Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, November 28, 2016

EoZTV: "Open-air prison camp" hosting high-tech expo this week

The latest EoZTV:

This week marks the annual ExpoTech show, showing Palestinian high-tech ventures, being held simultaneously in Ramallah and Gaza City.

Here are some photos from last year's show in Gaza:

Look at all the starving children!

I found two of the exhibitors interesting, the Amassi Group and Jawal Sons:

Both of them prominently display the Hewlett-Packard logo in their booths.

HP, of course, is one of the targets of the BDS boycott. Apparently, in Gaza, being an HP partner is not considered a liability.

And this week happens to be the week that HP is specifically targeted for boycott by BDS!

There is nothing wrong with such an expo - in fact, I wish Gaza high tech companies all the success they can have, especially in finding the type of work that can be done remotely for clients worldwide, like coding mobile applications. It is a shortcoming of the PA and Gaza governments that such ventures have not been a key part of their economic policy. Instead, they skew their economies towards the hundreds of NGOs that bring tons of money that do not create any actual products.

Those very NGOs are the ones who are most against showing these types of images, because they can't raise money for Gaza when people see Gazan schoolkids attending a high-tech expo instead of playing in rubble that purposefully hasn't been cleared two years after a war.

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Ali Abunimah is pining for a pineless Palestine (Petra Marquardt-Bigman)

In a recent post on the “Pine libel,” EoZ focused on a commentary by the notorious antisemite Gilad Atzmon who described the forest fires raging in many parts of Israel last week as nature’s revenge against evil Zionist efforts “to make Palestine look like Europe” by planting supposedly non-native pine trees. Well, as EoZ showed, pines are native to the region – which kind of ruins Atzmon’s triumphant conclusion: “Like the pine tree, Zionism, Israel and the Israeli are foreign to the region.”

But Atzmon’s ignorant screed wasn’t even original: the claim that Zionists planted pines “to make Palestine look like Europe” is rather popular among anti-Israel activists, and can e.g. also be found in a lengthy Electronic Intifada (EI) article from 2010, where Max Blumenthal gloated about the devastating Carmel fire: “the nonindigenous trees of the JNF were poorly suited to the environment in Palestine” and “go up like tinder in the dry heat.” Inevitably, Blumenthal later recycled the EI article for “Goliath,” his book-length demonization of Israel.

With the fires raging in Israel last week, Ali Abunimah promptly promoted Blumenthal’s 2010 article again, emphasizing the claim that the “Zionist regime planted forests to erase traces of Palestinians.”

In another tweet, Abunimah opined that “Israel’s use of ‘forest planting’ of ill-suitied[sic!] tree species to conquer Palestinian land is root cause of the fires.” He linked to a JTA article which he apparently hadn’t really read: the article didn’t say that Israel had planted “ill-suited tree species,” but on the contrary quoted the JNF’s director of forest management as praising “these pioneering pines” for doing “a wonderful job for the first generation.” The article also explicitly mentioned the “Aleppo pine, also known as the Jerusalem pine” – so Abunimah, who after all claims to be Palestinian, could have noticed that the pine wasn’t named for a European location…

But Abunimah insisted that “Fires in ‘Israel’ are caused by planting of non-native pines by European settlers and disastrous Zionist land mismanagement;” and he even mocked Jack Mendel, a journalist for the British Jewish News: “‘journalist’ @mendelpol thinks I made up the facts about Zionist colonizer filling Palestine with highly flammable non native pines.”

Well, if Abunimah had bothered to read the JTA article he linked to so helpfully, he would know that his “non-native pines” are named after the now so unfortunate Syrian town of Aleppo, and he could actually also have learned something about “land mismanagement”:

“For centuries the area was covered in a patchwork of squat, dense low-lying forest, especially in the native woodland areas of the Carmel, Galilee and the Judean hills. But by the time the early Zionist settlers arrived, much of the forestland had been depleted, used over the years as firewood, building material, grazing land for goats and sheep, and even train tracks in the Ottoman era.”

Let me also add that I don’t think anyone would ever accuse Abunimah of making up facts – his record is clear: he’s always making up lies about the “Zionist colonizer.” As it happens, this time the lies he made up exposed his lack of knowledge about the historic Palestine that he claims as his homeland.

But since Abunimah is the son of a high-ranking Jordanian diplomat and presumably sometimes goes to visit his family in Jordan, I have a suggestion: next time he visits, he could plan a family excursion to the Dibeen Forest Reserve, a “pristine pine-oak habitat” which is said to feature “Aleppo pines” that “are some of the oldest and largest in the Kingdom.” According to one travel guide, it’s rather small but nevertheless “a nice destination for peace and quiet” – how about it, Ali Abunimah? To get into the mood, you could check out the relevant page at “Magic Jordan,” which notes that Dibeen forest includes the “indigenous Aleppo pine” and “is representative of the wilderness that once covered a large part of north-western Jordan.”

Admittedly, the site’s photo gallery offers some views of the reserve that look just like those places in Israel that monstrously evil Zionists transformed from barren hills to “little Switzerlands” – and it’s a depressing thought that some people might wish for it all to burn down just because it doesn’t fit their ignorant ideals of a pristinely barren Palestine.

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11/28 Links Pt1: Abbas: A Record of Rejectionism; Israel’s Terror Fires; Politicizing Israeli Wildfires

From Ian:

Khaled Abu Toameh: Palestinians: The 'Wall of Shame'

"The equation facing the Palestinian factions is clear: Hand over the terrorists and there will be no wall. The Palestinians have proven that they are unable to take security matters into their own hands in this camp." — Lebanese security official.
These anti-Palestinian practices are regularly ignored by the international community, including mainstream media and human rights organizations, whose obsession with Israel blinds them to Arab injustice. A story without an anti-Israel angle is not a story, as far as they are concerned
Typically, Western journalists and human rights activists do not even bother to report or document cases of Arab mistreatment of Arabs. This abandonment of professional standards is why apartheid laws targeting Palestinians in several Arab countries are still unknown to the international community.
The Lebanese authorities also say that they decided to build the wall after discovering several tunnels in the vicinity of Ain al-Hilweh, used to smuggle weapons and terrorists into and out of the camp.
The new wall will not solve the real problem -- namely the failure to absorb the refugees and grant them citizenship. Palestinians living in Arab countries are denied citizenship (with the exception of Jordan) and a host of basic rights.

JPost Editorial: Fires and Hezbollah

In the past few days the nation has faced one of the worst brushfires in its history. Nearly a thousand hectares of forests and rural areas have been destroyed in Zichron Ya’acov, Neveh Shalom, Modi’in, Neveh Ilan and Nataf. Tens of thousands were evacuated from their homes in the Haifa area alone.
Israel’s under-staffed firefighting forces have been battling day and night to stop the flames from spreading.
Firefighters and equipment from abroad have provided important backup. In times of natural disaster – even when many of the fires seem to have been the result of arson – nations come together. Israelis received help from Palestinians and Turks as though the political differences that normally taint relations did not exist.
Thankfully, as of this writing there have not been any casualties. This is a testament to the success of firefighters and other rapid response teams.
However, the fires provide an opportunity to reflect on the dangers of a very different scenario.

325 Foreign Nationals Came to Israel to Fight Fires

The media may have hailed the arrival of the Supertanker from the United States, but the heads of Israel's Fire & Rescue Authority said Sunday there is no need for the massive firefighting aircraft at present.
The Supertanker landed in Israel on Friday night, but was only put to use on Saturday in the Jerusalem Mountains area, over Nataf.

It took to the air again on Sunday afternoon, but found itself circling idly over the sea near Zikhron Ya'akov and the Haifa Bay area after all of the major fires had already been put out.
While acting Fire Commissioner Shimon Ben-Ner said there was no need for the Supertanker, the aircraft is operated directly by the Israel Police and it is the police that will eventually decide whether or not to use it.
On Saturday, police demanded to use the firefighting aircraft in the forests that border Highway 1, while the Fire & Rescue Authority determined there was no operational need for it. Eventually, despite disagreements between the two emergency services, the Supertanker was used to help extinguish areas that were still on fire near Nataf.
The massive firefighting aircraft, which reached Israel after firefighters had already gained control over the fires in Haifa, was one of 21 planes that took to the sky to help put out the blazes that plagued Israel last week.
In total, some 325 foreign nationals participated in firefighting efforts.

According to Al Akhbar, a newspaper close to Hezbollah, the military leaders of Hezbollah met with Russian military leaders in Lebanon for the first time. From Now Lebanon:

Hezbollah military officials have held their first ever direct meeting with their Russian counterparts in a landmark sitdown that tackled the Aleppo front, according to a daily close to the powerful Lebanese militant organization.

“Less than a week ago, Aleppo witnessed the first direct meeting between Hezbollah field commanders and Russian army officers,” Al-Akhbar reported Thursday.

The Lebanese daily said that the gathering “came at the request of the Russians” who were impressed by Hezbollah’s military performance during the “Battle of Martyr Abu Omar Saraqeb,” a failed rebel offensive launched in late October against regime positions in western Aleppo.

This report, if true, combined with the news of the Hezbollah military parade recently on Syrian soil, gives the impression that Hezbollah has transformed from a terror group to a conventional military force.

A Lebanese writer, Hussain Abdul-Hussain, thinks this is a good thing, at least for Lebanon:

The significance of a militia turning into an army is substantial. If Hezbollah sticks to such a format, it means that the party will lose its ability to fight asymmetric wars, and will be forced to engage in regular army-to-army battles. This means that Hezbollah will lose its ability to blend in with non-combatants, or launch its offensive from civilian neighborhoods. After all, tanks and artillery do not really fit in small streets and cannot be hidden behind bushes.

If Hezbollah’s militia sticks to its new setup as a conventional army, then the party will have to calculate its wars more carefully. Hezbollah already avoids battle with Israel after Tel Aviv announced its Dahiyeh (Suburb) Doctrine and razed large areas of Beirut’s southern suburbs, as well as Shiite villages in the south in the 2006 War. Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of neighborhoods containing Hezbollah and its supporters exacted a heavy toll on the party, and have forced it to avoid further wars with the Israelis, despite all the bravado from Hezbollah’s leaders.

With an army instead of a militia, Hezbollah will have to fight its future wars with Israel out in the open, which should be good news for Shiite non-combatants and the Lebanese at large, who lost a considerable chunk of their infrastructure, such as bridges, that Israel destroyed to hinder the movement of the party’s invisible fighters in 2006.

Now that Hezbollah’s fighters are visible, Israel will have less reason to hit Lebanon, and will instead engage Hezbollah in head-to-head combat, which Hezbollah says they are not shying from this time, arguing that in any future war with Israel, the party’s fighters will not sit back and defend, but might pressure the Israeli north, attempting to win and hold territory.

This is way too rosy a viewpoint. Just because Hezbollah is acting like a regular army in Lebanon doesn't mean it has the desire to act that way against Israel. After all, the tactic of using human shields is worthless against the rebel forces in Syria.

Entire communities in southern Lebanon have been turned into hiding places for thousands of rockets among homes and schools. Hezbollah is not going to move them into easily identified silos in the countryside any time soon.

In short, Hezbollah's perceived advantage against Israel is entirely based on its dismissal of the rules of war, which incidentally it also ignores in Syria. It is beyond wishful thinking to believe that the terror group will behave any more morally with tanks than without them.

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Here is an amazing indictment of the New York Times' culture of deciding what is news and what isn't, from former employee Michael Cieply:

For starters, it’s important to accept that the New York Times has always — or at least for many decades — been a far more editor-driven, and self-conscious, publication than many of those with which it competes. Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”

It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.

Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: “My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?”

The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.”

Having lived at one time or another in small-town Pennsylvania, some lower-rung Detroit suburbs, San Francisco, Oakland, Tulsa and, now, Santa Monica, I could only think, well, “Wow.” This is a very large country. I couldn’t even find a copy of the Times on a stop in college town Durham, N.C. To believe the national agenda was being set in a conference room in a headquarters on Manhattan’s Times Square required a very special mind-set indeed.

Inside the Times building, then and now, a great deal of the conversation is about the Times. In any institution, shop-talk is inevitable. But the navel-gazing seemed more intense at the Times, where too many journalists spent too much time decoding the paper’s ways, and too little figuring out the world at large.

We've seen this happen many times. With Israel, the narrative drives the stories, not the facts. And in the case of the Middle East, the NYT narrative is indeed what drives too many politicians and pundits in other media outlets to slavishly follow the Gray Lady's lead.

The narrative is of a far-right Likud government which has no interest in negotiations and of a moderate and pragmatic Palestinian leadership that is frustrated by Israeli intransigence. The narrative is where Jews who want to live on their ancestral lands are considered the biggest obstacle to peace while the terror attacks that occur every day have nothing to do with incitement by the Palestinian leaders in the media and in their school curricula, which is almost never reported.

And this is just the news desk. The editorial page is much worse, and consistently shows an anti-Israel slant, with anti-Israel op-eds outnumbering pro-Israel op-eds by a ratio of 5-1 most months.

True, middle America couldn't care less about the NYT narrative, as the last election showed. But the power brokers in Washington and New York indeed believe that the Times "sets the agenda" and they happily play their part in following it. It blew up in their faces on Election Day but there is little indication that the soul-searching at the NYT is going to be extended to its foreign news coverage, where the editors still create the narrative and the reporters still follow.

(h/t Yaacov Lozowick)

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The English edition of Jordan's Ammon News reported on Sunday:

The Civil Defence Department said that it had participated in fighting brush fires that swept large areas in Israel and the occupied West Bank after the Jordanian government received an official request for help this morning.

It said in a statement that the contribution is part of the humanitarian regional effort in which a number of countries, including Egypt, Turkey and the Palestinian National Authority, took part alongside other world nations. It added that the fires fall within the category of natural disasters.

That last sentence was clearly meant to head off criticism of the being "normalization" with Israel, saying that this goes beyond politics.

On the Ammon News Facebook page in Arabic, the comments from Jordanians to this story were quite mixed.

The first reaction was against the aid, saying that Israel and Jews were burning Palestinian identity in the land and that the fires were divine retribution.

The second pointed out that Israelis reacted strongly against Jordan for sponsoring the UNESCO resolution on the Temple Mount, yet Jordan needs to be smart. When Israel asks for aid, it suffers embarrassment, and by Jordan giving help it puts Jordan at a moral advantage in any future negotiations.

One person justified the aid as good training for Jordanian firefighters.

This woman was puzzled:

Another said, simply, "Allah burn all Israelis and Jews in the world."

Yet another asked "What is the problem?" and the following commenter said that Jordan acted 100% properly.

This was all a big contrast to the reactions to the Jordanian gas deal with Israel, where practically everyone who wrote about it publicly was against the deal even though the government supported it.

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EoZTV: Fire roundup

In the latest EoZTV, Mrs. Elder and I discuss the latest we know about the fires in Israel this past week and how many of them seem to be from arson.

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Mohammed Dahlan, former Fatah leader in Gaza who was exiled by Mahmoud Abbas and now lives in the UAE, gave an interview to Le Monde where he criticizes Abbas ahead of the seventh Fatah conference scheduled to start this week.

He said, "Abu Mazen [Abbas] wants to get rid of all dissenting voices. He wants to destroy Fatah as he destroyed the institutions of the Palestinian Authority. For me, Fatah is more important than the Authority. It is a cause to which one supports voluntarily, where one is ready to become a martyr or prisoner, and not to receive a salary....In Arafat's time, the Fatah congress served to ease internal tensions. We came out with solutions. Abu Mazen does the opposite. He terrorizes all opponents. Nobody dares contradict him in the central committee. How can rebuild Fatah in such conditions?"

Dahlan continues, "My conflict with [Abbas] is political, not personal. The Palestinian Authority today is like Africa: Zero democracy! Imagine that people are recruited to track users who criticize Abbas on Facebook! All the money is taken over by his sons. For us Palestinians this is something inconceivable."

Dahlan, posing in front of a portrait of Yasir Arafat, doesn't think to mention that Arafat was like someone who stole the crown jewels of England while Abbas swipes a pack of gum from the corner store.

Dahlan also makes clear that he feels that Abbas is too pro-Israel. "The first responsibility of a leader is to take into account the feelings of his people. But Abu Mazen is more concerned about Israel than his people. There is a difference between peace ( salam ) and surrender ( istislam ). What we are witnessing today is an occupation without charge, a luxury surrender."

When the interviewer asked the exiled strongman what he thinks of negotiations with Israel, given that he participated in them, he says "I'm not against negotiations, they are essential. But what good are negotiations that last twenty-five years? The talks with the Israelis started in 1991 in Madrid and there was Oslo in 1993. Until 2000, this process worked, year after year. At least Israel ceded land. We had a little hope. But after the death of Yasser Arafat , everything collapsed. "

That is an interesting bit of revisionist history, as Dahlan simply doesn't mention the intifada that started right after the Camp David negotiations collapsed because of Arafat's intransigence.

Dahlan is no less a liar than Abbas, but even though he has been in Abu Dhabi for several years, there are still a number of Palestinian media outlets that are unabashedly pro-Dahlan today.

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11/27 Links: Anatomy of a firestorm: 180 injured, hundreds of homes in ruins, 33,000 dunams of parkland burned

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Fighting fire

As the smoldering embers of Israel’s massive, nationwide firestorm died out and thousands of evacuated families began returning home over the weekend, the country could take heart in the blessed fact that no one had been killed by the conflagration. The well-coordinated firefighting effort of both local and foreign crews, combined with orderly evacuations, was a reassuring sign that Israel, this time, had indeed learned from past mistakes.
The significance of this achievement can be measured by the failure of such systems not too long ago, in the Mount Carmel forest fire of December 2010, when 44 lives were lost in an abortive attempt by Prisons Service cadets to rescue inmates trapped in the Damun Prison. That fire raged for five days before being brought under control, also with the help of a fleet of firefighting planes assembled from foreign countries. One of the lessons of that disaster was that Israel did not have enough such aircraft – but even though we acquired more, this time they were not enough.
Another achievement since that time was Israel’s refining of its world famous disaster rescue capability, which was recognized recently by the World Health Organization as the No. 1 emergency medical operation in the world.
Israelis are renowned for the speed and effectiveness of our rescue efforts after earthquakes and other natural disasters anywhere in the world.
Unfortunately, we have been forced to learn such life-saving practices by confronting the suffering brought upon us by decades of terrorism. It is too early to determine whether the current disaster was the fault of nature – parched brush land waiting for promised winter rains being set on fire by perhaps a careless camper, then blown into a massive blaze by fierce winds – or was the fault, at least partially, of nationalistically motivated terrorists.

Anatomy of a firestorm: 180 injured, hundreds of homes in ruins, 33,000 dunams of parkland burned

The wildfires that have raged across Israel over five days have left at least 133 people injured, rendered hundreds of homes unlivable and consumed tens of thousands of dunams of protected parks and nature reserves.
The Magen David Adom rescue service reported Saturday that among the 133 people treated by the organization for fire-related injuries, one was seriously hurt and three others were moderately injured. The overall tally is likely higher, officials said, as some people – one estimate suggested as many as 50 – may have gone to hospitals on their own for injuries such as smoke inhalation.
Haifa was the worst-hit city from the blazes, with 527 homes completely destroyed, according to a Ynet News tally. Other reports have indicated a lower number, more than 400 homes, that were rendered unlivable in the northern city. Some 1,700 Haifa residents are not able to return home by late Saturday, Channel 2 said, because their homes are unlivable.
It appeared late Saturday that the worst of the fires — some of which are believed to have been started deliberately — were over. But dry weather and strong winds have played a major part in the spread of the flames, and rain was not forecast for several days.
The battle to push back the flames marked among the most difficult operations ever undertaken by Israel’s firefighters. Some 2,000 firefighters battled the fires since Tuesday, many of them working in grueling 24-hour shifts alongside 450 soldiers from the Home Front Command and 69 Cypriot firefighters.

Fresh blazes break out in north, West Bank, Jerusalem

Firefighters on Sunday continued to battle at least four fresh wildfires nationwide as the nearly week-long spate of blazes persisted.
A fire tore through a park in the northern town of Karmiel on Sunday afternoon. Firefighters were at the scene.
Another fire was reported Sunday in the area of the West Bank settlement of Halamish, where 18 homes were consumed by flames on Friday night.
A small brush fire broke out in the French Hill neighborhood of Jerusalem and another was extinguished next to the national police headquarters in the capital.
Earlier, police said that a fire raging in a field outside Moshav Rishpon, north of Tel Aviv, was attended to by firefighters. A police spokeswomen said that fire was “under control” and would soon be doused.
She said police and firefighters had yet to establish the cause of the fire.

A recent opinion piece for the Washington Post by Rabbi Jill Jacobs, author of Where Justice Dwells: A Hands-On Guide to Doing Social Justice in Your Jewish Community, and Daniel Sokatch of the allegedly pro-Israel New Israel Fund, is entitled, "Why Jews have a special obligation to resist Trump."

Jacobs and Sokatch claim that:

Donald Trump’s winning platform includes pledges to ban Muslims from entering our country, to forcibly deport millions of people, to remove legal protections from vulnerable minorities and to reinstate the use of torture. The president-elect has threatened massive attacks on human rights and constitutional freedoms. Just last week, he appointed to the highest advisory position in the White House Stephen K. Bannon, a former publisher of Breitbart News, which the Southern Poverty Law Center calls the “media arm” of the white supremacist alt-right movement.

The idea behind the article is that because Trump is essentially a Nazi, Jews have a particular obligation to join with other "threatened" minorities in political opposition.

I always find it interesting, though, when people tell Jews that we have "special" obligations.

It reminds me a bit of when they say that Jewish people have failed to learn the lessons of the Holocaust - a "special" obligation if ever there was one - with the implication that Jews are not nearly as ethical as we need to be in order to prove our moral worthiness. It is one of those obligations that we can never seem to master in the eyes of others, including many other Jews.

The false and exaggerated claims toward Trump, however, are not intended to create insight, bu to spread fear of the individual and loathing toward Americans who voted for him. The absolute terms within which they are presented also leave no wriggle-room for actual discussion of the issues raised by the authors.

Is it really Trump's policy to simply "ban Muslims from entering our country"? No, of course it is not. This is a lie. But making such a claim, with its implication of implacable racism, serves to shut down the much needed national discussion around immigration policy.

In this way, Jacobs and Sokatch frame the argument in much the manner that the hard-left always frames virtually any argument; one is either in agreement with them or exiled as a deplorable monster. In either case, there is no discussion to be had, nor disagreement allowed.

Jacobs and Sokatch would have us believe that Jews are extra-special and that as the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors - not to mention the inheritors of Talmudic scholarship and ethics - we have a distinct moral obligation not incumbent upon others. We are, thus, never allowed to be just normal Israelis or Brits or Aussies or Americans. Instead we are told by our ethical superiors, sometimes Jewish and sometimes not, that we have special obligations and if we fail to carry out those obligations then we are something other than kosher.

Now, at the dawn of the Days of Trump, some on the battered left are doubling-down on the kind of relentless moral narcissism that helped bring us Trump in the first place. Throughout the Obama administration, and the reign of the baby-boomers since Bill Clinton, the progressive-left relentlessly pounded issues of racism, sexism, and homophobia into the atomic protoplasm of every living creature from Bridgeport, Connecticut to San Francisco, California. We even had poor Hank Hill, of King of the Hill fame, prior to Obama, wondering if his dog was racist.

Nonetheless, Jacobs and Sokatch warn American Jews that, "Trying to conduct business as usual with the Trump administration could prevent us from joining with other threatened groups to protect our neighbors."

Jacobs and Sokatch represent one small Jewish example of the mass hysteria whipped like a meringue into the general population over the last six months. The ceaseless and ever-increasing rhetorical churning of alleged racism, sexism, and homophobia that set the rhythm for the Obama administration turned into a crescendo as we got closer and closer to November 8. By November 9, instead of peaking and then sliding into its natural level, Trump Hatred became a discordant howling that continues until this very moment.

Jacobs and Sokatch, in service to this cult of victimhood, combine the spreading of raw fear with a cloying form of religious outreach that seeks to exploit the famous Jewish sense of guilt.

They write:

Even if Jews were not personally threatened as Jews, it would still be imperative for us to call upon all of the communal strength we have and all of the institutions we have fought to create to oppose threats to other people. This is an obligation that comes from our tradition. In the Torah, one of God’s first commands to the Jewish people after our liberation from slavery is to protect those who are most vulnerable, as we, too, know the experience of being strangers.

I have no reason to doubt Jacobs and Sokatch's sincerity or intentions.

Like many millions of Americans they have succumbed to the constant media yammerings of how regular working-class white Americans are creatures ruled by hatred and fear of the Other. Despite the fact that the United States is actually one of the very least racist or sexist countries on the entire planet many in the Democratic Party insist that we are among the worst.

In the final months heading into the election the progressive-left, the Democratic Party, and the traditional media conjured an apparition from hell which they called the "alt-right." In truth, it was there all along, but with little national or cultural significance until Hillary and the anti-Trumpers saw some use for them as a club with which to smack around the Deplorable Cheetoh.

The alt-right, a creature that virtually no one had even heard of prior to this election, seems to have taken over the country almost entirely out of the blue. The manner in which it went from being on the utmost political fringe to front-and-center within a matter of weeks is an amazing testament to the power of group-think, public relations psychology, and the political manipulation of normal human fears for electoral purposes. If the progressive-left didn't have any actual Klansmen or Nazis to shadow-box with then, by God, they'd conjure it up themselves, which is precisely what they did.

As it happens, however, Steve Bannon and Breitbart News, whatever else we may make of them, are friendly toward Jews, friendly toward Gay people, and Breitbart senior editor - and "dangerous faggot" - Milo Yiannopoulos, happens to be both.

I am sorry, but pro-Jewish and pro-Gay does not for white supremacism make.

That the so-called "alt-right" contains some racists is undoubtedly the case, as does - in no particular order - the Democratic Party, the Obama administration, the progressive-left, the EU, the UN, Black Lives Matter, western feminist leadership, and any media outlet that tells Jewish people where we may, or may not, be allowed to live within our own homeland.

Do Jacobs and Sokatch believe that we have a "special" obligation to resist them, too?

Somehow, I doubt it.

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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Iraqi writer: The Simpsons' Jewish/Masonic creator gives hints to future events in the show

Noor Karim al Tai is an Iraqi opinion writer who has a BA in English language and literature.

She has discovered that the Simpsons TV show has predicted 9/11, the Trump presidency, the Ebola virus and much more.

Essentially, she saw a YouTube video that showed 10 of these "predictions" (there are other places on the Internet that show various lists.)

For example, here is "proof" that the Simpsons' writers knew the date of the 9/11 attacks in 1997:

See how the World Trade Center forms the 11?

Noor did her "research" and discovered that not only did the Jews withdraw bomb-sniffing dogs from the World Trade Center on September 6, 2001, but they also didn't come to work on 9/11.

Noor knows that Simpsons creator Matt Groening is a Jew, which would explain why he knows about events like 9/11 in advance. But he is also a Freemason, as her research showed, almost certainly from this other YouTube video whuch proves it from the secret Masonic gesture that Groening uses as he adjusts his glasses in this photo:

The writer suggests that Jews and Masons simply love putting these hints in plain sight.

In fact, she is so convinced that the Simpsons are the key to knowing about future events that she started watching all the episodes. She is only up to season 2, so it will tale a while.

Amazing how these evil masterminds of world domination can't keep a damn secret.

I emailed her asking if she really believes this stuff, but unfortunately I didn't receive a reply.

It is one thing when crackpot conspiracy theorists use the Internet to spread their bizarre views. But forget "fake news" - many Arab writers consistently seek out the craziest conspiracy theories from any source to blame their own problems on the unseen puppetmasters rather than taking responsibility for their own situation.

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

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Palestinians mourn Castro. Amnesty calls him "progressive but flawed."

Mahmoud Abbas ordered public displays of mourning today to mark the death of Fidel Castro, ordering flags to be flown at half-mast.

From the English website of the PFLP terror group:

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine extends its condolences to the Cuban people, the Palestinian people and the revolutionary movements of the world upon the loss of the former prime minister and president of Cuba and the historic international revolutionary leader, Comrade Fidel Castro Ruz, on Friday, November 25, 2016.
Castro’s internationalist revolutionary commitment to fighting imperialism and capitalism – manifest in the revolutionary victory against US imperialism and its puppet Batista regime in the 1959 Cuban revolution – conistently stood with the oppressed peoples of the world in their confrontation of imperialism, Zionism, racism and capitalism. Throughout his life, Fidel was a supporter and an example of revolutionary struggle in Latin America, in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador and throughout the continent. From Angola to South Africa, Palestine to Mozambique, Bolivia to El Salvador, Castro’s legacy of international revolutionary solidarity and struggle continues to serve as an example in practice that transcends borders toward revolution, democracy and socialism.

The DFLP terror group made these posters:

Fatah also mourned with this vintage (badly edited) PLO poster of Castro and Arafat, saying that they will have a memorial service today for him in a Ramallah hotel:

So-called human rights group Amnesty International was conflicted over the death of someone who was responsible for the murder of thousands of his people. But the worst they could say about him was that he did not allow freedom of expression:

"There are few more polarising political figures than Fidel Castro, a progressive but deeply flawed leader."

"Access to public services such as health and education for Cubans were substantially improved by the Cuban revolution and for this, his leadership must be applauded. However, despite these achievements in areas of social policy, Fidel Castro’s 49-year reign was characterised by a ruthless suppression of freedom of expression.

“The state of freedom of expression in Cuba, where activists continue to face arrest and harassment for speaking out against the government, is Fidel Castro’s darkest legacy."

It adds:

After his accession to power following the 1959 revolution in Cuba, Castro oversaw dramatic improvements in access to human rights such as health and housing. This was accompanied by an unprecedented drive to improve literacy rates across the country.

At the very end, it grudgingly mentions that Castro executed "hundreds" of people in trials. "Amid accusations that many of the trials were unfair, Castro responded: 'Revolutionary justice is not based on legal precepts, but on moral conviction... we are not executing innocent people or political opponents. We are executing murderers and they deserve it.'"

Amnesty is way more upset over Cuba's restrictions on Internet usage than on Castro's legacy of blood.

Here is what Amnesty doesn't bother to mention, from the WSJ in 2005:

The Cuba Archive project (www.cubaarchive.org) has already begun the heavy lifting by attempting to document the loss of life attributable to revolutionary zealotry. The project, based in Chatham, N.J., covers the period from May 1952 -- when the constitutional government fell to Gen. Fulgencio Batista -- to the present. It has so far verified the names of 9,240 victims of the Castro regime and the circumstances of their deaths. Archive researchers meticulously insist on confirming stories of official murder from two independent sources.

Cuba Archive President Maria Werlau says the total number of victims could be higher by a factor of 10. Project Vice President Armando Lago, a Harvard-trained economist, has spent years studying the cost of the revolution and he estimates that almost 78,000 innocents may have died trying to flee the dictatorship. Another 5,300 are known to have lost their lives fighting communism in the Escambray Mountains (mostly peasant farmers and their children) and at the Bay of Pigs. An estimated 14,000 Cubans were killed in Fidel's revolutionary adventures abroad, most notably his dispatch of 50,000 soldiers to Angola in the 1980s to help the Soviet-backed regime fight off the Unita insurgency.

The death of Castro exposes the double standard of the Left, the so-called "human rights community" as well as the so-called Palestinian "moderates" and their friends who are so enamored with this symbol of the fight against imperialism and capitalism that they are willing to overlook mass murder.

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Russian TV dance competitions: "Holocaust on Ice" and "Dancing with the Nazis"

This unbelievably tasteless Holocaust-themed ice dancing routine was shown on a Russian TV competition this weekend:

According to the tweeter, the women is the wife of a spokesman for Russia's president Putin.

In the thread that this was posted in, someone responded with another tasteless routine from a different Russian dance show last April with a Nazi officer dancing with the woman he was about to kill.

There are no words.

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11/26 Links: Dozens arrested for arson; Terrorists and their supporters mourn loss of ‘comrade’ Castro

From Ian:

Israeli Firefighter Recounts Battling Fierce Flames in Haifa: It Was Like a Movie

“It was like a movie,” an Israeli firefighter who battled the blazes that swept through the northern city of Haifa on Thursday told The Algemeiner as he recounted his experiences a day later during a rare moment of rest.
“Every moment we were called to help in another place,” Yair Cohen — of the Carmiel fire station in the Galilee region — said. “There were so many apartments on fire and crazy traffic as people were escaping with their kids and whatever else they could take.”
Cohen is one of the hundreds of firefighters who have worked day and night over the past week in an effort to contain the dozens of wildfires that have popped up across northern and central Israel.
“We’re doing our best to save forests, homes, property and pets,” he said. “It’s really sad to think about all the people who’ve lost all their possessions. Yesterday, we saw one woman who was too scared to go see what had happened to her house. It’s heart-wrenching.”
On Thursday, Cohen was dispatched to Haifa’s Romema neighborhood, the scene of some of the worst fires that broke out in Israel’s third-largest city.
“We were at one home where the roof began to collapse and we were trying to put the fire out from both the outside and the inside,” he said. “It’s been a tough and tiring week. It’s nuts, I can’t comprehend it.”

US supertanker among 29 aircraft battling blazes across Israel

The newly arrived US supertanker, considered the largest firefighting aircraft in the world, was among 29 planes operating across Israel to battle blazes on Saturday, the fifth day of a wave of massive nationwide fires, according to authorities.
The supertanker launched its first operation in the Jerusalem hills Saturday where fires have been raging since Tuesday and where residents were evacuated on Friday. On Saturday afternoon, residents of the Jerusalem hills village of Nataf were allowed to return to assess the damage. At least a dozen homes were consumed by the fire in the area, as was the famed Nataf restaurant Rama’s Kitchen.
The main highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Route 1, was shut briefly on Saturday afternoon between the Sha’ar Hagai and Horesh interchanges, as the massive plane went into action.
Earlier, six firefighting teams battled a fresh blaze in the Druze village of Daliyat al-Karmel, near the northern Israeli city of Haifa, bringing the fire under control.

Firefighters batlle Nataf fire

Hundreds have been injured, dozens of homes burned, tens of thousands were evacuated in the raging fires across Israel in the past few days. Watch the brave firefighters as they battle against the rising flames in the village of Nataf, located on the Judean hills in central Israel.

Anti-Israel and Arabic sites are publishing antisemite Gilad Atzmon's comment on the fires in Israel, where he blames the fires on, who else, Jews. Specifically, he blames the pine trees that the JNF planted:

Israel’s rural landscape is saturated with pine trees. These trees are new to the region. The pine trees were introduced to the Palestinians landscape in the early 1930s by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in an attempt to ‘reclaim the land’ . By 1935, JNF had planted 1.7 million trees over a total area of 1,750 acres. Over fifty years, the JNF planted over 260 million trees largely on confiscated Palestinian land. It did it all in a desperate attempt to hide the ruins of the ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages and their history.

Along the years the JNF performed a crude attempt to eliminate Palestinian civilisation and past but it also tried to make Palestine look like Europe. The Palestinian natural forest was eradicated. Similarly the olive trees were uprooted. The pine trees took their place. On the southern part of mount Carmel the Israelis named an area as ‘Little Switzerland’. By now, there is no much left of “Little Switzerland.”

...In spite of its nuclear ability, its criminal army, the occupation, the Mossad and its lobbies all over the world, Israel seems to be vulnerable. It is devastatingly alienated from the land it claims to own and care for. Like the pine tree, Zionism, Israel and the Israeli are foreign to the region.

The pine tree that the JNF has been planting for so many years is the Aleppo pine, pinus halepensis (known in Israel as the Jerusalem pine.) It is found throughout the Mediterranean, from Morocco to Syria. The JNF did not choose the tree to make Israel look like Europe, a lie repeated by Mondoweiss. Native Aleppo pine forests exist in the Carmel and Galilee regions.

Moreover, pine trees were observed in Palestine by travelers in the 19th century. From The Popular Cyclopædia of Biblical Literature, 1856:

The tall cypress only exists in Palestine, as cultivated by man in gardens, and in cemeteries, and other open places of towns. But as the spontaneous growth of the country, we find upon the heights and swelling hills, the walnut-tree, the strawberry-tree, the laurel-tree, &c.; while on the formerly wooded heights, various kinds of pine-trees, large and small, still maintain their ground.

As far as Mount Carmel is concerned specifically, the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1907 says it is "covered with helm-oaks and pine trees."

So in one sense, Atzmon is correct. Jews are just as native to the region as the Aleppo pine.

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