian women.
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In a rare UN criticism of the Palestinians, the world body’s racism watchdog urged Ramallah to combat “hate speech and incitement to violence,” saying it was “concerned” about statements by Palestinian public figures, politicians and media officials, as well as in school textbooks and curricula, pointing to “hate speech against Israelis” which it found “fuels hatred” and “may incite violence” and “antisemitism.”
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) further called on the Palestinians to “remove any derogatory comments and images from school curricula and textbooks that perpetuate prejudices and hatred.”
In addition, the panel found that Palestinians laws and policies failed to implement UN treaties on racism, or to properly investigate complaints for acts of racial discrimination.
The 18 independent experts reviewed the Palestinian record and those of six other countries at a session that ended on Thursday, when they issued their findings.
Palestinian Delegate Lashes Out at UN Watch
In wake of the review session two weeks ago, Palestinian representative Ammar Hiajzi lashed out at UN Watch after the Geneva-based non-governmental organization briefed the UN experts on Palestinian incitement.
“We must not allow our discussions to be diverted and side-tracked by those organizations founded and funded to deny the Palestinian narrative, dehumanize the Palestinian people by spreading lies and half-truths about them,” he tweeted on August 15th, prompting a sharp reply from UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer.
The report marked the first time the panel had criticized Palestinian officials, according to UN Watch, a Geneva-based organization that addressed the session leading to the report.
The committee called on Ramallah to better protect journalists, human rights activists and political dissidents; to act against incitement to violence by public figures, politicians and media officials; and to remove inflammatory and discriminatory images and text from school curricula and textbooks.
The panel also recommended that Palestinian officials ensure that minorities enjoyed full rights and public services, especially Bedouins, and that minorities found adequate representation in politics.
Near the top of the report, titled “Concluding observations on the combined initial and second periodic reports of the State of Palestine,” the committee said that Israel’s presence in the West Bank, its settlements and its blockade of Gaza posed “severe challenges for the State party in fully implementing its obligations under the Convention.”
At the committee’s 99th session, held earlier this month, during a review of the “State of Palestine,” some delegates referred to examples of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish content in Palestinian textbooks and state-owned media outlets.
“What happened this week was unprecedented,” Hillel Neuer, the executive director of UN Watch, said after the session. “Since 1974 when Yasser Arafat and the PLO were welcomed into the United Nations, this is the first time that the world body’s spotlight was officially placed on Palestinian racism, discrimination and anti-Semitism.”
An upscale restaurant in Ramallah backed out of hosting a lunch meeting between the US Embassy’s commercial attache and Palestinian businesspeople earlier this week, according to both an activist as well as a businessman who said he was invited to the lunch.
The restaurant said it would not host the meeting after the National and Islamic Forces in Ramallah, a group of local activists, contacted its management and demanded it cancel the event, according to Isam Bakr, a leading member of the group.
“We called the members of the management and told them that the restaurant should not host this meeting. We asked them how it could permit the gathering to take place on its premises following all of the US administration’s punitive measures against Palestine, including the State Department’s recent decision to erase Palestine from its site,” Bakr told The Times of Israel, referring to the department’s removal of the “Palestinian Territories” section from its website.
“Approximately half an hour later, the management informed us that it would not host the meeting, which we highly appreciated,” said Bakr, who asked that the name of the restaurant not be identified over concerns it could be targeted.
He said that the event was slated for Thursday at noon, but the restaurant decided to cancel it on Wednesday.
The most problematic part of this video is perhaps not the attack itself, but that UNIFIL kept it under wraps.
Exclusive video obtained by Fox News shows a peacekeeping patrol under attack by the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hezbollah. An intelligence source confirmed to Fox News the Iranian proxy force was behind the attack.
While the U.N. described the attack in a report, the video and the ensuing chaos following the ambush show how dangerous Hezbollah has made the situation for UNIFIL, or the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon.
The video shows groups of men block off the convoy with their cars. Once blocked off several men set upon the vehicles, trying to break in through the windows with hammers and stones.
At one stage, gasoline is poured over the second U.N. armored vehicle and then lit on fire. As it burns one peacekeeper leaves the vehicle while being accosted by the men. Another peacekeeper comes running out from behind the lead armored vehicle with his gun drawn, only to retreat. Another peacekeeper leaves the APV, surrendering his weapon to the terrorists. Men carrying automatic weapons can be seen during the melee.
By not letting anyone know, UNIFIL is essentially protecting Hezbollah - a terror group.
(h/t Irene)
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Nazmi al Jubeh, an associate professor of history and archaeology at Birzeit University outside Ramallah, told a UN conference last June that there was no evidence linking the Jews to Jerusalem.
Thus far, so predictably mendacious. But thanks to the Elder of Zion website, a piece has now surfaced written by al Jubeh in 2006 in which he demolished the myth of Palestinian identity and made plain that it was invented solely to destroy Zionism and Israel.
Not that he acknowledged the Jews’ own history in the land. He made correct but passing reference to the Romans renaming Judea as “Palestina” in order “to challenge the memory of the Jews” after the Romans put down “the Jewish rebellion.”
Yet he didn’t provide the context for this by explaining that the Romans had crushed the Jewish kingdom, which had existed for centuries before being conquered in turn by successive waves of colonial invaders.
Instead, he claimed that the “Palestinian Jews, an essential component of the Palestinian people, started at the beginning of the twentieth century to identify themselves with the Zionist movement, thus separating themselves from the rest of their own people … ”
Despite this egregious and absurd falsification of Jewish history, the striking element of al Jubeh’s account is his admission of what we know to be objectively true – that, from the earliest times, there was no Palestinian identity.
For many centuries, Palestine was a sparsely populated, poorly cultivated, and widely neglected expanse of eroded hills, sandy deserts, and malarial marshes. This was Mark Twain’s description when he visited in 1867:
A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds—a silent mournful expanse.
A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action?.?.?.?We never saw a human being on the whole route.
There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country (Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (London, 1881).
As late as 1880, the American consul in Jerusalem reported the area was continuing its historic decline. “The population and wealth of Palestine has not increased during the last forty years,” he said (Melvin Urofsky, American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust (Bison Books: 1995), p. 29).
Take a look at some of the photos from the late 19th and early 20th century to see the desolation Twain talked about:
The Oslo Accords were based on the illusion that the PLO could totally change and suddenly become a "partner for peace"... It soon became clear that the Palestinian Authority was still the PLO: terrorist attacks quickly multiplied. The money received by the Palestinian Authority was used to continue incitement to murder and payments to incentivize it.
In 1967, a change of strategy took place. No one, the PLO decided, would speak of a "war for the destruction of Israel". Instead, they would call it a "war of national liberation". From then on, the PLO was presented as a "liberation movement".
Arabs who had left Israel in 1948-49, many of whom remained in refugee camps, were defined as the "Palestinian people"; in this way were the Palestinian people invented. As PLO Executive Council member Zuheir Mohsen said in 1977: "The Palestinian people does not exist... Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people..."
The leaders of the Palestinian Authority have, in fact, never stopped resorting to "armed struggle", the name they give to terrorism and murdering Jews. To "frustrate all the schemes of Zionism", they invented the Palestinian people; their "struggle for national liberation" gave them international recognition. By renaming terrorism and murdering Jews "armed struggle", they made their use of terrorism and murder acceptable. By signing the Oslo Accords, they could appear interested in peace without having to renounce terrorism. They could even demonize Israel and give it the image of a barbaric and cruel country while continuing to murder Jews.
"If you look at history... what ends conflicts is one side giving up.... and then it's over.... in World War II, [the Germans] were forced to give up... and note how much they benefited by giving up." -- Daniel Pipes, historian, November 19, 2017.
No U.S. president had ever told Palestinian leaders that they were lying, or had required them to stop inciting murder and financing terrorism, and no U.S. president had ever decided to cut funding for the Palestinian Authority as long as it continued to incentivize terrorism. President Donald J. Trump did.
Actually, these are cartoons that I created/edited and tweeted over the past few weeks that I never posted on the blog.
Political Football
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This New York Times story from April 23, 1964 discusses an attack by black youths in Bedford-Stuyvesant on Jewish kids in a Lubavitcher yeshiva.
There are some parallels with today's antisemitic attacks in Brooklyn against mostly elderly Jews, but today the media doesn't want to be accused of racism so hardly anyone is even mentioning the race of the attackers.
In contrast, this article tries to understand the source of the violence in the black community. The black youths, already subject to the endemic racism of the time, see in the religious Jew a white target that can't fight back. But there is also traditional antisemitism there.
Today, the people trying to understand the current attacks on Jews are only looking at how the Jews might have brought it onto themselves rather than the bias of the attackers.
In other words, in some ways people were less antisemitic in 1964 than today.
The children of the Lubavitcher Yeshivoth are Orthodox Jews and do not look like other American children. They wear skullcaps and have the fuzzy beginnings of beards and there is to them a look of the Old World and of the ghetto.
They do in fact, go to school in a ghetto. It is not the ghetto of the Old World, but a ghetto of the new, the black ghetto of Bedford‐Stuyvesant.
In that black world that one Negro referred to yesterday as “the bottom of the bottom” they represent a curious focus of hatred. They are white, yet they are a minority, and in the eyes of the Negroes, a weak and defenseless minority. For about a decade trouble has been simmering.
Tuesday the tension erupted in a brief explosion when a gang of older Negro youths shouting anti‐Semitic slogans attacked the Jews. Several of the students and two rabbis were injured.
Yesterday the police kept a close watch on the school and promised a round‐the‐clock guard for an indefinite period. The Jews were shaken, more emotionally than physically, and during the day there was a long series of visitors of all faiths and colors, come to assure them that the incident was unfortunate.
Yet in the eyes of the school's officials it was more inevitable than unfortunate.
“It's been building up for several years,” said Rabbi Samuel Schrage. “We are desperate to get out of here.
“We are not wanted here, we are not liked here, and we do not have the respect of our neighbors.”
At almost the same time a police official, a Negro, was saying: “It has all the makings of trouble. This is a very tough area. You don't have to be a genius or a sociologist to spot the dangers.”
Another police officer added: “The Negroes are simply doing to the Jews what the Irish used to do to the Jews.”
Rabbi Schrage disputed this. The yeshiva had trouble with the Irish, he said, “but the Negroes are more flagrant, more audacious.” He smiled and added: “They have more chutzpa.' Chutzpa means gall, among other things.
Tuesday's incident, because of its racial and anti‐Semitie nature, overshadowed an event of far greater violence that indirectly triggered the Tuesday attack.
This was a stabbing on Saturday night that took the life of a 14‐year‐old Negro boy, Major Jones. The attack took place in a dispute among a group of Negro youths. According to the police, young Jones was probably not a member of a gang, and so technically he did not die in a gang fight.
On Tuesday a wake was held for him at the Brown and Mitchell funeral home, which is only a block and a half from the yeshiva. Many of the youth's friends were at the wake. The mood was highly emotional. Many of the young Negroes sobbed.
After the wake, a group of Negroes ‐ not an organized gang ‐ passed the yeshiva as the students were having a lunchtime break. Some of the Negroes, shouting epithets, tried to shake down the Jewish children. Rabbis went to the aid of the students, and soon there was a fight. The Negroes reportedly were armed with knives, bottles, chains and sticks.
“It was like watching a movie from Africa, one of those rebellions where the Africans attack the whites,” Rabbi Schrage said.
A crowd of about 50 persons, almost all of them Negroes, gathered to watch. They made no move to stop the fight.
Finally a white man, Leo Berman, grabbed one of the Negroes, and the others fled.
The neighborhood was not always Negro. Twenty years ago, when the yeshiva opened, it was primarily Irish. The school building, bought at an auction, had once housed the old Unity Republican Club.
In the early days on Bedford Avenue, the Jews with their skull‐caps and the older students with their beards were frequently taunted by the Irish.
“They had beards, and people with beards are different, and so people threw water on them,” Rabbi Schrage related. “But with the Irish kids it was mostly a case of yelling a curse and running. And some of the parents would come by the school and apologize. That doesn't happen now.”
Other, less Orthodox, Jews in the neighborhood at that time began to move, partly because the neighborhood was changing and partly because the anti-Semitism that went with the yeshiva also affected them.
The Irish, too, moved away, and about 10 years ago the neighborhood became predominantly Negro—and then finally altogether Negro.
At the same time, ironically, the yeshiva flourished as Orthodox families all, over the city sent their children there. Many of the fathers of the current students are rabbis. Many work in the garment, diamond or pearl industries. More than a third of the students, according to Rabbi Schrage, will become rabbis.
They could hardly offer a sharper contrast with the young Negroes in the area. They know nothing of fighting, nothing of gangs. In many of their homes television is not permitted because there is too much violence on it.
“These kids don't know dancing or dating,” said Rabbi Schrage. “For them a big treat is if someone reads a Bible story.
“They can't protect themselves, and the Negroes know this. So the Negroes would sooner go after them than some white kid who might fight back.”
The shakedown of the Jews began almost immediately after the neighborhood became a Negro one. “It was always anti-Semitic,” he said. “It was always: ‘Give me a dime, Jew,’ not ‘Give me a dime, boy.’ ”
The students, he said, were regularly shaken down for small change, and frequently lost hats, coats and briefcases. The transit passes that all city school children get are specially stamped “Good on Sunday” because the Yeshiva students go to school on Sunday, and the Negroes covet these, too, Rabbi Schrage said.
The Negro youths' world, in contrast, is a violent one. It is a world of gangs, of absenteeism from school, of early sexual experience and sometimes of early death.
To the Negroes, the Jews are white, richer, different. They are also obviously weaker. In addition, said a rabbi, an undercurrent of anti‐Semitism is frequently evident in the meetings and teachings of the Black Muslims.
All this, added to what one police official called “the overpowering feeling of frustration in that area,” led to the conflict.
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As readers may be aware, an internal UN report has been leaked accusing the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN body that looks after Palestinian refugees, of corruption, sexual misconduct, nepotism, waste, and poor management among its leadership team. This comes on top of long-standing complaints about the agency, including:
- Its tolerance of incitement to hatred and violence in its schools and other institutions;
- Its unique definition of who is a Palestinian refugee that means the number of such refugees will expand forever;
- Its political promotion of the legally-baseless Palestinian “right of return”, contradicting the two-state solution and thus damaging any realistic hopes for Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Now, the American blogger “Elder of Ziyon” has called attention to some material from UNRWA’s own website demonstrating how the latter two political stances lead to gross waste by the agency, quite apart from the current scandal.
Basically, “Elder of Ziyon” points to three facts noted on the UNRWA website:
- UNWRA says it has “started construction on a new health centre in Zohour area within the Jordanian capital Amman. … The actual construction activities started late in July 2019 and the health centre is expected to be functional by August 2020 and will improve access to health care for over 68,000 Palestine refugees in the area.”
- UNRWA admits “In Jordan, the 2.2 million Palestine refugees who are registered with UNRWA enjoy broad inclusion in social and economic life. The vast majority have Jordanian nationality, with the exception of some 158,000 ‘ex-Gazan’ refugees,” and “[M]ost of the over 2 million Palestine refugees in Jordan have been granted citizenship, and have the same access to health care as other Jordanian citizens.”
- UNRWA says “In Jordan, our clinics serve more than 1.1 million people, nearly 56 per cent of the registered Palestine refugees in the country.”
What these three facts amount to is this: UNRWA is paying to run, and even currently expanding, a separate and discriminatory health care system in Jordan which is almost completely unnecessary.
Completely reliant on donors, UNRWA is always living on the edge, with uncertain funding and a culture of secrecy. The agency regularly assesses its management, but it publishes uniformly positive reports. The imperative is always to support calls for future funding and avoid lending ammunition to critics, namely the US and Israel.
One lesson is that funders must demand internal controls, external audits and public access to information. Assurances regarding Palestinian needs aren’t enough. Scrutiny is also needed for the Palestinian Authority, which uses foreign aid to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in pensions to terrorists and their families.
A second lesson concerns the danger of devoting an international organisation to a single population. UNRWA was effectively taken over by Palestinians decades ago. Politicisation began at the bottom with school curricula, but crept upward with senior managers calling for the Palestinian “right of return”.
The US funding cuts were the first serious challenges to a long overripe status quo. This latest scandal is an opportunity for the US, joined by other angry donors, to demand a phaseout plan for the entire organisation.
UNRWA’s 30,000 employees could join the Palestinian Authority, which would take over its health, education and welfare responsibilities like the state it claims to be. UNRWA’s expensive international cadre, including lobbyists in Washington and Geneva, should be disbanded. And Palestinian residents of Arab states – all of whom are considered refugees by UNRWA – should become citizens of those states, as they are in Jordan, or of the Palestinian Authority. If Palestinians truly desire a state, they should join the call for UNRWA’s abolition.
No joke: 🇨🇭 Switzerland paid for this.
"In 2015, UNRWA chief Pierre Krähenbühl created a post of “Special Advisor” and gave the position to his mistress. Costs of this post were funded by the Swiss foreign ministry from March 2015 to December 2018." https://t.co/Tvhmxr4nyohttps://t.co/DyePU0dA0C
Seeing Palestinian flags at rallies for liberal causes like LGBTQ rights, women's rights and Black Lives Matter is always jarring, because Palestinians are among the least liberal people on Earth.
But the sight of the flag associates the "pro-Palestinian" (really anti-Israel) cause with liberalism and that is something that happens subconsciously.
If we are to fight the anti-Israel side we have to sometimes play by their rules. Let's associate the Palestinian flag with the anti-liberal causes that are their actual positions.
Here's a start:
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The official Palestinian Wafa news agency reports on the usual over-the-top reaction to a diplomatic defeat:
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned Honduras' decision to open a diplomatic mission in Jerusalem linked to its embassy in Tel Aviv, calling it a direct aggression against the Palestinian people and their rights and a flagrant violation of international law and international legitimacy and its resolutions.
It decided to file a complaint against Honduras with the Secretary-General of the United Nations over the opening of an official diplomatic mission in Jerusalem linked to its embassy in Tel Aviv, and to submit a draft resolution in the General Assembly against Honduras for violating Security Council resolution 478 of 1980, and announced that it had withdrawn from its intention to open an embassy in Tegucigalpa.
The Foreign Ministry also decided to ask the Arab League Ministerial Council, which will hold its ordinary session chaired by Iraq on September 10, to condemn this step and push for punitive measures against Honduras for the crime committed against the Palestinian people, ignoring its obligations towards the resolutions of the Security Council, which condemns the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and the transfer of any embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
The Ministry indicated that it would go to the OIC General Secretariat for the same purpose and ask for a trade boycott action against Honduras.
Hyperbole is normal diplomatic language for Palestinians. because they know that it can intimidate Western diplomats who want to keep the peace so an irrational actor must be coddled rather than more appropriately being confronted or mocked.
There's more:
"The status of Jerusalem as an occupied city is endorsed by the vast majority of states, in line with their standing legal and moral obligations to uphold international law," [Hanan] Ashrawi said.
Honduras will almost certainly locate its mission to the west of the Green Line. Hanan Ashrawi is saying that all of Jerusalem is occupied, proving yet again that Palestinians have no interest in sharing anything.
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Yesterday, the White House announced that it had issued sanctions on a number of Lebanese financial institutions and individuals that help fund Hezbollah and Hamas.
The transcript of the press conference (the source seems bizarre but the transcript is accurate) is a pleasure to read, as it is so refreshing even three years after Obama to see a White House that is so clearly supportive of Israel's right to self defense and so against coddling Iran and its support for terrorists. Something like this was unthinkable a few years ago, but it is so obviously the correct and moral position. Say what you want about Trump but in this area it is the Obama administration that was immoral in propping up Iran and its terror proxies Hamas and Hezbollah.
A couple of reporters asked the administration officials about presumed Israeli attacks on Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria and Lebanon. The answers show that while the White House does not officially support Israel's actions, it has absolutely no problem with them.
Q Hi, it's Karen DeYoung at the Washington Post. ...On the larger question of Hizballah and Iran, I wonder if you could -- any of you -- talk a bit about the recent Israeli strikes in Syria and Lebanon, and whether the United States is playing any role in encouraging or discouraging those attacks, and just what you think of them in general. Thank you.
OFFICIAL 1: I'll leave it for the Israelis to comment on what they did or they didn’t do. But the United States neither encourages nor discourages the Israeli attacks. The United States believes that the government of Israel has a right to defend itself from threatening activities throughout the region, wherever they may be.
OFFICIAL 2: ...It's our position that Israel is only acting because of Iran's actions. If Iran was not pouring heavy weapons and fighters into Israel's neighbors with the express purpose of threatening Israel, I don't think Israel would be needing to take any of these actions. And we fully support Israel's right to self-defense, and denounce Iran's regional campaign to violence.
Q Hi. This is Jeff Schogol with Task & Purpose. I just wanted to follow up on my colleague's question. The U.S. supports Israel's right to self-defense and Iraqi sovereignty. But if Israel attacks targets in Iraq, what does the United States do when Israel's right to defend tramples over Iraq's sovereignty?
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I think that's actually an excellent question for the Iranians. Where is their respect for Iraqi sovereignty when they are putting this material into Iraq? That seems, to me, a pretty gross violation of sovereignty if that's the topic under discussion.
The press conference also revealed that Iran has transferred over $200 million to Hamas in the past four years. This is besides the funding of other terror groups in Gaza.
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When Israel barred two US congresswomen from entering the country earlier this month, I initially thought it was a stupid decision. But after hearing the reactions from both American politicians and American Jews, I’ve started to think that it may have been necessary.
This isn’t to deny the substantial damage it has caused. Pro-Israel Democrats felt betrayed and even some pro-Israel Republicans were outraged. Most of the organized Jewish community was horrified. And the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement received media exposure it could never have gained on its own.
But nobody would have felt outraged or betrayed had Israel barred, say, white-supremacist politicians. Thus the underlying message of these reactions was that unlike white supremacism, advocating Israel’s destruction is a legitimate opinion, and is entitled to the same respectful treatment as the view that Israel should continue to exist. Yet, no country can or should treat its own erasure as a legitimate option.
To understand why this was the issue at stake, a brief review of the facts is needed. When Israel originally agreed to allow a visit by Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), it knew that they enthusiastically supported BDS, a movement unambiguously committed to eliminating the Jewish state. It also knew they would use the visit to tar Israel in every possible way.
However, it assumed that they would at least pay lip service to Israel’s existence by following the standard protocol for official visitors – meeting Israeli officials and visiting some Israeli sites. On that assumption, and since the law banning entry to prominent BDS supporters permits exceptions for the sake of Israel’s foreign relations, Israel decided to admit them “out of respect for the US Congress,” as Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer said at the time.
A few days before the visit, however, the proposed itinerary arrived and proved that assumption wrong. Far from paying lip service to Israel’s existence, the trip literally erased the country from the map.
US-Israel relations have been through worse, and they will survive this too. But the incident is worth contextualizing within the US-Israel political framework. Tlaib and Omar displayed remarkable audacity in openly lying about their trip, both in advance and then again after it was canceled. They falsely claimed they were planning to meet Israeli officials when their itinerary included only ‘Palestine’, Palestinians, and supporters of Palestinians.
Tlaib’s actions proved that her visit was never meant to be an impartial trip to the scene of the conflict. Nor was it about seeing her grandmother. The point was to showcase the so-called “occupation.” Such manipulations, compounded by the soft power enjoyed by pro-Palestinian groups, magnify a fictitious reality. They allow those groups to hijack the narrative of peace, justice, and human rights while yearning for Israel’s destruction.
US-Israel relations do not exist in vacuum, and US opinion is neither monolithic nor frozen in time. It has undergone significant shifts since 1948, with some groups becoming more favorable toward Israel and others less so. Nevertheless, as polls illustrate, support for Israel has become an American value, even if some elected officials feel otherwise. Sustaining this requires work and perseverance.
It is a serious challenge to get past the self-delusion and zero-sum exclusion of the BDS worldview, which polarizes American politics regarding Israel, and convey the actual reality of the Middle East. The normalization of antisemitism in American politics and culture – together with our growing collective dependency on technology and the general tone of politics – reduces complex issues to sound bites and drives polarization and ignorance. (h/t IsaacStorm)
In The book, The Trials of Richard Goldstone, Daniel Terris, a friend and admirer, provides us with an in-depth account of a remarkable career.
Goldstone, 80, is a third-generation South African who was born into a Jewish family in Boksburg, near Johannesburg.
In the book, we follow, and are helped to understand, the events and circumstances that led to the emergence of Goldstone as a towering figure in international jurisprudence.
As his legal career progressed in South Africa, where he combated and helped defeat apartheid from within the system, and as chief prosecutor for the UN in bringing the Bosnian Serb political and military leaders to justice, Goldstone proved himself a dedicated advocate of human rights and an unwavering upholder of international humanitarian law.
Terris both describes and explains the challenges that Goldstone faced along the way, and the principles that informed his many decisions – principles that evolved over the course of his career, and have become his legacy.
Then late in the story, when he was already past 70, came the debacle of the Goldstone Report, a pivotal episode in his life and in his career. Terris describes the episode with scrupulous honesty.
It is well known that a couple of years later, Goldstone published an article in The Washington Post containing the key sentence: “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.” His partial retraction of the report’s conclusions was condemned at the time as “too little, too late,” and in a sense this was true. Yet Terris also highlights the reactions of some in the human rights world who applauded Goldstone’s moral courage in acknowledging when mistakes had been made. “Heroism of the first order,” one editorial called it.
A source in the Palestinian resistance said on Tuesday that the resistance factions in the Gaza Strip will enter the front line upon the outbreak of any war with Hezbollah on the northern front.
"If there is a battle with Hezbollah in the north, the resistance factions in Gaza will enter the confrontation line," the source said.
What does Gaza have to do with Lebanon?
Iran funds many Gaza groups and would instruct them to start shooting rockets from the south while Hezbollah shoots them from the north, leaving Israelis with nowhere to go outside of rocket range - except perhaps parts of Judea and Samaria.
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Lebanese Baffled Why Israel So Bad At Apartheid Vs Palestinians When Lebanon Right There Showing Them How
Beirut, August 29 - Residents of Israel's tiny northern neighbor voiced puzzlement today regarding the Jewish state's policy of segregation and disenfranchisement perpetrated against Palestinians, noting that despite Lebanon's decades-old, comprehensive use of the practice to emulate, their neighbor to the south has never implemented any competent version of the policy.
Lebanon residents both native and Palestinian shared their confusion about Israeli Apartheid, observing that while international media, NGOs, Arab political figures, and numerous other sources call attention to that Apartheid, the fact remains that Israel has done a lousy job of following any real Apartheid policy even though Lebanon lies just over the border and makes no effort to hide its bona fide Apartheid treatment of Palestinians. Israel could imitate that policy with the simple step of copying the plain-sight example to the north, but has failed to do so.
"I can't hold a real job," noted Jibril Hassan, a resident of the Palestinian refugee camp Ein el-Hilweh. "It's against the law in Lebanon for me to own property, a business, attend university, or find employment in a whole array of fields, especially government. And of course I can't participate in Lebanese elections because I'm not a citizen. All that is for my own good, because otherwise I might get used to being in Lebanon, and I might even like it, when I'm supposed to be fighting to destroy Israel and reclaim the place my grandparents fled seventy plus years ago. Whatever the reason for the policy, it's clear Israel has no clue what it's doing, because it can't be that hard to just copy and paste Lebanese law on the subject. But here we are, and Israel lets Palestinians hold jobs, own property, attend university, and what have you - and when every now and then Palestinian leaders decide to hold elections, Palestinians under Israeli rule are allowed to vote. It's like those Jews have no idea how to do Apartheid."
"We're not allowed to employ Palestinian guests," confirmed Baalbek entrepreneur Awad Afkam. "Officially, as you know, this is for their own sake, which is why we also build high walls around their camps, we love them so much. We even let them fight among themselves instead of forcing our police upon them. But Lebanon is a small country and we must also protect our workers from low-wage competition. It amazes me that Israel doesn't follow this easy example, considering its much greater resources and wealth. It's weird, because everyone knows they have no hesitation about appropriating everything else in Arab culture such as falafel."
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The Republic of Nauru has recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, Israel Foreign Ministry announced on Thursday.
"I commend @Republic_Nauru’s important decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. We will continue to strengthen Jerusalem and to bring about the recognition and opening of diplomatic missions and embassies in our capital," Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz tweeted on Thursday.
In a letter the country’s mission to the UN in New York wrote to the Israeli mission on the matter, it stated: “The Mission of Nauru has the honor to convey the decision of the Government of the Republic of Nauru to formally recognize the City of Jerusalem as the Capital City of the State of Israel.”
The island country from the Pacific joined a small number of other countries who have taken this step in the last several years, including the United States, Guatemala and Honduras. The President of Honduras is due to arrive in Israel this weekend to open a trade office in Jerusalem.
The "Charter of Makkah," unanimously endorsed on May 28, 2019, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, by leading Muslim scholars from 137 nations, offers Muslims guidance on concepts that champion moderate Islam.
"All people, regardless of their different ethnicities, races and nationalities, are equal under God. We reject religious and ethnic claims of 'preference.'"
"Differences among people in their beliefs, cultures and natures are part of God's will and wisdom. Religious and cultural diversity never justifies conflict."
"We recognize and respect the other's legitimate rights and right to existence. We set aside preconceived prejudices, historical animosities, conspiracy theories and erroneous generalizations."
"We should advance laws to deter the promotion of hatred, the instigation of violence and terrorism, or a clash of civilizations, which foster religious and ethnic disputes."
"The empowerment of women should not be undermined by marginalizing their role, disrespecting their dignity, reducing their status, or impeding their opportunities, whether in religious, academic, political or social affairs. Their rights include equality of wages and opportunity."
Braving extremely inclement weather, with a flood-like situation, Singha Bahini, a grassroots organization in India, held a pro-Israel rally in Kolkata, India on August 16, 2019. Over 10,000 people braved the heavy sudden downpour and flooding, which caused bumper-to-bumper traffic and clogged roads. Many thousands more could not make it through the treacherous conditions to the rally site. While the organization SinghaBahini is just a year old, the organizers have been on ground helping in the existential battle for the Hindus in the villages of Eastern India for over a decade.
Pro-Israel rallies are not new to the founder of the organization Devdutta Maji, who was instrumental in organizing two large pro-Israel rallies in India: 20,000 people in 2014 and 70,000 people in 2018. At the rally, demonstrators held placards saying, "We Support the Jewish People in their 2,000-Year-Old Struggle," "India and Israel Friends Forever," and "We Support Israel in Her War against Terrorism."
The rally reflects the positive turn in the India-Israel relationship under the leadership of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. The Indian prime minister visited Israel in July 2017 and Prime Minister Netanyahu reciprocated with a visit to India in 2018. With strong trade ties, people-to-people contact, and rallies in support of Israel as seen recently, ties between India and Israel and between the Hindus and Jews worldwide are expected to strengthen further.
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Sunday, September 01, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
Saeb Erekat's response is classic, though:
