They might identify as Palestinian, but they are Israeli. They might have songs that are anti-Israel, but they pay Israeli taxes. They started their career singing in Hebrew and playing in Tel Aviv clubs. Their first anti-Israel song was written after one of their friends was killed in a shooting - even though he was killed by an Arab.
By any definition, they are an Israeli hip-hop group that sings now in Arabic.
But BDS isn't boycotting this Israeli band.
No, the woke people behind BDS only boycott "Israeli" artists when they are Jewish. If DAM would bring in a leftist anti-Israel Israeli Jew to sing with them, they would lose every gig in England because of protests.
BDS is pure Jew-hatred dressed up as "anti-Zionist."
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.
Journalist and author Matti Friedman talks to Fathom Deputy Editor Calev Ben-Dor about his acclaimed recent book, Spies of No Country which tells the little known story of the origins of Israeli intelligence by following four of Israel’s first spies through the 1948 War of Independence. He also discusses the importance of the ‘Mizrachi’ component in Israel’s identity, arguing that without grasping its centrality, neither Israelis, Westerners nor those in the Arab world can properly understand the country
CB-D: I recently interviewed Yossi Klein Halevi about his book, Letters to my Palestinian Neighbour and one of the things he emphasised was how he wanted to tell a 21st century Zionist story. You touched on this earlier, in that the story often told is overly Euro-centric – the narrative begins with the pogroms in Russia and ends with the Holocaust. Your book, which is different in many ways, has a similar idea in that if we are to tell the story of Israel today – both to Israelis and outsiders – we need to make it more accurate to include a Mizrachi component.
MF: People still tell the story of Israel as: When the Jews of the Islamic world moved to Israel they joined the story of the Ashkenazim – so the story of Israel is the story of the Jews of Europe. But having thought about this, and having lived here for 23 years, it is clear to me that what actually happened is much closer to the opposite. The remnants of the Jews of Europe come to the Middle East and inserted themselves into the story of the Jews of the Islamic world. The State of Israel is shaped by our contact with Islam and Jews who have lived here for centuries. The dominant narrative of the European Jews is wrong.
Looking ahead, telling Israel’s story in the 21st century will have a lot less to do with the Warsaw Ghetto than it will with Kurdistan and Aleppo. And Western observers find that difficult. But if we want to understand Israel, we are going to have to make an effort to move our centre of consciousness to the Middle East because that’s where we are.
New York Times opinion editor and columnist Bari Weiss will be writing a book about fighting antisemitism.
Weiss has penned a two-book deal with Crown Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House, she announced on Twitter this week. The first book, due out in September, is titled How to Fight Anti-Semitism, and was described as “an urgent wake-up call to all Americans, exposing the alarming rise of antisemitism in this country and in Europe – and explains what we can do to defeat it.”
Weiss gave a speech on the topic of fighting antisemitism on Monday evening, at the Temple Emanu-el Streicker Center in New York City.
The Jewish writer and editor, who grew up in Pittsburgh, worked at Tablet magazine and The Wall Street Journal before landing at The New York Times in 2017.
During her time there, she has written several columns on the Jewish-American experience and antisemitism in the 21st century.
Weiss called US President Donald Trump's refusal to condemn neo-Nazis in Charlottesville an "utter moral failure," and called out Rep. Ilhan Omar for "making accusations based on nothing more than prejudiced stereotypes." Last year, after the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, where Weiss held her bat mitzva, she penned a moving op-ed.
When did the BBC and the Guardian become ‘fake news’ outlets? Last week the Guardian newspaper, published a letter, written by ‘over 200 Jewish members’. It was compiled to belittle the problem of antisemitism in the Labour Party, and in support of Jeremy Corbyn. For some (as yet to be discovered) reason, BBC News even gave airtime to it. The letter is no more than a rehash of the last time the Guardian decided to give this particular rabble a voice. Nor any different from the one before that, nor the one before that. We can follow this line all the way back to 2002, when the Guardian first gave publicity to the movement that was to become BDS.
Who is inside the rabble? People like Naomi Wimborne Idrissi, who have spoken under the flag of the soon to be proscribed Hezbollah and Elleanne Green, founder of the antisemitic Palestine Live Facebook group. Without the antisemites, this group could not gather a regular ‘minyan‘, which is why they never publicly demonstrate. In other words everybody should know, including those at the BBC and the Letters Editor at the Guardian newspaper, that this fringe crowd is not a legitimate ‘Jewish’ voice.
Last September, the Independent also gave publicity to another list of Jewish organisations that upon closer inspection was also not a legitimate Jewish voice. That list even contained the vile group ‘Scottish Jews against Zionism‘. The face of ‘ScottishJAZ’ is Jolanta Hadzic:
Jolanta is just another person who spreads rabid antisemitism and Holocaust denial:
What do all these letters have in common? That it is always the same names. Some of those involved are not Jewish and some are even publicly outed hard-core antisemites. Both the Independent letter and the Guardian letter have signatories who spread Holocaust Denial. The situation is absurd. There are always people who will stand in opposition to anything. You can find Christians who oppose Christ, people who believe in Santa and Muslims who fast on Yom Kippur. There are more people who believe that they were abducted by aliens, than there are active anti-Zionist Jews in the UK. Would the BBC or Guardian run an article about alien abductees every time they aired a show featuring Brian Cox in order to ‘add balance’?
No of course not, because they would quickly be regarded as fake new junk sites. Which is exactly why we must not let them get away with how they treat Jews.
The head of the PLO's executive committee, Saeb Erekat, said that Hamas had revealed its true nature and had officially removed its mask to prove that it was an operational tool for Donald Trump's "deal of the Century" peace plan.
Erekat said to Voice of Palestine Radio that Hamas and others calling for Abbas to leave his role as president are "functional tools created to carry out the strike against the Palestinian national project and prevent the establishment of an independent state."
There have been some large rallies in Gaza recently, organized by Hamas, calling on Abbas to resign.
It used to be that Palestinians accused each other of being Zionist, or Jewish. Now they are accusing each other of supporting Trump.
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.
Yesterday, I posted some cartoons I took from The New Yorker and changed their captions to be reflective of the casual antisemitism of today's Left.
Here are some more:
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On the one hand was the military wing of Hezbollah, which has spent decades raising the levels of violence in Lebanon and bringing destruction to various neighbouring countries, including Israel and Syria, as well as further afield. But according to the UK Foreign Office this organisation was a totally separate entity from the one known as Hezbollah (political wing). Of course this division of labour within Hezbollah existed in no other realm other than the minds of a few officials in Whitehall and their counterparts across Europe. It didn’t exist in the eyes of anyone in the region. It didn’t exist when the terrorist group blew up a bus carrying tourists in Bulgaria in 2012, or attacked targets in South America. And it certainly didn’t exist in the eyes of Hezbollah itself, who must have been bemused by the division of labour which the British Foreign Office chose to impose upon people working in the same organisation.
So as I say, a victory for common sense. But also a victory for the many victims of Hezbollah’s terror across several continents. It should also be said that this is a victory for the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, who appears to be chalking up a set of wins at the moment. Though the action he announced this morning is only what any and all of his predecessors could have and should have done (these facts have all been known in Whitehall, as elsewhere, for many years) the fact that he has done it is commendable.
There is only one other thing to say. For years at radical and Islamist demonstrations in London it has been commonplace to see the flag of this terrorist organisation being waved. After such events – such as the Khomeinist ‘Al-Quds Day march’ which takes place in London each year – the police have said that they will not arrest people flying the flag of Hezbollah because the wavers might be demonstrating support for the (unbanned) political wing rather than the (already banned) military wing. From now on that distinction will quite rightly not be able to be held or claimed. So as well as pursuing any and all funds that go through the UK or UK banks for Hezbollah or any of its subsidiaries, it can be presumed from now on anybody flying the Hezbollah flag in Britain will be arrested, tried and imprisoned for supporting a terrorist group. I find myself almost looking forward to ‘Al-Quds day’ this year.
Just hours after Labour chose to impose only a one-line whip on the vote on banning Hezbollah, meaning that Labour MPs – including Corbyn – are under no obligation to vote for the ban, a Labour spokesman has gone further and directly challenged Sajid Javid’s decision to ban it:
“The Home Secretary must therefore now demonstrate that this decision was taken in an objective and impartial way, and driven by clear and new evidence, not by his leadership ambitions.”
Hezbollah is already banned in its entirety – including the political wing – by numerous states and organisations from the United States to the Arab League. Even apart from their direct terrorist and military activities, Hezbollah are prolific spreaders of Holocaust denial and egregious anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and their ultimate goal remains the destruction of Israel. Hezbollah itself has mocked the supposed distinction between its military and political wings that its apologists like to promote in the West…
Corbyn once again shows why he is completely unsuitable to be Leader of the Opposition, let alone Prime Minister. Labour MPs who talked themselves into not quitting the party yet because of his second referendum pledge must be having serious second thoughts already…
Jewish political writer and journalist Annika H. Rothstein was one of several journalists to be attacked and robbed on Venezuela’s border with Columbia.
Rothstein, a native of Sweden, was detained by paramilitary guerillas sympathetic to embattled Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Saturday.
“I was taken by the pro-Maduro guerilla in San Antonio del tachira, robbed and beaten along with my security and then they forced us to get on our stomachs while they held guns to the back of our heads. They took everything we had,” Rothstein tweeted on Saturday from a stranger’s phone.
“The guerilla was HEAVILY armed and I truly believed they would kill us all, they saw my camera and press pass and put guns on us all. After they finally let us go we only got 10 minutes down the road before gunfire broke out on both sides and we hid in a shed for over an hour,” she also tweeted. “They yelled at me that I was trying to infiltrate Venezuela and that what I was doing was a crime, they took my things and called it contraband and slapped me across the face when I didnt move bc of shock.”
Annika Rothstein @truthandfiction, an independent journalist, has been reporting for some time on the miseries – and resilience – of the Venezuelan people. Last weekend she went to the Colombian border, where government forces had assembled to keep an aid convoy from entering the country.
The story she got was one she was lucky to survive. We speak to her in relative safety, where she recounts the story of a very bad day in a dangerous country – and what the people she encountered say about the forces wrecking Venezuela.
The Palestinian Cabinet meets every week and issues bland statements about how evil Israel is and what the next official holiday will be.
But this week, the image of the meeting seems to have something new.
Let's look a little closer:
These look like 10 or 11 inch tablet PCs, purchased very recently.
Somehow, there is always money for the things they really want. Which are rarely the same as what their people want.
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.
A video put out by Islamic Jihad on its military capabilities completely dispels the myth that Gazans cannot get the raw materials they need to build and manufacture things.
The progressive terror group's documentary has a woman interviewing masked terrorists whose voices are electronically altered as she gets tours of their extensive tunnel network.
They built an entire (bomb-proof) Israeli village to attack and shoot rockets to, over and over again.
The video shows hundreds of rockets that were manufactured in Gaza. Plenty of metal to go around for the terrorists!
And here's a lightbox they use in the tunnel to show actual Israeli civilian targets.
Here's the entire video.
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Lately, I have been spending some time reading the Twitter accounts of the ultra-Left haters of Israel.
They live in a bubble, of course. When they get into discussions with a Zionist they will make sure that the entire frame of reference is their accusations against Israel, and Zionists are put on the defensive. One mistake in their argument and the haters claim victory. And if the Zionists point out that other countries do worse things, they are accused of "whataboutism."
It's time to change the script.
Forget defense - go after these guys. Point out how hypocritical and immoral their positions are. Put them on the defensive and make them explain why Palestinians have rejected multiple peace offers, or why ethnic cleansing of Jews is not only permitted but encouraged by these so-called "progressives."
I've changed a lot of my Twitter habits over the past few days to push things in that direction as well:
If you believe that the Palestinian Arabs, who never thought of themselves as a nation until the mid-20th century, have more of a claim to nationhood than Jews who have been a nation for 3000 years....
I have not usually been actively tweeting these to the haters, but that is where the focus should be - ridiculing them and forcing them to defend the indefensible.
And there is a lot that is indefensible. There are polls that show that Palestinians have supported the most heinous terror attacks, there is "pay for slay," there are the other surveys that show that Palestinians who do say they support a two state solution only look at it as a stage to destroying Israel.
Sure, Israel needs to do a better job in describing its side of the story. But defense only gets you so far. Giving the haters free reign over social media to throw mud until something sticks makes the onlookers think there is something to their arguments.
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.
Anyone who peruses the website of the U.S. Green Party or any component of the global Green movement would naturally expect to read about the noble aims of a movement devoted to such values as ecological wisdom and environment protection. Such issues touch upon the very sustainability and integrity of our existence on the planet and should logically override partisan, political issues.
In a world that is plagued by environmental and ecological catastrophes and that faces continuing and ongoing moral and humanitarian crises such as willful bombing and wholesale killing of civilians, mass murders, mass expulsions, denial of basic social, cultural and religious rights and freedoms, assaults on immigrants and others, it is curious that the U.S. Green Party has chosen to concentrate most of its efforts on hounding Israel.
This is even more astounding because Israel is one of the only states that excels in the very values treasured by the Green movement - innovative ways to protect the environment, reduce pollution, purify wastewater, desalinate seawater, reforest, and protect natural resources.
It is all the more curious that the U.S. Green Party, as a matter of policy, considers itself sufficiently credible and authoritative as to advocate dismantling the State of Israel and replacing it with "the creation of one secular, democratic state for Palestinians and Israelis on the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan."
On September 12, 2018, the U.S. Green Party wrote to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on behalf of "the oppressed and besieged people of Palestine peacefully protesting on a weekly basis for their Right of Return," accusing Israel of committing crimes against humanity, including genocide.
The U.S. Green Party ignores the grave Palestinian violations of some of the most basic and important ecological and environmental principles that should surely constitute the backbone of any genuine Green party, including deliberate pollution of the air through the massive burning of tires, the deliberate arson of agricultural produce through the use of explosive kites and balloons, and the deliberate pollution of groundwater resources.
The U.S. Court of Appeals has just reinstated the lawsuit. Reuters reports:
In a 3-0 decision on Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said a federal district judge wrongly concluded in August 2017 that all of the plaintiffs’ claims raised political questions that could not be decided in American courts….
… in Tuesday’s decision, without ruling on the merits, Circuit Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson said the only political question concerned who had sovereignty over the Israeli-occupied territories.
She said courts could rule on whether the defendants conspired to expel non-Jews or committed war crimes “without touching the sovereignty question, if it concluded that Israeli settlers are committing genocide.”
Henderson said that presented a “purely legal issue” because genocide violated the law of nations, and could support the plaintiffs’ claim under the federal Alien Tort Statute.
Of note, the courts refers to the territories in question as “disputed territory,” rather than the popular “occupied territory.” Israel has a legal claim to the “West Bank” despite the propaganda otherwise:
1 The ownership of the territory, which comprises the WestBank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, is at the heart of a decades-long dispute between the Israelis and the Palestinians. We refer to it as the “disputed territory.”
The court clearly is wrong on the issue of whether the complaint raises non-justiciable political questions. Everything in the case turns on the issue of whether Israel and Israeli settlers properly control the “disputed territory.” That is a political and foreign policy question.
Hopefully either the D.C. Circuit will hear the case en banc, or the Supreme Court will take the case.
French Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut has claimed that the populist movement in Europe has largely been a reaction to demographic changes, blaming German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Finkielkraut labelled Chancellor Merkel’s infamous “wir schaffen das!” (we can do it!) phrase during the height of the migrant crisis in 2015 as “nonsense”, saying, “You see it yourself: you can not do it. This mix of extreme moralism and economic interests was repugnant,” Die Welt reports.
“The Germans wanted to buy themselves free and finally become a morally impeccable people. But that happens at the expense of the Jews, who are the first victims, as more and more immigrants are let in,” he added.
The philosopher said he would support “responsible, if not extremely restrictive” immigration policies, explaining: “I am convinced that the integration of immigrants is becoming increasingly difficult. If immigration goes on, we will have more reverse phenomena, namely that the French adapt to the culture of Islam or convert more and more.”
Last Saturday Finkielkraut was the victim of anti-semitic abuse hurled at him by a Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vest) protestor who was later revealed to be an Islamic extremist.
Commenting on the attack, Finkielkraut said: “We are now trying to convince ourselves that this is a reawakening of old nationalist and anti-Semitic combat calls such as ‘France belongs to us’, ‘France for the French’.”
“But the one who called that, the most aggressive of them all, is a Salafist,” he said, adding: “If someone says: France belongs to us, then that means: France is destined to become Islamic soil.”
Jerome Rodriguez, one of the prominent leaders of the yellow vests movement in France, who lost his eye from a rubber bullet fired by the police, told Maariv that his movement was not antisemitic. Nevertheless, he added, "Finkielkraut is someone who goes around letting everyone know what his views were." According to Rodriguez, he did not take part in a demonstration against antisemitism because he was "busy visiting his movement's checkpoints in various parts of the country." However, he added that if he had time, he would prefer to participate in a demonstration organized by an anti-Zionist organization that supports boycotting Israel".
I had some time on Sunday so I started looking at creating new captions for New Yorker cartoons that make fun of Israel haters.
I posted some of these on Twitter, others will be posted there later this week.
Enjoy.
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.
Continuing from last
time, if you are an aggressor, then it is easy to come up with an
enact strategies and tactics involving being an aggressor against your enemies.
This observation should be obvious, yet we so often fail to
appreciate its converse: that lack of an aggressive goal limits one’s ability
to behave aggressively against others, especially those you have not branded as
enemies.
There are many explanations as to why Israel’s friends have
failed to meet the challenge of BDS and other anti-Israel propaganda campaigns
with adequate force, from weak will among Jewish institutional leaders to historical
factors that lead Jews to value accommodation with non-Jewish
majorities over sticking up for ourselves.
Such criticisms are certainly well founded, but they fail to
take into account that even if we were disposed or led to fight rather than get
along, we would still need a destructive end-point to guide strategies and
tactics that would get us to that destructive goal.
But if you were to ask even the most vocal critics of the
Jewish community’s response to BDS, I suspect you would find almost no one who
wants to see the world’s Muslim’s disbursed, Arab states dismantled, or other
outcomes likely to get large numbers of people killed, despite the fact that dismantlement,
disbursement and death are the fates hoped for and worked towards by Israel’s
enemies.
In fact, both militant and non-militant defenders of Israel
are united in the desire to see Israel left in peace, its citizens unthreatened
and unmolested, and the Jewish condition normalized. But if these are the goals we seek, how can
we be expected to attack those that attack us with matching levels of
ferociousness?
Even if such levels of attack could be initiated, possibly through
campaigns designed to tell the truth about the Arab world (including their
treatment of women, gays and minorities) as incessantly and aggressively as
they tell lies about us, BDS has taught us that such campaigns would need to go
on not for months or years, but decades.
Can a community that longs to live at peace with others be realistically
expected to put in the time, effort, resources and organization into behaving
in such a way for a century?
But it actually gets worse.
For, as readers of Divest This know, BDS does not
limit the damage it causes to Jews alone.
Whenever they import the Middle East conflict onto a college campus, or drag
an academic association, church, municipality, or even a humble food coop into
their campaigns, they do untold damage to everyone making up those communities,
creating needless strife and conflict over an issue that is only on the agenda
because the boycotters want to leverage other people’s reputation for their own
political gain.
Are we ready to do the same?
And how about all the effort the Israel haters have been putting into ginning
up hatred between races and religions in their war against the Jewish state? Are we ready to stop trying to heal rifts in
our society and instead exacerbate the pathologies driving the world to ruin,
just to see enemies harmed?
In addition to our lack of militant goals, another reason we’re
not ready to harm others to get our way is that it is wrong, and even if we (like our foes) are able to delude ourselves
into thinking a descent into evil represents virtue and courage, is this really
who we want to become?
Finally, even if we can distort our souls enough to fight
fire with fire for decades in hope of seeing someone else destroyed, our foes
already have a fifty-year head start on us, not to mention alliances with
dozens of powerful nation states controlling vast wealth and a stranglehold on
organizations like the United Nations and other major institutions. If anyone can explain a strategy for
generating another 49 Jewish states or finding other ways to dominate global organizations,
I’m all ears.
Our inability to take on Israel’s enemies by becoming more
like them should not be considered a weakness, but an opportunity since it
forces us to look for alternative strategies that meet our goals while limiting
our enemy’s ability to achieve theirs. This
is in fact what Israel and, to a large extent, its supporters have done
(however imperfectly) since Israel was founded seventy years ago.
What are the strategies that have left Israel sending
spaceships to the moon while its would-be destroyers sink ever deeper into
genocide, ignorance, poverty and weakness?
They involve manning the walls, celebrating
life over death, and making every Israeli and every friend of Israel count, while
not standing in the way of Israel’s enemies having to live with the
consequences of their own choices.
Thoughts on the strategies and tactics associated with those
four ideas next time.
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Palestinians on Sunday uprooted some 50 trees planted in the West Bank in the memory of Ori Ansbacher, who was brutally murdered in Jerusalem by a Palestinian terrorist.
The 19-year-old was attacked and murdered at the beginning of February by 29-year-old Arafat Irfayia in the woods of Ein Yael, on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
The trees were planted between the West Bank settlements of Tekoa, where Ansbacher lived, and Nokdim, during which a confrontation sparked between local Palestinians and the settlers, with the Israel Defense Forces having to intervene. Shortly thereafter, the settlers noticed the Palestinians had extracted the newly planted trees.
Gush Etzion Council head Shlomo Ne'eman said in response: "The State of Israel must define this agricultural terrorism as terror for all intents and purposes,l and put an end to this phenomenon. A firm stand must be taken, for we cannot allow human lives to be harmed."
Meanwhile, as part of an initiative led by drivers from the Egged bus company, poems Ansbacher wrote will be printed and displayed on the company's vehicles.
WATCH: Palestinians uproot & steal 50 trees that were planted by Jews in memory of terror victim, Ori Ansbacher, who was raped & murdered by a #Palestinian terrorist.
US special envoy Jared Kushner was interviewed on Monday on Sky News in Arabic, saying that "the American peace plan is very detailed and will focus on drawing the border and resolving the core issues."
"The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been used for years to incite extremism," Kushner said, "for years resistance to the nation of Israel has united the region, but now it is changing ... We see that Iran is the greatest threat in the region."
"We want to see the Palestinians united under one leadership, the Palestinians want a non-corrupt government that cares for their own interests," Kushner added.
Kushner also claimed that the US "managed to keep a large part of the plan secret," and that they "succeeded in formulating practical and just solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian issue that will be relevant for 2019."
Yonah Morrison, 20, was 15 when he first stepped off a plane in Tel Aviv.
Alone in a country he'd never visited, a strange feeling washed over him: He was home.
The Canadian teen spent the next two months in Israel as part of a program that familiarizes North American Jews with the Jewish state. While on that trip, he spent a week embedded with the Israeli military.
He says that week in fatigues left such an impression on him that three years later, in the summer of 2016, after he graduated from his Toronto high school, he decided to leave Canada and enlist in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).
"I always considered Israel to be my home," Morrison said. "I don't see why I shouldn't have to serve, just because I was born somewhere else."
Military service is mandatory for almost all Jewish Israelis as of age 18, with notable exceptions, one of which — that for ultra-Orthodox men — was at the centre of a bitter political fight that triggered an early election call last December.
But Jews from other nations are also allowed to enlist. They're known as lone soldiers.
At least 230 Canadians were serving in the military, according to 2017 statistics from the IDF, with periods of service usually lasting around two years. Hundreds more go over for shorter periods of service through similar programs to the one Morrison did in 2013.
The Leader of the Islamic Revolution—Ayatollah Khamenei— met with teenaged international chess medalist, Ariyan Gholami, who refused to play against a representative of the Zionist regime in a recent international chess competition. In this meeting held today February 24, 2019, the young medalist presented his medal to Ayatollah Khamenei.
The following is the text of a conversation that took place between the Supreme Leader and Aryan Gholami:
Imam Khamenei: Did you join the national team?
Gholami: yes, thanks to you. I am grateful.
Ayatollah Khamenei: Thanks be to God. May God protect you, and the youth like you. May God preserve you for Islam and for this country. Is this gentleman your father? And this lady is your mother? May God protect this young man for you [his parents]. I hope he will make you feel proud in this world and the hereafter, God willing.
Gholami: I would like to offer you my medal.
Ayatollah Khamenei: Wonderful! You made me really happy Mr. Gholami, dear Ariyan. I am happy to have you, and other youth like you, thanks be to God. For the country’s future, you are the best assets; keep these assets.
Gholami: Thank you very much. It is kind of you.
Ayatollah Khamenei: I accept your medal and then, I return it to you. I would like you to keep this medal.
What a natural-sounding conversation!
In reality, Gholami didn't have a choice, and was miserable at having to not play his match in early January.
In 2017, Borna Derakhshani, a 14-year old chess player, was banned by Iran Federation forever for playing against an Israeli player.
Aryan Gholami tells schack.se that he has no personal antipathy against the Israeli Ariel Erenberg.
"But if I were to play against an Israeli, it would have serious consequences for me."
An Iranian human rights group released a caricature showing how Khamenei forced Gholami to withdraw.
Gholami quickly learned that he has to pretend to be a good patriot instead of a frightened pawn.
The Swedish site also revealed that tournament organizers routinely try to set up the draws in such a way to avoid any matches between Israelis and Iranians, and the international chess federation FIDE looks the other way when this happens, to avoid controversy.
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The uber-Left social media is in an uproar because one of their own has decided that supporting Syria's murderous regime is perhaps not very progressive.
Bluestockings is a bookstore in Manhattan that describes itself as "a volunteer-powered and collectively-owned radical bookstore, fair trade cafe, and activist center in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We carry over 6,000 titles on topics such as feminism, queer and gender studies, global capitalism, climate & environment, political theory, police and prisons, race and black studies, radical education, plus many more! "
It was scheduled to screen an anti-Israel film called "Killing Gaza" and follow that with a discussion via Skype with Max Blumenthal who produced the film.
Then it realized that Blumenthal supports the murder of hundreds of thousands by Syrian president Assad, and decided that he is perhaps not as progressive as his anti-Israel credentials would indicate.
We here at Bluestockings want to be very clear on our decision to cancel the Killing Gaza screening the @nycDSA set for March 16. All the love to the DSA, it's clear that there wasn't enough due diligence on both our parts in regards to the film's director, Max Blumenthal.
As has been pointed out to us over the past few days, Max Blumenthal and many in his camp regularly make a point of retweeting and sharing pro-Assad stances.
This goes from directly mocking Syrian refugees to suggesting that Assad's war crimes are completely fabricated. Which hurts not just the Syrian people but the sizeable Palestinian population within Syria.
The objection to this screening is entirely based on Max Blumenthal and we are in talks with the DSA to screen another film that is made by and centers Palestinian voices in the ongoing conflict against the Israeli army.
Bluestockings is a community space first and we want to make sure that our inclusivity does not come at the expense of Middle Eastern communities and activists.
The response has been pretty evenly split between those who love Blumenthal's hate for Israel above all, and those on the far-Left who still have some idea of the difference between right and wrong. (Not with Israel, of course, but I suppose we should praise those who actually agree that killing hundreds of thousands of Syrians is a bad thing.)
Here's a subthread where Lebanese journalist Rania Khalek and her friends explain why they are so upset, to a little pushback - but mostly support.
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Major European leaders are meeting with Arab leaders in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
If you believe the Palestinian media, the summit looks like it could have taken place during the Oslo process, and the Palestinian issue is dominating the discussion as the issue that must be resolved before anything else.
European media indicates something quite different, with the Palestinian issue all but ignored.
Palestinian Ma'an says that the Palestinian cause is the central issue, and gives examples from speeches.
Host Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said at the opening, "Common challenges have been reflected in the hotbeds of conflict in the region, foremost of which is the Palestinian issue, which is the main Arab cause and one of the main roots of these conflicts, as it continues to deprive the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights, and even the continued destruction of Palestinian human rights, which the international community overlooks."
King Salman Bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia said that the Palestinian issue is the primary issue of the Arab states. "At the recent summit of the Arab states held in Jeddah called the Jerusalem Summit, we reiterated our firm stand towards restoring all the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, including an independent state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital in accordance with the Arab peace initiative and international legitimacy. "
He echoed the subtle threat that used to be standard in all discussions with Arabs, saying that the solution of the Palestinian issue is important for peace and stability not only in the region but also for world peace and for Europe in particular, praising the European efforts to find a lasting and just solution to this issue. The implication being that terrorists will blow stuff up unless Europe gives the Palestinians whatever they want.
Mahmoud Abbas' speech today is expected to echo the same theme, according to Saeb Erekat, that the key to regional and world peace is giving in to Palestinian demands.
Arab League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit also mentioned the Palestinians, saying that the Palestinian issue is a political issue and will not be solved by economic measures. The settlement of the Palestinian issue in a fair and sustainable manner is the most effective way to stabilize the region, he said.
Coverage of the summit by the European media tells a different story, though.
Germany's DW has an article on Day 1 of the summit, and the word "Palestinian" is missing.
The EU statement on the summit likewise ignores what had been up until recently widely considered the key issue to be resolved in the Middle East. Instead, it says:
Leaders from both sides will seek to strengthen Arab-European ties. They will also address a wide range of issues and common challenges, such as:
multilateralism trade and investment migration security the situation in the region
The summit will also provide an opportunity for leaders to discuss the latest developments in the region, such as the Middle East Peace Process and the situation in Yemen, in Libya and in Syria.
The absence of the word "Palestine" in that last paragraph says volumes.
Significantly, after the opening statements, the rest of the Day 1 activities were closed sessions, so it appears to be understood that the Arab leaders would trot out the pretense that they care about the Palestinian issue and then get to work on the real problems of the region.
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