Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, March 13, 2017

Of course Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah praises today's terrorist as a "martyr"

This morning a Palestinian Arab stabbed two Israeli policemen multiple times. They killed him.

Naturally, Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah is extolling him as a "martyr" and making sure that his act is viewed as a religious obligation.

This is all to let the next terrorist know exactly how his acts will be honored.

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By Petra Marquardt-Bigman

Ali Abunimah and his Electronic Intifada colleague Asa Winstanley marked last week’s International Women’s Day by denouncing a Reuters report that described “Israel’s women combat soldiers” as being “on [the] frontline of battle for equality.” As far as the Electronic Intifada crew was concerned, this was a “Pathetic Reuters propaganda piece for Israel’s occupying killers” because these Israeli women should be condemned as having joined a “battle for equal rights to murder Palestinian babies.” Judging from the 90 re-tweets and 66 “hearts” the tweet garnered, many of their fans appreciated this view.

Since accusing Jews of murdering babies has been a favorite of Jew-haters since the Middle Ages, I thought it was perhaps time to document that Abunimah is one of the foremost purveyors of this age-old calumny in our time. The slideshow below offers just a glimpse of the numerous examples that can be found in Abunimah’s Twitter output, reflecting his ceaseless efforts to demonize the world’s only Jewish state in pretty much the same terms that Jew-haters from the Middle Ages to the Nazi “Third Reich” found so useful.

Let me just add a few relevant points that are useful to keep in mind when you watch the slideshow. While Abunimah relentlessly accuses Israel of wantonly murdering Palestinian children, he himself glorifies terror groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad – that are only too happy when they succeed in murdering Israeli children – as noble “resistance,” or as the “Palestinian defense forces.” And Abunimah has nothing to say about the obscene glorification of killers – including the killers of Israeli children – by Palestinian and Arab society. The most recent example is from today’s news about the hero’s welcome prepared for the Jordanian soldier who was just released from prison after serving a 20 year sentence for killing seven Israeli school girls on March 13, 1997, during a school field trip to the “Island of Peace,” a joint Israeli-Jordanian tourist resort. But given Abunimah’s open admiration for groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, it seems fair to assume that as the son of a high-ranking Jordanian diplomat, he may well warmly sympathize with the glorification of this killer by his fellow-Jordanians.

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03/13 Links Pt1: Israel bars entry to British BDShole; The Israelization of anti-Semitism

From Ian:

Israel bars entry to British activist over BDS support

The Chairman of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, a pro-BDS organization, was denied entry into Israel Sunday night. In a joint statement the Interior Ministry’s Population and Immigration Authority and the Strategic Affairs Ministry said British national Hugh Lanning was denied entry over alleged efforts to promote boycotts against Israel.
“The organization Mr. Lanning heads is one of the leading anti-Israel delegitimization and BDS organizations in Britain, and one of the largest in Europe,” the ministries said in a statement Sunday night.
Spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry Sabine Haddad said Lanning landed in the afternoon, but the decision to deny him entry was only reached at approximately 9:00 p.m.
Hugh Lanning has served as chairman of the PSC since 2009 and worked as a head of prominent trade unions in Britain.
The statement, from the Population and Immigration Authority and the Ministry of Public Security, cited the PSC's connections to other British groups critical of Israel and the presence of some of its members on ships that aimed to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza in 2010. The statement said Lanning had personally met with top Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza in 2012. Included with the statement was a picture of Lanning standing for a group photo with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
Minister of Strategic Affairs Gilad Erdan, said Sunday night that “Whoever acts against Israel should understand that the rules of the game have changed. No sane country would allow entry to key boycott activists working to harm the country's core interests and lead to its isolation”.
Interior Minister, Aryeh Deri, said “The decision we made tonight is an unequivocal statement against boycott activists,” adding that a Knesset law passed last week allowing the Interior Ministry to refuse entry to supporters of boycotts is “another step in fully implementing this policy.”

Antisemitic global terrorist Carlos the Jackal faces trial in France

Carlos the Jackal, the 67-year-old Venezuelan terrorist who executed horrific terror attacks in the 1970s and early 1980s , will be tried in France on Monday for the deadly bombing of a Paris shop he has allegedly committed 40 years.
Carlos, whose real name is Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, was apprehended in 1994 by French police and is serving a life sentence for the murder of two French policemen and a Lebanese revolutionary. He had also been convicted for four bombings in the cities of Paris and Marseille in the early 1980s, which resulted in the death of 11 people and injured close to 150.
Carlos, who is known to be sympathetic with the Palestinian cause not unlike multiple modern-day lone wolf terrorists who target Western countries in the name of political and religious agendas, is the former leader of a gang that attacked targets for pro-Palestinian causes.
The international terrorist has expressed his hatred of Jews and the Jewish state on numerous occasions in the past. As AFP reported in 2014, while in prison Carlos verbally attacked a female prison official, calling her an "Israeli," "Zionist" and "dirty Jew." He was later fined for his antisemitic lashout.
In a different antisemitic incident that occurred in 2009, Carlos issued a campaign in which he endorsed France's Anti-Zionist Party. He expressed his solidarity with the views of the anti-Israel party in a move that came after he had blamed Israel for framing him in the three murders he was charged with. Carlos, who joined the Front for the Liberation of Palestine back in 1970, has made multiple remarks against Israel in the past, with one of them being that Israel was "the first terrorist state in history."

The Israelization of anti-Semitism

Monika Schwarz-Friesel and Jehuda Reinharz are the authors of Inside the Antisemitic Mind: the Language of Jew-Hatred in Contemporary Germany, available through Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England.
Antisemitic attacks throughout the centuries have been grounded in demonizing Jews as the ultimate evil. This concept was found repeatedly in the messages we studied. For example, in one 2007 letter to the Israeli Embassy, the writer states, “The Israelis are and remain, no matter what a show they put on, the greatest racists, war criminals, warmongers, murderers, child-murderers, violators of international law, torturers, robbers and thieves, Nazis, liars, [and] terrorists…” Another message sent to the embassy in 2008 announces plainly, “Here’s one in the kisser for you, you filthy Jew. You’re to blame for the misery in the world!”
In addition to demonization, a second millennia-long antisemitic idea delegitimizes the very existence of Jews, paving the way first for segregation and then elimination or genocide. Just as Jews have no right to exist, it is claimed, a state so abysmally evil and destructive has no right to exist. In the minds of these antisemites, Israel has become the Collective Jew and should be destroyed. Racist delegitimization draws on stereotypes of Jews as exploiters, parasites, and homeless nomads, as in this message from 2006 sent to the Central Council of Jews in Germany: “Only dissolution of the Israeli state can counter the Jews’ solidarity and thereby also their highly aggressive tendencies as a united people that ruthlessly indulges its congenital aggression and frustration. The Jews who move away from Israel will then have the possibility of settling elsewhere. In Old Testament times, the Jews were already a nomadic people that emigrated at one point to Egypt, at another to Babylon, the latter, by the way, because of moral turpitude, after which they moved back to Israel.”
Looking at the messages as a whole, there was little variation among the different years except the spikes we noticed during times of military conflict such as the 2014 war in Gaza. This event ignited a storm of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish commentary in Europe and the United States that continues to this day—spread most widely online. It is also interesting to note that these conflagrations were defined always in one-sided terms, with Israel as the sole aggressor. This unilateral framework applies not only to Israel’s military conflict with the Palestinians and Arab States but also to the condemnation of Israel for human-rights violations that are defined as almost exclusively characteristic of Israel in comparison to the records of other countries.
When Israel, the Jewish state, is denounced as uniquely evil and immoral, antisemitism is clearly at play. Modern antisemites have turned “the Jewish problem” into “the Israel problem.” In this world where we are trying to eliminate racism, misogyny, homophobia and more, it is time to include the age-old hatred of Jews as well.

A story in Commentary about choices and behaviors within anti-Trump organizations pointed me towards this interesting (and accessible) piece of academic research that discusses experiments on the impact extreme tactics have on popular support for political causes and organizations.

The paper looks at what “counter-normative, disruptive, or harmful” political tactics do for two key goals of any social movement: (1) raising the profile of a movement and its causes and (2) gaining support from the wider public (which can take the form of increased membership, donations, or general friendliness towards the movement’s goals).

In theory, profile-raising and support-building should go hand-in-hand since the public needs to know about a group and understand its mission and purpose before they can support it. But in our media-saturated age, it often requires extreme tactics to gain attention – especially when competing with other causes, or with other individuals and organizations claiming to represent your issue.

This is where extreme tactics such as “inflammatory rhetoric, blocking traffic, and damaging property” come into play since such rhetoric and actions are likely to get you on the nightly news (as well as more web site hits and social media likes) than quietly cultivating the public through rational discourse. But, as it turns out, even those friendly to causes such as animal rights, Black Lives Matter or the anti-Trump movement (the subjects of the study linked above) become less likely to support those causes if their proponents turn to such extreme tactics.

In the meaty discussion section of their piece (starting at page 17 if you want to skip the description of their experiments), the authors of the study try to answer the question of why social movements turn to such tactics, given that they seem to be empirically counterproductive. One explanation they suggest is that participants don’t understand or appreciate the negative impact of extreme tactics, confusing increased attention with increased support.

The authors also qualify their findings by pointing out that some activists might have goals outside of winning popular support, towards which extreme tactics might make sense, priorities such as “winning funding, impacting powerful elites, psychologically empowering disadvantaged individuals, fostering commitment in existing supporters, and cathartic expression.”

To this list I would add another item drawn from experience dealing with the decades-long extremism of the BDS “movement:” fantasy-politics in which the public does not even exist to protestors, except as props in a drama taking place within the protestor’s own individual and collective heads.

Scientific evidence that the BDSer’s choice of tactics is likely to limit their effectiveness is a useful thing to know. But such insights can also guide our choices in fighting against BDS and other forms of anti-Israel propaganda, highlighting the importance of tactics and language that will make those we want to persuade feel not just good about us but good about themselves for supporting our cause.

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How to prove that BDS is antisemitic

The Jerusalem hotel I am staying in is in the neighborhood of French Hill, which is considered an "illegal settlement" by B'Tselem and most of the world.

Before 1967, French Hill was a Jordanian military outpost that had few if any residents. Israel established the neighborhood after 1967, partially in order to join Mount Scopus, which had been isolated in 1948, with the rest of Israel.

It turns out that one of the very best falafel places in Jerusalem is French Hill Falafel.

Unfortunately, I cannot taste how good its falafel is; it is owned by an Arab and isn't kosher.

As much as 16% of the residents of French Hill are Israeli Arabs. Which means they are "settlers."

People who support BDS - and the UN - say that any business that operates in "occupied territory" is profiting from the "occupation" and must be shunned. Such a list is being prepared by the UN and is supposed to be published later this year in accordance with previous resolutions.

Will French Hill Falafel be on that list?

It is operating inside an "illegal settlement." It is owned (almost certainly) by an Israeli Arab. It only exists because the neighborhood exists; its customers are by and large Israelis, both Arab and Jew.

By any definition, French Hill Falafel is profiting from the "occupation."

If it was owned by a Jew, then of course it would be on the boycott list.

But it is owned by an Arab.

Up the hill from the falafel joint is the excellent Israeli burger chain Burgers Bar.

So the acid test for BDS is to ask them: Would you boycott French Hill Falafel?

Then ask: Would you boycott French Hill Burgers Bar?

Obviously the BDSers don't boycott Arab-owned businesses anywhere, even those owned by Israeli Arabs. They only boycott Jewish-owned businesses and multinational businesses who seem to benefit Jews.

Which answers the question.

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After Reform leaders bask in Abbas' glow, they attack Netanyahu in meeting

I noted on Friday that American Reform Judaism leaders met with Mahmoud Abbas, and from all reports they found that they agreed with nearly everything he said.

Union of Reform Judaism president Rick Jacobs emphasized how "impressed" he was with Mahmoud Abbas, a Holocaust denier who funded the Munich Olympics massacre and whose antisemitic rhetoric includes referring to Jews' "filthy feet" when they visit their holiest spot.

In contrast, the URJ meeting with Netanyahu apparently combative ("candid" is the word used). They complained about the "muezzin bill" that limits the volume of amplified calls to prayer before 7 AM; and they complained about the bill that would legalized settlement construction after the fact in very limited circumstances.

In other words, they parroted the Palestinian position on virtually everything, willing to give the benefit of the doubt to those who want to destroy Israel and showing contempt for those trying to protect it.

They treated Abbas like an honored head of state who truly wants peace and Netanyahu as a person who knows less about how to protect the State of Israel than they do.

So, Rick Jacobs - whose side are you on?

Perhaps you should go through this blog's archives to find out the truth about Abbas and what Palestinians really want, since your entire worldview seems to be based purely on The New York Times and the Forward.

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Real life Purim joke: Iran's FM says Achashverosh is a hero for saving Jews

From Javad Zarif's Twitter:

Yes, Zarif is saying that the man who eagerly signed the decree calling for the genocide of the Jews of Persia is a hero for later countermanding that decree at his wife's behest.

This would be considered a high form of Purim humor if anyone else had said it.

(His assertion that Iran "gladly" took in Jews during the Holocaust is an exaggeration as well. One Iranian diplomat did save hundreds of Jews, confident that the leader of Iran at the time who was very good to the Jews would back him up. Also, several thousand Jews were among over 100,000 Polish refugees who had been interned in the Soviet Union who ended up in Iran in 1942.)

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Haaretz declares all of Israel to be an illegal settlement

As bad as reading Haaretz online is, it is more disgusting to see it on paper.

Here is a headline from Sunday's edition. I honestly couldn't read the entire (full page broadsheet) article itself because the headline tells you all you need to know.

Here is what we can tell Haaretz believes by publishing this.

The "occupation" did not begin in 1967, It didn't even begin in 1948. No, any Jew who dared move to Palestine since 1917 is an "occupier" who stole Palestinian (meaning Arab) land.

Let's think about this for a second.

Any Jew who moved to Palestine a hundred years ago was an immigrant, by definition.

Haaretz, that bastion of supposed liberalism, is saying that Jewish immigrants are thieves - criminals - by their very presence on "Palestinian" land, even those that purchased the land. It's all the same crime.

At the very same time that liberals are rising up in defense of immigrants seeking a better life elsewhere, Haaretz is declaring that Jewish immigrants who were fleeing persecution had no right to move to their ancestral homeland and are in fact criminals for doing so.

If anyone would make such a blanket statement about immigrants in any other context, they would be pilloried by the very same people who read and trust Haaretz.

It would be funny if it wasn't so sickening.

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03/12 Links: Murderer of 7 schoolgirls given hero's welcome in Jordan; Trump throws Mahmoud Abbas a lifeline

From Ian:

Daily Mail: A sick new low for foreign aid: Palestinian boys and girls pretend to execute an Israeli soldier – as teachers at schools funded by YOU tell their pupils that terrorists are heroes

Britain is pumping huge sums of foreign aid into Palestinian schools named after mass murderers and Islamist militants, which openly promote terrorism and encourage pupils to see child killers as role models.
A Mail on Sunday investigation has found 24 schools named after Palestinian terrorists and evidence of widespread encouragement of violence against Israel by teachers, with terrorists routinely held up as heroes for schoolchildren.
Pictures of ‘martyrs’ are posted on school walls, revolutionary slogans and symbols are painted on premises used by youngsters, sports events are named after teenage terrorists and children are encouraged to act out shooting Israeli soldiers in plays.
Head teachers openly admit flouting attempts by British and European donors to control the curriculum at schools. They print overtly political study aids for pupils, some even denying the existence of Israel, and teachers boast of encouraging pupils to emulate teenage attackers killed in the most recent wave of terrorist attacks in the region.
One senior teacher from a prominent West Bank school, asked what he would say to a pupil threatening to attack Israelis, told this newspaper: ‘I would tell them go in the name of God.’

Watch: Murderer of 7 schoolgirls given hero's welcome in Jordan

A hero's welcome is planned for the Jordanian soldier released last night after serving 20 years in prison for murdering seven Israeli schoolgirls during a class trip in 1997.
Ahmed Daqamseh was a soldier in the Jordanian army when he opened fire on a group of students who were visiting the “Island of Peace” of Naharayim on March 13, 1997, as part of a class trip.
Daqamseh was sentenced to life in prison for the massacre, which in Jordan usually means 25 years in prison. However, he was released five years early following repeated calls for his release. In 2013, 110 out of 150 Jordanian MPs signed a petition calling for his release.
In 2011, then-Jordanian Justice Minister Hussein Mjali caused an uproar when he called for Daqamseh’s release, claiming that he is “a hero. He does not deserve prison. If a Jewish person killed Arabs, his country would have built a statue for him instead of imprisonment."

'Israelis are human waste. We must get rid of them'

Ahmed Daqamseh, the Jordanian soldier who opened fire on a group of students who were visiting the “Island of Peace” of Naharayim on March 13, 1997, as part of a class trip, killing seven Israeli schoolgirls justified his murderous actions Sunday after being released from prison five years early.
"The Israelis are the human waste which the nations of the world vomited up before us," Daqamseh told Jordanian media less than a day after his release. "Unfortunately, they occupy the purest land after Mecca and Medina."
"We must eliminate this waste by incineration or by burial," Daqamseh added.
Daqamseh relayed a message of continouous war with Israel to the Jordanian people. "Do not believe the lie of normalization with the Zionist entity. Do not believe the lie of the two-state solution. Palestine is one, from the sea to the river, from Rosh Hanikra to Um Rash-Rash. They forged the names of the cities, and unfortunately, many Arabs say 'the State of Israel.' There cannot be a State of Israel.
Daqamseh's car was surrounded by supporters after his release Saturday night. The supporters chanted, cheered, and filmed the event as the vehicle made its way towards his village. His tribe planned to hold a large party in his village Sunday afternoon for Daqmeseh, who they call a "hero soldier."

Team Israel Manager, Jerry Weinstein

I am flabbergasted.

They did it again!

The Mensches have taken four wins straight during the tournament, thus far, after winning three in a row in the qualifying matches last September.

Team Israel, a 200 to 1 underdog to actually win the World Baseball Classic (WBC), beat 8th-ranked Cuba yesterday after taking the Netherlands last Wednesday (4 - 2) and generally whooping ass.

The guys play under manager Jerry Weinstein who has an endearing, toothpick-chewing, Pepe the Frog quality.

{Frankly, the man scares me.}

Coming into the qualifying rounds, Israel ranked a lowly 41st among WBC participating teams but went undefeated and beat Great Britain twice to qualify for tournament play. The only thing that could have made it better would have been the opportunity to beat Great Britain a third time.

If Brazil had not crushed Pakistan (10 - 0) in the preliminaries then we would have seen Team Israel versus Team Pakistan in the semifinals.

Sadly, it was not to be.

Pakistan is the only Muslim country with representation at the WBC. Unless we are pleasantly surprised, do not expect to see any other Arab or Muslim country so much as apply for the qualifying rounds for 2021. The Middle East is a baseball-benighted land and we are all the poorer for it.

The sad truth, of course, is that only Jewish Americans truly understand the game of baseball on its purest, Kabbalistic level.

Famous Jewish actor and comic Billy Crystal insists that as a child sitting in the old Yankee Stadium he saw Mickey Mantle hit a baseball so hard and high that it went up into the clouds... and simply never returned... or, at least, that is my recollection of his recollection from the Ken Burns miniseries Baseball.

I have little doubt, however, that Mantle's baseball - lo, these many decades later - is still circling the Earth and gravity will eventually erode its orbit and deliver it to precisely the spot where the House that Ruth Built once stood.

{Will wonders never cease?}

Gocheok Skydome, Seoul

Since coming into Seoul's futuristic Gochoek Skydome in Round 1 of the tournament, Israel has been unstoppable against clubs considered far better than the mensches on the benches.

They have not lost a single game.

This is pretty amazing for an outfit that was not even expected to make the tournament when they showed up in Brooklyn's MCU Park last September for the qualifying matches.

"The Jew Crew"

Part of what I love about all of this (win or no win) is that Team Israel truly is an underdog. Many of the guys - who sometimes wear t-shirts reading "Jew Crew" - have big league experience, but unlike other teams none of them are currently playing in the bigs.

The United States, ranked number 2 behind last year's winner, the Dominican Republic, has World Series veteran, and All-Star player, Buster Posey of the San Francisco Giants behind the plate.

None of them, however, aside from Team Israel, have the cosmic assistance of the "mensch on the bench"... and that makes all the difference.

Furthermore, anyone who knows anything about baseball and American Jews knows that, as Forrest Gump might put it, we go together like peas and carrots.

Throughout the twentieth-century baseball represented one of the key methods wherein first-generation Jewish boys assimilated into American culture by involving themselves in street-lot baseball games from the Bronx to the Golden Gate.

Without baseball - and its attendant character-building baseball brawls - the Jewish-American experience would have been something very different.

This will come in handy because, as Elli Wohlgelernter quips in the Jerusalem Post, "They will have a tough battle in the next round, when they face Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq simultaneously."

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

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How Arab newspapers illustrate "Jewish settlers"

The official Wafa news agency has another scoop courtesy of Ghassan Daghlas, the man who is literally paid by the Palestinian Authority itself to make up lies about Jewish settler activity and yet gets quoted by major news sources dozens of times a year even though he never backs up his accusations with any actual evidence.

This time Daghlas claims that Jews not only uprooted over 140 olive trees - something that is literally impossible without major earth moving equipment and a lot of time - but that they stole them!

How many trucks would be needed to steal over a hundred olive trees? Unless they are saplings that were just planted this past year or so, this story has zero credibility.

As most of Daghlas' fantasies have.

Which doesn't stop wire service reporters from quoting him liberally.

Of course, this absurd accusation of Jews stealing trees is all over Arab media.

And if the Jews are stealing trees, then Daghlas doesn't have to show any evidence - the evidence was stolen!

There is a difference between fake news from the Palestinian Authority's official news media and from any other media. No one (besides me and a very few others) calls them on it. So when the mainstream media swallows their lies, they have more incentive to add to the lies.

It would be so easy for a Washington Post or AP to launch an investigation into the lies of the PA's official news agency. A single story would do more for peace than a hundred anti-Israel stories. But there is no interest in exposing Arab lies, and that lack of interest in covering what would be a major story in the West feeds into the fantasy that both sides have equal credibility.

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The headline is Purim, but the rest of this article is not.

"Rabbi" Michael Lerner of Tikkun Magazine writes:

We at Beyt Tikkun have been struggling internally about how to deal with the Jewish violence and revenge that is part of the Purim story.

The question we struggle with is: Should we boycott this holiday entirely? Is there a way to challenge its hurtful parts without discrediting the legitimate joy our people feels when it is saved from the intended violence against us?
...
At a Purim celebration last year Rabbi Dev Noily presented this very moving introduction to those chapters that momentarily woke up those who had come to “just have fun” with a message that forced everyone to realize that we were talking about Jews involved in mass killing.... Please read Rabbi Dev’s valuable words.

Rabbi Dev Noily's introduction to chapter 9 of the Book of Esther:

And now, my friends, here comes the part

that, if you have one, will break your heart.

Na'hafoch na'hafoch,it's all reversed,

all turned around and gone berserk.

What's good is bad what's bad is good,

there's bloodshed where the hero stood.

Our people are spared, no one kills any Jews

and that, of course, is very good news.

If only the story could stop right here,

we'd offer thanks, we'd raise a cheer!

We'd dance and sing and shout in glee,

we'd be just who we hoped we'd be.

The Jews of Shushan would fall to their knees

with gratitude to the Source of Being.

But no, my friends, we'll have no such luck.

As the story unfolds, we think,What the F - ???

This "Rabbi Dev" and "Rabbi" Lerner don't even understand the basic plot of the Book of Esther. No, they cannot find a possible way to interpret the text in any way beyond bloodthirsty Jewish revenge.

This ridiculous poem is an introduction to Chapter 9 of Esther. Yet Chapter 8 explains exactly why the Jews were going on the offensive. It was because the king's decree that would allow his subjects to murder all the Jews was still in force (verse 5), and a royal decree cannot be reversed (verse 8). Haman's followers were sharpening their swords to murder the Jews at the very point in time that this ridiculous Tikkun "rabbi" claims that the Jews were saved.

Moreover, while the decree that Mordechai wrote would have allowed the Jews to kill not only the men but also their wives and children and to take their possessions, in chapter 9 there is no mention of any killing of women and children - it says in Shushan that 500 men were killed, and the 75,000 killed elsewhere are described only as "enemies" and "those who hated" the Jews. Furthermore, the chapter makes clear that the Jews did not take the possessions of their enemies, which again the edict would have allowed.

Why did the Jews not follow the edict allowing them to take the spoils? The answer may be because the wording of the edict in chapter 8 was meant to instill fear in the enemies of the Jews as verse 2 of chapter 9 states, "no man could withstand them; for the fear of them [the Jews] was fallen upon all the peoples."

Similarly, the wording of the edict used the word "avenge" - but the actual description of the fighting in chapter 9 does not.

There is a clear disconnect between the words of the edict and what is reported about what actually happened. How deep that disconnect is, we cannot say for sure.

What we can say is that not only are the Tikkun "rabbis" completely wrong in their assumption of Jewish bloodthirsty revenge for no reason, but the very words of Esther can be easily interpreted to say that the Jews only destroyed the hard-core enemies bent on genocide, while the others who felt the (intended) fear from the edict opted out of the civil war, and the edict was worded in a way to avoid unnecessary casualties.

Why can't Tikkun have figured out a way to interpret Esther in a way that would adhere perfectly to the Geneva Conventions as I showed here using only the plain text of the Megillah?

The answer is that, to Tikkun, the narrative of the warmongering militant Jew hell-bent on murdering civilians for no reason is too compelling for them to abandon. They aren't bending over backwards to interpret the story in a way that they can tell their children that the Jews acted properly; they are bending over backwards to tell their children that they are more moral than the savage Jews of yesterday - and today.

(h/t JW)
—

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03/11 Links: Hamas trains UNRWA pupils to be terrorists; 8 BDS 'Victories' in 2016 That Were Actually Losses

From Ian:

The BDS Movement Claimed Eight Victories in 2016. They Were All Actually Losses

One of the key tactics of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign is to make claims that are, at best, overstated—and in many cases provably false—in order to bolster their appearance of success.
For example, organizers claimed in 2010 that the American rock band the Pixies had cancelled a show in Israel due to their advocacy. In fact, the Pixies cancelled due to security concerns, and eventually played a concert in Israel in 2014. The Pixies are even planning to return to Tel Aviv for two shows this summer. Other big names to tour Israel in recent years include Alicia Keys, Lady Gaga, Bon Jovi, and the Rolling Stones.
An article on the website of the Palestinian BDS National Committee, the main BDS advocacy organization, claimed that the campaign chalked up eight impressive victories against Israel in 2016. Predictably, the claims are misleading, overstated, and often outright false.
Below is each claim, followed by an explanation of why it is wrong.

Hamas trains UNRWA pupils to become terrorists

An excerpt from an upcoming documentary on the relationship between the Hamas terrorist organization and UNRWA shows Gazan children being led into a mock terror tunnel, where they are taught how to attack an Israeli kibbutz.
"The UNRWA kids were recruited by Hamas to help build the tunnels, and then infiltrate through the tunnels," said David Bedein, the director of the Center for Near East Policy Research, which is producing the documentary.
Bedein said that Hamas has diverted international aid to construct tunnels with which to attack Israel. "At the same time, Hamas has been getting full supplies, including from Israel, for the past year, and they are able to get cement to continue building [the tunnels]."
He said that the tunnel in the video was a "model tunnel that they built" for training purposes, including the training of school children to kill Israelis.
"Hamas controls the UNRWA teacher's union, and Hamas comes into the schools and [takes the children for this training] as one of their after-school activities."

Trita Parsi’s Accusations Over Kansas Shooting Are the Least of NIAC’s Problems

Last week, Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), co-wrote an article for The Huffington Post called “Trump Didn’t Start The Anti-Iranian Fire.” In it, Parsi and NIAC fellow Tyler Cullis write about a deadly February shooting at a Kansas Applebee’s, after which the suspect, a middle-aged man named Adam Purinton, told a bartender that he’d shot “two Iraninans.” For the authors, the shooting proves that the “anti-Muslim and anti-immigration rhetoric that rode Donald J. Trump to the White House has now spilled over into fear for the physical safety and security of Iranian Americans.”
Per Parsi and Cullis, journalists, think-tankers, and policy advocates who have allegedly demonized the Islamic Republic regime also bear some responsibility for the Kansas atrocity. More than a few people on Twitter noticed that the only people the authors’ called out by name—Michael Rubin, Eli Lake, Adam Kredo, Josh Block, and David Keyes—had one curious thing in common: They are all Jews.
Parsi and Cullis argue that these five, a list that includes a Bloomberg columnist, the CEO of The Israel Project, and the English-language spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “push war with Iran in the most hyperbolic terms, all the while defaming those – most particularly, those in the Iranian-American community – who urge a peaceful resolution to the historical tensions between the two countries.” The Kansas shooting, the authors argue, was the inevitable result of this group’s allegedly warmongering work. “A decade of messaging like this, though, has now had its payday: Adam Purinton walked into a bar and shot to kill what he believed to be Iranians.”
The authors rhetorically connect five of their perceived political opponents to a hate crime without going through the effort of proving that the shooter had drawn any inspiration from their work, or even knew that these five people existed. The causal nexus between the Kansas killing and the Washington Free Beacon is left unexplained.
But these logical leaps represent the least of NIAC’s current issues, as the organization is now facing increasingly visible opposition from the constituency it claims to represent.

Naftali Bennett describes how to avoid war. @HRW's @KenRoth falsely claims he threatens civilians.

Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch tweeted this:

If Hezbollah attacks, Israeli minister vows to bomb "Lebanon’s civilians" including Shia "back to the Middle Ages." https://t.co/13XP3OjxBs pic.twitter.com/YOtZPL0PZp
— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) March 11, 2017

This is not what Bennett said.

Here is what he said:

Hunting rocket launchers during a war is almost impossible, Bennett told Haaretz this week, adding that he says this “as someone who specialized in hunting rocket launchers.”

...11 years have passed and Hezbollah has learned to deploy in a more sophisticated manner. “They moved their launchers from the nature reserves, outposts in open areas, to dense urban areas. You can’t fight rockets with tweezers. If you can’t reach the house where the launcher is, you’re not effective, and the number of houses you have to get through is enormous,” he explained.

... “Today, Hezbollah is embedded in sovereign Lebanon. It is part of the government and, according to the president, also part of its security forces. The organization has lost its ability to disguise itself as a rogue group.”

Bennett believes this should be Israel’s official stance. “The Lebanese institutions, its infrastructure, airport, power stations, traffic junctions, Lebanese Army bases – they should all be legitimate targets if a war breaks out. That’s what we should already be saying to them and the world now. If Hezbollah fires missiles at the Israeli home front, this will mean sending Lebanon back to the Middle Ages,” he said. “Life in Lebanon today is not bad – certainly compared to what’s going on in Syria. Lebanon’s civilians, including the Shi’ite population, will understand that this is what lies in store for them if Hezbollah is entangling them for its own reasons, or even at the behest of Iran.”

At the same time, he notes that this is not necessarily the plan for a future war, but instead an attempt to avoid one: “If we declare and market this message aggressively enough now, we might be able to prevent the next war. After all, we have no intention of attacking Lebanon.”

According to Bennett, if war breaks out anyway, a massive attack on the civilian infrastructure – along with additional air and ground action by the IDF – will speed up international intervention and shorten the campaign. “That will lead them to stop it quickly – and we have an interest in the war being as short as possible,” he said. “I haven’t said these things publicly up until now. But it’s important that we convey the message and prepare to deal with the legal and diplomatic aspects. That is the best way to avoid a war.”

Bennett never said he wanted to bomb civilians, but he wants to relay the message that Israel is prepared to bomb civilian infrastructure that is being used illegally by Hezbollah - which are legitimate and legal targets in war. Yet he is not saying that this should be Israel's actual war plan, but something to warn the Lebanese to understand the consequences of allowing them to essentially give their government over to Hezbollah and Iran, both of whom would gladly sacrifice Lebanese lives in their zeal to hurt Israel.

This is his plan for avoiding war. The execrable Ken Roth is framing it as if Bennett is telling the world that he wants Israel to attack civilians.

Even the leftist Haaretz doesn't spin this interview with Bennett to make him appear to be a warmonger the way Roth does. Author Amos Harel, who has written a book about the 2006 Lebanon war, praises Bennett's military positions as "complex" and says he displays a "healthy skepticism over positions taken by top defense officials, and he refuses to accept their insights as indisputable conclusions."

It is bad enough that the leader of a human rights organization is so willing to lie to denigrate Israel. Roth would no doubt argue that he doesn't single out Israel but he will expose anyone worldwide who threatens to attack civilians.

Yet only in February Hezbollah threatened to launch strikes at Israel's nuclear power plant and at ammonia tanks in Haifa, which he said could result in the deaths of 800,000 Israelis.

Civilians.

The people that Human Rights Watch pretends to care about.

Unless, dare I say it, they happen to be Israeli Jews.

Because a direct threat by the effective leader of Lebanon towards nearly a million Jews is not worth a single tweet from self-appointed arbiter of morality Ken Roth from among the 600 tweets he has written since then.

Ken Roth is an abomination.

He has turned Human Rights Watch into a joke and yet he can act with impunity since the media won't go after a "human rights" NGO.

If anyone applied the standards of morality, truth and fairness to Ken Roth that he pretends to demand from others, he would fail miserably. He is a hypocrite, a liar and openly and provably biased.

(h/t Yenta P)

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Happy Purim!

For those of you who are outside Jerusalem now, have a freilichen Purim!

(h/t JB)

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03/10 Links Pt2: The Centenary of the Balfour Declaration; Academic Forum or Anti-Semitic Farce?

From Ian:

David Collier: Bare faced lies, distortion and propaganda at the SOAS centenary talk

Last night 9/3/2017, I had an invite to two very different events. The first, an event at UCL hosted by the UCL Israel Society, with Mohammed Zoabi. The second, part of the SOAS centenary lecture series, with a talk by ‘renowned human rights lawyer’ Raja Shehadeh.
As it was, I chose to see both, an upside to the new trend of live streaming. This a tale of two people. One looking beyond the hate, the other losing himself to it. I am left asking why SOAS chose to place such a moment of recognition on pure anti-Israel slander? Academia is now blind to truth, deaf to reason and actively assisting in spreading propaganda instead of academic research or messages of hope.
Zoabi at UCL
Mohammed Zoabi is a confident young man. Very easy with the audience, and spent most of his time interacting and taking questions. Even with the reflection and confusion that being an Arab inside Israel must bring, he handles these different identities well.
Nor is Zoabi an ‘Israeli apologist’ of any sort. He is clearly moderate, open to criticism and ideologically firmly grounded. It is wrong to suggest Zoabi is a Palestinian Blumenthal or Pappe. Zoabi is no self-hater, he is someone who reaches out to both sides.
What Zoabi clearly carries is recognition that Israel is his state, that much of what is being pushed around by the anti-Israel activists is based on lies and distortion. He recognises both the freedom he experiences and the difficulties that conflict introduces to civil society. Like me, he identifies BDS as problematic and based on false narrative.
Those present clearly enjoyed the event.
Shehadeh at SOAS
Then there was Raja Shehadeh. To understand Raja, you only need to listen to the first 3 minutes of his talk. He begins by outlining how his father was involved in an attempt to make peace with Israel in 1967. A peace proposal set on the lines of the 1947 partition. A deal supported by ‘50’ Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
He speaks of its rejection as if Israel flatly refusing to return to the November 1947 position because 50 Palestinians asked nicely was extreme or irrational. As if the Arabs had proposed something valid and Israel, the aggressor had refused. Remember, this is not about a return to the 1949 armistice position, but the lines of the November 1947 partition plan, the Arabs had all flatly rejected (that led to the conflict in the first place).
And then to press home how Israel doesn’t want peace, Raja said this:
“As time passed, most of the PLO supporters of the plan were assassinated by Israel, amongst whom were my father (Aziz Shehadeh), Issam Sartawi, Said Hammami, Naem Hader (sp?), Azadin Chalak (sp)? Now 50 years later it is what the PLO and most of the countries of the world are calling for. How much suffering would we all have been spared, had gone through then.”
Except none of that is true. His father, was killed with a knife by unknown assailants in 1985. Issam Sartawi was assassinated in 1983, in an attack claimed by the ‘Abu Nidal’ Organization. Said Hammami was assassinated in 1978, also by ‘Abu Nidal’. The last two names may have met similar fate, but I was unable to identify them.
So all murdered, but not by Israel. They were killed by other Arabs for not being extreme enough. The truth is, that like everywhere around Israel, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt and, Libya, political opponents have a short shelf life. Being moderate and placing yourself against radical terror organisations, tends to impact on your ability to stay alive. How on earth can Raja stand on a platform at a London university event and calmly blame Israel for Arab clan wars, Arab extremism, the lack of democracy and their inability to live with those that think differently?

A disgrace to human rights

Human rights organizations have called for the United Nation’s secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, to add the IDF to the blacklist of states and armed organizations responsible for serial injury to children during armed conflict, alongside brutal terrorist and guerrilla organizations such as ISIS and al-Qaida. This attests to the international community’s profound misunderstanding of the difficulty sovereign states face in low-intensity war (fighting terrorist/guerrilla organizations) while minimizing the collateral damage.
For years the State of Israel has endured a deep lack of understanding regarding its war against terrorist organizations. A prominent case in point is the UN’s Goldstone Report that was published after Operation Cast Lead in 2009. This report served as a “moral earthquake” as far as Israel was concerned, as it stated that Israel had a policy of deliberately harming civilian noncombatants.
In an op-ed published two years later (April 2011) in The Washington Post, Goldstone retracted this statement and admitted that “if I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”
Upon retraction, Goldstone argued that the international laws of war should be implemented by nonstate organizations, such as Hamas, to the same extent in which they should be implemented by the armies of sovereign states. According to Goldstone, lack of implementation of the international laws of war during warfare should lead to investigation of the violating party.
This assertion is compelling testimony to the lack of understanding that the terrorist organizations, such as Hamas which the IDF is fighting, have an entirely different value system from that which is acceptable to Israel as a democratic country. These organizations tend not to take human life into consideration – not the lives of their own activists, or the lives of the population in whose name they are fighting, or the lives of the enemy.