Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, August 08, 2017

The knock on the door (Forest Rain)

Israelis are generally friendly, warm and happy to have guests over. You don’t have to call in advance, just show up and knock on the door.

But there is also a different kind of knock on the door. One that is never welcome. In fact, it is every family’s nightmare.

Last night a family in Haifa was getting ready to go to bed. Galit and her four children ages 6-14, were going through their habitual motions, the same as any other evening. The only thing different was that Galit’s childhood sweetheart, husband, father of her children, was away in the south of the country, on reserve [military] duty.

Dinner, baths, possibly a TV program or a movie. The things every family does.

There was no forewarning, nothing to raise alarm or concern. Dudi hadn’t gone off to fight in a war, of course he would come back… The news that a military helicopter crashed would not have reached his family. The news was only released this morning.

One moment life is completely normal and then, a knock on the door changes things forever.

Can you imagine that knock on the door, when no one is expected to show up? Looking out, you see military uniforms and somber faces. Your heart begins to race. This is the experience you have heard about from others. The one experience you never dared think about, horror of horrors, the event you never want to have happen to you. But it is happening. This time, the nightmare is yours.

Do you dare open the door? If you let them inside you know your life will be shattered. You don’t want to hear what they came to tell you. At the same time, you know that slamming the door in their face will not undo the reality that is about to step in to your home.

Did Galit hope they were going to tell her that her Dudi had been injured? Were her children next to her when she was notified?

If your child is asleep when you find out that your husband is dead and will never come home again, do you wake up the child or do you let the child sleep to give him or her a few more hours of innocence?

The IDF never leaves a bereaved family to cope alone. A trained team goes to notify the family face to face. They are the ones who take the brunt of the family’s initial shock and all the emotions that rise up as a result – anything can happen from tears, rage, to physical collapse that necessitates emergency medical treatment.

I have heard so many stories of this awful moment. People who opened the door and understanding what they were about to be told, instinctively slammed the door, as if that would keep the awful news away. One mother told me that when she was notified, she fainted. When she revived she found herself lying on her couch but it seemed like she was in a black pit with demons pushing her down. She couldn’t get up, couldn’t hear anything that was happening around her.

I will never forget the teenager who described how the night before they were notified that his brother had been killed, he and his mother felt physically ill. The next day he was sitting in the window of their home and he saw the uniformed team walking to their door. He flew out of the house, screaming at them to go away, to not come any nearer to his home. He did not want to hear what he knew they were going to tell him. He did not want his mother to have to face them. He screamed at them in rage. They calmed him, hugged him and took him inside to speak with the rest of his family.

What a horrible job.

It takes unfathomable depths of spirit to be capable of embracing and containing the pain of families ripped apart.

I did not know Maj. David “Dudi” Zohar or his family but he is (was) a well-known figure in Haifa. He was a Hebrew Reali School alumnus. His four children attend the Reali school (the same school mine attended). The school has a Remembrance Wall for each student / graduate killed during IDF duty or in terror attacks. Dudi’s will be the 302^nd name added to the wall.

Dudi Zohar was a highly appreciated figure in Elbit Systems where he worked for the last 13 years. Just a few short hours before the tragic helicopter crash Dudi was filmed for an internal project in Elbit, geared to support and encourage leadership. He explained his perspective on camera, saying: “Talents are a good starting point. No one is born to be on top. Those who attain the top are born talented but also must work very hard. Talents are the minimal starting point. After that, everything depends on work, guidance and faith… a leader must be brave and have enough daring. His [or her] responsibility is to coach others.”

I didn’t know Dudi but, in a way, I do know him. He is family I never met. His are the qualities that built this country, raised up new leaders and protected our future. He served his people in the IAF and in civilian life. His death bites chunks out of the lives of many who will continue to live but will always have a gap where the man they once knew should have been. The husband, the father, the friend, the advisor, the mentor…. Gone.

I don’t know Galit or her children but I can’t stop thinking about the knock on their door. My heart aches for their pain.

And I hope to God that knock never comes to my door.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

08/08 Links Pt2: Ryan Bellerose: Unassailable; Why Is The News Fake? Visit France see a play on the Toulouse Jew-murderer

From Ian:

Ryan Bellerose: Unassailable

Pro-Israel advocates and activists need to understand that we do not have to say things like “ Jews are indigenous BUT….” Or “ The Arabs have rights too….” Of course the Arabs have rights of longstanding presence but those rights are not the same as indigenous rights.
The indigenous argument is important, because its airtight. The only arguments against it come from people who don’t even understand indigenous rights or indigenous status. The people who say “but the Arabs are indigenous” are only doing so because they have been force-fed false history and lies. The Arabs are indigenous… TO ARABIA, the Hejaz where their language, religion, customs and genetics all come from. If they self-identify as Arabs then they cannot self-identify as indigenous to non-Arab lands and that means any land outside the Hejaz, because truthfully the Arab world should be called the “Arabized” world. Indigeneity is site specific – Jews are not indigenous to the entire Middle East any more than Arabs are, any more than Amazigh are or Bedouin. It’s time to start calling out false narratives, not empowering them.
Jews can trace their lineages back several thousand years. They can show the genesis of their spiritual mode and method and trace it back to Israel, their evolution as a people, their cultural and linguistic coalescence, all of it comes right back to Israel, every path, every creek and stream, every hill, all have a story attached, that’s how you know the Jews are home. How can you expect that to be balanced with a group of people who started showing up in the 7th century and never actually built anything other than some scabby villages and a few mosques?
So get off the fence, you don’t need to be – besides some of you have been fence-sitting so long your ass must be getting sore by now. Take a side, take a stand, because we are the good guys and we are tired of having to carry your ass. No more virtue signaling, no more weak and vacillating arguments that give equal time to the enemy. It’s time to tell the truth.
Jews are indigenous to Israel. Jews are from Judea, Arabs are indigenous to Arabia. It’s not complex, it’s not fair, it’s not balanced, it’s simple unfettered truth.

IsraellyCool: Why Is The News Fake?

Have you ever wondered what I know about how the News Wires like AP, Reuters and Agence France Press (AFP) operate which leads me to be so contemptuous of most of their coverage. This is the first time I’ve told this story in public.
When Matti Friedman first came out and exposed the goings on at Associated Press (AP) in Israel, I recognised the pattern. I had a chat with him and told him the same story I told above: he had never been to the APTN offices in London and wasn’t working directly with the video side but as soon as I told him he started to rethink about things he’d seen while working at AP in Israel.
His original whistle blowing article had put the finger on the problem completely: there is a filter through which the news passes. Stories painting Israel in a positive light very often get blocked, negative stories pass. Negative stories about Palestinian leadership almost never see the light of day.
If you want to see a written version, I first put this down in 2006. It was republished in 2010 largely unchanged. If I have to stress one point about what I saw at the offices of AP TV News in London it is this: why are over half the staff I saw working in a London office speaking and working almost exclusively in Arabic?

Melanie Phillips: Lionising the fringe elements

The key fact about Jackie Walker, however, which has merely been reinforced by her Edinburgh travesty, is that she is troublingly obsessed by Israel and the Jews. In any normal universe, such a person would be treated as a (truly) fringe wacko of repulsive views and ignored. Instead, she is lionised. At Edinburgh she received a standing ovation (ok, there were only about 30 people in the audience, but still) with a banner fixed to the front of the stage reading: “Anti-Semitism is a crime. Anti-Zionism is a duty”.
Across the Atlantic a not dissimilar scene was being enacted by the far left Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) at a convention in Chicago last Saturday. That passed a BDS motion, with 90 percent approval of the 697 delegates from 49 states, to wild applause while participants chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. In other words they were chanting their support for the extermination of Israel. This is, of course, what the BDS movement is all about.
You can watch that horrible scene here.
As with the British Labour Party’s Jew-baiting and Israel-bashing bigots, the issue that should cause such concern is the tacit or overt support for such views – or at the very least, the conspicuous failure to confront them.
The DSA claim that they now have about 25,000 dues-paying members nationwide, up from 8,000 in recent years. A similar rapid increase is true of Labour’s far-left Momentum caucus. The real problem, however, is the failure by the Labour Party to kick Momentum out, and the silence of the Democratic party in the US over the DSA spectacle – for even though the DSA is a separate organisation, this is the general direction in which the Democratic party itself has gone.
The deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee Keith Ellison, who has been associated in the past with the virulently anti-Jewish Nation of Islam, has made a number of questionable remarks including recorded comments at a 2010 private fundraiser in which he said that American foreign policy was “governed” by Israeli interests.
In other words, both Jackie Walker in Britain and the DSA in America are holding a mirror up to the so-called moderate left. Like Caliban in The Tempest, those self-described centrists may be recoiling from what they see in that glass – but it’s their own reflection from which they are flinching.

Ma'an publishes, with a straight face, an article by a self-described international law expert named Samir Dweikat describing exactly why Jews have no right to buy land in British Mandate Palestine under international law.

The "logic" is fairly bizarre, but the argument seems to go like this: After the Ottoman Empire dissolved, the Palestinian Arabs gained legal ownership of everything from the river to the sea (even though these boundaries were created by the British and French.)

The laws that governed the area of what became British Mandate Palestine were -Palestinian Arab laws!

And Palestinian law does not allow Jews to purchase land in Palestine!

QED.

The fact that there was no Palestinian Arab entity or Palestinian Arab laws, in 1918 are of little importance to this expert on international law.

"Palestinian law" which apparently governs international law says that Jews have no right to own "any inch of the land...from the river to the sea." Anyone who sells land to a Jew is a traitor and the sale is invalid, and the Jew must return the land. Dweikat reiterates that Jews are not allowed to own even a grain of sand.

Under international law.

Ma'an actually thinks that this argument, made without a single reference to a single actual law, is weighty enough to publish.

Which tells you a lot about Palestinian media altogether.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

An op-ed in Al Hayat says that Israel's support for persecuted minorities in the Muslim world is really the Jews' attempts to destroy Arab and Muslim unity.

You can't make this stuff up.

Salah Hassan writes that Israel has been wooing religious and ethnic minorities in Arab countries, under the pretext of protecting them from persecution by Muslims. He concentrates on how Israel is destroying Iraq by supporting minority population there.

It started with Israel bringing Iraqi Jews to Israel in the 1950s. Then Israel went after the Baha'i, who were concentrated (and persecuted) in Iran and Baghdad, and who now are based out of Haifa.

Israel has been cultivating relationships with the Kurds for decades as well.

The final straw, apparently, was the Israeli Knesset hosting Nadia Murad, the Yazidi survivor of ISIS atrocities, last month. Once again the Jews are trying to fragment the Arab world by turning the Yazidis against the Muslims who are raping and beheading them.

Hassan is also concerned over some Jews who are making noises to save the minority Mandeans in Iraq.

This is all, we read, "part of [Israel's] work on the permanent fragmentation of the Arab countries. This is to complete the work of Daesh [ISIL}"

Of course, the idea that Arabs and Muslims just have to treat their minority groups as human beings is not part of the discussion.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

08/08 Links Pt1: Arab Tour Guides Slander Israel at Yad Vashem; It’s Not the Settlements, Stupid

From Ian:

Palestinian tour guides accused of anti-Israel 'brainwashing'

Palestinian and Israeli Arab tour guides working in Israel are repeating incendiary falsehoods to foreign tourists they take to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem -- including the refrain common among Palestinians that "Israel is doing the same thing to us as the Germans did to the Jews in the Holocaust."
The Israeli Tourism Ministry grants Palestinian tour guides certificates in accordance with the 1994 Paris Protocol of the Oslo Accords, which mandates that Israel allow Palestinian guides, certified by the Palestinian Authority, to guide tour groups in Israel.
However, several Israeli tour guides have revealed that Palestinian tour guides make anti-Israel assertions, not only at Yad Vashem and elsewhere in Israel, but also during other tours, such as those conducted by the Israeli Tourism Ministry to Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
"The problem is mainly with the Palestinian guides, but sometimes also with Israeli Arab guides," says O., an Israeli tour guide. "The guide usually takes a group of tourists on one- to 10-day trips. ... What he says, and how he says it, will shape their opinions of the place and the people."
Tour guide Zvi Harpaz says he has heard the Palestinians slander Israel at Yad Vashem on numerous occasions.
"This is known in the tourism world, and this phenomenon has been around for many years. I myself heard a guide say that exact sentence to a group of American Catholic tourists, and I am not alone," Harpaz says.

Two Rising Stars of the Democratic Party Are Courting the Anti-Israel Left

Senators Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand, both of whom are expected to seek the presidential nomination in 2020, have just seized opportunities to shore up their anti-Israel bona fides, according to Jonathan Tobin. Booker, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, voted against the Taylor Force Act—which would condition U.S. aid for the Palestinian Authority on its cessation of payments to terrorists and their families—while Gillibrand made clear her opposition to the Israel Anti-Boycott Act. Tobin writes:
Both [senators] were once rock-solid supporters of Israel. But both have other priorities these days—they are thinking about running for president in 2020. Their problem is that no one who plans to compete in future Democratic primaries can ignore the growing power of their party’s left wing, which has grown increasingly hostile to Israel. The influence of the far left is the only thing that might explain why Booker and Gillibrand are presenting themselves to their party’s base as less than fully supportive of Israel. . . .
Booker—considered very close to the Jewish community [while serving as mayor of Newark], before he was elevated to the Senate—was one of four committee Democrats (out of ten) to oppose the Taylor Force Act. His explanation was that he wanted the aid money to be held in escrow for more than a year. A more likely reason is that he is signaling to the left that he wants to be considered sympathetic to the Palestinians. Gillibrand’s abandonment of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act was just as telling. . . .

Four US Senators and how they betrayed Taylor Force

Somewhere I read their explanations and their excuses, but so much of it was gobbledygook that it made no sense to me.
Nor would it make sense to anyone who has an understanding heart. There is nothing vague or subtle about Abbas’ program.
His program calls for the murder of every Israeli and every Jew, else why the reward?
Taylor Force, a US Army Veteran, was not Jewish (so far as I know) but on a visit to Israel last year he was murdered by an Arab whose family now live wealthy from the PA pension. That’s what sparked the legislation. The only question is – what took so long?
Next question – who could vote against a bill that asks nothing more than humanity and decency?
Perhaps Murphy, Udall and Merkley would like another try explaining themselves, and as for Booker, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach feels “betrayed” by his “friend.”
The advice from Pirkei Avot (“Ethics of the Fathers”) is to “seek no intimacy with the ruling powers.”
They will use you but when it counts they will let you down – and they did it again last week, times four.

For the ninth consecutive year, Saudi Arabia announced that it would host a thousand family members of Palestinian "martyrs" for Hajj.

King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud ordered the hosting on Monday.

The Minister of Islamic Affairs Sheikh Saleh bin Abdulaziz bin Mohammed Al-Sheikh said that the offer comes from the Muslim and Arab brotherhood held by the King for Palestine and its people.

Al-Sheikh stressed that the Palestinian people deserve all the respect and appreciation due to their great sacrifices to preserve Jerusalem and the land of Palestine, which is an Arab Islamic land.

He pointed out that the Kingdom sought in all circumstances to obtain the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and achieve their hopes and aspirations, and harnessed their potential at all levels to reach those goals.

These statements make the much heralded Saudi-pushed "Arab Peace Plan" look more like a stage towards the destruction of Israel rather than a permanent peace, if all of Israel is considered to be forever an Arab Islamic land.

This also makes it look like, while Saudi Arabia has been leaning towards declaring Hamas a terror group, it doesn't consider all Palestinian terrorists to be terrorists - only the ones associated with either Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood.

Fatah terrorists are heroes.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Ma'an News published "the story of a martyr" in which a teenager who decided to die while attacking Israeli police two years ago is described in poetic terms filled with antisemitism. It was written by a friend of his.

Excerpts:

16 year old Laith al-Khalidi has been a refugee in his homeland since he opened his eyes to this world...

It was his dream to become a lawyer one day, so he can defend his cause and his homeland Palestine, and he loved life and studied to be an Oud player, with a vivid and lively smile...

On Friday, July 31st, Laith awoke with his family to eat breakfast together, as usual, and heard the shocking news in Palestine, of a baby that was burned by the hands of the lowly monkeys. He addressed his mother saying: "Why did they burn him?

Two tears fell from Laith's eye to announce the death of an innocent child inside him and the birth of a brave man.

Al-Laith went with his father and his brother to pray Friday, and after the prayer they returned home, the sorrow and hatred filled his heart and hatred of the pigs and monkeys had reached its peak, as he opened his account on the social networking sites, and published a picture of the burning of Dawabsha, Sometimes thoughts come to him like arrows...What can he do? Every day the enemy shames women, kills children and humiliates the elderly. Laith realized here that the hour had come to take revenge for every Palestinian. His mind did not cease to fantasize like a united fist.

He and his friends went to the Atara checkpoint north of Ramallah. He came out of the house angrily and echoed his words: "I am not afraid of the bullet. Come, let me be a martyr." "We must burn them like they burned the baby." ...The last stone he threw after a crack inside him the voice of crying for him and his mother and his father and his brother Ahmada , "God bless you for the baby to me."

A few seconds later, with the sound of bullets, a soldier fired his treacherous shot. Laith greeted it with an open chest and with all his heart, ...pounding the chrysanthemums in his chest
.
It was said to be a butterfly shot, any label that assassinated the beautiful tomorrow as the butterfly !!! The earth is saturated with it until it is plucked, and from it the flowers were drawn to her, and green fields were opened on that holy body.

.. O Laith, the most beautiful story I have ever heard in my life, the legend that will shine in our veins and will remain on the banks of our pains, the flower of Jasmine will still embrace the strings of the warm sun, and will not forget your gift on the teeth of a child like lion, The sky of the camp, its crescent overlooking its land, its walls painted with pain, everything in existence will miss you. The sun, and the color of your skin, was painted in a color of freedom.

If this is not encouragement for young Palestinians to become "martyrs," I don't know what is.

Yet Ma'an keeps getting funded by European NGOs and governments.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

1959 Jordanian guidebook erases Jews from history, all Jews since King David are "occupiers"

The "Guide to the West Bank of Jordan" was a 1959 booklet, written for Christian pilgrims by Jordanian Christians Ghattas J. Jahshan and Maheeba Akra Jahshan:

Almost certainly the book was written in conjunction with the Jordanian government as this full page photo of King Hussein indicates.

The book does everything is can to erase Jews from the history of Judea.

So while Kings David and Solomon are reluctantly mentioned, King David merely "occupies" Jerusalem and Jews are excluded from its history.

The Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem is the "ex-Jewish Quarter" complete with a new name that Jordan created for it to erase any Jewish history:

The Mount of Olives is described without mentioning the tens of thousands of Jews buried there.

Even the Kotel is mentioned without mentioning anything about Jews.

Its map of the area calls Israel the "Occupied Area of Palestine:"

Notice that the West Bank isn't "occupied Palestine." It isn't Palestine at all. Only Israel is.

Yet the book couldn't erase the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount altogether, calling it "Mt. Moriah." This is before Muslims succeeded in telling the world that the entire Mount is "Al Aqsa."

(h/t Josh K)

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Another universal human right that Mahmoud Abbas is against

Every month or so, religious Jews flock to Joseph's Tomb in Nablus to pray. They do this in the middle of the night, under heavy Israeli police protection, because otherwise they would be lynched.

Under existing agreements, the PA is supposed to allow access to holy sites under its control. The Interim Agreement says, 'Both sides shall respect and protect the religious rights of Jews, Christians, Muslims and Samaritans concerning the protection and free access to the holy sites as well as freedom of worship and practice.'

Here is how the PA's official Wafa news agency describes the latest pilgrimage by religious Jews, who are willing to stay for hours in a virtual prison where walking outside could get them killed, in order to get a chance to pray at Joseph's Tomb:

Palestinians confront Jewish settlers in Nablus, two injured

NABLUS, August 7, 2017 (WAFA) – At least two Palestinians were injured by rubber-coated metal bullets during clashes that erupted in Nablus in the northern West Bank early Monday after hundreds of Jewish settlers flocked to Joseph’s Tomb on the outskirts of the city.

Palestinian security sources told WAFA that an Israeli army unit gave cover to hundreds of extremist settlers who came to Joseph’s Tomb near Balata refugee camp to hold religious rituals prompting clashes between the Israeli soldiers and local Palestinian youths.

In Arabic, the Jews were said to have "stormed" and "broken in" to the site.

According to Palestinians, Jews who want to pray at a holy site are provocative settlers. Their very existence "prompts clashes."

The PA is against freedom of religion to Jews. If it wasn't for the IDF, Jews would be banned from visiting the site altogether.

The way they treat Joseph's Tomb is how they would treat any other important Jewish site that they insist should be under their control, which happens to include every single major Jewish historical and religious site.

Anyone who thinks that there can be peace with the Palestinians needs to explain exactly how these tolerant, peaceful people would treat the Jews who want to pray at Jewish holy sites. And feel free to bring examples from the tolerance of the Muslims when they controlled those sites under Ottoman and Jordanian rule, as well as how the PA treats Joseph's Tomb today.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

08/07 Links Pt2: Bolt: Telling Jews they are too dangerous as neighbours; Anti-Semitism is an integral part of European culture

From Ian:

Andrew Bolt: Telling Jews they are too dangerous as neighbours

Australia is shamed. A NSW court last week banned construction of a synagogue at Bondi, to save locals from getting accidentally hurt if the Jews are shot or bombed.
After this decision by the Land and Environment Court, what next? Send Jews back to the ghettos to keep us safe?
What a victory for the jihadists trying to kill them.
This disgrace started when the Friends of Refugees from Eastern Europe decided to build a synagogue on tennis courts at Wellington St, Bondi.
Waverley Council, which ironically includes several Jews, resisted, worried at first by a design with apartments at the back.
That design was then modified; a planned blast wall — a defence against car bombs — was made smaller and less obtrusive.
And when Waverley Council still failed to approve the project, FREE appealed to the Land and Environment Court.
The council now claims it was the court alone that rejected the appeal, on the grounds of the danger to the neighbours.
But Commissioner Graham Brown made clear in his findings that the council’s barrister had queried the “suitability of the site having regard to impact on safety and security ‘of future users of the synagogue, nearby residents, motorists and pedestrians’.”

Anti-Semitism is an integral part of European culture.

The level of anti-Semitism in the Visegrad countries differs. In 2014, an ADL study asked 11 basic questions concerning classic anti-Semitic attitudes in a number of countries. It found that 45% of Poles harbor anti-Semitic attitudes. In Hungary the figure is 41%, and in the Czech Republic 13%. No data is available for Slovakia. When asked if Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust, 62% of Poles responded yes, with 61% of Hungarians agreeing. 44% of Czech citizens answered affirmatively to the same question.
In 2004, I interviewed Mark Sofer, then Deputy Director General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. At that time the Visegrad countries and several others had just joined the EU. He said: "Conventional wisdom tells us that the accession of these countries to the EU is positive for Israel. For once, conventional wisdom may well be correct." He has indeed been proven correct. These and other central European countries often support Israel in a frequently politically hostile EU. They are also important for Israeli investors.
Another reason these countries are important not only for Israel but also for European Jewry is that they oppose immigration. The immigrants are to a large extent Muslims from the Middle East. Brussels and the leaders of European countries know well that most Muslim immigrants have been indoctrinated with extreme anti-Semitic propaganda from childhood. An advisor to the European court wants it to reject the challenge by Hungary and Slovakia against the EU European council decision that EU members must take in hundreds of asylum-seekers.
Yet the EU leaders do not care. The decent thing would have been to vet Muslims immigrating into Europe so that these so-called liberal democracies would not have admitted anti-Semitic immigrants. As this is not the case, the policy of the Visegrad countries not to receive immigrants is preferable. In this way in future at least a few European countries where Muslim anti-Semitic hatemongers will not play a prominent role.

Palestinian Propaganda Is Infiltrating US Public Schools

Six years ago, a teenager in Newton, Massachusetts — Shiri Pagliuso — asked her father if it was true that Israel tortures and murders women activists in the Palestinian resistance movement.
Then a high school freshman, Shiri had learned the information from her textbook — the Arab World Studies Notebook, a 540-page volume so riddled with unabashed bias that it had garnered a scathing 30-page report from the American Jewish Committee (AJC).
Back in 2011, Shiri’s father — Tony Pagliuso — wasn’t yet aware of the AJC’s report. But he knew outright propaganda when he saw it.
He contacted his daughter’s teacher, the head of the high school’s history department, the principal, and eventually the superintendents — who all defended the Arab World Studies Notebook as essential for sharpening critical thinking skills. They also praised the book for providing a “balanced perspective” and an “Arab point of view.”
Pagliuso realized that he was being stonewalled, which got him thinking: If he looked at Shiri’s other course materials, what other dreadful stuff would he find?
Determined to expose the extent of the problem, a bitter multi-year battle ensued that pitted Pagliuso — who was soon joined by a group of other parents and Newton residents — against a shockingly hostile school district.
Together, the parents and residents fought to get school officials to acknowledge their legitimate concerns, provide access to all the curriculum materials as required by law, and to pull the Arab World Studies Notebook and other academically unsuitable materials.
Now, in a new study by CAMERA (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting), researcher Steven Stotsky carefully traces how these partisan materials — many with scant scholarly value — seeped into a nationally prominent public school system.

Did I ever tell you about my dinner with Tuvia Tenenbom?

Tuvia is a bestselling author that I've reviewed twice here. He writes in a very entertaining style. I like Tuvia!

I was invited to a dinner party about a month ago hosted by Phyllis Chesler in her apartment. The food was great and the guests were even more so. One of them was Tuvia, who is a lot like Phyllis in important ways.

Phyllis is one of the pioneers of the modern women's movement. However, she has become disillusioned with her old friends who have now become anti-Zionist and anti-Israel. Phyllis, no fool, knows first hand how dangerous Islam is to feminism and how feminism and Zionism fit together naturally.

In other words, both Phyllis and Tuvia care little about political correctness. They care about the truth. That's why I like them.

Over a delicious dinner, Tuvia asks me why I didn't review his book about his travels through America. I tell him that if he sends me a review copy, I'd be happy to! I have a weak spot for free books, just like Tuvia has a weak spot for good food and honest people no matter who they are or what they believe.

During the course of the evening, Tuvia tries to wheedle out of me my real name. My anonymity is almost a shtick now, but I refuse to tell it to him. He keeps trying. He asks the server to pour me liquor. He asks me other questions to trap me to tell it to him.

I realize fairly soon, having read his work, that he won't give up until he gets the answer. I also realize that I am giving him my address to send the book to, so he can figure out my name anyway! So I tell him my name, knowing that he would like it. He does.

After I review his book, Tuvia emails me asking me if I'll review his brand new book, Hello Refugees!, about his travels throughout Germany to dig up information about the huge wave of Muslim refugees that were admitted there. I am skeptical about whether this fits into the general theme of the blog, but he writes back to me and says:

It’s about a people who not long ago were very busy cremating Jews and are now quite busy trying to impress the world that they the best human beings world-wide, so that can stand tall and tell the Jews what they really think of them. Is this not an Elder's cup of tea?

I agree it is my cup of tea and in no time the book arrives at my doorstep.

Tuvia writes in an entertaining way, first person and present tense. His style, both in writing and interviewing, is knowingly naive. But Tuvia is quite smart and he a skilled interviewer who can almost always get past the soundbites to find out what his subject really thinks. Sometimes he employs subterfuge to get there.

We are traveling along with him as he takes his rental car from city to city in Germany, speaking to any refugees he can find and sneaking in to their refugee camps/housing. In general, these places are guarded by good German guards who will not let in any Westerners or any reporters. Tuvia knows Arabic, and he convinces the refugees he meets to let him in so they can tell him their stories.

Tuvia genuinely likes his Arab friends, and he is genuinely horrified at the conditions of most of the places they are staying. The Germans are happy to allow these refugees into their country but didn't plan very well how they would be housed. So groups that have hated each other for centuries are thrown together, where in at least one place they spend the evenings knifing each other.

Nice!

Tenenbom also speaks to German officials, from the left and the right.

One question he asks every German he meets is, why are the Germans so much more welcoming of these refugees than any other European country? The answer, no matter whom he asks, is the same: Because of Adolf. The Germans do not want anyone to think that they are still Nazis and they want to show the world how progressive and open-minded and open-hearted they are so everyone will love them.

There is another fairly consistent pattern among the German leftists he meets. They like to bring up, often unprompted, how evil Israel is. They'll throw the word "Gaza" in the conversation even if they don't know Tenenbom is Jewish. They want the world to know not only that they are progressive and welcoming, but also that they are better than those Israeli Jews whose grandparents they gassed to death.

Another surprising bit comes when Tuvia interviews the most hated right-wing Germans, who are reviled as today's Nazis. Every single one says that they support giving asylum to people who are genuinely fleeing persecution and war, for example in Syria. They want to allow entry to people who would be killed in an instant if they returned to their homes.

The German Right is more liberal than many centrist Americans.

But this doesn't stop them from being spit upon, hounded, and regarded as evil incarnate by the good Germans who are so proud of how they have transcended the nastiness of the past and now treat their Muslims better than they treated their Jews. Sure they are still in camps, with inadequate medicine and plumbing and beds, but they aren't dead! And besides, the Jews are acting horribly in Israel now, so the Germans can feel good about themselves.

In fact, many of the refugees that Tuvia interviews are economic "refugees," looking for a better life in Europe. They aren't in danger. They want to marry blonde German women.

The good German liberals aren't so liberal as they are self-righteous. They don't really care about the condition of their Muslim guests, but they want everyone to know that they are really good people today, and not like their own ancestors. (East Germans don't have the same complex, Tuvia notes.)

Hello, Refugees! is an entertaining read. While it isn't about Jews and Israel, in many ways it explains a great deal about how Jews and Israelis are treated today. But most of all, as always, Tenenbom shows in his deceptively simple style that the truth is far more complex than any of the intellectuals can understand.

(If you didn't notice, I tried to mimic Tenenbom's writing style here. With mixed results.)

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Vile propaganda and incitement from American Muslims for Palestine (Petra Marquardt-Bigman)

By Petra Marquardt-Bigman

Maybe I’m late, but I recently discovered “American Muslims for Palestine.” It’s not a particularly prominent organization: it was founded in 2006; its Twitter account has some 6,600 followers, while the Facebook page – which describes the outfit as a “Public & Government Service in Falls Church, Virginia” – has some 15K followers. I’d love to know which government is behind this “service”…

In any case, the main “service” offered at the time of this writing on Twitter is a frantic effort to promote the hashtag #HonorRasmea in support of convicted supermarket bomber and US immigration fraudster Rasmea Odeh. I have to confess that it strikes me as not terribly prudent when groups that surely oppose restrictions on Muslim immigration to the US cheer a convicted terrorist like Odeh – though I guess the Trump administration will only be too happy to have this kind of opponents.

Consider this tweet: “If more people were like her, we would live in a more just world #HonorRasmea and come to her farewell.” Yeah, if more people bombed supermarkets full of Jewish shoppers and then sneaked into the US by lying about their terrorist past, it would be really great, wouldn’t it.

Another “service” provided recently by American Muslims for Palestine was a demonstration with “Friday prayers outside Israeli embassy;” the demonstrators were mobilized with the blatant lie “AQSA UNDER ATTACK” – with “Aqsa” referring to the entire Temple Mount.

Just how low American Muslims for Palestine will go is nicely illustrated in a slideshow that is featured on the group’s website under the title “Jerusalem in the crosshairs.”

We learn that it all started in December 1917, when the British marched into Jerusalem, “ending hundreds of years of Ottoman rule of Jerusalem, ushering in an era of colonization and dispossession. Despite Palestinians’ best efforts, the Judaization of Jerusalem has been ongoing since this period and exacerbated after the June 1967 war.”

Right – who wouldn’t be sentimental about the good old days of “Ottoman rule of Jerusalem,” when the city became the ‘backwater of a dying empire’ – but at least non-Muslims “lived under numerous restrictions” and were “subject to special taxes” that had to be paid “both to the Turks and the local Moslem authorities.” Glorious!!!

And naturally, when such glorious times end and non-Muslims, especially Jews, are no longer treated as second- or third-class citizens, rampant “Judaization” sets in. Horrific!!!

The slides are full of distortions and outright lies, which are all too obviously meant to incite and justify Muslim rage and terrorism.

The slide for June 7, 1967 is entitled: “Israeli forces occupy Al Aqsa;” the text mentions the raising of the Israeli flag on the Dome of the Rock – but not that the flag was quickly taken down; it also claims that Israeli soldiers “burned the Quran,” prevented worshippers from praying and confiscated the keys. Needless to say, there is no slide explaining that, in a concession that may have no precedent in history, Israel quickly handed control of Judaism’s holiest site back to the Muslim Wakf.

The intentionally misleading use of “Al Aqsa” for all of the Temple Mount in many of the slides clearly serves to add fuel to the fires of religious passions; one example is the slide for January 28, 1976, which asserts: “Israeli Supreme Court rules that Jews have the right to pray in Al Aqsa.” The next slide claims that “Members of the extremist Temple Mount movement storm Al Aqsa and raise the Israeli flag with the Torah.” The accompanying image is taken from a 2015 Daily Mail article about renovations at the Dome of the Rock and shows the shrine with two regular Israeli flags (without Torah!!!) in the foreground, i.e. clearly not on the Temple Mount, let alone the Al Aqsa mosque.

No less vile than the incitement propagated by American Muslims for Palestine are the justifications offered for the murderous Al Aqsa intifada and the more recent “stabbing intifada.”

Since American Muslims for Palestine prominently emphasize that they want “to educate the American public and media about issues related to Palestine and its rich cultural and historical heritage,” it’s a pity that the historic Palestinian leader who clearly inspires their efforts gets no mention in the slideshow. But at least Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas knows how to honor this important Palestinian hero: he has repeatedly paid homage to Haj Amin al-Husseini (a.k.a. “Hitler’s Mufti”), praising him for having “sponsored the struggle from the beginning.”

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

08/07 Links Pt1: Weakening Palestinian rejectionism; Arabs marginalize the Palestinian issue

From Ian:

PA minister defends payments deemed incentives to murder by US senators

Reuters quoted Sen. Bob Corker, the committee’s Republican chairman, as saying he hoped it would prevent innocent people “being murdered by someone who’s being incentivized to do that by his own government.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, the bill’s sponsor, said: “I insist that they stop paying their young people to become terrorists and I don’t want our tax dollars used to support any government that would do that.”
But Qaraqe termed the committee vote “an incorrect decision” and said “the reason for it is Israeli incitement against the prisoners and martyrs. It cannot be implemented. We as Palestinians reject the accusation that the prisoners are terrorists. We consider the occupation the reason for terrorism in the region and that these prisoners are victims of the presence of the Israeli occupation.”
“Legally, the responsibility is individual, not collective. The individual is in prison but he has a family” that needs support, he said. He said that about 7,000 families receive monthly payments.
Qaraqe voiced confidence that Abbas would not cave in to American pressure over the payments. “Abu Mazen can’t give up on thousands of families that fell victim to the Israeli occupation. The authority cannot accept this decision.”
Over the weekend, Husam Zomlot, chief representative of the Palestinian General Delegation to the US, told a gathering of Palestinian expatriates that he had informed the US administration and members of Congress that “if there is a choice between the American aid and our responsibilities to our people we will choose the latter” the Bethlehem-based Ma’an news agency reported.
But officials in the PA are deeply concerned about the impact of a halt to the American aid. An official in the Social Affairs Ministry, who requested anonymity, said it would harm the PA’s ability to keep making its welfare payments to 110,000 families living below the poverty line. “We refuse this decision. It will affect the poor families our ministry supports, most of which don’t have income and live off of our assistance.”

Daniel Pipes: Weakening Palestinian rejectionism

The discrepancies between the two responses point to a deep Palestinian ‎reluctance to accept Israel as the Jewish state. Very few accept that "Jews have some rights to this land" and ‎great majorities insist that, some day, "Palestinians will control almost all of Palestine." Ritualistic denial of ‎Israel's legitimacy is standard; it is more noteworthy that such denial only partially interferes with recognizing Israel's ‎inescapable existence. ‎
Confirming this point, note the dramatic change in attitudes over just two years. Asked if two states ‎means the "end of the conflict" or whether it must continue "until all of historic Palestine is liberated," West ‎Bank residents voted 35% to 55% in favor of continued conflict, while Gazans voted 47% to 44% in favor of ‎resolution. Back in May 2015, West Bank residents voted almost as they did this year but Gazans 2-to-1 preferred continued ‎conflict, prompting Pollock to note that, in the intervening two years, "many Gazans have probably come to regret ‎the lasting damage of the disastrous 2014 war on their territory, and shifted their views in a relatively peaceful ‎direction." More proof: Asked whether Hamas should maintain its cease-fire with Israel, the 55% and 80% ‎affirmative replies point to the impact of many rounds of warfare in Gaza.‎
When it comes to Washington, "pressure on Israel to make concessions" is not the Palestinians' priority. ‎For West Bank residents, the priority is U.S. pressure on the PA to make it "more democratic and less corrupt"; for Gazans, it is ‎‎"increased economic aid." ‎
These replies suggest that some Palestinians have moved away from grand anti-Zionist ambitions and that ‎they are not imbued with an infinite spirit of resistance; they are not supermen. Like everyone else, they are ‎prone to despair, a collapse of will, and defeat. ‎
This conclusion points to the utility of an Israel victory strategy that increases the pressure on ‎Palestinians until their dictators in Ramallah and Gaza accede to this turn toward the practical. This could ‎potentially start the long process of ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. ‎

The Decline of the Palestinian National Movement

The contemporary Palestinian national movement is reaching its end. As its institutions wither and its leaders fade away, there is no obvious successor to take its place. With the passing of Arafat and most of his colleagues, Fatah's ability to hold its fractured parts together waned.
The social and political milieu of the West Bank and Gaza - steeped in clannish and personal influences - highlighted local fiefdoms as Fatah became mired in narrow and parochial turf wars. With no new leaders, no marked success in government, and no progress toward peace, Fatah fundamentally disappeared as a real political agent.
Abbas' peace policy has provided the PA with a formidable firewall against the kind of international pressure associated with the Palestinian national movement's past violence and, since 1994, many of the day-to-day governing affairs of municipal, health, education, and other functions have been in Palestinian hands.
Perhaps most important, Abbas has succeeded in insulating the Palestinian people from much of the violence and destruction of the "Arab Spring" and from the growth of Salafi and jihadist movements in the West Bank. However, as a result of the failure to make diplomatic progress even in the shadow of a relatively friendly U.S. administration, the entire notion of peace negotiations has been discredited.
Hamas' adoption of armed struggle has been no more successful than Fatah's. The suffering of Gaza's population has not served as a model or source of inspiration for the rest of the Palestinians.
Similarly, Hamas' decade-long governance of Gaza has been marred by the same charges of corruption, incompetence, and heavy-handedness as its PA counterpart. Those looking to Hamas as a replacement for Fatah would find it difficult to argue that the former has delivered where the latter has failed.

Elder and others have forwarded me this recent bit of BDS bombast, one which celebrates the “movement’s” unstoppable momentum by highlighting not just one-hundred but two-hundred successes!

My first instinct was to write an analysis similar to this one which took apart the boycotter’s BDS@100 Victories fantasy list from 2015. But this would have largely been a word-for-word repeat refutation, given that this year’s 200 list simply copied and pasted “wins” from yesteryear, ignoring how many of them have been exposed as fraudulent, outdated, or irrelevant long ago (how many more years are we going to be asked to believe the Hampshire College divestment hoax for example).

For a while, I flirted with generating a BDS Fail at 20,000 list that would crowdsource a compendium of BDS catastrophes one-hundred times larger than their alleged list of triumphs. Once I hit 50, however (and started toting up the considerable work others had done in this area), I realized such a project could easily get caught up in the old debate over what constitutes an actual BDS win or failure.

Does someone playing a concert in Israel represent a slap in the face to the boycotters, for example? Certainly when they openly defy targeted protests, as Radiohead did this year. But what about the hundreds of artists (not to mention thousands of scholars, pilgrims and tourists) who flock to Israel on a regular basis? Are they also pushing a thumb in to the eye of Omar Barghouti and Roger Waters, or are they just taking advantage of the free, open, exciting, intellectually, culturally and spiritually vibrant nation that is Israel?

Similarly, do the billions in investment and even more billions in M&A and IPO dollars pouring into Israel represent a failure of the BDS movement or the success of the inventive and determined Israeli people? In other words, might turning Israeli triumphs into BDS defeats be a way of diminishing Israeli accomplishments?

Rather than zero in on the BDSers faux triumphs, or try to overwhelm them with our own list of defeats, what if we instead looked at the concept of victory and defeat through the lens of warfare, a perspective I continue to urge our side to embrace.

For in war, the enemy distributing a leaflet or picketing a store doesn’t register as either a win or a loss, unless such action – in conjunction with others – can ultimately trigger attacks on an enemy or an abandonment of an ally. In which case, we should be looking at whether BDS is having an impact on those nations where support for Israel is strategic.

The US is obviously the place to start, and if you look at the fact that half of state legislatures have already overwhelmingly passed anti-BDS legislation and the federal government is contemplating the same, it seems as though BDS continues to be considered toxic within communities whose decisions have real strategic impact.

Now such relationships could change over time. Enough indoctrination of the young, for example, might turn upcoming generations of leaders against the Jewish state. Indeed, one could analyze the hostility of the last President to Jewish and Israeli interests as a success for the Israel-haters long game.

But keep in mind that such long games are subject to reversals and influence by confounding variables. To cite the most obvious example, does the most recent US election represent the “victory” of pro-Israel/anti-BDS forces, or was it the result of a much more complex set of factors, most of which had nothing to do with Middle East or Jewish politics?

If we move from treating every student government vote as a victory or defeat to thinking about factors that are truly strategic, what seems to matter more than failed (or even successful) hummus boycotts are the factors that led to the explosion of the Israeli economy (including liberalization of finance, cultivation of entrepreneurship, and an embrace of the modern information-based economy).

Similarly, while it’s painful to see Israel harangued at yet another BDS conference or rally, what has more impact on the world: those shrieks and scolds, or the fact that Israel has just become a de-facto ally of the world’s second most populous nation (India), and is making diplomatic inroads into areas of the world that have been hostile to it for decades such as Asia, Africa, and even the Middle East?

At the center of these genuine victories has been an Israeli government which, whatever its shortcomings, has set priorities where they belong: growing the economy, expanding diplomacy, doing what is necessary to keep the flames engulfing the entire Middle East outside, rather than inside, the walls.

Similarly, friends of Israel in the US who have built strategic relationships with both political parties, not to mention strategic alliances within academia, business and mission-focused organizations, understand that we too can play a long game. And one key to victory in such a game is to never mimic our enemies by mistaking fleeting (never mind trivial or false) “wins” as the measurement for genuine success.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

The situation at Gaza hospitals is getting more and more desperate, while the world ignores what "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas is doing to his own people.

It has now been four months since the Palestinian Authority decided to withhold medicines and medical equipment from Gaza hospitals.

According to the Gaza ministry of health, some 516 medicines are completely unavailable in Gaza hospitals, representing 40% of the medicines that are normally used. Additionally, some 291 medical supplies (out of 853 total) are unavailable.

Patients in Gaza hospitals who need painkillers and similar medicines are told to go to private pharmacies and pay for them themselves.

Every day, Gaza hospitals run out of more medicines and medical supplies.

Yet Doctors Without Borders, which has blamed Israel for Gaza medicine shortages in the past, is silent.

The World Health Organization issued a statement last month about how the medicine and electricity shortage is affecting Gaza hospitals, but the only party it blamed was Israel. This is even though the Palestinian Authority has publicly bragged about reducing electricity to Gaza!

A couple of reporters mentioned the medicine crisis a month or two ago, and then promptly dropped the story.

Other "Palestine activists" are also suddenly silent about this human rights violation by the "moderate man of peace" Mahmoud Abbas, who has promised to further cut off supplies to Gaza.

The hypocrisy is stunning, but normal and expected.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.