Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, April 28, 2014

04/28 Links Pt2: Palestinian Student Defends Her Visit to Auschwitz; Life of Begin

From Ian:

A Palestinian Student Defends Her Visit to Auschwitz

When my fellow Palestinian travelers talk among themselves and with friends and family about the accusation that they “sold out to the Jews” by visiting Auschwitz, they tend to cite their love for their country, noting that their travel makes them no less patriotic or nationalistic than their critics. Although the public outcry has silenced most of them, they all went to Auschwitz out of the belief that deepening their knowledge of the Holocaust could help pave the road to peace. Not only did they choose to reject ignorance, but they displayed remarkable moral courage by choosing to respect the past suffering of “the other.”
Our experience reminds me of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” The great philosopher asks you to imagine that you have been imprisoned all your life in a dark cave, with your hands and feet shackled and your head restrained so that you can only look at the wall in front of you. Behind you is a blazing fire, and between you and the fire there is a walkway where others move back and forth. The shadows cast on the wall by those objects are the only things you see. Those shadows become your reality. Suppose you are released from your shackles and freed to walk around the cave. Dazzled at first by the fire, you would gradually come to understand the origin of the shadows that you thought were real. Finally, you are allowed out of the cave and into the sunlit world, where you see the fullness of reality. But if you go back to the cave and tell others what you saw, will they believe you? No, they will condemn you. That is what happened to us, the Palestinian students who dared to visit Auschwitz. We simply left the cave.
Some of Professor Dajani’s colleagues believe this entire exercise has been a curse, given the attacks and criticism we have suffered since we returned home. Yet Professor Dajani, the eternal optimist, sees only a blessing in what we have done. We have opened a crack in the wall of ignorance. We have made Palestinians talk publicly about a topic that was once taboo.

Life of Begin

Review: ‘Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel’s Soul’ by Daniel Gordis
Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel’s Soul is a pleasure to read. The author, Daniel Gordis, a fellow at Jerusalem’s Shalem College, has a gift for clearly summarizing complex events, including key incidents about which much nonsense has been written.
Begin was born in the Polish town of Brisk in 1913. His most important early influence was his father Ze’ev Dov Begin, a deeply religious man who helped organize Jewish self-defense.

Gordis does point out Carter’s cluelessness about what made Begin tick. “His public protestation of Christian piety notwithstanding, Carter had none of the biblical sensibilities or knowledge that were central to who Begin was,” Gordis says. This ignorance continues today. Kerry blames Israel for the failure in negotiations without any idea of Jewish history, of the difficulties Israel faces, and of the nature of the enmity against it, rooted in Islam and the absolute refusal to accept a Jewish state in the heart of the Islamic world.
Begin’s Jewishness is a running theme in the book. Begin was, the author notes, the “most Jewish of Israel’s prime ministers.”

A couple of days ago Saeb Erekat made some headlines in Israeli media by declaring that "“Hamas is not and will never be a terrorist organization to us.”

He has now added to that theme, by saying that not only is Hamas not a terror group, but Israel is the real terrorist entity.

Arabic media is reporting that Erekat said that "the occupation is the worst kind of terrorism under international law."

He repeated himself to Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, saying: “The real terrorism is the [Israeli] occupation and settlement construction, and not Hamas."

No doubt the Quartet just nodded their collective heads, thinking that Erekat has the right to his own narrative where terror is peace, right is wrong and black is white.

Muslim "human rights expert" slams Judaism as an extremist, violent religion

Here is the cover of a new book on human rights in Islam.

Really.

The author of the book is Amna Nasir, and on Sunday she gave a talk to promote the book at a library in Egypt. According to this article, however, she didn't speak about human rights in Islam, but about how evil Judaism is.

The Jewish religion is violent and extreme, and this is because of the nature of the Jews of Biblical times who were marred by violence and aggression, she said.

Nasir noted that Jews kept complaining to Moses in the desert about not enough food and water, and they worshiped the golden calf. There are many examples of "grumbliong Jews," she notes.

Nasir added that when Jesus came on the scene his message of peace was like a slap in the face to the extremist Jews, but they refused to come to terms with their inherent violent nature.

We've spoken before about Arab projection, but this is off the charts.

It is also interesting that in so many of my recent stories about Egyptian antisemitism, the haters are women.

04/28 Links Pt1: Kerry the false prophet; Holocaust denial -- part of Palestinian narrative

From Ian:

Kerry the false prophet

US Secretary of State John Kerry continues to sermonize, disseminating self-fulfilling prophecies, whose incendiary warnings not only place the onus on Israel for failed peace talks, but worse could be construed as justification for the Arabs to spill Israeli Jewish blood in greater quantities.
In his latest statements as reported on Monday, Kerry warned that Israel could become an “apartheid state,” like South Africa if it doesn’t continue on its ‘two-state solution’ path, which of course involves Israel making suicidal land concessions to the Palestinian Authority.
While official Israeli Hasbara outlets were quick to point out that last week’s reported Hamas/PA unity agreement reveals the PA’s true disposition, those of us who have been awake during the past 20+ years of Oslo, never doubted that the PA/PLO remains till this day a ruthless anti-Semitic terror organization bent on Israel’s destruction.
Nevertheless, while reportedly Kerry had something to say about both sides, it was Israel, the only democracy in the region, which this false prophet felt necessary to drop the A-bomb (apartheid) on.

Ariel: Ashton 'Spit in Our Face on Holocaust Memorial Day'

Housing Minister Uri Ariel slammed European Union Foreign Minister Catherine Ashton Sunday for supporting the Hamas-Fatah unity deal. “On the eve of Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Memorial Day, she spit in the face of those who fight against terror around the world," he accused. "European support for the deal will encourage Hamas terror, and will ensure that Europe loses it moral authority as a party that can help solve the conflict.
In a statement, Ashton said that even if Hamas was considered to be a terror group by the EU itself, negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority must continue. “Negotiations are the best way forward,” she said. “The extensive efforts deployed in recent months must not go to waste. The EU calls on all sides to exercise maximum restraint and to avoid any action which may further undermine peace efforts and the viability of a two-state solution. The fact that President Abbas will remain fully in charge of the negotiation process and have a mandate to negotiate in the name of all Palestinians provides further assurance that the peace negotiations can and must proceed," she added.

Holocaust denial -- part of Palestinian narrative

When Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas finally says that "the Holocaust is the most awful crime every committed against humanity in the modern age" and accepts that Holocaust Remembrance Day is "an especially mournful day," the burden of proof is on him to show he's not just sputtering remarks to be left by the wayside. The Palestinian experience, you should know, has for years conveyed conflicting messages, sometimes even antitheses.
And it is within the framework of this existence that Abbas' rehashed Gaza partner puts on a children's play complete with ovens "showing how Israel burns Palestinians inside"; a crossword puzzle in the official PA newspaper defines Yad Vashem as "the center for perpetuating the Holocaust and such lies"; and even Jibril Rajoub, a popular interviewee in Israeli media, lets himself flip historical incidents from the Holocaust on their heads.

Official PA daily: Israel "enthusiastically imitates everything the Nazis did to them"

This evening is Israel's annual Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. Sadly, the Palestinian Authority continues to demonize Israel, libeling it as behaving like the Nazis in its treatment of Palestinians. In op-eds that appeared recently in the official PA daily, Israel was accused of "enthusiastically imitat[ing] everything the Nazis did to them" and Zionism was said to be based on "racism," "arrogance" and the "Masada Complex." One article also stated that Israel built its security fence not in response to Palestinian terror attacks, but because of Israel's "Jewish ghetto worldview."
Palestinian Media Watch reported that senior PA official Jibril Rajoub recently referred to Israel as "this criminal, fascist, Nazi occupation " [Official PA TV Live, Feb. 26, 2014], and he subsequently stated that Hitler "could have learned" from Israel "about the concentration camps, the extermination camps." [Official PA TV, April 4, 2014]

The "Apartheid" canard, and others - from 1961

From The Daily Beast:

If there’s no two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict soon, Israel risks becoming “an apartheid state,” Secretary of State John Kerry told a room of influential world leaders in a closed-door meeting Friday.

Senior American officials have rarely, if ever, used the term “apartheid” in reference to Israel, and President Obama has previously rejected the idea that the word should apply to the Jewish state. Kerry's use of the loaded term is already rankling Jewish leaders in America—and it could attract unwanted attention in Israel, as well.

By claiming that Israel could become an "apartheid state," even in a closed-door session, Kerry has just handed a huge victory to the Israel haters. It proves that a lie, told often enough, convinces people who want to be convinced.

The earliest accusation of "apartheid" against Israel dates not from the Six Day War but from as early as 1961. Here is the description of part of several UN debates in September-October 1961 between the Saudi representative Ahmed Shukairy, later to become the first head of the PLO, and Golda Meir. The "apartheid" charge is towards the end but it is worth reading all of it to see how all the arguments we hear today against Israel pre-date "occupation."

The representative of Saudi Arabia, Ahmad Shukairy, [in a strongly anti-Western speech], chided the Western powers because to them "divided Berlin is everything, and Jerusalem, the holy, is nothing," although "the Berlin hardships can be found multiplied a thousand times in Palestine.” He deplored the plight of “the hundreds of Arabs who are machine-gunned yearly by Israel forces” only because “they attempt to cross to their homes or their fields on the other side of the barbed wire.” Addressing himself to the newly-independent nations of Asia and Africa, Shukairy declared that Israel's emergence to independence was not the legitimate establishment of a legitimate state, since Israel was “the embodiment of imperialism, the symbol of colonialism, the fruition of capitalism, and the author . . . of anti-Semitism.” He concluded by denouncing what he termed the United States’ “support for this flagrant injustice calledIsrael” and its treatment of Israel as if it were "the fiftieth state of the United States."

The representative of Israel, Foreign Minister Golda Meir,said with reference to the situation in the ME that the majority of the area's inhabitants were non-Arab, and that Israel enjoyed relations of friendship with all ME countries except those belonging to the Arab League. She further pointed out that the Arab-Israel conflict was only one source of tension in the area, hostility to Israel being "largely a means used by Arab leaders to divert the attention of their peoples from their own unsolved problems and hardships." Referring to Shul:airy’s speech Mrs Meir observed that she “could not help wondering
why he did not worry less about other countries and worry more about the state of affairs in his own.”

As regards the Arab population of Israel, Mrs Meir stated that she challenged any Ar-ab country to match the social and economic progress achieved by the Israel Arabs. Border incidents, she said, were only the result of Arab belligerence against Israel. Concluding her state-ent, Mrs Meir declared that “no Israel-Arab issue can be solved without negotiation; every one of the issues can be solved by negotiation.” Pending Arab willingness to conclude a final peace settlement, she proposed that these should be an Arab-Israel non-aggression pact and that a fresh effort be made to bring about regional cooperation in development programmes.

Taking the floor again on Oct 17 under the right of reply, Shultairy said that “the lady from Israel” had challenged the Arabs to find fault with the situation of the Israel Arabs. He quoted from a number of newspapers and books to prove his thesis that "the apartheid of South Africa is being practised by Israel” against the Arab minority. He denied Israel'sright to try Eichmann since Israel was “another Eichmann in a State.” In conclusion Shultairy made three“concrete proposals”: the establishment of a UN commission to implement the UN resolutions on Palestine; the appointment of a UN "committee of inquiry” to ascertain the conditions of the Israel Arabs; and an investigation by the International Atomic Energy Agency of "the true nature of the atomic reactors recently built in Israel."

Notice also Shukairy's comparing Israel to the Nazis, his claim that antisemitism is Israel's fault and the statement that Israel has no claim on any part of Jerusalem.

Nothing has changed, but now the US State Department is starting to repeat Shukairy's talking points of 1961. And to the Arabs, who think strategically in terms of decades and centuries, Shukairy's 1961 lies have just borne fruit.

(h/t EoL)

Egypt paper lets readers decide if Holocaust was real

Egypt's Masrawy newspaper decided to perform a public service and tell its readers what the Holocaust was.

The beginning of the article isn't bad at all. It gives a fairly good overview of the highlights of the Nazi attempt to destroy Jews and others.

However, the article ends with "But there are many who deny the Holocaust and who provide evidence to prove their opinion, including that the extermination of 6 million Jews is grossly exaggerated, and the lack of a single document that talks about the details of what was done in the gas camps or concentration camps." It then lists the names of some Holocaust deniers and their qualifications ("famous historian," "philosopher," etc.)

So thanks to Masrawy, Egyptian readers can decide for themselves what the truth is.

Given the endemic antisemitism in Egyptian media, it isn't hard to figure out what most of them would decide.

"Comrade" Kayed al-Ghoul, a member of the political bureau of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, spoke about Mahmoud Abbas' acknowledgment of the Holocaust during a television interview.

Ghoul said, "These statements reflect the principled and ethical position of the Palestinian people against Nazi fascism against humanity, including Jews, regardless of the numbers that are being circulated as victims of the Holocaust.

Ghoul added, "The Zionist movement has exploited the Holocaust and Jewish suffering in the promotion and establishment of its racist, fascist colonial entity at the expense of the Palestinian people, and the governments of the Israeli occupation of successive did not draw the lessons of the Holocaust, but rather re-produced and practiced the policies that the Nazis perpetrated, including massacres and violations of the rights of the Palestinian people and the rights of the Arab peoples. This requires the international community to deal with the state of the occupation and its policies the same way that they dealt with Nazism and its crimes against humanity."

This seems to be much closer to what Abbas really meant than how his statement is being spun by the media.

Another day, another Egyptian blood libel

Egyptian newspaper Al Talyia News has an article by columnist Ghada Abd El Moneim (translated by Shawarma News):

We received news of a (classified) CIA report that was leaked by the Egyptian General Intelligence, the report points to the truth of the information circulating in the Arab region about the brutality and secret rituals practiced by the Jews in their festivals such as Passover and Chanukah, including the slaughter of non-Jews and offering human sacrifices to the God, and confirming that Jewish extremists of Palestinian origin did kill a number of children to mix their blood (for the baking) of matzos for Chanukah every now and then, as well as confirming their killing of foreign children from African countries, Palestinian, Egyptian, Moroccan children, Egyptian prisoners of war, Palestinian prisoners to use their blood for the baking of matzos for Chanukah.

The article links to a lengthy YouTube video that purports to prove how Jews ritually murder Christians.

Moneim also posted the article on her Facebook page.

As usual, it is impossible to find any articles in Egypt - or even comments to these articles - that say that the blood libel is a lie.

Oh, and a major Egyptian newspaper, Al Masry Al Youm, had an article on Sunday about how the Holocaust is just a means for Israel to blackmail the world and oppress Palestinians.

Administrivia - EoZ email subscriptions

For years I've been using a service for my email newsletters, Feedburner, that has been essentially unsupported. Lately people have been complaining about problems receiving the emails and other issues.

So I switched everyone to a new newsletter format powered by Nouri.sh.

I don't know if this will have any glitches, and I see that it only excerpts the beginnings of articles instead of showing the entire post, but for now it will have to do until I find something better.

If you want to subscribe to my email newsletters, you can click here or fill your email address in the form below (or use the form on the left hand sidebar.)

From Daily News Egypt:

The [Egyptian] armed forces say they have discovered and destroyed the openings of six tunnels found in a mosque in the Gaza border town of Rafah.

The tunnels, discovered on Saturday, are thought to have been used by “extremist elements” for “smuggling and infiltration to and from the Gaza Strip in order to intensify their activity in northern Sinai,” said an armed forces statement on Sunday.

Egypt’s armed forces have been targeting the network of tunnels that are known smuggling routes into the Gaza strip, with some large enough to transport vehicles under the border.

The tunnel openings were found behind Al-Nasr Mosque’s washroom, behind the pulpit, one in the southern corner and three “from the bottom of the mosque”, according to the armed forces.

The armed forces destroyed the tunnels using machinery and flooding them with water.

You mean, Egypt is attacking a mosque that was used to smuggle weapons for terrorists?

I'm sure we will be seeing huge headlines about this in the mainstream media any minute now.

UPDATE: Video.

(h/t Terror Watch)

04/27 Links: Palestinian Christian Reveals the Reality Over the Propaganda

From Ian:

European Jewish Congress: Amid rising anti-Semitism, Jewish life in Europe unsustainable

“Normative Jewish life in Europe is unsustainable,” European Jewish Congress President Dr. Moshe Kantor said on Sunday. Presenting the results of a study on worldwide anti-Semitism in 2013 by the eponymous Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University, Kantor cited increasing anti-Semitism and rising “fear and insecurity” as factors leading to a European Jewish decline.
Citing a November study by the European Union’s Agency for Fundamental Rights which showed that almost a third of Jews in several European countries are mulling emigration, Kantor asserted that “Jews do not feel safe or secure in certain communities in Europe.”
“According to that survey, almost half of the Jewish population is afraid of being verbally or physically attacked in a public place because they are Jewish and 25% of Jews will not wear anything that identifies them as Jewish or go near a Jewish institution for fear of an attack,” he said.

Honest Reporting: Palestinian Christian Reveals the Reality Over the Propaganda

In April 2012, CBS’s 60 Minutes broadcast one of the most biased pieces of reporting of that year (and a Dishonest Reporter Award finalist) on the status of Christians in the Holy Land. Bob Simon presented an unbalanced picture blaming Israel for virtually every difficulty experienced by Palestinian Christians.
The segment included an interview with Christy, a young Palestinian from Bethlehem, whose family home had been affected by Israel’s security barrier on three sides. Christy was forced to flee to the UK to escape persecution by Palestinians who disagree with her political views and sympathy for Israel’s case. At meeting in London in 2013, Christy explained to me how Bob Simon and CBS had, through selective editing, misrepresented her views on the security barrier and the situation of Christians in Bethlehem.
Christy greatly impressed me, both for her courageous stance and the intelligent manner in which she presented her side of the Palestinian issue in stark contrast to the anti-Israel propaganda that so dominates the discourse.

CAMERA: 60 Minutes Source Undermines Credibility of Segment Aired in 2012

After speaking in defense of Israel's right to exist with her fellow Palestinians, Christy reports she was threatened by one of her own family members – who said he would put a bullet in her head if she didn't stop talking in defense of Israel. The explanation for the threat was that she was putting her family in danger by speaking out in Israel's defense.
During her talk in Sweden, Christy also described how one of her uncles was shot in the head and blinded for his refusal to pay protection money, or “al-jizyah,” to Muslim extremists in the West Bank.
His life was only saved by the treatment he received in an Israeli hospital. She also describes how Palestinian judges have colluded with the theft of land from Christians in Palestinian society.

Christy a Palestinian Christian's plea to Dr. Saeb Erekat

The progressive-left, and the grassroots / netroots of the Democratic Party, has betrayed its Jewish constituency through its acceptance of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism, and the BDS movement, as part of its larger coalition.

This betrayal is a symptom of the undermining of progressive-left values due to the ascendancy of the multicultural ideal over that of universal human rights within the heart of the western progressive movement and of the Democratic Party in the United States and the West, more generally.

The undermining of universal human rights as a core value within the progressive movement led also to the betrayal of women, the betrayal of Gay people, and the betrayal of Christians throughout Islamic regions of dominance, particularly in the Middle East and Africa, but also in Europe.

It also brought the defamation of Jewish supporters of Israel as something akin to Nazis or "ZioNazis," as is sometimes claimed, in a delicious inversion of historical reality for the purpose of beating up Jews as guilty for the very crime that murdered our families.

The movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction the Jews of the Middle East (BDS), which has found a home for itself within the international progressive-left and the grassroots / netroots of the Democratic party in the United States, has a history that goes to traditional Islamic Jew hatred, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union.

Within traditional Islam, of course, the Jews were mainly considered second and third-class non-citizens for 1,300 years throughout the region, including the Jewish homeland of Judaea and Samaria. The Arab-Muslim boycott of the Jews is derived, in part, from the fact that within al-Sharia no land that was ever under Islamic control can ever be considered anything but part of the vast Arab-Muslim holdings of Dar al-Islam. The Arab boycott of the Jews, in the twentieth-century, was also heavily influenced by the earlier Nazi boycott of Jewish goods which served as an example and inspiration that long outlived World War II; a war that actually never ended for the Jews of the Middle East.

Soviet Communism, of course, allied with the Arab states against the Jewish State of Israel during the Cold War and Marxist ideology, as it expressed itself in the west, opposed all forms of nationalism, but particularly Jewish nationalism.

The rise of post-modernity and neo-colonial theory within western academic fields in the humanities, following World War II, gave rise to important theorists such as the late Edward Said, of Columbia University, and Rashid Khalidi, of the University of Chicago, both of whom represent significant influences on the political ideology of US president Barack Obama.

Meanwhile a new generation of Israeli historians, including Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, and Avi Shlaim, sought to deconstruct the idealized founding myths of the Jewish State in order to allegedly present a more balanced historical picture.

All of these factors came together in the beginning of the twenty-first century to create a political alliance between "Arab Spring" Sharia Islamists, of the type aboard the Turkish Mavi Marmara, and western progressives, including significant "liberal" politicians, who joined them aboard that ship for the purpose of freeing Hamas to break that blockade and bring additional weaponry into Gaza in May 2010.

Thus, through the final months of 2012, Hamas and Islamic Jihad and their allies could launch hundreds of rockets against the minority Jewish population of the Middle East without any concern by the western progressive-left, including most of progressive-left Jewry. And, yet, when Israel finally hit back the Jews of the Middle East were castigated as something akin to Nazis by many within western-left circles.