Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, June 10, 2022

EU drafting deal to obtain natural gas from Israel and Egypt instead of Russia

The European Union is negotiating a gas supply agreement with Egypt and Israel, according to internal documents dated 7 June and seen by EUobserver.

A draft memorandum of understanding with the two countries, still subject to changes, is part of its efforts to reduce its dependence on Russian fossil fuels in the wake of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

"Security of gas supply is a common major concern. Egypt and the EU will work together on the stable delivery of gas to the EU," reads another internal document mentioning the trilateral collaboration deal.

The proposed agreement highlights that natural gas will be shipped to the EU from Egypt, Israel or any other source in the East Mediterranean region, including EU member states in the region.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is due to travel to Cairo next week, but it is currently unclear whether the memorandum will be signed during her visit.

Egypt has increasingly become a regional gas hub, with its two liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But Israel has also become a key regional gas supplier in recent years.

Under the draft deal, imports from Israel would involve gas being processed at Egypt's liquefaction plants before being shipped to Europe as LNG.

Mediterranean natural gas has been a game changer for Israel - not as earthshaking as the Abraham Accords, but it is redrawing the regional balance in ways that couldn't have been predicted.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah is threatening Israel - and a Greek ship - for exploring in gas fields that the UN said belongs to Israel but Lebanon disputes:

Lebanon should block Israel from extracting gas from the disputed offshore field, Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said Thursday, warning a hydrocarbon exploration company hired by Israel against proceeding with its activities.
"The immediate objective should be to prevent the enemy from extracting oil and gas from the Karish gas field," part of which is claimed by Lebanon, Nasrallah said in a televised speech.
Hizbullah will not "stand by and do nothing in the face of (Israel's) looting of Lebanon's natural wealth... which is the only hope for the salvation of the Lebanese people," he warned.
The company "should pull out its ship immediately and avoid getting involved in this aggression and provocation against Lebanon," the head of the powerful Iran-backed movement said, adding that Energean must assume "full responsibility" for its involvement.
“The resistance has the technical ability to prevent the enemy from extracting gas from Karish and I will not say how,” Nasrallah added.
“All of the enemy's measures will not be able to protect the Greek ship or the Karish field,” he warned.

If Lebanon had crafted a maritime border agreement with Israel years ago, it could have been selling gas to Europe by now. Instead it is a country on the verge of failure, in large part because of people like Nasrallah.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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06/09 Links Pt2: Liberating our Jerusalem; The Soviet origins of left-wing anti-Zionism; Israel’s Destruction Is Championed at the University of Chicago

From Ian:

Mark Regev: Shireen Abu Akleh, Palestinians, Al Jazeera and press freedom - opinion

The accusation of a willful murder is made when among the nations of the Middle East it is in Israel alone that a free and critical press thrives. Israel’s famously boisterous and pugnacious media is always ready to expose a misbehaving politician, government wrongdoing and the IDF’s mistakes. This while the practice in the PA and Al Jazeera falls into a very different category.

Press freedom in the PA, Qatar
Although a PA basic law theoretically guarantees a free press, in reality such freedom is nonexistent: the media is severely constrained, critical platforms are shut down and journalists arrested when the authorities object to their work. Reporters have been beaten while in custody, blogger Nizar Banat ended up dead. When Abbas was angered by an Al Jazeera story, he ordered the closure of the network’s Ramallah offices.

The Palestinian president might have championed the deceased Abu Akleh as a martyr, but live Palestinian journalists know what may happen if they incur the wrath of the PA.

For its part, Al Jazeera likes to present its reporting as hard-hitting independent journalism, but the Qatari government-funded channel’s hundreds of employees never report about matters that could embarrass their patron.

Consequently, Qatar’s ongoing systematic mistreatment of the country’s migrant worker population of more than two million (similar in size to the entire population of Gaza) does not make it to Al Jazeera’s newsroom. The network has been equally silent on the kingdom’s discriminatory sexist male guardianship laws, on the criminalization of criticism against the emir’s leadership and on the lack of press freedom.

Even more problematic, following last year’s war in Gaza, the channel was presented with an award from Hamas for its reporting of the conflict. Hamas acclaim for Al Jazeera is not new, the network has a history of glorifying the perpetrators of terror attacks and broadcasting material that incites violence; its recent regurgitation of erroneous claims that the Jews somehow threaten al-Aqsa Mosque just the latest example.

Ultimately, like with its Kremlin-controlled sister channel RT, the Qatari state furnishes a television news station with a highly tendentious agenda.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the European democracies banned RT broadcasts deeming them a “direct threat” to the “public order and security” of the EU. Yet, despite Al Jazeera’s record of affinity with a terrorist organization sworn to Israel’s destruction, Jerusalem takes no analogous action, media freedom being sacrosanct.

While Shireen Abu Akleh’s untimely death warrants thorough examination, allegations that Israel deliberately targets the press deserve no credence. They are cheap propaganda and should be dismissed as such.

Daniel Greenfield: Liberating our Jerusalem

In 1966, Jerusalem was a city sundered in two, divided by barbed wire and the bullets of Muslim snipers. Diplomacy did not reunite it. Israel pursued diplomacy nearly to its bitter end until it understood that it had no choice at all but to fight. Israel did not swoop into the fight, its leaders did their best to avoid the conflict, asking the international community to intervene and stop Egypt from going to war. Read back the headlines for the last five years on Israel and Iran, and you will get a sense of the courage and determination of the Israeli leaders of the day.

When Israel went to war, its leaders did not want to liberate Jerusalem, they wanted Jordan to stay out of the war. Even when Jordan entered the war, they did not want to liberate the city. Divine Providence and Muslim hostility forced them to liberate Jerusalem and forced them to keep it. Now some of them would like to give it back, another sacrifice to the bloody deity of diplomacy whose altar flows with blood and burnt sacrifices.

As we remember Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day, it is important to remember that the city is united and free because diplomacy failed. The greatest triumph of the modern state happened only because diplomacy proved hopeless and useless in deterring Muslim genocidal ambitions. Had Israel succumbed to international pressure and had Nasser been as subtle as Sadat, then the Six-Day War would have looked like the Yom Kippur War fought with 1948 borders– and Israel very likely would not exist today.

Even as Jews remember the great triumph of Yom Yerushalayim, the ethnic cleansers and their accomplices are busy searching for ways to drive Jews out of Jerusalem, out of towns, villages and cities. This isn’t about the Muslim residents of Jerusalem, who have repeatedly asserted that they want to remain part of Israel. It’s not about peace, which did not come from any previous round of concessions, and will not come from this one either. It’s about solving the Jewish problem.

As long as Jews allow themselves to be defined as the problem, there will be plenty of those offering solutions. And the solutions invariably involve doing something about the Jews. It only stands to reason that if Jews are the problem, then moving them or getting rid of them is the solution. There is less friction in defining Jews as the problem, than in defining Muslims as the problem. The numbers alone mean that is so.

Yom Yerushalayim is a reminder of what the real problem is and what the real solution is. Muslim occupation of Israel is the problem. The Islamization of Jerusalem is the problem. Muslim violence in support of the Muslim occupation of Israel and of everywhere else is the problem. Israel is the solution. Only when we liberate ourselves from the lies, when we stop believing that we are the problem and recognize that we are the solution. Only then will the liberation that began in 1967 be complete.

Only then will we have liberated our Jerusalem. The Jerusalem of the soul. It is incumbent on all of us to liberate that little Jerusalem within. The holy city that lives in all of us. To clean the dross off its golden gates, wash the filth from its stones and expel the invaders gnawing away at our hearts until we look proudly upon a shining city. Then to help others liberate their own Jerusalems. Only then will we truly be free.

The Soviet origins of left-wing anti-Zionism

Ironically, Soviet anti-Zionism itself drew extensively from Nazi rhetoric and imagery. Many prominent contributors of propaganda material, such as Trofim Kichko, Yuri Ivanov, Lev Korneev and others unabashedly recycled ideas directly from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf. They even blamed the Jews for the extermination of both Jews and non-Jews during World War II. Today, anti-Zionist groups keep that legacy alive by routinely comparing Zionism to the Nazis. For example, Shahd Abusalama, a professor at Sheffield University in the United Kingdom, found it acceptable for a first-year student to compare an Israeli operation in Gaza to the Holocaust.

One of the Soviet propaganda machine’s greatest victories was the United Nations’ 1975 adoption of the “Zionism is Racism” resolution. Its revocation in 1991 had little effect on the U.N.’s stance on Israel. Statistics from 2020 are particularly illustrative: Israel was targeted by 17 U.N. resolutions, while all other countries combined, including regimes like Iran and North Korea, received six. On campus, Israel is frequently attacked in the same language. For example, at a Cornell SJP poetry reading, one participant designated Israel a “racist, exclusivist, supremacist state.”

Throughout their entire anti-Zionist campaign, the official Soviet line was that anti-Zionism was not anti-Semitism. A 1979 article in TheWashington Post noted, “Although the number of anti-Semitic books and denunciations has grown continuously [in the Soviet Union] since the Six-Day War in 1967, recent months have brought remarkable new additions to this genre. Officially, they are labeled ‘anti-Zionist.’ Soviet bureaucrats vehemently reject suggestions that ‘anti-Zionism’ means ‘anti-Semitism.’ To many Soviet Jews, it is a distinction without a difference.”

Today, this is one of the most popular talking points among left-wing anti-Zionists and anti-Semites. Indeed, it is telling that anti-Israel groups have repeatedly attempted to block universities and municipalities from adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Anti-Semitism, which defines certain kinds of anti-Israel rhetoric as anti-Semitic. At the City University of New York (CUNY), for example, former president of CUNY’s SJP chapter Nerdeen Kiswani tweeted: “#IHRAoutofCUNY we know all too well that this purposeful conflation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism is used against Palestinians and organizers for Palestine. We must protect our right to organize and speak out against oppression.”

There is no doubt that today’s left-wing anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism can be directly traced to the Soviets’ anti-Zionist propaganda campaign. Knowing this is the first and perhaps most important step toward creating a more balanced and honest dialogue on the issue.

Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas gave a speech via telephone to the "Property Documents and the Historical Status of the Blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque" conference at Al-Bireh.

He started off by directly attacking the fundamentals of Judaism, denying Jewish history and Judaism's connection to Jerusalem, accusing Jews of having a "false narrative" that has "no basis, neither in history, nor in reality, nor in international law."

"All the historical evidence and documents confirm the identity of Al-Quds and Al-Aqsa Mosque and all the Islamic and Christian holy sites in our holy capital," he said, after denying any Jewish connection to the city.

But don't worry - he assured everyone that he isn't antisemitic.

He went on to say, "Our struggle with the occupation is essentially a political struggle and not a struggle against a particular religion."

Good to know that he is really a tolerant person.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

In 1960, Life magazine published small excerpts of transcripts of tapes from a fellow Nazi interviewing Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in the 1950s.

This excerpt explains the similarities between Nazis in the 1930s and the fanatic Israel haters today.

We did not devise the yellow star to put pressure on the Jews themselves. On the contrary, its purpose was to control the natural tendency of our German people to come to the aid of someone in trouble. The marking was intended to hinder any such assistance to Jews who were being harassed. We wanted Germans to feel embarrassed, to feel afraid of having any contact with Jews. So our administration was quite happy to distribute these bolts of yellow cloth and to regulate the time limit by which the stars would have to be worn.

The yellow star was not to punish the Jews, but to make it difficult for non-Jews to express sympathy with them.

Today, the people who advocate boycotts of Israel aren't primarily trying to hurt Israel. They are trying to make it difficult for other people to be pro-Israel.

Those who accuse Israel of "apartheid" or "ethnic cleansing" or "genocide" aren't trying to get Israel to treat Palestinians better. They are trying to make tar anyone who supports Israel's right to exist as supporting war crimes themselves.

"We wanted Germans to feel embarrassed, to feel afraid of having any contact with Jews. " Is there any better description of the purpose of BDS and anti-Zionism? Just look at how celebrities who visit Israel are treated by the "woke" crowd.

It is exactly the same.

Only exceptional people could stand up to the social pressure to ostracize Jews in Germany. And only exceptional people can stand up for Israel in Leftist circles. The weaker ones in both cases cower, and then it is but a small step to claim that their cowardice is really a moral, righteous position.

The yellow star was not meant to hurt Jews. It represents the original cancel culture.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

06/09 Links Pt1: Feeding Palestinian delusions; Fatal blow to JCPOA if Iran doesn’t restore access within 3-4 weeks - IAEA; U.S. Aid to Israel Is a Boon to American Taxpayers

From Ian:

Feeding Palestinian delusions

If the administration were consistent about its claim to be concerned with human rights, it would refuse to provide a nickel to the Palestinians until they ended their abuses, which include paying salaries to terrorists who have murdered Americans, continuing to incite violence, denying their people civil and political rights, and being so corrupt and inept that the overwhelming majority want Abbas to resign.

Then again, Biden is also going to grovel when he arrives in Saudi Arabia as part of a scheduled trip next month. After making a point of criticizing the Saudis’ human-rights violations and shunning Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for his role in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the president now believes, like his predecessors, that it is more important to be solicitous of the Saudis. He needs Saudi goodwill to increase the flow of oil to lower gas prices and perhaps save his presidency.

The difference is the United States does not need anything from the Palestinians and has no reason to care about their feelings.

Sadly, the Europeans, the United Nations, and the Palestinians’ cheerleaders in America and elsewhere continue to feed Palestinian fantasies that they can achieve their goals through petulance and claims of victimhood.

Instead of returning to the old, failed policy of making unilateral concessions, the administration should be putting the screws on Abbas. Alas, as we’ve seen in the administration’s negotiations with Iran, appeasement seems to be Biden’s modus operandi.

Other than the progressives sabotaging his domestic agenda and impeding his foreign policy, and the Arabist hacks he brought back into the government, what constituency does Biden think he is serving with his policy towards the Palestinians? His policies towards both the Palestinians and Iran are entirely out of step with the views of our regional allies.

On this one occasion, Biden should channel Donald Trump and read the riot act to Abbas. Instead of showering him with gifts and promises of pressuring Israel and opening a Jerusalem consulate, the president should lay down the law that the Palestinians won’t get economic or diplomatic support until they fall in line with American values and interests; stop the corruption and human-rights abuses; halt payments to terrorists; end incitement; and accept the reality that Israel is here to stay.

Oh, and I believe the words you’re looking for Mr. Abbas, are “Thank you.”

Why Biden Needs to Fight, Not Appease, the Enemies of Peace

While Hamas and the Houthis target Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership, in addition to that, continues to act against the interests of its own people. PA President Mahmoud Abbas appears to be encouraged by the unconditional support he is receiving from the Biden administration, to the point where he feels free to continue denying his people good governance and judicial due process.

All signs now indicate that most people in the region are fed up with the anti-peace camp in the Arab and Muslim world, especially with Iran's proxies Hamas, the Houthis and Hizbollah, all of which have offered the region, including the Palestinians, nothing but violence and bloodshed.

Whenever Abbas feels encouraged by the US, he sees that support as a green light, this time from the Biden administration, to impose more suppression on his people and to whip up violence in the region.

Does the Biden administration really want as its legacy that it backed, encouraged and funded unscrupulous, violent regimes – the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Chinese Communist Party, the state sponsor of terrorism Iran, the illegitimate rule of Venezuela's Maduro – and the corrupt government of Mahmoud Abbas?

Meanwhile, Iran's proxy, Hamas -- whose charter calls not only for the elimination of peace but also of all Jews -- continues to urge Arabs and Muslims not to normalize their ties with Israel.

Iran, among other atrocities, imprisons attorneys for defending human rights, executes minors, and criminalizes human rights activism. If that is how Iran's regime treats its own people, what makes anyone think it will treat other countries -- in the region or in Europe -- any better?

And in a rare occurrence, according to the veteran Iranian journalist Amir Taheri, demonstrators in Iran have recently been publicly calling for regime change.

The Pakistani minister, however, is mistaken if she thinks that firing a journalist will support the rights of the Palestinians. Such myopic measures only support and embolden the enemies of peace, stability and human rights in the Middle East: Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, the Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey and Iran.

Stop worrying about international opinion

It's a lesson Israelis should have learned long ago. Still, the experience of the last 12 months should have reminded them of it again. Those who bash Israel as an oppressor or embrace the big lie that it is an "apartheid state" aren't interested in what it does. They hate it because of what it is: a Jewish state.

That's once again relevant because of the end of an experiment that should have conclusively proved that the calumnies about apartheid and oppression are absurd. The presence of Mansour Abbas's Ra'am Party – an Arab faction that is, in principle, opposed to Israel's existence and believes in the institution of an Islamist regime in its place – in the government of Israel should have put an end to discussions about apartheid. It was a decisive piece of evidence (though hardly the only one) that showed that the Jewish state is a lively democracy based on equality under the law for all its citizens, both Jewish and non-Jewish.

Yet throughout the last year, the vituperation against Israel not only failed to be quieted. It actually increased with the BDS movement in the United States continuing to promote hate while retaining support from influential leaders of the intersectional element that dominates the left-wing of the Democratic Party.

Nor did the nest of Israel-haters and anti-Semites of the UN Human Rights Council stand down from its obsession with attacking the Jewish state. Its open-ended "Commission of Inquiry" is still pushing the apartheid lie as part of a campaign to delegitimize Israel and isolate Israel as a pariah state.

Instead, the likely fall of the government in which Abbas and Ra'am have served as a destabilizing factor will be seized upon as fodder for more "criticism" of Israel than is merely thinly veiled anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

After the events of the last few days, it appears more than likely that Israel's experiment in a multi-party coalition that spanned the ideological spectrum is about to come to an end. Defections from the government led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid have created a situation in which it cannot pass vital legislation. While it is still fighting for life and engaging in desperate maneuvering to hold onto power, few observers believe that it can survive much longer.

The Caroline Glick show: Iran crosses nuclear threshold as Israel, US fight amongst themselves | Mideast News Hour

In this week’s episode of “Mideast News Hour,” Caroline Glick is joined by Dr. David Wurmser, a senior Middle East policy advisor in both the Bush and Trump administrations. They discuss: - Why the International Atomic Energy Agency’s announcement that Iran has crossed the nuclear threshold has gone virtually unremarked by Israeli and American media? - How both the US and Israel are now governed by post-nationalist governments. - American domestic struggles, as parents are not able to feed their children. - The unheralded world-changing legacy of the First Lebanon War.

@Airwars takes a chapter from @Amnesty - creating a database that declares terrorists to be "civilians" (@DigFind_)

In 2015, Amnesty International created a website called the Gaza Platform, created with Forensic Architecture, that claimed to identify every casualty in the 2014 Gaza war and the circumstances around the incident.

As I showed at the time, the database was filled with inaccuracies, and many of the people that they claimed were civilian were in fact terrorists. Amnesty was aware of my research showing terrorists in their uniforms with guns that they called "civilian" and chose to keep the lies in the database - which is still available, today.

Airwars is another NGO that purports to document the innocent victims of war, and they do just what Amnesty did - they are calling legitimate military targets "civilians."

This is a Twitter thread by open source researcher DigFind on this:

Our investigation finds that award winning non-profit company @airwars is whitewashing terrorism with the help of high profile donors.

Airwars' interactive map project detailing the "civilian casualties" in Gaza was nominated for @amnesty media awards 2022.

Airwars is based at Goldsmiths, University of London @GoldsmithsUoL. Chris Woods @chrisjwoods is the founder and until yesterday the director. Chris also sits on Forensic Architecture @ForensicArchi's Advisory Board.

Previously, Amnesty International @amnesty and Forensic Architecture @ForensicArchi teamed up to create the "Gaza Platform", an online data visualization app that describes many known Palestinian terrorists as civilian casualties of the 2014 Gaza War.

Mohammed Barham Abu Draz (محمد برهم على أبو دراز) was a member of Al Qassam Brigades - a terrorist organization. He is listed as civilian casualty.
gazaplatform.amnesty.org/#1528

Same for Alaa’ Jamal Barda (علاء جمال بردع). He was a field commander with the same terror group.

https://gazaplatform.amnesty.org/#1528

Airwars receives funding from Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust @jrct_uk, Open Society Foundations @OpenSociety, Stichting Democratie en Media, Reva and David Logan Foundation, and J. Leon Foundation.

On Airwars' Advisory Board are anti-Israel boycotts, divestments and sanctions (BDS)supporting Raed Jarrar @raedjarrar and Chris Cobb-Smith @CobbSmith. Both also linked to Amnesty.

@NGOmonitor background information on the two:

ngo-monitor.org/amnesty-usas-n…

CNN Cites Consultant Who Teams Up with NGOs to Bash IsraelOn May 24, 2022, CNN published an article alleging that evidence suggests that Shireen Abu Akleh was killed in targeted attack by Israeli forces. This inflammatory charge, which was vehemently denied …https://www.ngo-monitor.org/cnn-cites-consultant-who-teams-up-with-ngos-to-bash-israel/

Amnesty-USA’s Newest Anti-Israel HiresAmnesty International and its various country branches systematically hire researchers and campaigners with histories of anti-Israel activism. These employees write analyses on Israel that are both in…https://www.ngo-monitor.org/amnesty-usas-newest-anti-israel-hires/

Some examples of "civilian casualties" that were actual Hamas, Fatah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists.

Ezz El-Din Mohamed Helles (عز الدين محمد حلس) - member Al Qassam Brigades

Muhammad Yahya Abu Al-Atta (محمد يحيى أبو العطا) - field commander al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Muhammad Saeed Abu Al-Atta (محمد سعيد ابوالعطا) - field commander Al Qassam Brigades.

Osama Ashraf Abu Rida (اسامه اشرف ابو ريده) - Activist Fatah youth. Fatah Movement Eastern Region referred to him as their martyr hero.

Zaher Atya Anbar (زاهر عطية عنبر) - member of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades - Nidal Al-Amoudi Brigade, a Gaza based armed group.

Yasser Al-Masry Abu Musab (ياسر المصري ابو مصعب) - Commander of the Deir al-Balah Brigade in Saraya al-Quds. Recently he died of injuries sustained in May 2021. Airwars' assessment of the IDF strike on Al-Masry - "civilian harm"

I'd like to add that when someone is misidentified as a civilian, it not only affects the raw statistics of the victims. If the IDF has a legitimate target that was of a high enough value, then under the laws of armed conflict they are allowed to attack it even if there are civilians that will be harmed. This is not a carte blanche to attack anyone without regard to civilians, but if the target is someone or something that is important enough, some collateral damage is acceptable according to the principle of proportionality.

This means that any civilians who were effectively used as human shields by the terrorists cannot be treated as if they were killed far away from any target. Unlike how NGOs like Amnesty and HRW frame it, their deaths are legal. Only if there was no military gain from the attack does it violate the laws of war. When NGOs pretend that every civilian is a victim of Israel, they have it backwards: they died because Hamas and other terrorists hid behind them.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The wild snipers of Jenin and the likely location of Shireen Abu Akleh's killer

I have previously mentioned that I think I identified the most likely location of the gunman who killed Shireen Abu Akleh.

Based on the audio forensics of the gunshots/bullet shockwave, this building is the exact distance away that the gun that killed her was - between 178-187 meters away from the microphone that recorded the shots depending on where one would be standing on the roof of this house.

Here is the path a bullet would take from that house to Abu Akleh.

I have found a fantastic high resolution aerial video of Jenin, uploaded to YouTube last month, which shows even more clearly how perfect that location would be both for Jenin snipers to be positioned and their line of sight to Shireen.

Not only is there perfect line of sight to where Abu Akleh was standing, but from the vantage point of the snipers there would be an unimpeded view down the street to where the IDF convoy was likely (and, indeed, did) pass by.

The entire area at full resolution can be seen if you click on this thumbnail.

As previously reported, multiple witnesses said that they saw snipers on buildings at the time of Abu Akleh's death. We do not have any direct video of those gunmen at that time, but it is obvious that the terrorists would use rooftops as the most strategic firing locations in Jenin. Proof can be seen from this video of multiple gunmen two days later, on May 13, shooting northward from a rooftop/terrace from which you can see the sports field and also the house I just mentioned.

Even the famous video from Jenin on May 11, where the terrorists tell each other that an IDF soldier was down at the time Abu Akleh was killed, shows a puff of smoke from a rooftop apparently from gunfire (0:15)

The shebab clearly act like they own the refugee camp. They will not ask permission to take over a rooftop firing position.

The analyses from CNN, AP and Bellingcat did not give readers any idea of the scope of gunman activity in Jenin that day, only showing two groups of militants when in fact they were all over the area. The "experts" did not identify, directly or indirectly, a single case of gunmen on rooftops.

Yet those rooftop gunmen are the only people with a clear line of sight to Shireen.

Nor do these "investigators" mention how amateur these gunmen are, often firing without aiming. That is obvious from the video above, and even clearer in this video uploaded on the day Shireen was killed.

This is all circumstantial evidence, of course, but so is the "evidence" given by the media that blame the IDF.

The circumstantial and hard evidence that indicates that Jenin gunmen killed Shireen Abu Akleh, and that the IDF didn't, is far more compelling:

- We know the killer was between 177 and 195 meters away from the microphone near Shireen. (audio forensics)

- We know that the IDF was more than 200 meters away. (video)

- The only recorded people with guns in that zone were Jenin militants to the southeast of Shireen. (video)

- There were gunmen on rooftops that were pointed out by residents/journalists minutes before her death. (video of pointing)

- Jenin gunmen shoot from roofs of multiple buildings, and it doesn't appear that they ask permission. (video above)

- There is at least one building with a roof that is ideal for gunmen that is also the exact distance from Abu Akleh that the audio forensics indicates, and one of the Jenin residents/journalists pointed in that direction. (photos, maps above)

- The best line of sight to Shireen would have been from an elevated position such as a rooftop. (logic)

- The two main witnesses to her death said explicitly that she was killed by "snipers" in buildings "across" from her, when there was no IDF presence in that area. (video, interview)

- Jenin gunmen fire without looking carefully at their targets. They are not professionals in any sense. (video above)

- The bullet pattern on the tree next to Abu Akleh, the one hitting Shireen and the one hitting Ali Samoudi, is far more indicative of wild Jenin gunmen-style firing than shooting by professional soldiers. (CNN's idiot "expert" who is known to hate Israel claimed the exact opposite!)

- The IDF has no incentive, and plenty of disincentive, to kill reporters, and reporters specifically show themselves to the IDF every day to ensure their own safety - including on May 11.

All evidence points to the real killers - the Palestinian terrorist youth who have hijacked the Jenin camp.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The US State Department's 2021 Report on International Religious Freedom was recently released. It has quite a large section on Israel, much of it about religious coercion by Orthodox in Israel towards other denominations.

But one theme on that and the West Bank/Gaza page was seemingly against religious freedom.

When it discusses Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, the tone of the report is decidedly negative, which is quite strange for a report that is supposed to support freedom and rights for religion:

According to local media, some Jewish groups performed religious acts such as prayers and prostration on the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount despite the ban on non-Islamic prayer. The Israeli government reiterated that overt non-Islamic prayer was not allowed on the grounds of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount. NGOs, media, and Jewish Temple Mount advocacy groups continued to report that in practice, police generally allowed discreet non-Muslim prayer on the site. The news website Al-Monitor reported in October that although the country’s two chief rabbis repeatedly said Jews were not to set foot in the Temple Mount out of concern they could inadvertently step into an area which, in Jewish law, it was forbidden to enter unless one was ritually pure. In recent years, some Jews had entered the mosque and tried to offer prayers.

No Jews entered the mosque. The State Department is adopting the absurd recent Palestinian claim that the entire Temple Mount is a mosque. (If it was, then no Muslim would be allowed to wear shoes on the entire complex!)

In August, the New York Times reported that Rabbi Yehuda Glick, whom the newspaper described as a “right-wing former lawmaker,” led “efforts to change the status quo for years” and said that Glick livestreamed his prayers from the site. The report said that although the government officially allowed non-Muslims to visit the site each morning on the condition that they did not pray there, “In reality, dozens of Jews now openly pray every day [at the site]… and their Israeli police escorts no longer attempt stop them.” The New York Times reported that Glick and activists ultimately sought to build a third Jewish Temple on the site of the Dome of the Rock, an idea that Azzam Khatib, the deputy chairman of the Waqf council, said “will lead to a civil war.”

The same article said that Glick only wanted to build the Third Temple in dialogue with Muslims, not above their objections, and it would be open to all religions. Both of those facts should be relevant but the report seems to want to paint the Jews as extremists who want to forcibly take over the Mount.

According to the Religion News Service, one group known as the Temple Institute hoped to build a third temple where one of the al-Aqsa complex’s three mosques now stands and to reinstate ritual animal sacrifices. The group’s website reported that it was working with an architect on a design. In September, al-Monitor reported, “In the past, doing so [praying out loud or making movements of genuflection], could lead to the person being detained and ejected from the site, as Jews are not allowed to pray there. But more recently, a warning is reportedly more common. Last July Israel’s Channel 12 filmed Jews praying silently at the site while police officers watched.” Police continued to screen non-Muslims for religious articles. Police allowed Jewish male visitors who were visibly wearing a kippah and tzitzit (fringes), and those who wished to enter the site barefoot (in accordance with interpretations of halacha, Jewish religious law) to enter with a police escort.

On October 5, the Jerusalem Magistrate Court ruled that “silent Jewish prayer” on the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount did not violate existing police rules on the site. The ruling was in response to a case involving a 15-day administrative restraining order against a man whom police had removed from the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount on September 29 on grounds that he disturbed public order by engaging in Jewish prayer. The judge ruled that silent prayer “does not in itself violate police instructions” that prohibit “external and overt” non-Muslim prayer on the site. Al-Monitor said the Magistrate’s Court’s ruling was “unprecedented” and “seem[ed] to question the status quo that has prevailed over the site.” The Jerusalem District Court overturned the lower court’s ruling on October 8, ruling that the INP had acted “within reason,” and “the fact that there was someone who observed [him] pray is evidence that his prayer was overt.” Minister of Public Security Bar-Lev supported the appeal, saying “a change in the status quo will endanger public security and could cause a flare-up.” The Waqf said the lower court’s ruling was “a flagrant violation” of the complex’s sanctity and a “clear provocation” for Muslims.

This report is framing the Jews who want true religious freedom as fanatics who are somehow limiting Muslim religious freedom. The supposed "status quo," which was by definition antisemitic in that it forbade Jews from prayer, is held up as an ideal.

(h/t Irene)

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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06/08 Links Pt2: In-depth Audit Says World Vision Totally Incompetent, Funded Hamas; Hostile environments toward Jewish students; Middle East Professors Boycott Israel — Where’s the Moral Outrage?

From Ian:

NGO Monitor: In-depth Audit Says World Vision Totally Incompetent, Funded Hamas

On November 3, 2021, the Israeli Registrar of Non-Profits petitioned the Jerusalem District Court to dissolve an Israeli non-profit organization belonging to the international aid agency, World Vision (וורלד ויזון in Hebrew). As justification for the request and following a multi-year investigation, the Registrar alleges that the local non-profit did not implement humanitarian projects as it claimed to and conducted financial transactions for purposes other than its stated goals – including providing funds to Hamas. Moreover, the Registrar charges that the non-profit’s executive and oversight frameworks were non-functional and ineffective.

These evidence-based findings are particularly significant in light of the ongoing trial against Mohammad El-Halabi, manager of World Vision’s Gaza operations, over his alleged diversion of $50 million in aid materials to Hamas. Responding to his arrest and trial, World Vision officials in Australia, who funded this operation, have repeatedly insisted that local finances were managed competently, and that the allegations could not possibly be true. Although they claimed that a full audit was conducted after Halabi’s arrest, in fact, no report has been made public.

In contrast, the Registrar’s conclusions, based on an independent audit conducted by the Schmidt, Ben-Tsvi, and Perlstein accounting firm, [on file with NGO Monitor] confirm concerns revealed by previous NGO Monitor analyses of World Vision financial reports. (For more on the financial inconsistencies and irregularities discovered by NGO Monitor, see “World Vision’s Operations in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza” and “World Vision Finances in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza”.)

The following primer summarizes the Registrar’s assertions – as well as World Vision’s responses – on a series of issues
- Terror funding
- Financial and organizational mismanagement
- Funds not utilized to achieve the non-profits goal
- Unclear financial transactions
- Salary payments
- Cash withdrawals
- Multiplicity of bank accounts

Jonathan Tobin: What does the BDS movement really stand for?

As a Pew Research Institute study recently revealed, the overwhelming majority of Americans have little or no idea what the debate about the BDS movement is about. With 84% of those polled confessing ignorance about the topic, that left only 11% to express an opinion about it one way or the other. Those who understand the anti-Semitic nature of BDS activism may take some cold comfort from the fact that its supporters haven't made all that much headway in the public square. But the fact that only 6% opposed it, while a mere 5% backed it, is a frightening result when one considers the consequences of the way many on the left-wing of the Democratic Party are buying into exactly the sort of intersectional ideology that is the foundation of BDS lies about Israel.

That's the context for the news that a Boston BDS group is promoting a "Mapping Project" that is supposed to illustrate "how local support for the colonization of Palestine is structurally tied to policing, evictions and privatization locally, and to US imperialist projects worldwide."

It's not clear whether such extremism has much support even in the most woke sectors of one of the country's most liberal communities. But what makes it truly sinister is the way that it creates maps of synagogues and other Jewish institutions, including schools in the state of Massachusetts, and attempts to hold them out as bastions of "harms" such as "racism," "policing, "US imperialism" and "ethnic cleansing."

It should be understood clearly what Boston BDS and its leftist allies are doing here. They are placing a target on American Jews – declaring that anything and everything associated with Jewish life in this country is fair game for false accusations of crimes against minorities, delegitimization, and, at the very least, hounding out of the public square and, perhaps, ultimately violence. This is tangible evidence of the way elements of the ideological left have crossed over to the kind of open anti-Semitism that many Jews are only prepared to acknowledge when it comes from the far-right.

Some on the Jewish left have urged Americans to understand BDS as a cry of protest against what they mischaracterize as oppressive Israeli policies and a way to pressure Israel to withdraw from the West Bank. They say that progressives who either support BDS – like the members of the left-wing congressional "Squad" – should not be treated as anti-Semites or beyond the pale of normal politics. But it should be noted that the kind of rhetoric from the BDS movement – in which talk of "colonization of Palestine" refers to Tel Aviv, not remote settlements in the territories – actually reflects exactly the sort of toxic stuff that is routinely spouted by both the Hamas terrorists who rule the Gaza Strip and their supposedly moderate rivals of the Palestinian Authority that autonomously governs the Arab population of the West Bank in their official media.

Ruthie Blum: Shavuot, the Six-Day War and the Sorry ‘Status Quo’ on the Temple Mount

Israeli and Diaspora Jews visiting the Temple Mount in Jerusalem on Sunday to celebrate Shavuot—the holiday marking the revelation of the Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai—were greeted by angry Palestinians. The latter, mostly young men, have taken to rioting regularly on the compound where the Al-Aqsa mosque is located.

It would be easy to attribute the behavior of the Muslim troublemakers to the occasion when Jews make a festive pilgrimage to the site of the two temples. It would be equally simple to attach significance to the Gregorian date, which coincided with the 55th anniversary of the 1967 Six-Day War.

Though the two are indelibly linked, the tendency of mostly young male Palestinians to use any excuse to desecrate the site—the holiest in Judaism and third in Islam after Mecca and Medina—has become commonplace. And it’s no wonder.

Incited by the Palestinian Authority, with a little help from the king of Jordan, these guys get to cloak their violent energy in a veil of religious and political purity. The neat trick on the part of the leaders in Ramallah, Gaza and Amman to encourage terrorist activity is to perpetuate the bald-faced lie that Israel plans to storm the compound and destroy the mosque.

The mendacity doesn’t end there. The PA leadership also pretends that the presence of Jews in the ancient land of Israel is a myth, and that the story of the First and Second Temples is a fabrication.

That the Bible and archaeology say otherwise is of no consequence to PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, who determines what is published in the press that his people read and the curriculum in their schools. A central theme in the material that he disseminates is that the State of Israel is an illegitimate entity whose destiny is elimination.

While his rivals in the terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad openly aim for this goal, Abbas puts on a charade for international consumption. The act involves talking peace while fomenting hostility against his alleged partner on the road to a “two-state solution.”

Here’s the rub. He insists that the stumbling block to this dream of Palestinian independence is Israel’s grip on the territories that it occupied in 1967. The fact that anyone in Israel or abroad still buys this hackneyed baloney is mysterious, to say the least.