Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

06/28 Links Pt1: Prosor: UN’s Moral Ban-Kruptcy; Glick: Abbas’s satisfied customers

From Ian:

Today, U.N Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon landed in Jerusalem for a final visit before the end of his term. During his 10-year stint as Secretary General, he has seen Palestinian “innovation” flourish. From bus suicide bombings, to rocket fire, and their latest “terrorvation” - underground terror tunnels.
While in Israel, will Mr. Ban condemn the Palestinians digging these terror tunnels and aiming rockets at Israeli children in towns like Sderot? Will he unequivocally condemn the terror attacks in the midst of our cities? Will he speak out at all against the ongoing incitement and hatred so prominently displayed in the Palestinian territories? The answer is - unlikely.
During Operation Protective Edge (2014), Mr. Ban visited the region while Israel faced hundreds of terrorist rockets raining down on its cities and towns and dozens of terror tunnels designed to murder our children. The Secretary General arrived on a private jet financed by the government of Qatar. Conveniently enough, he chose to disregard the fact that every rocket flying out of Gaza has the same Qatari wings as the plane he arrived on and that every terror tunnel dug, bears the imprint ‘courtesy of Qatar’.
All these facts make it highly unlikely that Mr. Ban will use his influence to stop incitement, end terrorism, or move us any closer to a lasting peace in the Middle East.

Through my four and a half years at the United Nations, I have gotten to know Secretary Ban personally. He is a good and decent man, but he has found himself under pressure supporting a very bad cause. The Secretary-General has proven his willingness to downplay or simply ignore tragic events as well as supporters and instigators of violence in an apparent effort to appease and get along with some of the world’s most brutal regimes, and the extreme and hateful ideologies that they represent.

During my tenure as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, I learned a great deal about the world body’s hypocrisy, its duplicity, and the triple standard it applies to world affairs - one for dictatorships, one for democracies, and a special critical standard designed only for Israel.

Michael Oren: Ban Ki-moon, we have lost faith in the UN

Dear Mr. Secretary General,
Welcome back to Israel, the island of democracy and stability in a region that has so challenged the United Nations during your tenure as its leader.
We hope that your visit will advance peace and security for us and our neighbors, yet we are forced to ask ourselves – what happened in the nine years you have led the United Nations? Has the UN fulfilled the goals of its charter? Is the UN ensuring the equal rights of Israel as a nation among nations large and small? Are the UN agencies engaged here promoting these goals?
Regrettably, we remain as alarmed today as we did when you yourself, speaking in Jerusalem in 2013, admitted that in the UN, Israel has been: “…criticized and [has] been suffering from this bias and sometimes discriminations.”
Your admission was widely reported and it gave Israelis hope that a Secretary General was finally taking corrective action to restore the UN’s lost credibility. Until your statement, the UN’s failure to engage the Israeli people led more than 70% of them to lose confidence in this august institution and its bodies.The loss of confidence comes from UN actions such as:

In the past decade the UNHRC has issued 128 condemnations against nations around the world – and more than half of these, 67, were aimed at a single country, Israel.

The UNESCO resolution on Jerusalem that denied any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount holy site, while recognizing the Muslim holy site. The Brazilian foreign ministry called this “an error which makes the text partial and unbalanced.”

The UN condemns Israel, a country with free speech, free elections and minority rights more often than all the world’s mass murdering dictatorships combined. In 2007, you said you were “disappointed” by the UNHRC singling out of Israel. Nine years later that exact same bias is still present. There has been no progress.

UN schools in Gaza have been repeatedly used by Hamas to store weapons. You yourself said this was “turning schools into potential military targets.”

PMW: PA celebrates joining international Scout Movement with map of “Palestine” erasing Israel

The Palestinian Authority continues unabated to teach its youth that Israel does not exist and that all of Israel's land is part of “Palestine.”
To celebrate that the World Organization of the Scout Movement in February this year recognized “Palestine” as a full member, PA Chairman Abbas sponsored an event for the Palestinian Scout Association at which senior PA officials handed out plaques of honor decorated with the PA map of “Palestine” which presents all of Israel as “Palestine”.
Giving out the plaques were Jibril Rajoub, Deputy Secretary of the Fatah Central Committee and Head of the Supreme Council for Sport and Youth Affairs and Laila Ghannam, District Governor of Ramallah. Palestinian Media Watch has documented that both of them as policy deny Israel’s right to exist, support terror and glorify terrorists.
The same denial of Israel’s existence was taught to young children on the PA TV program The Best Home, which is entertaining kids daily during the Ramadan. In a quiz, the TV host asked a boy who called in to the program what is “the size of Palestine”. The host and the puppet Ramzi taught that “the size of Palestine is 27,000 sq. km.” However, the combined area of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is only 6,220 sq. km. Only by adding the area of the State of Israel, excluding the Golan Heights, does the area of “Palestine” reach 27,000 sq. km:

PA TV teaches kids that “Palestine is 27,000 sq. km.” which includes all of Israel

PA TV: All of Israel is "Palestine" "from the [Mediterranean] Sea to the [Jordan] River"

Christians being slaughtered in Lebanon. Let's put it on page 5.

From the New York Times:

Eight suicide bombers launched two waves of attacks on the Christian town of Al Qaa in northeastern Lebanon on Monday, killing at least five people and raising fears that violence from the civil war in neighboring Syria will further destabilize Lebanon, its fragile neighbor.

Four attackers blew themselves up in the town before dawn, killing five people and wounding a dozen others, according to local officials. Four more attacks took place at night as residents prepared for funerals to be held on Tuesday morning, wounding 11 more people, according to the state-run National News Agency.

In tiny letters at the bottom:

A version of this article appears in print on June 28, 2016, on page A5 of the New York edition.

Muslim rioters in al-Bayda, Egypt

Yes, an elaborate suicide bomb attack involving eight bombers, aimed purely at killing Christians because they are Christians, is not front page news.

There was also this story that was under the radar this month:

In a chronically familiar scene, angry, rioting Muslims in Egypt burned down around 80 Christian homes on June 17. In the words of one of the victims, Moses Zarif,

"On Friday afternoon, after noon prayers, a large number of Muslims gathered in the front of the new house of my cousin because a rumor had spread in the village that it would be turned into a church. They were chanting slogans against us: 'By no means will there be a church here' and 'Egypt will remain Islamic!'"

According to the report, rioting Muslims beat the two cousins, attacked the building, destroyed all construction materials, and threw rocks at any Christian trying to intervene. Then they "turned their wrath on the Christian homes adjacent to the building, hurled rocks, looted houses and set fire to any Christian property in their wake."

When the local priest heard what was happening, he rushed to the scene -- only to be attacked while in his car; the Muslims climbed on it, stomped on it, and damaged it.

Currently the Christians of al-Bayda village, where the incident took place, have no church.

Maybe Jews shouldn't feel so bad that daily Arab attacks on them are under-reported. It happens to Christians too.

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From AP:

Israeli police on Tuesday banned non-Muslims from a contentious Jerusalem holy site until the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan following repeated clashes with Palestinians rioters.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said rocks and other objects were hurled toward police forces Jewish worshippers in a nearby plaza. He said a 73-year-old woman was lightly wounded and police arrested 16 suspects in the disturbances. As a result, police decided to close access to Jewish worshippers and other visitors for the remainder of the week to prevent tensions with Muslim worshippers until Ramadan is over. Throughout the week Palestinians had holed themselves up in the Al-Aqsa Mosque atop the mount and attacked officers with fireworks and other objects they had stockpiled inside.

And the rioters are rewarded with exactly what they wanted: no Jews allowed on the site.

It is amazing how often the Islamist criminals and terrorists get exactly what they want because of their violence. And it makes it that much harder to fight them the next time.

If Israel would ban all Muslims, the human rights groups would cry "collective punishment!" If that is true, then how much worse is it to punish innocent Jews (and Christians) for crimes done by Muslims?

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Even though the news media in Egypt seems to have become more explicitly antisemitic in recent months, its movies and TV series seem to have been going in the other direction.

One of last year's centerpiece Ramadan series was called "Jewish Quarter,"a historic drama where a Jewish family in the 1950s was depicted generally admirably.

This year, a series called "Mammon and Associates" had a Jewish character who was also treated like a normal human being.

According to Egyptian media, this is causing a backlash among some of the public. However, they are quick to point out, the directors are generally uniformly anti-Zionist and against any sort of "normalization" with Israel, and actors and filmmakers have been making a very sharp distinction between how they think about Jews and Zionists.

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The man who tried to give away Judaism's holiest sites for nothing says Netanyahu is "groveling" to Turkey

Last week:

Opposition leader Isaac Herzog held secret talks with PA President Mahmoud Abbas during the 2014-2015 election cycle, and agreed to cede the entire West Bank and East Jerusalem to the Palestinians as part of a future peace deal, according to report published on Thursday.

Herzog’s negotiator, former minister Efraim Sneh, and a Palestinian Authority representative who remained unnamed reached an agreement under which Palestinian refugees would receive financial compensation, the Western Wall would remain under Israeli control, and Israel would retain a “symbolic” military presence in the Jordan Valley, alongside Palestinian and Jordanian soldiers, Channel 10 reported.

“I learned that there is someone to talk with, something to talk about, and that we can arrive at understandings on everything,” Sneh said of the negotiations.

The Palestinian refugee issue was to be settled based on UN Resolution 194 and the Arab Peace Initiative, according to the report, with financial compensation for the majority of refugees and a “symbolic” return for some based on a “joint decision.”

The Temple Mount, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, Rachel's Tomb and other holy sites in Judea and Samaria would no longer be under Jewish control. Herzog would agree that descendants of 1948 refugees would get compensation.

All in return for a piece of paper.

So forgive me if Herzog's criticism of Netanyahu's deal with Turkey sounds a little less than sincere:

Opposition leader MK Isaac Herzog accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday of groveling before Turkey, by agreeing to pay out compensation to families of 10 Turkish citizens killed in confrontations with IDF soldier aboard a Gaza-destined flotilla in 2010 as part of a reconciliation deal with Ankara.
"The agreement with Turkey is a part of the pattern of the prime minister's activities. He starts with big declarations, moves on to promises, and winds up groveling," Herzog wrote in a post on his Facebook page.
"Restoring relations with Turkey is an important diplomatic goal but compensating the attackers of IDF troops is inconceivable, especially when those signing onto the deal are the Netanyahu-Lieberman-Bennett trio."

There may be legitimate criticism of the Turkey deal - I haven't delved into it but at first glance it looks like Turkey did a lot more groveling than Israel did - but Herzog's criticism sounds very hollow.

Accepting that millions of Arabs have a right to return, even if that "right" will not be exercised, is much greater a grovel than paying nine families.

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On my way to Israel - a great time to donate to EoZ!

(Post pinned on top)
I finally made it to Israel and I have a number of good interviews and events planned (if anyone has any other ideas for stories, please let me know.) Posting will be a little sporadic for the next several weeks.

But it is also time for my quarterly appeal for donations.

The blog has been increasing in popularity but it is time to take it to the next level. I have a number of plans of what to do next, but I have reached the edge of what I can do by myself. It is time expand our audience and reach out to the many people who need to know the truth about the Middle East and to find out what they are missing when they read the newspapers and watch CNN.

To put it bluntly, for the blog to be more effective, it will require money.

Already we have been spending money for email lists, for web hosting (and future web hosting,) for software and services (such as for the EoZTV broadcasts which will hopefully resume soon,) and for travel. Not to mention that I would like to do more for my columnists than I have already been doing.

I hope to be able to unveil some of these exciting new initiatives in the coming months, but they will require funding.

So please help spread the truth. Click on the Donate button now. You'll feel good about yourself.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

06/27 Links Pt2: Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Why Don't Feminists Fight for Muslim Women?; Why Zionism Is Americanism

From Ian:

Prager U Video: Why Don't Feminists Fight for Muslim Women

Are women oppressed in Muslim countries? What about in Islamic enclaves in the West? Are these places violating or fulfilling the Quran and Islamic law?
In Prager University's newest video, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an author and activist who was raised a devout Muslim, describes the human rights crisis of our time, asks why feminists in the West don't seem to care, and explains why immigration to the West from the Middle East means this issue matters more than ever.
Culture matters. It ‘s the primary source of social progress or regression. Nowhere do we see this more clearly than in the status of women. The Judeo-Christian culture -- and perhaps a more apt word is civilization -- has produced over time the law codes, language and material prosperity that have greatly elevated women's status.
But this progress is not shared everywhere.
There are still hundreds of millions of people that live in a culture -- the Islamic, for instance -- that takes female inferiority for granted. Until recently, these cultures -- the Western and the Islamic -- were, for the most part, separated. But that is changing. Dramatically so.
Large numbers of immigrant men from the Middle East, South Asia and various parts of Africa have brought a different set of values to the West, specifically Europe. More than a million arrived in 2015 alone. More are on the way.
As a result, crimes against girls and women -- groping, harassments, assaults and rape - have risen sharply. These crimes illustrate the stark difference between the Western culture of the victims and that of the perpetrators.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Why Don't Feminists Fight for Muslim Women?

Phyllis Chesler: The American Gulag

Left censorship is going from bad to worse.
For years, beginning in 2003, I have personally faced both censorship and demonization. When I began publishing pieces about anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and Islamic gender and religious apartheid at conservative sites, I was seen as having "gone over to the dark side," as having joined the legion of enemies against all that was right and good.
My former easy and frequent access to left-liberal venues was over. I learned, early on, about the soft censorship of the Left, the American version of the Soviet Gulag. One could think, write, and even publish but it would be as if one had not spoken--although one would still be constantly attacked for where one published as much as for what one published.
Since then, Left censorship has only gotten worse. (There is also censorship on the Right--but not quite as much.)
A week ago, a colleague of mine was thrilled that a mainstream newspaper had reached out to him for a piece about the violent customs of many male Muslim immigrants to Europe. He discovered, to his shock, that his piece had been edited in a way that turned his argument upside down and ended up sounding like American Attorney General Loretta Lynch's view, namely, that home-grown terrorists need "love and compassion," not profiling or detention.
I told him: One more left-liberal newspaper has just bitten the Orwellian dust. He could expose this use of his reasoned view for propaganda purposes--or wear out his welcome at this distinguished venue.

Western Universities: The Best Indoctrination Money Can Buy

The tendency of modern liberals to wring apologies out of governments for the actions of their ancestors, from the slave trade to Orientalist depictions of the peoples of Islam, is a pointless attempt to re-write history. There are, of course, no calls for Muslim governments to apologize for anything from their slave trade to the early Arab conquests.
"The ethics of establishing a campus in an authoritarian country are murky, especially when it inhibits free expression." -- Professor Stephen F. Eisenman, Northwestern University (which has a branch in Qatar)
Oxford and Cambridge, have accepted more than 233.5 million pounds sterling from Saudi and Muslim sources since 1995 -- the largest source of external funding to UK universities.
"Several agreements made between the MEC [Oxford's Middle East Centre] and donors appear to indicate that funders have sought to influence the centre's output and activities." -- Robin Simcox, A Degree of Influence, 2009, p.35
One of those "dilemmas" is the influence by teachers across the United States on impressionable students who organize Israel Apartheid Weeks. They join with assorted anti-Semitic demonstrators, condemn Israel for every sin under the sun, and use intimidation against Jewish and Zionist colleagues, but are never told any historical, legal, or political facts by their equally biased faculties.

06/27 Links Pt1: Abbas' advisor: “Every place you find an Israeli - cut off his head”; Israel, Turkey officially reconcile

From Ian:

PMW: Abbas' advisor: “Every place you find an Israeli - cut off his head”

Abbas' advisor and Fatah Central Committee member Sultan Abu Al-Einein is one of the many Fatah leaders who regularly refute the myth that Fatah is moderate and peace promoting. During an interview with a Palestinian news agency about building peaceful and normal relations with Israel, Abu Al-Einein explained that he rejects “negotiations, meetings, and normalization” activities and believes when a Palestinian meets an Israeli he should kill him:
Mahmoud Abbas' advisor, Sultan Abu Al-Einein:“Regarding the matter of normalization [with Israel] and the participation of members of the Fatah leadership and members of the PLO Executive Committee in Israeli conferences, Abu Al-Einein said: ‘If you would ask me about my personal position, I would tell you - every place you find an Israeli cut off his head. Likewise, I am against talks, negotiations, meetings, and normalization in all its forms with the Israeli occupation.’”
[Donia Al-Watan (independent Palestinian news agency), June 27, 2016]
Based on his previous statements and Facebook posts it is clear that his statement promoting murder should be taken literally. Abu Al-Einein has stated in the past that killing Jews/Israelis is not merely a Palestinian national goal but is what Allah demands of Palestinians as an Islamic necessity. After a bloody terror attack in November 2014 in which 4 rabbis were murdered during prayer in a synagogue in Jerusalem, Abbas’ advisor posted pictures of the dead rabbis and a picture of their blood on his Facebook page to celebrate the murder. He wrote that the butchering of the rabbis with axes and kitchen knives was "the heroic operation at the religious Zionist institute.”

Palestinian Leader: “Brexit is the Work of Israeli Rabbis” (satire)

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has asserted that the British vote to leave the European Union is the result of determined efforts by several rabbis in Israel to undermine Continental unity.
“Only a week ago, I ran into some Zionists as they were torching olive groves in colonized Palestine. Over several cups of sweet tea, they confessed to me that booting Britain out of Europe was the first step in a phased plan to dominate the world. As we all know, not a single British citizen actually voted to leave the EU. How else then can you explain the result of last week’s referendum?” Abbas said in an address to the European Parliament.
In response to these allegations, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump stated that “I love a good conspiracy theory as much as any paranoid. But we all know that Brexit happened when millions of buff white farmers with ‘roid rage got fed up with their wives and girlfriends leaving them for skinny Indian techies driving fancy new cars. Send ’em back on boats to Bombay: that’s how you’ll make Britain great again!”
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton noted that following the Brexit vote, “We bid a fond farewell to the United Kingdom. But, who will fill the void left by our longtime ally? I’m sure I wrote an email outlining a very sensible plan of action, but I seem to have mislaid it. Just give me a minute and I will get back to you.”

Egypt wants to know more about its people in Israel

Egyptian Minister of Immigration Nabilah Makram created quite a stir recently when she said she has no information concerning the size of the Egyptian community in Israel.
Immediately following Makram's June 13 remarks to the parliamentary Human Rights Committee, parliamentarians declared that the growth of the Egyptian community in Israel constitutes a danger to Egyptian national security — although it wasn’t clear how, exactly, since no information on the size of the community was presented.
Speaking to Al-Monitor on this issue, Makram stressed that the Egyptian community in Israel is a unique diaspora as a result of security and political reasons. She said she has been working with others in the government and labor unions to develop a database of expatriate Egyptians that will include all relevant details.
Meanwhile, Nancy Nasir, a parliament member and representative for Egyptian expatriates, told Al-Monitor, “The concerns of Egypt’s expatriates overall have been dealt with extremely ineffectively, and not only the Egyptian community in Israel.” This is despite parliament’s numerous committees relating to expatriates, including the Arab Affairs, African Affairs and Foreign Relations committees, she said. (h/t Zvi)

Iran celebrates terror ahead of Quds Day rallies

The last Friday of Ramadan - which is this week - was declared by the late Ayatollah Khomeini to be "Quds Day" where the Jewish presence in Jerusalem is decried.

The festivities are starting early.

TEHRAN (Tasnim) – The head of the Intifada (Uprising) and Quds Center at Iran’s Islamic Propagation Coordination Council said the international Quds day has a major influence on the issue of Palestine and prevents it from sliding into oblivion.

“The international Quds day has a very significant impact on the Palestinian issue,” the official noted, expressing the hope that rallies marking the event would be held with the massive participation of Muslims.

He further praised the Palestinian nation’s third Intifada, saying that the anti-Israeli campaign is very meaningful because Palestinian fighters are trying to make a path forward by themselves without expecting support from others.

I love the names of these anti-Israel organizations.

Meanwhile, a Shiite leader in Iraq is using the occasion to declare war on Israel:

Seyyed Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of Iraqi Sadr Movements, has issued a statement on Saturday for upcoming international Quds Day announcing his readiness to confront Israel and stressed had Saudi Arabia focused the coalition of 40 Islamic and Arab countries on liberation of Palestine all Muslim nations would have benefited the move.

In the statement, read in Friday prayer sermons across Iraq, Palestine is dubbed as the wound of Arab and Islam.

He stressed,” I am ready for confrontation with our Zionist enemy and as we have stood against American occupying forces, we are maintaining our resistance with the new cover of terrorism in our country.”

If you needed any more evidence that the honor/share dynamic is the motivating factor behind Muslim and Arab hate for Israel, the phrase "the wound of Arab and Islam" should put that to rest.

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Academic antisemite of the day: Frank Leon Roberts

Frank Leon Roberts teaches courses such as "Black Lives Matter" and "The Life and Times of James Baldwin & Malcolm X." at NYU and Yale.

He was glancingly mentioned in a nice Tablet article criticizing the current "intersectionality" by John Paul Pagano. Pagano makes some very astute points about antisemitism and why the current Black Lives Matter movement is opposed to acknowledging that it exists:

White privilege is real. Yet when discussing racism I often challenge people who blithely saddle Jews with privilege, because it’s clear to me that they don’t understand anti-Semitism. For one, color bias is an insignificant factor in the history of Jewish persecution, so foisting “white privilege” on Jews is parochial—it shoehorns centuries of Jewish suffering into the particular American experience of racism, which centers on anti-black bias. But more important, anti-Semitism doesn’t work like most forms of racism, which denigrate their victims as inferior. Anti-Semitism is special in that it often perceives its target—Jews—as having too much privilege and assails them for it.

Unlike racism, whose modern versions stem from 19th-century pseudo-science, anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory and at root all conspiracy theories envision a demonic elite oppressing and exploiting the common people. They may alight on eclectic topics—war, UFOs, weather and climate, food, medicine, the authorship of Shakespeare’s works, to name just a few—but if you delve deeper, you will find that every conspiracy theory is a narrative in which a secret society of the rich and powerful controls the banks, the media, schools, and governments in order to enslave and exploit the rest of humanity. Anti-Semitism is a name for the conspiracy theory which holds that “the Jews” are this evil elite. To the anti-Semite, Jews are the ultimate bearers of privilege.

It is clear from the first three words quoted above that Pagano is not a racist by any means. But he attacked an antisemitic statement by Frank Leon Roberts:

With much rhetorical pomp and little practical relevance to issues faced by African-Americans, last year a group of over 1,100 black activists, including BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors and Talib Kweli, launched Black Solidarity with Palestine, releasing a statement in which they decried Israeli “slaughter” of Palestinians, repeated lies about Israel sterilizing Ethiopians, endorsed the unmaking of Israel as a Jewish state, and demanded “unified action” against the related evils of “anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and Zionism.” The BLM activist Frank Leon Roberts, who took to Twitter after the Gaza Flotilla raid to complain about “Jewish elites” and their “monopoly” of influence, now teaches the nation’s first “Black Lives Matter” course at his alma mater, NYU.

Here are Roberts' tweets from 2010:

Its crucial for the public to realize that NBC/MSNBC,The NYTimes,US News & World Report, & the NY Daily News are all owned by Jewish elites
— Frank Leon Roberts (@FRANKLEONROBERT) June 1, 2010

Speaking out against Israel's massacre & Jewish elites' monopoly of the American free press is not anti-Semitic. #Gaza, #Flotilla, #OilSpill
— Frank Leon Roberts (@FRANKLEONROBERT) June 1, 2010

Um, yes it is, since there is no "Jewish elites monopoly of the American free press." And the Jews who happen to head major media companies are hardly monolithic in their political opinions. So, yes, accusing Jews of monopolizing the media is antisemitic, because it implies a sinister Jewish cabal that means to do nefarious things to others.

Roberts is now defending his antisemitic tweets:

@johnpaulpagano I stand by the statement. And all other statements of fact. Will not be shamed into your racist agenda.
— Frank Leon Roberts (@FRANKLEONROBERT) June 25, 2016

There was a whole thread between the two where Roberts came out quite the loser:

I don't attack intersectionality b/c I'm a racist, @FRANKLEONROBERT. I attack it b/c it leads to racism. Like this. pic.twitter.com/vnHsqW73x2
— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) June 25, 2016

The very idea of someone attacking the utterly insane concept of "intersectionality" makes one ipso facto a racist shows these academic frauds are quite aware of how poorly their theories do when faced with facts, and when the emperor is shown to have no clothes, their only defense is name calling.

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06/26 Links: Inside the PA's anti-Semitic propaganda machine; Huge blow to BDS – International UAW rules against BDS

From Ian:

Filmmaker Calls for UNRWA ‘Self-Introspection’ Over Palestinian Classroom Incitement

A newly released 10-minute online video produced by the Jerusalem-based Center for Near East Policy Research says that many of the Palestinians who have murdered Israelis during the so-called “stabbing intifada,” which began in September 2015, were educated in schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
Titled “The UNRWA road to terror: Palestinian classroom incitement,” the video claims that the current wave of violence was not spontaneous, but rather has roots deriving “from an educational curriculum taught to Palestinians beginning in first grade.”
Thirty-eight Israelis and tourists have been murdered in the nine-month-long Palestinian terror wave, most recently the shooting at Tel Aviv’s Sarona market that killed four Israelis.
UNRWA’s curriculum, the video says, is focused on “jihad,” while UNRWA teachers glorify the so-called “right of return” of Palestinian refugees through war. The video reveals a military-themed school play held in April 2016 at the UNRWA Nuseirat School in Gaza, in which students hold an Israeli hostage at gunpoint and emerge from a tunnel in order to carry out an attack against Israelis — the latter scene mirroring the Hamas terror group’s efforts to attack the Jewish state through cross-border tunnels running underground from Gaza to Israel.
The footage begins by zooming in on classrooms of Palestinian children repeating phrases chanted by their teachers such as “Palestine is an Arab land from the river to the sea” and “We want Haifa, we want Acre,” with no recognition of a state called Israel.

The UNRWA Road to Terror: Palestinian Classroom Incitement

JPost Editorial: Blood libel

What was Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas thinking as he addressed the European Parliament last week? Was it about jump-starting the long-suspended peace process? Perhaps declining an EU offer to meet with President Reuven Rivlin, coincidentally in Brussels?
Or perhaps it was about his Soviet doctoral thesis denying the Holocaust and explaining how Hitler was really a Zionist (“The Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement”). It must have been along these lines, since Abbas chose to share with the parliamentarians of Europe – the cradle of anti-Semitism – a blood libel straight from the Middle Ages.
Israeli rabbis are ordering their disciples to murder Palestinians, Abbas shamelessly asserted. “Certain rabbis in Israel have said very clearly to their government that our water should be poisoned in order to have Palestinians killed. That is provocation and we are against this sort of call for violence,” he said.
“Our hands are extended with a desire for peace,” Abbas declared, although he went on to contend that Israel has started three wars in the Gaza Strip and killed thousands of his people. Moreover, he claimed, since 1967 Israel has imprisoned more than 1 million Palestinians. Israel has “turned our country into an open-air prison,” Abbas told the EU lawmakers.
Such appalling views are not uncommon in Palestinian society. A Hamas leader in Gaza, Salah al-Bardawil, said in an interview with Hamas TV last November that Jews have “ancient biblical beliefs, which instructed them to kill children and collect their blood, in order to knead it into the bread that is eaten on Passover. Today, they are trying to say that these things never happened, and that it was a joke or a lie, but these are the facts of history. Anyone reading about their history will find this there.”

PM: Water poisoning claims prove Abbas no peace partner

Ahead of his trip to Rome for talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s recent address at the European Parliament again proved he was an unsuitable partner for pursuing peace.
Abbas last week told European lawmakers in Brussels that an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and East Jerusalem would end global terrorism, and repeated a debunked hoax story claiming that local rabbis had called for poisoning Palestinians’ water supply. Admitting the claim was “baseless,” Abbas on Saturday apologized and walked back the water poisoning allegation.
“Abbas again last week proved to the entire world that he is not interested in direct negotiations with Israel,” the prime minister said at the start of his weekly cabinet meeting.
“Worse, he also spread abhorrent lies about the State of Israel and Judaism. True, he quickly apologized, a halfhearted half-apology, but the things he said there were in keeping with what he has said about us on other occasions, including at the UN General Assembly,” Netanyahu said. “Therefore, I think that people can conclude from this who wants to advance peace and a peace process – and who does not.”

Vic Rosenthal of the Abu Yehuda blog, the Elder of Ziyon, and other venues, has a recent piece entitled simply, Ten Propositions.

I discussed the first five at Israel Thrives the other day.

These are the next five:

6 - Everyone should be able to follow their own religion or lack thereof without coercion. But the official religion of the state of Israel should be Judaism.

7 - Israel and the Jewish people have an absolute right to defend themselves.

8 - Collective guilt justifies collective punishment.

9 - Nobody has the right to try to kill Jews or Israelis, even if their means are ineffective.

10 - There should be a death penalty for murderous terrorism.

Let's take these individually.

Number Six:

Everyone should be able to follow their own religion or lack thereof without coercion. But the official religion of the state of Israel should be Judaism.

Many secular Jews have a problem with this.

I do not.

We have to keep in mind that the Jewish people are a tiny minority throughout the world and almost half of us live in Israel. The forces against the Jews of Israel are many and their defenders are few.

Were it not for the Long Arab-Muslim War against the Jews in the Middle East I would not care whether or not Israel declared Judaism as the official state religion. In fact, as a creature of the European Enlightenment and the Constitution of the United States, I generally oppose declarations of state religions.

However, given this political moment in the history of the Jewish people declaring Judaism as the official religion of the state serves to promote the idea of Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people.

And it is this idea that must finally be driven home to both Christian and Arab, alike.

Number Seven:

Israel and the Jewish people have an absolute right to defend themselves.

Yes, we do, but the rest of the world does not see it that way.

On the contrary, Jewish self-defense has been viewed as a form of aggression for millennia. Whether in Europe or the Middle East - whether in terms of Romans or Christians or Arab-Muslims - Jews have historically been denied self-defense on the grounds that we are guilty of whatever accusations are flinged at us. Thus Jewish self-defense is a means of avoiding righteous justice and should not be allowed.

This is an ancient anti-Semitic sensibility, prominent in both Europe and the Arab / Muslim world, that has evolved and attached itself to present-day political sensibilities. This is why so many westerners, largely on the Left, but not entirely, believe that Arabs have every right to try to kill Jews as a matter of "resistance" or "social justice."

However, it must be made explicitly clear to both westerners and the Arabs of Israel - in word and action - that the Israeli government, on behalf of the Jewish people, will simply no longer put up with the racist, Koranically-based violence toward ourselves or our children.

Number Eight:

Collective guilt justifies collective punishment.

It is only those of us who live in cozy and secure places, like northern California, who think otherwise.

It is very easy for people who, for example, live in the United States to oppose "collective punishment" because Americans are not in an ongoing war for survival.

The Jews of Israel are.

Whenever Hamas starts tossing Qassams and Katyushas into southern Israel, on or around the towns of S'derot and Ashkelon, the world community sleeps. However, whenever Israel stands up and says, "Enough of this!" the western-left leaps to its feet and starts screaming from the hillsides about "genocide" and "collective punishment" despite the fact that, yes, the IDF does more than any other army in human history to avoid civilian casualties.

The truth is that the Arabs of the Middle East have inflicted a long war of attrition upon the Jews and in war there is always "collective punishment." The Jews of the Middle East did not start this war and they do not want it, but if they are to survive and thrive - if they are to protect their own children - they absolutely must fight it.

And, of course, in war innocent people are hurt and killed.

There is always "collective punishment" in war.

If the Arabs would like to see such "collective punishment" end then they should very much consider relinquishing their never-ending murderous, theocratically-based hysteria concerning the Jewish people.

Number Nine:

Nobody has the right to try to kill Jews or Israelis, even if their means are ineffective.

This is an exceedingly strange statement.

Would anyone ever suggest that nobody has the right to kill, say, Rosicrucians... even if their means are ineffective?

It flat-out amazes me that Rosenthal even needs to say this... and, yet, I agree that he does.

How many comments have we heard from the anti-Israel / anti-Jewish Left in the last decade that the rocket-fire coming from Hamas is really nothing but "bottle-rockets"... and similar statements?

The western progressive-left has a tendency to downplay anti-Semitic violence against Jews because either they simply could care less or honestly believe that the Jewish people have it coming for allegedly oppressing the bunny-like, native, indigenous, olive-tending, "Palestinians."

Number Ten:

There should be a death penalty for murderous terrorism.

Jewish religious tradition opposes the death penalty.

Nonetheless, Jewish religious tradition also stresses the necessity for self-defense. Although I am not a theologian, I feel reasonably certain that such a proposition would find advocates among religious Jews, as well.

We cannot have hostile and powerful political actors, such as Barack Obama, demanding that Israel release the murderers of Jews from Israeli prisons as a "confidence building gesture" to terrorists like Mahmoud Abbas.

I am, therefore, in agreement.

Anyone who seeks to murder Jews in Israel for either Islamic religious reasons or due to Palestinian-Arab nationalism needs to be made to understand that Israel will not put up with it.

The penalties for those who seek to murder Jews within Israel must be harsh enough to seriously discourage the idea that it is perpetually Jew Killing Season among Arabs.

I just feel badly that I failed to find more points of disagreement between myself and Vic.

Maybe next time.

Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

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Abbas walks back "poisoning wells" claim. Now let's see what he DIDN'T retract.

From NYT:

A little more than a day after President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority accused rabbis in Israel of calling for their government to poison the water used by Palestinians, he retracted the allegation in a statement on Saturday, saying it had become “evident” that it was “baseless.”

Mr. Abbas made the unsubstantiated allegation during an address to the European Parliament on Thursday. The remarks echoed anti-Semitic claims that led to the mass killings of European Jews in medieval times.

The Palestine Liberation Organization had initially published the allegation on a website run by one of its offices, and it spread through some regional news media outlets.

Mr. Abbas’s retraction was sent to reporters early Saturday morning, issued by the P.L.O., of which Mr. Abbas is the chairman. It said that Mr. Abbas “rejected all claims that accuse him and the Palestinian people of offending the Jewish religion.” It added that he “also condemned all accusations of anti-Semitism.”

“After it has become evident that the alleged statements by a rabbi on poisoning Palestinian wells, which were reported by various media outlets, are baseless, President Mahmoud Abbas has affirmed that he didn’t intend to do harm to Judaism or to offend Jewish people around the world,” the statement continued.

It's very nice that Abbas has admitted this, after he felt the pressure from the news media.

But what about the other lies Abbas made in this speech alone?

-He said that Israel has arrested a million Palestinians since 1967, a clear lie that gets bigger every year.
-He said that Israeli settlers were making Palestinian lives miserable, when in fact far more settlers have been killed by Palestinians than vice versa in the past year.
-He implied that Israeli settlements were ever-expanding, when in fact they have added practically no areas in over two decades.
-He said that his people have been in the area for thousands of years, when in fact every major clan can be traced back to other areas of the Middle East.
-He called all of the areas under his control "a big prison" while he himself had no problem going to Brussels, and over 100,000 Palestinians cross the Green Line every day.
-He claimed that women were equal to men under Palestinian law when in fact the penalty for "honor killings" of women is still lighter than for murdering a man.
-He said he doesn't want a religious war when he in fact incited the knife attacks last year by saying that Al Aqsa must be protected from Jews visiting by all means.
-He claimed to want peace and to be against terror while the political party he heads praises terrorism explicitly and credits him for inspiring the terror spree. Abbas himself also praises terrorists, even today.

And these were only some of the lies Abbas said to the EU Parliament. We are not even mentioning the litany of lies he has said in the past.

This incident shows an important fact: Abbas can be shamed. Yet reporters wouldn't have asked him for comment if Israel hadn't slammed that one specific egregious lie.

The most important part of the political reporter's toolbox is to point out contradictions and lies by major world figures. Yet this is the exception that proves the rule - reporters are reluctant to ask Abbas about all of the other inconsistencies and outright lies that he has said over the years.

The refusal to ask hard questions shows the bias that journalists have. Deep down, they want to see a peace deal, and they believe that exposing Abbas' lies will make that deal more difficult. Only Israel must be pressured, in their minds. So Abbas can lie with impunity until Israel makes the lies into a story that cannot be ignored.

And that is why Abbas feels he can get away with it.

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In an article about Brexit, Max Fisher of the NYT writes:

[T]he world has spent much of the last few centuries organizing itself under the principle of national self-determination, in which people with a common identity acquire their own state. Think of Italy for the Italians in the 1870s, Algeria for the Algerians in 1962, Tajikistan for the Tajiks in 1991 and so on.

While this idea has brought liberation to much of the world, it has also contributed to countless wars, including Nazi Germany’s invasions to “unify” with the German people of Austria and Czechoslovakia, the violent breakup of Yugoslavia along ethno-linguistic lines and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

So while many examples of national self-determination are good, Jewish self-determination is in the same league as Nazi invasions of neighboring countries.

Also, when exactly did the "Israel-Palestine" conflict begin? It certainly wasn't in 1948, that was the Israel-Arab conflict. The only wars between Israel and Palestinians came after Palestinians fired thousands of rockets were fired on Israel, but this happened after Israel was already six decades old.

So Fisher is saying that if a group starts wars and terror sprees against the world's only Jewish state, those wars makes the victim state retroactively something that should never have been created in the first place.

This is hardly a one-off for Fisher, who was hired by the Times after other similarly offensive statements such as when he justified (while pretending not to) the kidnap and murder of three Jewish teens.

(h/t Noam)

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06/25 Links: The European Parliament Rewards Hate; Senator questions PA payments to convicted murderers

From Ian:

The European Parliament Rewards Hate

Hats off to the British. Aside from all the other reasons to applaud Britain’s decision to leave the European Union (i.e. democracy, national sovereignty), it has voted to secede from an enabler of Palestinian terror and hate education. And if that accusation sounds harsh, consider what transpired in the EU Parliament on the very day of the Brexit referendum.
While the British were voting, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was addressing the EU Parliament in Brussels. By any objective standard, the visit didn’t start off well: Upon arriving, Abbas immediately rejected a personal plea by the parliament’s president, Martin Schulz, to meet with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, who happened to be in Brussels at the same time. But things quickly got worse when Abbas started speaking.
Abbas’s speeches are always full of anti-Israel slander, and this one was no exception. He accused Israel of “massacring” Palestinians’ “history, heritage, identity and geopolitical entity.” He termed the Israeli “occupation” the longest in history and deemed it uniquely evil, “unlike anything that has happened to any other people anywhere in the world,” to quote one reporter’s live tweeting of the speech (I haven’t managed to find a transcript); in reality, of course, not only have there been many longer occupations, but few conflicts have ever entailed so little bloodshed. He accused Israel of being “fascist” and “racist,” of committing extrajudicial killings, and of turning “our country into an open-air prison.” All this is pretty standard, as was the conclusion, in which he paid lip service to his willingness to make peace with the monstrously evil country he just described.
But even by Abbas’s standards, this speech was exceptionally vile in two respects. First, he accused Israel of responsibility for all terrorism worldwide, ludicrously asserting that “Once the occupation ends, terrorism will disappear, there will be no more terrorism in the Middle East, or anywhere else in the world.” After all, Israel is clearly the reason why Muslims are killing fellow Muslims by bombing mosques, schools, and hospitals in Muslim countries like Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan, right?
Then, he resurrected a medieval blood libel, accusing Israel of poisoning Palestinian wells. Granted, he was speaking in Arabic, and this accusation wasn’t in his prepared English translation; but the simultaneous translator rendered it into English, and Israeli reporters had no trouble hearing it; thus one has to assume it was audible to EU parliamentarians, as well.

Abbas walks back claim rabbis sought to ‘poison’ Palestinian wells

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday backed away from his claim that rabbis had called to poison Palestinian water, saying he hadn’t intended to offend Jews, after Israel and Jewish groups said his statements were promoting blood libels and anti-Semitic tropes.
“After it has become evident that the alleged statements by a rabbi on poisoning Palestinian wells, which were reported by various media outlets, are baseless, President Mahmoud Abbas has affirmed that he didn’t intend to do harm to Judaism or to offend Jewish people around the world,” his office said in a statement.
In his speech to the Parliament of the European Union in Brussels on Thursday, Abbas claimed accusations of incitement by the Palestinians were unfair as “The Israelis are doing this as well… Certain rabbis in Israel have said very clearly to their government that our water should be poisoned in order to have Palestinians killed.”
A story reported in the Turkish press earlier in June claimed a rabbi had made such a call, though the story was quickly debunked.
His office said he “rejected all claims that accuse him and the Palestinian people of offending the Jewish religion. [He] also condemned all accusations of anti-Semitism.”
Abbas did not walk back his assertion, also contained in his EU speech, that terrorism worldwide would be eradicated if only Israel withdrew from the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Israel excoriated Abbas on Thursday as a peddler of lies, with the Prime Minister’s Office saying he “showed his true colors” and “is lying when he claims his hand is outstretched in peace.
“Israel waits for the day Abbas stops peddling lies and inciting [against Israel]. Until then, Israel will continue to defend itself against Palestinian incitement, which fuels terror,” the statement said. (h/t Yenta Press)

Some Cover, Others Cover Up, Abbas Anti-Semitism

Some news organizations did cover Abbas’s libel with appropriate focus. Reuters, for example, pointedly addressed the issue in the lede of its article, “Abbas says some Israeli rabbis called for poisoning Palestinian water”:
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas accused Israeli rabbis on Thursday of calling for the poisoning of Palestinian water, in what appeared to be an invocation of a widely debunked media report that recalled a medieval anti-Semitic libel.
Even Diaa Hadid, a New York Times correspondent whose coverage of Israel at times has been dreadful, emphasized the importance of the story with a powerful opening paragraph:
Echoing anti-Semitic claims that led to the mass killings of European Jews in medieval times, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority accused rabbis in Israel of calling on their government to poison the water used by Palestinians.
But other news organizations, including the Associated Press, ignored Abbas’s antisemitic comments even while covering Abbas’s speech.
The Wall Street Journal took it a step further. Not only did the newspaper ignore the Palestinian leader’s hateful remarks in coverage of the speech, but it even framed Abbas’s remarks as being moderate relative to a speech by Israeli president Reuven Rivlin:
The refusal of Mr. Abbas comes as an ironic finale to the two leaders’ visits to the Belgian and European capital.
In a speech to the European Parliament on Wednesday, it was the Israeli president who brought the unpopular message that there were no prospects of a final peace deal in the near future and that a recent French initiative to revive negotiations amounted to little more than “negotiations for negotiations’ sake.”