Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, December 15, 2016

12/15 Links Pt2: Chris Matthews Claims Moving U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem Will 'Desecrate' Capital and Future 'Palestinian State'

From Ian:

Chris Matthews Claims Moving U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem Will 'Desecrate' Capital and Future 'Palestinian State'

Chris Matthews is deeply concerned that moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem will "desecrate" the holy city and "hopeful capital of the Palestinian state."
Speaking to Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, Matthews fretted over President-elect Donald Trump's vow to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem as a symbol of America's recognition that an undivided Jerusalem is and will remain the eternal capital of the Jewish State. Matthews couldn't possibly understand Trump's motivation here, and expresses as much in the following segment, via Newsbusters:
Why are we moving the embassy to — to Jerusalem at a time that the whole place over there could blow up? Why do something that's right in the face of the Palestinians, right in the face of the Jordanians, the Saudis, the Egyptians. The one thing they say is leave you know, the Dome of the Rock alone, leave our — the hopeful capital of a Palestinian state alone. Don't desecrate it by saying it's the capital of Israel at this point?
Murphy attempted to explain that Trump could go the way of George W. Bush and decide not move the embassy upon taking office. However, Matthews wasn’t buying it: “But you don't do it. You say you're going to do it to pander a little bit. Fine, that's politics. But you don't actually do it. Doesn't Trump know this?”
At another point in the program, Matthews spoke with talk radio host Hugh Hewitt about Trump's choice for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, whom Matthews fears will be too pro-Israel and work too well with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (God forbid, right?):

Michael Lumish and Cinnamon Stillwell: Trump terror within Middle East studies

Nowhere was the hysteria, panic, and fear-mongering attending Donald Trump’s win in the 2016 presidential election felt more strongly than on college campuses – and Middle East studies academics were no exception. Rather than acknowledging that justified concern over increasing terrorism in the U.S. was a strong factor, they dismissed Trump voters as angry, fearful, ignorant, “Islamophobic” white supremacists.
This despite Trump’s receiving more minority votes than did Mitt Romney in 2012, and the support of the same white working-class population that twice voted for biracial President Barack Obama.
It was not millions of American voters, but the professors themselves who exhibited bigotry, fear, and anger.
Admitting that the “segment of society” who voted for Trump “frightens me,” Muqtedar Khan, director of the University of Delaware’s Islamic Studies Program, ascribed his win to “myopia” and “cultural insecurity.” Accordingly, he announced that he was “frightened for the future of minorities in this country.” No word on whether Khan is frightened of his own shadow.

Honest Reporting: EXCLUSIVE: HR Exposes Accredited Journalist as BDS Activist

Did Loewenstein gain his official press card by claiming to be a Guardian writer? If so, then it looks like this may be one avenue that could be cut off. HonestReporting contacted The Guardian directly, pointing out that hiring Loewenstein was the equivalent of hiring a corporate lobbyist to be the newspaper’s business correspondent.
Did Loewenstein misrepresent himself at the FPA event to Yair Lapid as working directly for The Guardian? Given the reactions of both Peter Beaumont and Harriet Sherwood, has Loewenstein just been caught dishonestly burnishing press credentials in an effort to present himself as a credible journalist?
This could well be the case. The Guardian’s Head of International News Jamie Wilson responded to HonestReporting by stating that Loewenstein was contracted to write comment pieces for Guardian Australia and remains an occasional comment contributor but he “is not a news correspondent for the Guardian in Israel.” It was also relayed to us that Loewenstein has now been told to in future make sure he does not reference The Guardian at press conferences unless he is working on a direct commission.
HonestReporting Managing Editor Simon Plosker said:
The Guardian’s distancing itself from Loewenstein is a welcome development. We now call on the Foreign Press Association to revoke his membership of the organization as his BDS activism is incompatible with reporting on Israel in a professional manner. Having been exposed as a BDS activist, Loewenstein’s Government Press Office accreditation should be immediately revoked and questions asked as to how a BDS activist was able to acquire a press card in the first instance.
Ultimately, the exposure of Loewenstein is a wakeup call for the mainstream media when it comes to journalistic ethics and the use of freelance reporters. All too often the grey area between journalist and activist is ignored and professional and objective reporting on Israel is the victim. This time, there is a clear line and Antony Loewenstein has crossed it.
We await responses from those involved as well as further developments concerning Loewenstein’s status. We will, of course, keep our readers updated.

A few months ago I was asked permission by Likud Netherlands to use a graphic I once made for a book they were preparing called 150 Palestinian Tales. I of course gave them permission, asking to see the book when it was released (and translated to English.)

I just received my copy, and it surpassed my expectations.

You can see it for yourself. Here is a preview of the book, a mini-encyclopedia of answering anti-Israel lies.

Preview of 150 Palestinian Tales

This book is an invaluable reference. It should be handed out to every student going to college. If Jewish Federations want to make a real impact, they would order thousands of these and provide them to local Hillels.

Buy it.

By the way, the graphic they used of mine was this one:

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Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

I have avoided writing about Amona until now. This is because the legal issues surrounding the notion of land ownership in Judea and Samaria are so arcane that one legal scholar (email correspondence) wrote that “the number of people who have a good understanding of West Bank property law can be counted on one hand.” And I don’t want to add to the noise by writing yet another amateur legal brief about it. There are, though, some things that are clear and worth saying.

First of all, let me state my prejudices: I do not believe Jews living in Judea and Samaria are an “obstacle to peace,” nor do I think that Jewish communities there are illegal or even “illegitimate,” whatever that means. Indeed, I think that Jews settling anywhere in the land of Israel are performing a religious and Zionist mitzvah, and I’m all for it. Those who find this position offensive can stop reading now.

The last time I mentioned Amona, someone took me to task for advocating “land theft.” It’s private Palestinian land, he said. What more do you need to know? Well, actually there is a great deal to know. Some of the complexities are discussed here. It’s worthwhile reading if you care about more than slogans.

My take on the legal part is that the draconian decision by the Supreme Court to destroy all of Amona and uproot its residents because of what turned out to be a claim on about one half acre of the 125 acres on which it is built, and which ultimately rested on the illegal actions of the Jordanian king, was highly unjust.

How does it happen that a Jewish court would punish Jews for settling in the land of Israel? How does it then happen that alternatives to expelling these families from their homes are opposed by the Court and the government’s legal advisor (who is hand-picked by the Court)?

The answer isn’t legal, but is connected to international politics. Israel is the only country in the world whose real estate laws and transactions are scrutinized by the US State Department, the UN and the European Union’s Foreign Ministry. The Obama Administration, for example, recently weighed inopposing an attempt to move the Amona families to a nearby unused location that was listed as property abandoned by Arabs in 1967. And the EU opposed the Regularization Law (as did the UN), which is intended to legalize outposts built on land claimed by Palestinians by compensating the claimants.

I should add that the EU seems to see nothing wrong with directly financing illegal Palestinian construction in the territories, while vehemently opposing any Israeli building there – all this in “Area C,” which under the Oslo accords is supposed to be under full Israeli control. But their concern for legality apparently doesn’t include obeying Israeli laws.

The Palestinians who claim ownership of the land on which Amona was built didn’t decide to sue the state by themselves. Indeed, the petition to the Supreme Court was filed on their behalf by an “Israeli” NGO called Yesh Din (“there is justice”), an organization which claims to work on behalf of “human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT),” which it does by

collecting and disseminating reliable and updated information regarding systematic human rights violations in the OPT; conducting public and legal advocacy in order to pressure Israel’s authorities to cease violations; and raising public awareness to human rights violations in the OPT.

I put “Israeli” above in quotation marks because although its staff and directors are mostly Jewish Israelis,  the organization receives almost all of its funds from foreign sources. According to NGO Monitor, which examines annual reports filed by Israeli-registered NGOs, 93.5% of its funding from 2002 through 2014 came from foreign sources. Total donations between 2002 and 2016 were about 18 million Israeli Shekels, or about US $4.73 million. Sources (see link above for a breakdown) include individual European countries and the EU, and the US-based New Israel Fund.

When Yesh Din is not petitioning the Supreme Court to throw Jews out of their homes, it is falsely accusing the IDF of war crimes. How patriotic.

I think it’s safe to say that the  international community, led by the Obama Administration, the UN, and the EU, with the support of the great majority of the world media and its academic establishment, wish to force Israel to abandon Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. It is also an article of faith of the international “progressive” movement – including the Israeli Left – that “The Occupation” is the greatest source of evil in the world. This is shown by the fact that far more effort and money appears to be expended on combating it than on fighting Da’esh or nuclear proliferation.

I won’t speculate what the next step would be if Israel were to leave the territories. But I doubt that would be the end of the pressure.

There are historical reasons that we find ourselves in opposition to so much of the world: Oil, the KGB, victim-blaming from European Holocaust guilt, cowardice in the face of Arab terrorism, Stockholm syndrome, anti-nationalism, Arab grants to educational institutions, bribery of politicians and public figures, old-fashioned Jew-hatred, and our own anti-genius for public relations all had a part in it.

On our side, too, there is a huge expenditure – of effort and money (how much time have the Knesset and ministers spent on issues connected to Amona?), but also of national spirit. How many times can we send our police and soldiers to drag Jews out of their homes in the middle of the night? How many times before we lose our national soul?

To be honest, I think the answer is “no more times.” We spent all we could afford at Yamit and Gush Katif.

It’s time to decide.  Do we care about Judea and Samaria and the Jews that live there? If so, we need to commit, to act as though we truly are the sovereign power; as Annika Rothstein wrote, to make a marriage and not just an extended engagement. Zionism demands it.

If not – well, I don’t want to think about the alternative.

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12/15 Links Pt1: PA: US cut off all aid in 2016; Samantha Power’s Powerlessness

From Ian:

PMW: PA: US cut off all aid in 2016: "No shekel or dollar has been paid"

PA: US cut off all aid: "No shekel... or dollar has been paid"
PA: In total, all foreign aid to PA dropped 62% - 70%
PA: Only 3 donors have given "their aid": the European Union, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria
PMW's exposure of the PA's incitement and misuse of funds led to US legislation prohibiting direct funding of the PA unless "the PA is acting to counter incitement"
According to Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, the United States has completely stopped funding the Palestinian Authority's general budget:
"2016 is about to end, no shekel or agora, or dinar or dollar has been paid."
[Facebook page of PA PM Rami Hamdallah, Dec. 8, 2016; Interview with Voice of Palestine Radio]
This corroborates a statement made by US Assistant Secretary of State Anne Patterson earlier this year. At a hearing in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US Congress following the release of PMW's report The PA's Billion Dollar Fraud, Patterson was challenged by committee chairman Ed Royce as to why the US was funding the PA given documentation that the PA was still paying salaries to terrorist prisoners.
Patterson responded:
"None of our money goes to this [salaries to prisoners]. It's not fungible in that respect. Our money goes essentially to pay PA debts to Israel and to other creditors."
[House Foreign Affairs Committee YouTube Channel, April 13, 2016] (h/t Yenta Press)

PA PM Hamdallah: The US has not paid one dollar in aid to the PA in 2016

Samantha Power’s Powerlessness

When Samantha Power demanded to know at a meeting of the Security Council yesterday whether Russia, Iran and the Syrian government were “incapable of shame,” America’s United Nations ambassador crystallized the horror of the world about the siege of Aleppo, in which the Assad regime and its foreign allies are committing unspeakable atrocities against civilians. But her question could be just as easily posed to her boss, President Obama. If those carrying out the slaughter in Syria are unimpressed by her eloquence, it is because they know they would not be in a position to wipe out Aleppo were it not for Obama’s acquiescence to their actions.
Power’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, outlined the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, or R2P, in which she put forward the idea that the world had an obligation to step in to prevent the kind of mass murder that was committed in the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda. The fame that followed its publication led eventually to a post on Barack Obama’s Senate staff, then to his National Security Council and finally to the UN.
The ascension of Power to high office was, in theory, an opportunity to put into practice the R2P principle that she had championed. But yesterday’s speech was a requiem for R2P. Obama and Power have not merely flopped on the world stage; the catastrophe of Libya and the subsequent refusal to act on Syria as the worst human rights disaster of the 21st century unfolded has completely discredited a doctrine that was never even implemented.

IsraellyCool: Know Your History: James Bryce’s Impressions Of Palestine (National Geographic, Mar 1915)

A series where I use history to debunk common misconceptions about the Middle East conflict.
In March 1915, National Geographic featured an article by James Bryce, former British Ambassador to the United States, on his impressions of what was then known as Palestine.
As usual with these old articles, it provides valuable insights, before political correctness and false narratives started to dominate reporting and discourse about this land. Note in particular:

Bryce’s constant references to Jewish history in the land

The map reference to Judea and Samaria (now referred to as the so-called “West Bank”)

His observations as to how poor in natural resources the land was (making Israel’s achievements since then even more amazing)

Nowhere is the word “Palestinian” mentioned, only Muslims/Mussulmans (you can work out why)

The references to the Muslim conquest of the area and Muslim vandalism

The mention of the demographics of Jerusalem at the time (40,000 Jews, 13,000 Christians and 7,000 Muslims)

Note: I cannot provide a link to the full article since it is only available to those who have purchased a National Geographic subscription. But I have provided screenshots below. As usual, click on the screenshots to enlarge.

HRW hires another anti-Israel activist as a "human rights researcher"

Human Rights Watch is nothing if not consistent.

For years, HRW has been hiring anti-Israel activists to work in its Middle East division.

If they cared about human rights and transparency, these people should be specifically assigned to work anywhere else. Human rights expertise can be used anywhere in the world, the fact that HRW has consistently hired people whose anti-Israel political positions have been obvious specifically to work on reports about Israel is proof positive that HRW is not interested in fairness or transparency.

Now, NGO Monitor has discovered that they have done it again:

In October 2016, Human Rights Watch (HRW) hired Omar Shakir to serve as its New York-based “Israel and Palestine Country Director.” Shakir is a consistent supporter of a one-state framework and advocate for BDS (boycotts, divestment, sanctions) tactics, fitting the longstanding HRW practice of hiring anti-Israel activists to serve in key positions relating to Israel:

Shakir’s overt anti-Israel activism is exemplified by his May 2010 presentation at UC Irvine, “Apartheid IsReal.” In his talk, Shakir called for abandoning the two-state model as a way to eliminate Israel as the Jewish state: “Ehud Olmert is telling us where we need to go….that ‘If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses and we face a South African style struggle for equal voting rights, then as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished’.” (emphasis added)

Similarly, in his speech Shakir called on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to end its goal of “self-determination,” a euphemism for promoting the replacement of a Jewish State with a binational state. He also rejected the idea of a negotiated solution to the conflict, saying that negotiations “will do nothing but institutionalize injustice.”

Shakir compared Zionism to “Afrikaner nationalism,” and added that “It’s also an honor to be speaking at the campus that made a statement heard around the world, and the campus that officially said that we have no place here for a war criminal” (an apparent reference to the (illegal) disruption of the February 2010 campus appearance of Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, emphasis added).

HRW's consistency in hiring anti-Israel activists, together with its anti-Israel bias in its reports, shows yet again that the organization has zero credibility when it comes to reporting about Israel.

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Hundreds of thousands of counted Palestinians don't exist

Makor Rishon did a story on Palestinians who are counted by the Palestinian Authority as residents - but who really aren't.

Reporters went to Palestinian villages and found that in many of them, many or most residents - even those who own huge mansions - have relocated to the US or Latin America, and at best visit once a year. Towns are half-empty, with homeowners hiring caretakers for their houses to stop squatters from taking them over.

A lot of Palestinians marry unsuspecting American women to get citizenship. One local said, "Many young Palestinians want to get married to get a visa. They do not care if the woman is ugly, fat or stupid - especially when they get a green card and US citizenship. After they reach the United States, they leave the same girls and move on."

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who live abroad have no intention of ever returning, except for some token visits to instill in their children the idea that they are still Palestinian. Some of the pretend citizens are already in the second generation of those who left.

No one is counting the number of Palestinians who leave and don't come back. Israel does not even count the number of Arabs in Area C, under its control, and that number has been exaggerated by the media trying to pretend that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are suffering under Israel's control.

The reporters looked at the other side, of how many people the Palestinians claim to have under their control. Israel depends on the PA's numbers. And there is no way to know how accurate they are.

Today, the Palestinian authority claims 2.9 million people live in the West Bank, but Israel's Civil Authority said that the number was 1.8 million in 1997, which makes the increase impossibly high.

Demographer Sergio DellaPergola estimates that the PA is exaggerating the number of residents in the West Bank by a half million. And he is one of the more conservative demographers, arguing with others who claim that Palestinians exaggerate their numbers by much higher amounts.

(h/t Yoel)

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On December 4, I reported about a New York Daily News story that said:

Straphangers stood by and watched as three drunk white men repeatedly screamed “Donald Trump!” and hurled anti-Islam slurs Thursday at a Muslim Baruch College student before trying to rip her hijab off of her head on an East Side subway, the woman told the Daily News.

The point of my post is that after 20 paragraphs of describing how she was supposedly assaulted - which she reported to the police - the story mentioned in the last paragraph that there were far more antisemitic attacks since Trump's election than anti-Muslim attacks - in fact, more antisemitic attacks than all other bias attacks combined. I questioned why the anti-Muslim stories were getting so much more media attention.

It turns out that the Muslim woman who made these accusations has been arrested for making the entire story up:

Yasmin Seweid, 18, was charged with filing a false report after she told authorities three men called her a terrorist and chanted "Donald Trump" at her aboard the 23rd Street 4/5/6 subway station on Dec. 1.

Now police sources have told NBC 4 New York that Seweid allegedly admitted to them she had been out drinking with friends, and made up the attack to distract her angry father.

Seweid posted to Facebook about the attack on Dec. 2, saying that "it breaks my heart that so many individuals chose to be bystanders while watching me get harassed verbally and physically by these disgusting pigs."

She called the incident "traumatizing" and spoke with multiple news organizations about it.

This doesn't mean that every anti-Muslim attack is false, of course. But it does show that the media needs to be a little more skeptical about its reporting - and in this case the story was reported worldwide, where people will never see the update.

But there is more, that is far more newsworthy, if true:

Her strict, Muslim parents allegedly forced Seweid to shave her head over the incident and were upset that she was dating a Christian, sources said.

The bareheaded Baruch College student, not wearing her hijab, was charged with filing a false report and released after her arraignment early Thursday in Manhattan Criminal Court. A relative covered Seweid’s face with a black down jacket as she was escorted into a waiting SUV following her brief court appearance.

She faces up to a year in jail for each charge.

Yasmin is on the right

I assume that the punishment of shaving her head was so that her family wouldn't suffer the humiliation of her showing her hair.

Humiliating their daughter in the name of "honor" shows that honor is precisely not what this is about.

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This Jew's favorite Christmas songs

Most Christmas music drives me crazy.

But some Christmas songs I look forward to hearing every year. For the most part, they are cynical Christmas songs, but still....

#5. Greg Lake : I Believe in Father Christmas (the album version from Emerson Lake and Palmer)

Lake just passed away, but the song is described as "a picture-postcard Christmas, with morbid edges" by lyricist Peter Sinfield. It includes a section from Prokofiev, whom we just discussed on the blog, and part of the video was made in the Qumran Caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.

#4. The Who: Christmas

Part of the Tommy rock opera, it includes a subversive dig at Christianity, asking how someone who cannot see or hear can be saved.

#3. The Waitresses, Christmas Rapping

OK, this is far more traditional. The plot is corny, but, damn, I love both the lyrics and the tune. My guilty Christmas pleasure. (Along with the original Miracle on 34th Street.)

#2. Bob Rivers, I Am Santa Claus

This Black Sabbath spoof is great, with very funny lyrics.

#1 The Kinks: Father Christmas

Another subversive song, with poor kids mugging Santa Claus because they need money, not silly toys. And it really rocks.

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12/14 Links Pt2: Ohio State Terror, The Media, and Israel; It’s time for UK Labour Jews to call it quits

From Ian:

The United Church of Christ: Knowingly Silent on Terrorism

The United Church of Christ (UCC) published a guide to Israel-Palestine affairs in August and again in September 2016. Entitled, "Promoting a Just Peace in Palestine-Israel", this toxic document is a desperately one-sided, inaccurate, and counter-factual exercise in futile politics. It most certainly does not favour justice or peace in the Holy Land, as its contents show on every page.
The naïvety of the UCC is particularly striking in its choice to take at face value the Palestinian statement that if Israel ended its occupation peace would follow as day follows night. When, after 1949, Gaza was occupied by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan, no one protested, no one attacked Egyptians or Jordanians. In other words, Israel occupied only itself. But Palestinian terrorism against Israelis continued up to 1967, right through the period of Israeli non-occupation. There were no "settlements" then. Rather, the Palestinians have always regarded all of Israel as one big "settlement." Just look at any Palestinian maps; they cover both the entirety of Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Unfortunately, the Palestinians have a history of regarding every retreat by Israel as a triumph of aggression over diplomacy, as if to say: We shoot at Israelis and they leave; so let's keep doing it.
In its introduction, the UCC, knowing full well that Israel has not occupied Gaza since 2005, still speaks of "the Israeli military occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories: the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza."
The UCC Guide states flatly that "Israeli settlements in the West Bank are identified as illegal by the international community" -- even though international law says exactly the opposite. The West Bank and Gaza were both occupied as a result of a defensive war against Egypt and Jordan in 1967, in which the Israelis were victorious. It is never illegal to occupy territory obtained in defensive military action.

Ohio State Terror, The Media, and Israel

Enough’s enough – it’s time for Labour Jews to call it quits

Week after week, we read of insidious outbursts emanating from individuals within the Labour Party, from all levels. The statements are often dressed up as anti-Zionist. However, some are so extreme and outrageous that they can only be construed as blatantly anti-Semitic.
Anti-Semitism within the Labour Party is not new, but it was latent and unexpressed.
The cause of its eruption so severely during 2016 can be summed up in two words: Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbyn is the first leader of any major British political party to hold views which, if not directly anti-Semitic, are considered hostile by the overwhelming majority of Jews in this country. His antipathy towards Israel, his embracement of the Palestinian viewpoint and his friendship with Arab terrorist groups has characterised his Parliamentary career for decades – long before the nightmare of his leadership of the Labour Party was remotely contemplated.
Labour ’s report into anti-Semitism, led by Baroness Chakrabarti, was a farce. In the words of the Home Affairs Select Committee commenting on the report, it “was clearly lacking in many areas”, the party having become “a safe place for those with the most vile of opinions”.

When one sees the byline of William Booth and Ruth Eglash on a Washington Post article, what follows, one knows, is going to be a very ugly piece about Israel. There will be the pretense of balance, but the slant will always be there and the direction of that slant will never favor Israel. You read their stuff and you have to wonder what's wrong with them, the authors. Their regular and willful distortion of the facts must, by design, be born of deep-seated hatred for the Jewish State.

Now if the articles were balanced and at least factually true, we might have given Booth and Eglash a pass. We might have said they are writing what they write for the sake of truth. We could have called them truth seekers. We could have ascribed a certain logic to reporting true but ugly news about Israel, and called the authors "truth seekers." (Even though nitpicking on Israel is kind of a strange thing to do, considering the slaughter going on next door in, for instance, Syria.)

With Booth and Eglash, however, what you've got is something far from the truth, something at a distant remove from decency and basic journalistic standards. What you've got instead is two authors pushing a single agenda and passing off selected half-truths as cover for their naked hate of Israel.

It's pathological.

The latest Booth and Eglash screed against Israel is a piece about the mosque loudspeakers, Israel wants mosques to turn the volume way down. The piece is framed as though the proposed legislation to ban loudspeakers is a freedom of religion issue, which it most assuredly is not. The caption under the video clip at the top of the piece includes the phrase: "The Muslims say their sacred tradition can't be compared to a rowdy party to be shut down by police."

Right here is where the distortion begins that is carried throughout the article and here is why it is a distortion: the most important thing to know about the loudspeaker bill is that it does not muzzle the muezzin and his call to prayer.

No one asks this. No one wants this. No one is pushing such a thing.

Jews don't do that. Everyone in Israel is free to pray or not pray to whatever deity he or she so chooses. We believe in free will, free choice. We brought the concept to the world, for crying out loud.

What we don't like is having prayers of any sort blasted in our ears at 4:30 in the morning. That's not nice. It disturbs our sleep. It's noise pollution.

And it's deeply unnecessary.

The blasting of prayers at full volume over a loudspeaker is neither sacred nor a tradition. Islam thrived just fine between the 7th century, when Islam was founded, and 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell invented the loudspeaker. The muezzin managed his duties a-okay without a loudspeaker. And if any Muslim is afraid he will sleep so deeply that he will not hear the call to prayer, he can darned well set an alarm clock and call that a "sacred tradition," too.

But let's get to the meat of the article. Booth and Eglash tell us that when Muslims hear the call to prayer, they hear something beautiful, but when Jews hear it, they hear noise. This too, is a distortion. It makes it sound like the Jews are deriding Muslim prayer, calling it "noise."

No. We really aren't. We have no problem with Muslim prayer and don't think of it as noise. UNLESS YOU BLAST IT INTO OUR EARS OVER A LOUDSPEAKER AT 4 FRIGGING THIRTY IN THE MORNING. Like when we're sleeping.

Sing it out in your villages and towns and neighborhoods. But not with a loudspeaker. Not at full volume. Not in the middle of the night when we're sleeping.

And just by the way, it's not a benign sacred Muslim tradition, as Booth and Eglash would have you believe. It's Muslims asserting their belief in their religious superiority. It's a thumb in the eye to Judaism. That is the only reason for the loudspeaker, to make sure EVERYONE hears. Especially the Jews.

And the truth is no one cares about that either. Because we are Jews in our own land and let the Arabs think whatever the heck they want to think. We're secure in our own beliefs.

We DO, on the other hand, want to sleep undisturbed. That's the bottom line. Sleep. Ya know?

But Booth and Eglash, they don't get it. Or they do but pretend they don't. They write, "During periods of heightened violence, when the Jews who live near Palestinians hear the Arabs proclaim that 'God is great!' in a broadcast that travels far from the mosque’s loudspeakers, they say they do not think of God.

"They hear a threat."

What utter malarkey. We don't think of anything much at all. We grumble and pull our pillows over our heads and try to get back to sleep. Except for the babies. They cry. It sounds scary to them. And of course, if they cry and they're scared we can't go back to sleep, because we have to go take care of them, comfort them, try to rock them back to sleep.

Booth and Eglash write: "One might think that after centuries of Jews and Muslims living side by side, in war and peace, these issues would be settled — but that would be naive."

In what century did Jews and Muslims live side by side in peace??? Have they even read a history book? Have they never read about the Muslim Conquest? The Arab riots of the 1920's? The Farhud?

Booth and Eglash write:

“'This call doesn’t hurt anybody,' said Kamal Abdul Khader, a former boxer who works as a bus dispatcher in Shuafat."

It does hurt us. Yes it does. It causes sleep deprivation.

“'You know what the call is? The call is to come and pray to God,' he said. 'The Jews don’t want to hear this? Tell me why.'"

Because it's a call to pray according to Islamic tradition. And we're JEWS. We have our own way of praying. And because it WAKES US UP and WE don't have to pray or get up for at least another couple of hours. It's not fair. It's not nice.

"Told it wakes people up, Khader laughed and pointed at the chaotic street scene with its cacophony of honking horns, cellphone rings and pop music blasting from shops.

"'Listen, this is Jerusalem. We Muslims don’t complain when the Christians ring their church bells. We don’t complain about the Jews with their ram horns. This is religion,' he said. 'No one should interfere.'"

Christians don't ring their church bells at 4:30 in the morning. Jews don't blast their ram horns at 4:30 AM and even if they did, they don't do it into loudspeakers so as to force the Muslims on the other side of town to listen to them. We blow them in shul for the (Jewish) congregants gathered therein.

"Men attending Shuafat’s main mosque agreed. One recalled that he had heard the muezzin bill was changed to protect Jewish customs. In the deeply Orthodox communities of Israel, sirens often wail on Friday afternoons to mark the beginning of the Sabbath. Sometimes a trumpet or ram’s horn is sounded."

The main word here to note is AFTERNOON. We don't play the sirens at 4:30 in the morning. I've never heard of someone blowing a trumpet for this purpose, but even if they did, it isn't at 4:30 in the morning. It really is THAT simple. Don't blast your prayers at full volume over a loudspeaker at 4:30 in the morning.

"There are some who ask why such a divisive topic needs the blunt force of legislation and a ban."

Here is why: we keep asking them to turn down the volume. They crank it down for a bit and then slowly, they inch it back up. They simply don't respect our wishes. They don't respect our freedom of religion, which is to sleep through the night and pray with a minyan instead of on a prayer rug with our backsides facing the Temple Mount. They are inconsiderate and don't care that we want and need to sleep. They don't care that they are scaring our babies and waking them up.

And since they are rude and inconsiderate and don't care about our rights, we have to legislate our rights, enshrining them in law.

But Booth and Eglash make it sound like all Israel wants to do is suppress something of tremendous beauty.

"At the mosque in Shuafat, the muezzin, who asked to be referred to as Abu Mohammad, said he has sung the call to prayer for 35 years. He was sorry to hear about all the complaints. He said he thought there was nothing more moving than hearing the call in the quiet of the dawn as it echoes across the desert where the prophets walked.

“'If there is a more beautiful voice than mine?' he said. 'They can do the call.'”

Yeah. Because it's all about your voice. Right. Us Jews just don't get the poetry, the lilting harmonies, the LOUDSPEAKER BLASTING ARABIC IN OUR EARS AT 4:30 IN THE MORNING.

Sheesh.

Now it's clear that Booth and Eglash see Islam and the Arabs in this pink, soft, romantic light. Conversely, they want to see Jews and Israelis as culturally bankrupt morons. And actually, that would be just fine if they were writing fiction, or even opinion. But it's not fine that a newspaper like the Washington Post would carry a piece like this even once, let alone on an ongoing basis, as it has done.

In so doing, the Washington Post, rather than disseminating information, is fostering hate. Readers trust Wapo to tell them the truth. It's a sad thing indeed that Booth and Eglash are allowed to use the pages of the Washington Post to spread lies, misinformation, and their pathological hatred of Jews and Israel.

Sad and tragic.

The only thing to do is keep calling them on it. Every single time they do it. And to recap in logical terms, the truth of the matter.

It was only ever about sleep, Habibi. No matter what Eglash and Booth try to tell you. And no matter where they tell it.

(h/t Alexi)

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Joseph, You Know That One Of Those Eleven Stars Is Technically A Planet, Right? By Judah (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Joe, the guys are not pleased with your delusions of grandeur, and I can't say I disagree. Aside from the fact that it's just dangerously destabilizing to go boasting about visions of your own superiority over us, it's not right to go describing all the "stars" you saw using that word. For the sake of accuracy, you have to refer to one of them as a planet.

We've all seen the night sky, and we know the brightest small objects up there aren't just thermonuclear gas-and-plasma spheroids. Some of them are just chunks of rock or blobs of gas that reflect sunlight. Aside from the disturbing implications of your dreams for the unity and harmony of this family, if you're going to command any respect whatsoever among us you had best start using the correct terminology. Otherwise anyone serious will know you're not serious.

Let's leave aside the troubled history of this family: our grandfather Isaac's troubled relationship with his half-brother Ishmael, born of the tension between Great-Grandmother Sarah and her handmaiden Hagar; Grandpa Laban's manipulative treatment of his sister, Grandma Rebecca; and the fraught dynamic between our father and Uncle Esau. It's almost a given that at this point, one of us is going to be rejected as the principal heir because he's unworthy. Your antics make you a prime candidate, and your imprecision with astronomical nomenclature certainly is no help. A planet is a planet. A star is a star.

You're already seventeen years old. You've learned enough at our father's knee to know the difference between an object that produces light and an object that merely reflects light. It's not a difficult concept. Your insistence on calling anything up there that isn't the sun or the moon "stars" is almost as annoying as your astounding presumption that telling all of us, in excited tones, about how you're going to lord it over us because you foresaw it in a dream about stars wouldn't turn every last one of us against you.

Get your act together, Joseph. Just because you're the eldest son of Dad's favorite wife doesn't mean you've automatically secured a place of pride in this family. Look at what happened to Esau. Gone to Seir despite his lifelong efforts to kiss up to Grandpa. So stop it with your stupid dream tales. And start using proper terminology when you talk of these things. Don't be such a philistine.

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12/14 Links Pt1: Jerusalem likely disappointed by Trump's secretary of state pick; Can Trump Really Move the Embassy?

From Ian:

Analysis: Jerusalem likely disappointed by Trump's secretary of state pick

Nobody will admit it, but it is safe to assume Jerusalem was disappointed Tuesday when US President-elect Donald Trump announced the winner of his secretary of state sweepstakes.
It’s not because Jerusalem dislikes or does not trust Trump’s nominee, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson – policy makers in Israel, like those in most other non-oil producing countries, don’t know that much about him. It’s just that the Netanyahu government really liked some of the other candidates that were bandied about over the last five weeks: Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and John Bolton.
Giuliani, Romney, Bolton – these are men that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has known for years and with whom he shares a similar world view. Tillerson, however, is a largely unknown quantity.
Jerusalem knows that Tillerson is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and that he has worked intensively in Arab countries with which ExxonMobil does business. But no one seems to have any idea about where he stands on issues such as the settlements, Jerusalem and the two-state solution.
Some are making assumptions, however, that because he was highly recommended for the position by former secretaries of state James Baker and Condoleezza Rice, and because he is reportedly close to former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, that he doesn’t have a warm spot in his heart for either the settlement enterprise or Israel. But Tillerson has left no public record of comments on these issues to support that assumption. In short, his positions on the Mideast conflict are, at this point, anyone’s guess.
One thing it is important to keep in mind, said Danny Ayalon, a former Israeli ambassador to the US and deputy foreign minister, is that US secretaries of state “serve at the pleasure of the president, and we know that Trump is closer to Israel on issues like the settlements.”

ICC threat lingers over Settlements Bill among others

Politicians on the Right have been regularly underplaying the threat of the International Criminal Court and slamming Israel’s internal lawyer take-over revolution as well as the Supreme Court for interfering in the Amona debate by telling them what is or is not legal.
Apparently some of this is for show and on Monday at the Knesset’s joint committee closed-to the media meeting on the Settlements Bill, some of the same politicians took the threat far more seriously, which will likely impact their votes.
The question is whether passing the Settlements Bill would change an ICC full criminal war crimes investigation into the settlement enterprise from a neutral or remote possibility to a much higher likelihood.
If the ICC went after the settlement enterprise for war crimes, Israeli defense ministers, housing ministers, local settlement councils and possibly others could be on the hook.

Can Trump Really Move the Embassy?

The assumption of those promoting a two-state solution is that the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem would serve as the capital of the Palestinian state that would be created as part of a peace settlement. We don’t know whether the Palestinians will ever take yes for an answer and accept a peace that would recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn. But no reasonable person can dispute that Israel will always keep Western Jerusalem and those Jewish neighborhoods that were built after 1967. The city is the country’s capital, and always will be.
To a Middle East novice like Trump, recognizing this is just common sense. But for the foreign policy establishment, doing so would be a grave mistake. It would prejudge the outcome of peace negotiations, their thinking goes, and would result in violent riots throughout the Arab and Muslim world with unforeseen consequences. Yet Trump, with his outsider’s viewpoint, may get that these dire predictions are self-fulfilling prophecies, and trap the U.S. in a policy that perpetuates the conflict rather than moving towards a solution. If peace is to be achieved, the Palestinians and their supporters must accept that the Jewish presence in Jerusalem will never be reversed or its history erased (as the Palestinians have sought to do in various United Nations resolutions that designate the Temple Mount and the Western Wall as exclusively Muslim shrines).
It would be foolish to pretend that an embassy move would not cause problems or lead to riots ginned up by Islamists who hate the U.S. as much as they do Israel. But the world will not come to an end if the U.S. sends a signal to the world Washington has finally understood that the conventional wisdom about Jerusalem has done more to encourage Palestinian intransigence than it has to promote a solution. The new embassy would also not preclude a two-state solution or make it harder to achieve assuming the Palestinians wanted peace since all it would do is to make it easier for U.S. diplomats to travel between their new offices (at an empty site owned by the U.S. that has been designated for that purpose for decades) and Israeli government institutions they deal with.
On Jerusalem and One China, Trump may not be playing by the existing diplomatic rules. But it’s time for even those who doubted his fitness for the presidency to admit that those rules don’t always make sense and changing them might do more good than harm.

As far as I can tell, no mainstream media outlets mentioned Prime Minister Netanyahu's visit to Azerbaijan on Tuesday or his visit to Kazakhstan today.

This is probably because the media is invested in the idea of Muslims and Israeli Jews hating each other, with the subtext that Zionist Jewish invaders have taken over historically Muslim lands (and that Jews lived peacefully in Arab lands before Zionism ruined everything.)

And this is a narrative that is not accurate.

As Netanyahu said in his speech with Azerbaijani President Aliyev:

But I think there's something else that’s unique about this relationship: Israel is the Jewish state, it's a Jewish state. Azerbaijan is a Muslim state, predominantly Muslim population. Here you have an example of Muslims and Jews working together to secure a better future for both of us. And it's an example that shines against the background of intolerance and lack of acceptance and mutual respect.

In fact, the mutual respect that you show here, the attitude that you've shown to Jews in Azerbaijan over the years, has fostered this very strong bond of sympathy and admiration for Azerbaijan, first of all with the 70 thousand Jews living in Israel who are from Azerbaijan. It's a human bridge, but also something that we can show the world. You know, the world sees so much intolerance, so much darkness, and here is an example of what relations can be and should be between Muslims and Jews everywhere.

I have to tell you, Mr. President, I said this privately but I'm telling you that there is a change that we see in many parts of the Muslim world and specifically the Arab world. But I think if they want to see what the future could be, come to Azerbaijan and see the friendship and the partnership between Israel and Azerbaijan. It’s not only good for both our countries and both our peoples; I think it’s good for the region and good for the world. So I want to thank you again for welcoming us in the middle of the day. We come day and night. And you are, of course, invited to come to Israel. I hope to receive you there at the appropriate time, when it's convenient for you. And I want to say again how much we appreciate the friendship and hospitality that you've shown us. Thank you.

Iran is upset because, like the media, it wants opposition to Israel's existence to remain a consensus Muslim position.

An Armenian website, Panorama, reported on Monday that Iran considers Netanyahu’s visit objectionable, with a top Iranian cleric, Sayed Mehdi Ghoreishi, telling reporters, “It is unacceptable when a Muslim country tries to develop ties with a perpetrator. The Azerbaijani authorities must take this into account, as it is unacceptable for the Muslim society.”

The media isn't reflecting today's reality of Jewish Muslim relations. It is reflecting the desire of the extremists to make it a religious conflict.

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European-funded NGO teaches Arabs to write anti-Israel propaganda on Wikipedia (update)

Here is a video showing Arabs learning how to edit Wikipedia entries. (The HP computers are especially interesting.)

The logo behind the operators shows that the office is at the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, an anti-Israel NGO that I believe gets funding from many European nations and other NGOs.

If you look up this program at the Euro-Med Monitor site, you will see that they claim merely that they aim "to improve [Wikipedia] content with information on human rights."

But if you look at how the project is described in Arabic news sites, you find out the truth:

The Euro - Mediterranean office in the Gaza Strip launched in the middle of October a "Wikipedia Palestine" project, in cooperation with the Arab Center for the Development of Social Media, which aims to create a cadre of activists and editors for the encyclopedia "Wikipedia."
Rawan Abu-Assad, who coordinates social media in the Euro - Mediterranean Observatory, talks about the new project:
What are the goals of "Wikipedia Palestine" project?
"Euro-Mediterranean" is seeking through the project to enrich the content of human rights in the free encyclopedia "Wikipedia", promoting the narrative of victims of Israeli violations in the Palestinian territories to present them before the other party's [Israeli] narrative.

We've seen the work of Euro-Med before, and they are anything but objective, and the only human rights they care about are the ones they can use as weapons against Israel, no matter how absurd the claims.

A couple of years ago there was an uproar when Israelis were teaching activists how to use Wikipedia to help hasbara efforts. You can be sure that there will be no outcry about this, even though the goals are explicitly to bash Israel.

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

UPDATE: An earlier version of this post mixed up the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network, which are two separate NGOs. I am not yet certain where this group gets its funding from.

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Remarkable color photos of Jews in Jerusalem, 1927

The National Geographic magazine of December 1927 had a very long essay on the Holy Land, with some remarkable color photographs.

Here are the color photos of Jews in Jerusalem from 89 years ago.

Among the black and white photos were these of the Chief Rabbis:

Their photos of Muslims and Christians are no less impressive.

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