Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, December 02, 2014

Playing soccer on the Temple Mount is OK. Complaining about it, though...

According to this Facebook post, a young Jewish man visiting the Temple Mount saw some Muslims respectfully using the holiest site on Earth as a soccer stadium. He asked the police to do something about it, since Israel's Supreme Court has said that such sports are limited to very specific places.

So the police jumped to action - and escorted the whiny Jew off of the Temple Mount.

Post by ‎ארנון סגל‎.

(h/t Bob Knot)

12/02 Links Pt2: Respected journalists expose bias against Israel; Jon Stewart’s Betrayal of Israel

From Ian:

Missing Peace: Respected journalists expose media bias against Israel

Let’s move to Abeer Ayyoub, who (NYT correspondent Judy) Rudoren also praised (in November 2012, during Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense in Gaza) as her “wonderful fixer/journalist.” At that time, Ayyoub was getting reporting credit on stories written by Rudoren, even as she (like Akram) served as a consultant at the Israel-viperous Human Rights Watch.
Ayyoub no longer reports for the Times, but earlier this year she stated publicly that she has been boycotting all Israeli products for three years, which would cover her period at the Times.
In a Facebook post on July 29th, Ayyoub parroted the Hamas line. She said she was asked in an interview “why Palestinians in Gaza are not feeling angry because of Hamas using the building materials for their tunnels and not for building houses and schools.” Her response was straight-up Hamas propaganda. “My answer was: why people in Israel [sic] won’t feel angry about Israeli government spending more money on enhancing its army instead of raising the level of education and health there? More importantly, why the U.S. wouldn’t save the money it supports the Israeli army with for sheltering its [America’s] thousands of homeless there in the U.S.” It went on like this. She never really answered the question, but it was plain: Hamas diverting cement from kindergartens to terror tunnels was fine with her.
It gets worse.
In a particularly vile Facebook post on August 3rd, she attacked “so-called journalists” who “posted stuff and gave interviews that they left because they were threatened by Hamas to be kicked outta [sic] country if they don’t report what Hamas wants.” While excoriating those brave journalists, she defended Hamas. But she went beyond that. Using the term “we,” she actually implied that she was complicit in the cover-up of Hamas launching sites: (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Blacklisting of pro-Israel watchdog organization NGO Monitor by the Associated Press

Long-time readers will recall that I’ve relied on NGO Monitor’s work in the past. Indeed, one of the most consequential “scoops” I’ve had as a blogger, that Human Rights Watch Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson fundraised among rich Saudi Arabians with a pledge to use the money to counter pro-Israel forces in the West, came from NGO Monitor. My blog post on this, reprinted at the Wall Street Journal’s website, set off a controversy about HRW’s anti-Israel bias that has yet to fully recede (and assuredly won’t until someone less maniacally anti-Israel than Whitson and her boss Kenneth Roth is in charge).
More generally, Steinberg and NGO Monitor are huge players in the debate over the role NGOs play in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and has been particularly effective in revealing how many NGOs in both Israel and the territories that are hostile to Israel’s existence receive the bulk of their funding from European governments, creating significant controversy in Israel and Europe. I’ve been following NGO Monitor for years, and have yet to see the organization tell any lies or make any significant errors, which is much more than one can say for, e.g., Human Rights Watch and other anti-Israel organizations routinely relied upon by the media as objective sources. I’ve also met Steinberg and worked with his staff; they are professional, dedicated, and, based on my conversations with them, quite moderate in terms of the Israeli political spectrum.
Given all this, it’s hard to come up with an innocent explanation for the AP banning its reporters from talking to Steinberg, assuming Friedman is correct. There are many possible non-innocent explanations, and none of them reflect well on the AP and how it covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Jon Stewart’s Betrayal of Israel

As for Israel and Gaza, “Stewart”‘s position has crystallized long ago, and it is a one of studied moral equivalence. For each Palestinian atrocity (upon which “Stewart” usually glosses over anyway) he finds a reason to apportion equal blame to Israel, and since Israel is stronger and enjoys this “great American leeway,” Israel usually comes out as the guilty party.
“Stewart”‘s moral failure to condemn Hamas and defend Israel has nothing to do with his fickle Judaism and everything to do with his liberal dogma, which simply cannot stomach the fact that people in the Middle East can be guilty of anything. It is always the white man’s fault, and in this case – Israel’s. During one of his previous interviews, “Stewart” had no problem with his host Jonathan Dekel, another specimen of the same sort, denigrating Israeli democracy. Stewart never uttered a bad word about the Palestinians.
“Stewart” is correct on one thing. The Jews who “helped” the Nazis did so because, in their mortal peril, they’d abandoned their moral principles for the glimmer of hope of personal survival. “Stewart” – a pampered, self-centered, deluded king of his world – is nothing like those wretches in his attacks on the Jewish state and its defenders.
He is incomparably worse.

Firas Press reports that PA president Mahmoud Abbas has been insulting Hamas more and more lately.

He said that Hamas is merely a tool of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and takes its directions from them, implying that Hamas is not a Palestinian Arab movement at all.

Abbas also says that Khaled Meshal lied to him when he said that Hamas had nothing to do with the kidnap/murder of 3 Israeli teens last summer, when it was later revealed that Hamas in fact was behind the attack. He concluded that no one lies as much as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The head of Hamas' rival Fatah terror organization is clearly attempting to shore up his support in Egypt, where the people hate the Muslim Brotherhood and support the army's crackdown on Gaza smuggling.

At the same time, Hamas says that the PA has been arresting Hamas members in the West Bank for political purposes, and has also summoned a number of Hamas reporters for questioning.

JCPA just released a paper claiming that Hamas is considering rethinking its policies in order to remain relevant and some Hamas leaders have even called for it to change its antisemitic charter and to avoid all violence for five years, although it is doubtful that Hamas would actually follow through.

From Ma'an:

Egyptian authorities closed the Rafah crossing with the Gaza Strip on Tuesday after it was open for two days to allow Palestinians stranded in Egypt to return home, a statement said.

The Palestinian department of borders and crossings said in a statement that 554 travelers were allowed to return to Gaza throughout the two days the crossing was open.

Rafah was only open for Palestinians entering Gaza via Egypt, and not vice versa.

Egypt also opened the crossing for two days last week, when some 500 stranded Palestinians were allowed to enter.

Before last Wednesday, the terminal had been closed for more than 30 consecutive days.

So Egypt only allowed Gazans back in, but didn't allow anyone to leave.

This also means that the "aid" convoys that Egypt used to regularly allow into Gaza, like Miles of Smiles, have been barred as well.

Egypt has real security concerns in the Sinai, and they have every right to close the border with Gaza. Everyone understands this and there is little criticism.

But Israel, whose citizens are directly threatened every day by Gaza leaders, does not seem to have the same benefits s Egypt concerning its much more liberal policies about imports, exports and people movement from and to Gaza.

The double standards continue...

12/02 Links Pt1: PM: Palestinian failure to recognize Jewish links to Israel is a 'tragedy'

From Ian:

PM: Palestinian failure to recognize Jewish links to Israel is a 'tragedy'

It is a “tragedy” that many Palestinians deny any Jewish connection to the Land of Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday at the start of a meeting with visiting Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic.
This marks the first ever visit to Israel by a Serbian prime minister.
“Here, in the State of Israel, the Jewish people have achieved their self-determination in a democratic state that guarantees equal rights for all its peoples, all its citizens, regardless of race, religion or sex,” Netanyahu said, as the debate over the Jewish State Bill seemed to animate part of his welcoming comments to Vucic.
“It is indeed a tragedy that so many of our Palestinian neighbors still repudiate the basic facts of history.
They deny the more than 3,000-year-old connection between the people of Israel and the Land of Israel,” he said.
Netanyahu bewailed what he said was the Palestinian denial of Israel’s right to national self-determination, even as they demand that right for themselves.

Students Urge Gov't: Recognize Abbas's Role in Munich Massacre

Israel must formally declare Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas responsible for the 1972 Munich massacre, the Students for Israel movement appealed to the Ministry of Defense Tuesday.
From September 5-6 1972, masked terrorists stormed the apartments where Israeli athletes were staying in the Olympic Village for the 1972 Munich games. The terrorists took the athletes as hostages and demanded the release of 200 Arabs from Israeli prisons.
After several tense hours, the terrorists killed the Israeli athletes. Nonetheless, the Games continued for several hours afterward.
Over the past several years, it has been revealed on multiple occasions that Abbas was closely linked to Munich mastermind Abu Daoud.
Abbas praised Abu Daoud in 2010, saying "he was one of the leading figures of Fatah and spent his life in resistance and sincere work as well as physical sacrifice for his people's just causes."
Later, attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of the Shurat Hadin Israel Law Center, has exposed that Abbas in fact provided the financing for the Munich attack.
But the State of Israel must formally recognize Abbas's role in financing the attack, Chairman of the Students for Israel movement Eliyahu Nissim stated Tuesday.

Israel's foreign affairs budget among lowest in West

Israel's investment in its foreign affairs apparatus is significantly lower than that of other OECD countries, MK Ronen Hoffman (Yesh Atid), who chairs the Foreign Policy and Public Diplomacy Subcommittee of the Knesset's powerful Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, revealed on Monday.
According to the figures, Holland invests 4 percent of its budget in its foreign affairs deployment; Belgium invests 3.8 percent; Norway 2 percent; Turkey 0.9 percent; Greece 0.4 percent; and Israel, at the bottom of the list, invests a mere 0.38 percent of its national budget in its foreign affairs deployment abroad. On average, OECD countries invest five times more than Israel in their foreign affairs deployments.
The Foreign Ministry's total budget in Israel stands at an amount equal to only 3 percent of the country's defense budget, lower not only in comparison to Western countries but also to Iran (whose foreign affairs expenditure equals 8 percent of its defense budget) and Jordan (5 percent).
The Palestinian Authority maintains some 100 embassies and consulates worldwide, with a budget estimated at approximately 200 million shekels ($50.8 million). Israel, meanwhile, invests less than half that amount in its foreign affairs relations apparatus.

If you can't join ISIS, at least you can kill Jews

From NYT:

French intelligence officials got in touch with the parents of a shy, 15-year-old Muslim girl in this depressed town in eastern France last May to convey some shocking news: Their daughter had become a frequent visitor to websites preaching jihad.

The parents asked the French authorities to take steps to block their child from leaving the country and took possession of her passport, according to local officials. In the months that followed, the girl showed no sign that she intended to head for Syria or Iraq. She took off her veil to go to school, as French law requires, and she spent her days close to her mother.

Then in October, she disappeared. The surveillance cameras in the Mulhouse airport, 50 miles from her home, showed her moving confidently and alone as she used her older sister’s passport to fly to Istanbul and then on to Gaziantep, a Turkish city known as the gateway to Syria for jihadists.

...Another 15-year-old girl, who was intercepted by French intelligence officers as she tried to go to Syria months ago, has since told the authorities that once her recruiters realized she was unlikely to be able to leave the country anytime soon, they began pressing her to strike at home against Jews. She told them she had begun looking for weapons and targets.

...The 15-year-old who told the authorities she was pressed to attack Jews in France said she had already picked a location and figured out how to arm herself before the police arrested her, according to Dounia Bouzar, an anthropologist who founded an anti-radicalization center in Paris.

Amazingly, her 15 years of being brought up under the religion of peace didn't stop her from eagerly wanting to kill random Jews.

(h/t Ronald)

Palestinian human rights icon blasts UNRWA

From Bassam Eid in the Jerusalem Post:

We Palestinians can no longer deny our responsibility for the destiny of our people. For 26 years I have been devoting my life to the mission of defending human rights. I have seen wars and terror. I live in Jerusalem and was brought up in an United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) refugee camp in Shuafat, a refugee camp like 58 other UNRWA refugee camps created for the sole purpose of keep Palestinian Arab people in “temporary” conditions, for 65 years, under the false pretense and specious promise of the “right of return” to pre-1948 villages that do not exist.

As a proud Palestinian, I must take responsibility for what will happen to our people.

We can no longer deny our responsibility for the future of our people.

UNRWA, to continue its operation, depends on death and the visual suffering of five million Palestinians who continue to wallow in and around UNRWA facilities.

The more Palestinians suffer, the more power goes to UNRWA, which allows it to raise unchecked humanitarian funds and purchase munitions.

People ask: Why not abolish UNRWA? Well, this cannot be done.

The only agency that can abolish UNRWA is the UN General Assembly, which has never had the interests of the Palestinian people at heart. After all, the UN rakes in more than $1.2 billion a year as an “incentive” to continue our status as refugees.

People ask: Why not ask the donor nations to defund UNRWA? Do they not realize that a Western defunding of UNRWA would allow nations like Qatar to enter the vacuum, leaving the West with no leverage over UNRWA policy? The point is to influence donor nations to reform UNRWA and predicate future aid to UNRWA on reasonable conditions:

1. Audit all funds allocated to UNRWA, which operates with a $1.2b. budget.

2. Introduce UN High Commissioner for Refugees standards to UNRWA, to encourage permanent refugee settlement.

3. Cancel the UNRWA war curriculum, based on principles of jihad, martyrdom and right of return by force of arms.

4. Demand that UNRWA schools conform to the UNRWA slogan: “Peace Starts Here.”

5. Dismiss UNRWA employees affiliated with Hamas, defined by the donor nations to UNRWA as a terrorist entity.

It is therefore the responsibility of the Palestinian people to rebel against the arbitrary administration of UNRWA, which seeks to perpetuate our refugee status instead of helping our people to strive for a better future.

...In my opinion, it is essential to carry out a comprehensive investigation within the refugee camps throughout the entire Middle East, not only to ascertain the precise numbers of refugees, but also to understand what the Palestinian want for themselves, what they wish for, and what they believe they can reasonably expect.

In the eyes of the Palestinians, UNRWA acts a state with its own foreign policy.

And that foreign policy does not serve the best interests of the Palestinian refugees.

I’m saying this as a loyal Palestinian. I’m saying this because I am concerned about my people’s future.

These are all points that I have been making for years. But UNRWA will have a harder time ignoring Bassam Eid, who is founder and director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group.

This article will be part of a special presentation to the British Parliament sponsored by the London-based Henry Jackson Society and the Jerusalem-based Center For Near East Policy Research.

(h/t EBoZ)

From Al Jazeera:

The United Nations' food agency has announced that it is suspending its food programme serving more than 1.7 million Syrian refugees because it has run out of money.

The World Food Programme (WFP) said on Monday that it "immediately needs" at least $64m in December alone to support the displaced Syrians now living in neighbouring countries such as Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey.

"A suspension of WFP food assistance will endanger the health and safety of these refugees and will potentially cause further tensions, instability and insecurity in the neighbouring host countries," said WFP Executive Director Ertharin Cousin, in an appeal to donors.

"The suspension of WFP food assistance will be disastrous for many already suffering families."

Since the war in Syria began in 2011, over three million people have fled to neighbouring countries.

Under the UN programme, the refugees use vouchers to buy food in local shops. The UN provides basics like flour, cooking oil and sugar. But it also gives vital food vouchers to pregnant and nursing mothers.

"Without WFP vouchers, many families will go hungry. For refugees already struggling to survive the harsh winter, the consequences of halting this assistance will be devastating," the UN said.

Every month, the UN feeds over four million people inside Syria, and over a million more now temporarily sheltered in other countries.

Muhannad Hadi, the UN coordinator of the food programme, told Al Jazeera the refugees would face a harsh winter without support from the world body.

"It's definitely a catastrophe," he said, speaking from the Jordanian capital Amman. "If we cannot deliver the food voucher, they simply would not be able to eat."

"We are asking the world [to help]. This is an international crisis."

There is only so much international aid to go around, and one reason why the World Food Program is running out of money is because the bloated, superfluous UNRWA keeps on manufacturing its own "crises" every couple of months to keep its own cash flow coming.

Last week, UNRWA declared an "emergency" because of flooding in Gaza that did not kill or injure a single person.

While the WFP needs some $64 million a month to stop people from starving, UNRWA is demanding $1.6 billion from the international community on top of $300 million it demanded earlier this year.

While Syrian refugees cannot eat, UNRWA goes fundraising in Japan and Azerbaijan.

Even crazier is that UNRWA also solicits money for the relatively small percentage of Syrian refugees who fall under its mandate. Rather than a single UN fundraising effort for all Syrian refugees to ensure fair distribution, UNRWA has a separate program because the UN makes a distinction between refugees who happen to have some ancestors who lived in British Mandate Palestine in 1947 and all others. The UNHRC and WFP are struggling to give Syrian refugees the basics of food and medical care while the Palestinians who fall under UNRWA's mandate receive much higher levels of aid per capita, including schooling and medicine. "Palestinian" refugees from Syria go o different camps in Jordan than the rest of the refugees because of Arab bigotry against Palestinians that gets swept under the rug.

The inefficiencies from having UNRWA doing the same work as other UN agencies, and the Arab nations insisting on discrimination against Palestinians, is wasting huge amounts of money.

Hezbollah kids' magazine glorifies war and martyrdom; AFP waters it down

AFP gives us an object lesson into how to downplay even the most despicable acts by a terror group.

It’s aimed at children, but instead of princes and princesses, fairies and magicians, the heroes of Lebanon’s “Mahdi” magazine are the “fighters who fell resisting the Israeli enemy.”

Produced by Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement for the last 11 years, Mahdi aims to teach a new generation the militant Shiite group’s ideology of “resistance” to the Jewish state.

Packed full of stories inspired by the lives of Hezbollah militants and terrorists, its cartoons represent bearded fighters and its puzzles teach children how to avoid Israeli landmines.

Critics accuse it of glorifying violence, but its publishers insist the monthly magazine is not about indoctrination or military propaganda.

“What we want to do is teach children the values of the resistance,” the magazine’s general manager Abbas Charara told AFP.

“We don’t encourage carrying of weapons, we’re just making sure they know about the exploits of the resistance,” he added.

Before the readers of this AFP article knows what the magazine includes, they are exposed to Hezbollah's denials that there is anything wrong.

You have to read all the way down to paragraph 15 before reading anything specific about the content, and even further to read what a critic actually says - and that critic is still equivocal.

And AFP does not illustrate the article with a single page image of the magazine,and its examples of what the magazine includes does not include the worst parts.

Here is the reality, from blogger Khaled Alameddine who first exposed the magazine in July. This is the version of the magazine aimed at 4-7 year olds.

A children’s rhyme about defending your land, victory and how the enemy will reap defeat;

Color the weapons inside the big bomb!

Kids love stickers...

Help the bunny cross the minefield, and then count the different kinds of mines it avoided.

The Hezbollah spokesman in the AFP article said “We don’t encourage carrying of weapons," You decide if he is telling the truth. AFP can't figure it out.

There was also a poem addressed to "my father the martyr."

Effectively, a sickening piece of propaganda aimed for kids as young as 4 is being whitewashed because AFP is more interested in being "even-handed" than in showing the truth. Part of the problem seems to be that the AFP reporter was given exclusive access to the magazine editing facilities, and it appears that he or she wants to maintain a good relationship with Hezbollah as a source in the future.

By highlighting the Hezbollah defense of the magazine before mentioning what's wrong with it, and by ignoring the worst parts of the magazine, AFP is effectively being a mouthpiece for Hezbollah indoctrination of children into religion-based terror and hate.

Latest Gaza tally shows 52% militant, 48% civilians killed of those identified

The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center has released (in Hebrew only) part 8 of its series analyzing the people killed in Gaza and (using Palestinian Arabic sources) determining whether they were terrorists or not.

The latest report covers those reported killed between July 25-29.

So far, they have examined 1,165 fatalities. 157 of them are not yet identified as civilian or terrorist. Out of the remaining 1017 names, 528 were terrorists and 480 were civilians, a 52%-48% ratio.

Another interesting statistic comes out from this. Since the center is analyzing the deaths in chronological order, the people that were killed between July 25-29 are found to be 90 terrorists vs. 42 civilians, which is over 68% terrorists. (Many of the terrorists were from bodies found from the earlier battle in Shejaiya.)

Here are a few of the dozens of photos of terrorists that the Meir Amit Center found for this batch, including some "martyr posters" that were released as late as last week, including two that they got from me!

(h/t Yenta Press, Bob Knot)

12/01 Links Pt2: Interview with the Green Prince; Terror linked charities get British millions in Gift Aid

From Ian:

NGO Monitor: Statement on Media Censorship of Criticism of NGOs

In a November 30 article published in The Atlantic (What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel), former AP journalist Matti Friedman states that, during his time at the AP Jerusalem bureau, reporters had explicit orders “to never quote [NGO Monitor] or its director… Gerald Steinberg. In my time as an AP writer moving through the local conflict, with its myriad lunatics, bigots, and killers, the only person I ever saw subjected to an interview ban was this professor.”
“Matti Friedman’s revelations regarding the efforts to censor NGO Monitor and me as its president are not entirely surprising,” said Professor Gerald Steinberg, president and founder of NGO Monitor. “Based on our experience in publishing detailed research on over 150 NGOs claiming to promote human rights and humanitarian objectives, we are aware of the intense efforts to maintain the NGO ‘halo effect’ and prevent critical debate. While the AP censorship was explicit, we have experienced similar silencing from other media platforms.”
Friedman also highlights the “ethical gray zone of ties between reporters and NGOs” in Israel, where journalists socializing in the same circles as NGO officials, seek employment with NGOs, and adapt to a journalistic culture in which NGOs “are to be quoted, not covered.”

Reflections on the UN Partition of Palestine

On November 29, Arab UN delegations called the UN move ‘undemocratic.’ Ambassador Amir Arslan of Syria, proclaimed, “My country will never recognize such a decision,” Jamali of Iraq objected that Resolution 181, “Undermines peace, justice and democracy,” and they and their Arab colleagues abruptly walked out the halls of the UN in Lake Success, New York, in protest. Almost immediately, Arab labor strikes in Palestine were called, and acts of terror were launched against Jews.
In the first month after the UN vote, 118 Jews were killed and 217 were wounded. Civilians were attacked on the streets, and convoys to cities were also attacked as were medical clinics. Violence also extended into the Arab world. In the Yemenite city of Aden, anti-Jewish riots broke out with reports of 76 Jews killed and 74 wounded.
Soon, the Arab Legion of irregular troops led by Nazi trained commandoes Hassam Salameh and Abdul Kader Husseini, nephew of the infamous Mufti, Haj Amin Al Husseini, led the Arab war effort while the surrounding Arab nations preferred to wait until the British evacuation. On February 11, a bombing on Ben Yehudah Street in central Jerusalem killed and wounded hundreds.
The Jewish State, not even officially re-born, was fighting for its existence.

i24news Exclusive Interview with the Green Prince - 25/11/2014 (h/t Yoel)

Hamas/Fatah"unity" is over before it ever started

From Ma'an:

A senior Fatah official on Sunday told Ma'an that there was never any agreement that the Palestinian unity government would last only six months, hours after a Hamas spokesman said the government's term had expired.

Faisal Abu Shahla said that the national consensus government was assigned to carry out a number of tasks, including holding elections, "within at least six months," but that it was never agreed that the government term would end if it did not complete those tasks within that time frame.

"If the Hamas movement has retracted the reconciliation agreement and the termination of rivalry, that is a different case," Abu Shahla said.

The Fatah official added that further reconciliation discussions were pending a response from Hamas regarding the attacks with explosives against Fatah leaders' property in Gaza and the cancellation of a ceremony commemorating the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Gaza City in early November.

Earlier Sunday, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said that the six-month mandate of the national consensus government had ended.

Any decision on whether the government should be disbanded or continued or be reshuffled must be made only through national dialogue and consensus, Abu Zuhri said.

If Hamas declares "unity" to be dead, that pretty much means it is dead.

On a related topic, Hamas and the PA are arguing over payment for fuel for Gaza. Hamas wants a discount and is blaming the PA for not paying fpr enough fuel at a time to ensure the Gaza power plant can run.

More proof that Amnesty's and ICRC's definition of "Gaza occupation" are lies

As I was researching my post this morning, I came across this gem from Amnesty International last summer in a Q&A document they released during the Gaza war that proves, yet again, that Israel cannot be considered to be occupying Gaza.

Tunnels that are being used for civilian purposes (including smuggling civilian goods and supplies into Gaza) are not military objectives and cannot be directly targeted. As the occupying power, Israel may take reasonable and proportionate measures of control or security. This could include preventing unregulated entry and exit of goods, and ensuring that weapons and military equipment are not entering the territory.

An occupying power has the ability to monitor and control the border of the territory being occupied, so it is reasonable to expect that power to be able to prevent unregulated entry of goods and to prevent weapons, by simply adding police to the border areas and enforcing the law.

But for Israel to do what Amnesty says it is allowed to do to prevent illegal smuggling under international law, Israel would have to invade Gaza and take over the entire border area with Egypt. It would have to methodically destroy hundreds of houses in Rafah that are hiding tunnels.

Would Amnesty approve Israel's invading Gaza in order to fulfill its obligations as "occupier"?

The definition of occupation is that the occupying power maintains "effective control." That means that it controls the police, the borders, and the government of the territory under occupation.

Effective control means that the borders can be properly policed. If they cannot be, then there is no effective control, and hence no occupation.

Amnesty (and the ICRC and HRW and UN) must jump through rhetorical hoops in order to pretend that Israel is occupying Gaza. But when you actually read how they try to square that with actual international law, you find that all of them are forced to come up with bizarre arguments that would be laughed out of court if anyone but Israel was involved.

If you want to see an even more egregious example of how the definition of occupation changes when Israel is involved, check out this document that the ICRC wrote in 2002, before Israel withdrew from Gaza, as a study guide to the laws of belligerent occupation:

Anything that the ICRC has written about Gaza being occupied by Israel after 2004 directly contradicts its own definition from 2002.

12/01 Links Pt1: Toameh: Why a Palestinian State Will Become a Source of Instability

From Ian:

Khaled Abu Toameh: Why a Palestinian State Will Become a Source of Instability

This is precisely what Egypt and the rest of the Arab countries want: to turn the Gaza Strip into an Israeli, and not Arab, problem.
There is good reason to believe that the Arabs are not going to change their attitude toward the Palestinians once a Palestinian state is established. The future Palestinian state will have to continue relying on Israeli and Western aid in order to survive.
And if Israel and the West do not come to their assistance, the Palestinians will find themselves begging at the doorsteps of Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic State. Then, the future Palestinian state will be anything but a source of stability in the Middle East.

JCPA: Internal Hamas Debate about Rethinking Policies

The results of the Gaza war have caused Hamas serious distress, something its leadership did not foresee before launching the war with Israel. The movement now appears to be in a process of stocktaking and reassessment in light of its situation, including the difficulties in rehabilitating the Gaza Strip, the bitter rift with the Palestinian Authority, and the deterioration in relations with Egypt. Among other things, Egypt has been constraining Hamas’s ability to arm itself.
To this must be added the effects of the weakening of the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent-movement of Hamas, and of the strengthening of the Islamic State as an organization that, in the name of Islam, has been challenging Arab regimes and Western states as it acts to establish the Islamic Caliphate-the goal to which Hamas also aspires.
A recent conference at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah addressed the issue of “The Political and Strategic Status of the Gaza Strip.” Among the topics discussed were the difficulties Hamas is encountering in the domestic, national, and regional spheres and the need for a thorough rethinking of its tactics and strategy.

A Fantasy-driven Muslim World can Never Become Modern

In the last century those Renaissance and Enlightenment values finally triumphed in China, India, and China.
But not in the Muslim world, which went back on one of its periodic regressions to the fantasy past. The worst thing is that the Islamic Reaction to the past has been supported by Western politicians -- Jimmy Carter did it with the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran; Bill Clinton failed to get Bin Laden at least four different times; and now Obama, worst of all, consistently tries to make “friends” by religious maniacs in Qatar and Turkey, in the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran.
This is crazy, of course. But Obama is also the most mentally stuck person ever to occupy the presidency. He will never change.
The coming presidential election will therefore mean do or die for America and the world. We must find political leaders who are not delusional. It seems like a pretty basic idea, but twice in the last six years Americans have voted for a fantasy-driven person -- supported by a fantasy-driven media.
As the Iranian Bomb will soon teach the world, mass fantasies have a way of cracking under the pressure of facts.
It’s better not to wait for that to happen.

Chris Gunness' main argument against UNRWA school incitement gets demolished

I have spent quite a bit of time documenting that UNRWA schools have been teaching hate and antisemitism, based on their own websites. Also I have shown that UNRWA employs many viciously antisemitic and hateful employees whose opinions they happily publicize go completely against the UN chsrter and human rights standards. Even UNRWA's own photos of their schools show painting of terrorists on the walls.

When a documentary showing UNRWA schools teaching incitement against Israel was shown on TV, UNRWA's Chris Gunness responded on Fox News. First he attempted to trash the documentary and the person behind it, and he claims to have shown some inconsistencies showing that the schools in the film were not UNRWA schools. But finally, he argued that the curricula of UNRWA schools in "east Jerusalem" is exactly the same as those of other Arab schools in Jerusalem, and he sarcastically asked that if the teachers there were teaching anti-Israel and antisemitic incitement, then why is Israel allowing it?

It turns out that this is a very good question, without the sarcasm.

From Palestinian Media Watch:

Official Palestinian Authority television regularly educates children to see the destruction of Israel as a goal and PA leaders often present all of Israel as part of "Palestine," "occupied land" that will be "liberated" or "returned to" Palestinians. This worldview constitutes a basic tenet of Palestinian education and ideology, as documented by Palestinian Media Watch for years. Now, the Chairman of the Jerusalem Teachers' Association, Issa Salman, has stated that this is likewise the educational message in Arab schools in Jerusalem.

Speaking on PA TV, the teacher said:

"In our schools, we teach what our religion and conscience dictate: That Jerusalem is Arab and that Palestine - from north to south, from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea - is Islamic Palestinian Arab, and will remain so in spite of the damned occupier."
[Official PA TV, Nov. 15, 2014

UNRWA's Chris Gunness admitted that UNRWA schools in Jerusalem teach the same material that other Arab schools in Jerusalem do. Arab teachers brag that they teach that Israel must be destroyed.

So Chris Gunness must admit that UNRWA schools are teaching the exact hate that I've already proven they teach.

PA president Mahmoud Abbas has stated that he is fully behind Egypt's actions in the Sinai against "terrorists," including Egypt's shutting down the tunnels to Gaza.

Speaking to Egyptian media, Abbas said, "I cannot ask Egypt to stop the military operation in the region, and we are aware of the nature of the Egyptian national action."

Abbas stressed the need to demolish illegal tunnels between Egypt and Gaza, pointing out that he had called on the Egyptian authorities multiple times to close the tunnels. He added that the tunnels have created 1,800 millionaires in the Gaza Strip through their exploitation of the smuggling.

He claims that he had proposed that Egypt create a 30-meter water-filled trench along its border and to destroy the homes of Rafah residents who hosted tunnels, saying that that "no country in the world suffers from the problem of tunnels, only Egypt and Palestine."

Abbas pointedly didn't mention the tunnels that Hamas constructed to attack Israeli civilians in the Negev, which is a bit worse than the problem of Gazans making millions by importing cars and washing machines. He also did not say a word about tunnels being used to smuggle weapons into Gaza.

Abbas is fully behind Egypt's siege of Gaza, and he fully accepts Egypt's narrative that it is necessary for defense. Yet when Israel is directly targeted by tunnels under its border - not for smuggling but for kidnap and murder - Abbas is against any military action.

Human Rights Watch has called the tunnels a "lifeline" to Gaza's economy. Amnesty International has previously said that Israel has no right to target civilian smuggling tunnels in military operations as Egypt is today.

Luke Baker at Reuters wrote a highly biased article about Israel that nicely illustrates how journalists play games with the facts in order to push an agenda rather than report objectively.

Let's fisk it a bit:

A cartoon in Israel's left-leaning Haaretz newspaper showed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu studying a poster made by his publicity team of Mahmoud Abbas, the mild-mannered, soft-featured Palestinian president.

The poster depicted Abbas looking fierce, with menacing eyes and bloodied fangs. A disappointed-looking Netanyahu turns to his aide and asks: "Can you lengthen his fangs a tad?"

Spot the bias! Abbas is represented in the most positive way even though his speeches are every bit as fiery as any politician's.

The prime minister has lost no time in casting Abbas as the devil in recent months, accusing him of inciting violence in Jerusalem that has lead to the death of 11 Israelis, including four rabbis stabbed and shot by Palestinians in a synagogue. Around a dozen Palestinians have also been killed, including several of those who carried out the attacks.

While the head of Israel's security service says Abbas is not inciting unrest, and centrist politicians have warned Netanyahu against alienating the only partner Israel has in stalled peace negotiations, the prime minister shows no sign of letting up in his criticism of the 79-year-old Palestinian.

The reason, in large part, is politics.

Baker ignores the direct incitement that Abbas has been directing, not to mention the much more disgusting incitement in the media that is under his direct control and in the statements of leaders of his political movement.

Abbas has said that he wants Arabs to defend Al aqsa Mosque 'by all means," which would naturally include killing Jews who are perceived as wanting to visit. Officials have called for religious war against Jews on PA-run TV. PA newspapers call murderers of rabbis "martyrs." Fatah social media is filled with antisemitic articles and cartoons.

That is incitement. And it is not reported by Reuters.

As well as demonizing Abbas, he has pushed a highly contentious bill that would establish Israel as the Jewish nation state, legislation critics say puts religion ahead of democracy and marginalizes the Arab minority.

Can Reuters quote the part of the draft bill passed by the cabinet that puts religion ahead of democracy? No, because it isn't there.

...[T]he upshot is the most hardline government analysts can recall.

"This is the most right-wing government in Israeli history, much further to the right than the Menachem Begin or Ariel Sharon governments," said Menachem Klein, a professor of Israeli politics at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv.

Ah, the old trick of finding "experts" that agree with the reporter's bias. As we have shown, Netanyahu's positions are well to the left of Yitzhak Rabin's, the Nobel Prize winner who never uttered the words "two state solution."

But why look at facts when you can find an "expert" to contradict them?

Combined with the nation-state bill, which would enshrine certain rights for Jews only...

Really? Can you name one? Of course not! Baker is just assuming that what he reads in Haaretz must be true, because he likes its politics.

Most of these aren't direct lies. Reuters editors can self-righteously say that they are merely quoting what some Israelis themselves are saying. But that is sophistry, not reporting. They knew what they wanted to report before a word was written and there was no objectivity - the exact opposite of how reporters are supposed to act.

Matti Friedman has more proof of media bias against Israel

Matti Friedman, former AP reporter who blew the whistle on how Middle East reporters are biased against Israel in two explosive Tablet articles earlier this year, has added more in another must-read article, this time in The Atlantic.

Here are significant excerpts, but still less than half the article:

During the Gaza war this summer, it became clear that one of the most important aspects of the media-saturated conflict between Jews and Arabs is also the least covered: the press itself. The Western press has become less an observer of this conflict than an actor in it, a role with consequences for the millions of people trying to comprehend current events, including policymakers who depend on journalistic accounts to understand a region where they consistently seek, and fail, to productively intervene.

[H]ow precisely does this thought pattern manifest itself in the day-to-day functioning, or malfunctioning, of the press corps? To answer this question, I want to explore the way Western press coverage is shaped by unique circumstances here in Israel and also by flaws affecting the media beyond the confines of this conflict.

I’ll begin with a simple illustration. The above photograph is of a student rally held last November at Al-Quds University, a mainstream Palestinian institution in East Jerusalem. The rally, in support of the armed fundamentalist group Islamic Jihad, featured actors playing dead Israeli soldiers and a row of masked men whose stiff-armed salute was returned by some of the hundreds of students in attendance. Similar rallies have been held periodically at the school.

Such an event at an institution like Al-Quds University, headed at the time by a well-known moderate professor, and with ties to sister institutions in America, indicates something about the winds now blowing in Palestinian society and across the Arab world. The rally is interesting for the visual connection it makes between radical Islam here and elsewhere in the region; a picture like this could help explain why many perfectly rational Israelis fear withdrawing their military from East Jerusalem or the West Bank, even if they loathe the occupation and wish to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbors. The images from the demonstration were, as photo editors like to say, “strong.” The rally had, in other words, all the necessary elements of a powerful news story.

The event took place a short drive from the homes and offices of the hundreds of international journalists who are based in Jerusalem. Journalists were aware of it: The sizable Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, for example, which can produce several stories on an average day, was in possession of photos of the event, including the one above, a day later. (The photographs were taken by someone I know who was on campus that day, and I sent them to the bureau myself.) Jerusalem editors decided that the images, and the rally, were not newsworthy...On the day that the AP decided to ignore the rally, November 6, 2013, the same bureau published a report about a pledge from the U.S. State Department to provide a minor funding increase for the Palestinian Authority; that was newsworthy. This is standard. To offer another illustration, the construction of 100 apartments in a Jewish settlement is always news; the smuggling of 100 rockets into Gaza by Hamas is, with rare exceptions, not news at all.

I mention these instances to demonstrate the kind of decisions made regularly in the bureaus of the foreign press covering Israel and the Palestinian territories, and to show the way in which the pipeline of information from this place is not just rusty and leaking, which is the usual state of affairs in the media, but intentionally plugged.

Journalistic decisions are made by people who exist in a particular social milieu, one which, like most social groups, involves a certain uniformity of attitude, behavior, and even dress (the fashion these days, for those interested, is less vests with unnecessary pockets than shirts with unnecessary buttons). These people know each other, meet regularly, exchange information, and closely watch one another’s work. This helps explain why a reader looking at articles written by the half-dozen biggest news providers in the region on a particular day will find that though the pieces are composed and edited by completely different people and organizations, they tend to tell the same story.

...[I]n Israel and the Palestinian territories, foreign activists are a notable feature of the landscape, and international NGOs and numerous arms of the United Nations are among the most powerful players, wielding billions of dollars and employing many thousands of foreign and local employees. Their SUVs dominate sections of East Jerusalem and their expense accounts keep Ramallah afloat. They provide reporters with social circles, romantic partners, and alternative employment—a fact that is more important to reporters now than it has ever been, given the disintegration of many newspapers and the shoestring nature of their Internet successors.

In my time in the press corps, I learned that our relationship with these groups was not journalistic. My colleagues and I did not, that is, seek to analyze or criticize them. For many foreign journalists, these were not targets but sources and friends—fellow members, in a sense, of an informal alliance. This alliance consists of activists and international staffers from the UN and the NGOs; the Western diplomatic corps, particularly in East Jerusalem; and foreign reporters. ... Mingling occurs at places like the lovely Oriental courtyard of the American Colony hotel in East Jerusalem, or at parties held at the British Consulate’s rooftop pool. The dominant characteristic of nearly all of these people is their transience. They arrive from somewhere, spend a while living in a peculiar subculture of expatriates, and then move on.

In these circles, in my experience, a distaste for Israel has come to be something between an acceptable prejudice and a prerequisite for entry. I don’t mean a critical approach to Israeli policies or to the ham-fisted government currently in charge in this country, but a belief that to some extent the Jews of Israel are a symbol of the world’s ills, particularly those connected to nationalism, militarism, colonialism, and racism—an idea quickly becoming one of the central elements of the “progressive” Western zeitgeist, spreading from the European left to American college campuses and intellectuals, including journalists. In this social group, this sentiment is translated into editorial decisions made by individual reporters and editors covering Israel, and this, in turn, gives such thinking the means of mass self-replication.

Many freshly arrived reporters in Israel undergo a rapid socialization in the circles I mentioned. This provides them not only with sources and friendships but with a ready-made framework for their reporting—the tools to distill and warp complex events into a simple narrative in which there is a bad guy who doesn’t want peace and a good guy who does. This is the “Israel story,” and it has the advantage of being an easy story to report. Everyone here answers their cell phone, and everyone knows what to say. You can put your kids in good schools and dine at good restaurants. It’s fine if you’re gay. Your chances of being beheaded on YouTube are slim. Nearly all of the information you need—that is, in most cases, information critical of Israel—is not only easily accessible but has already been reported for you by Israeli journalists or compiled by NGOs. You can claim to be speaking truth to power, having selected the only “power” in the area that poses no threat to your safety.

Confusion over the role of the press explains one of the strangest aspects of coverage here—namely, that while international organizations are among the most powerful actors in the Israel story, they are almost never reported on. Are they bloated, ineffective, or corrupt? Are they helping, or hurting? We don’t know, because these groups are to be quoted, not covered. Journalists cross from places like the BBC to organizations like Oxfam and back. The current spokesman at the UN agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, for example, is a former BBC man. A Palestinian woman who participated in protests against Israel and tweeted furiously about Israel a few years ago served at the same time as a spokesperson for a UN office, and was close friends with a few reporters I know. And so forth.

In the aftermath of the three-week Gaza war of 2008-2009, not yet quite understanding the way things work, I spent a week or so writing a story about NGOs like Human Rights Watch, whose work on Israel had just been subject to an unusual public lashing in The New York Times by its own founder, Robert Bernstein.

Editors killed the story.

Around this time, a Jerusalem-based group called NGO Monitor was battling the international organizations condemning Israel after the Gaza conflict, and though the group was very much a pro-Israel outfit and by no means an objective observer, it could have offered some partisan counterpoint in our articles to charges by NGOs that Israel had committed “war crimes.” But the bureau’s explicit orders to reporters were to never quote the group or its director, an American-born professor named Gerald Steinberg. In my time as an AP writer moving through the local conflict, with its myriad lunatics, bigots, and killers, the only person I ever saw subjected to an interview ban was this professor.

The radio and print journalist Mark Lavie, who has reported from the region since 1972, was a colleague of mine at the AP, where he was an editor in the Jerusalem bureau and then in Cairo until his retirement last year. Lavie believes that in the last years of his career, the AP’s Israel operation drifted from its traditional role of careful explanation toward a kind of political activism that both contributed to and fed off growing hostility to Israel worldwide. “The AP is extremely important, and when the AP turned, it turned a lot of the world with it,” Lavie said. “That’s when it became harder for any professional journalist to work here, Jewish or not. I reject the idea that my dissatisfaction had to do with being Jewish or Israeli. It had to do with being a journalist.”

When Hamas’s leaders surveyed their assets before this summer’s round of fighting, they knew that among those assets was the international press. The AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right beside their office, endangering reporters and other civilians nearby—and the AP wouldn’t report it, not even in AP articles about Israeli claims that Hamas was launching rockets from residential areas. (This happened.) Hamas fighters would burst into the AP’s Gaza bureau and threaten the staff—and the AP wouldn’t report it. (This also happened.) Cameramen waiting outside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City would film the arrival of civilian casualties and then, at a signal from an official, turn off their cameras when wounded and dead fighters came in, helping Hamas maintain the illusion that only civilians were dying. (This too happened; the information comes from multiple sources with firsthand knowledge of these incidents.)

Colford, the AP spokesman, confirmed that armed militants entered the AP’s Gaza office in the early days of the war to complain about a photo showing the location of a rocket launch, though he said that Hamas claimed that the men “did not represent the group.” The AP “does not report many interactions with militias, armies, thugs or governments,” he wrote. “These incidents are part of the challenge of getting out the news—and not themselves news.”

This summer, with Yazidis, Christians, and Kurds falling back before the forces of radical Islam not far away from here, this ideology’s local franchise launched its latest war against the last thriving minority in the Middle East. The Western press corps showed up en masse to cover it. This conflict included rocket barrages across Israel and was deliberately fought from behind Palestinian civilians, many of whom died as a result. Dulled by years of the “Israel story” and inured to its routine omissions, confused about the role they are meant to play, and co-opted by Hamas, reporters described this war as an Israeli onslaught against innocent people. By doing so, this group of intelligent and generally well-meaning professionals ceased to be reliable observers and became instead an amplifier for the propaganda of one of the most intolerant and aggressive forces on earth. And that, as they say, is the story.

Read the whole thing.

Apparent leftist "price tag" attack against synagogue in Tel Aviv

From Arutz-7:

A Tel Aviv synagogue was vandalized Sunday with graffiti reading, “In a place where the Jewish State Bill will be legislated, books will be burned.”

The vandals left a pile of burned books next to the wall that bore the graffiti. The books are not sacred texts.

The attack took place at the The Tel Aviv International Synagogue where Ariel Konstantyn of the Orthodox Zionist Tzohar Rabbis organization, originally of New York, serves as rabbi. Rabbi Konstantyn says the incident has been referred to the police but he views it as a “clear act of anti-Semitism.” According to the rabbi, the timing of the attack and the explicit graffiti seem to indicate that this was perpetrated by radical left-wing activists.

Rabbi Konstantyn expressed his shock saying “It is ironic and shocking that they targeted a synagogue where every perspective is respected and welcomed and where Jews are taught to love each other regardless of their political views.”

The rabbi pointed out that the founding of the International Synagogue was as initiative of the Tzohar Rabbinical Organization as a hub of inclusive outreach to the greater Tel-Aviv community. Over the past few years the synagogue has hosted Shabbat & holiday programs for thousands of Jews from all walks of life and political backgrounds.

Ah, so they burn books as a preventative measure to stop their opponents from burning books, a threat that only exists in their most antisemitic fantasies.

Got it.

But since they are apparently from the Left, we won't be seeing any Reuters or NYT articles on this house of worship being vandalized. Wwe need to be tolerant of the intolerant leftist haters of Judaism, especially the Jews..

I find it interesting that this attack was so well planned that the arsonists had created a stencil ahead of time to leave their little threat.