Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, October 06, 2014

Hamas billboards in Gaza heralding an upcoming prisoner swap

Over the past two days, billboards have been erected in Gaza by Hamas telling people to prepare for another Shalit-style prisoner swap deal.

Hamas media is implying that the group is ghoulishly holding on to some body parts of a soldier or two who were killed in Gaza - or even a live soldier that somehow no Israelis know about.

The most likely body that Hamas has would be of Staff Sergeant Oron Shaul, whose death was determined but whose body was never recovered.

Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas' "political bureau" vice president, has said that there will be a number of "surprises" in the next few days.

10/06 Links Pt1: The Palestinians squander another opportunity; The end of the Abbas era

From Ian:

Daniel Gordis: The Palestinians squander another opportunity

Pandering to his street’s basest instincts, Abbas proved that he cannot lead. Whatever the opposite of leadership is, is precisely what Abbas did at the UN.
In so doing, he reminded even left-wing Israelis why the centre and the right want nothing to do with him. In so doing, he reminded Israelis who might have been willing to overlook it, that he was an avid promoter of the unity government with Hamas. In so doing, he pushed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to suggest, in his response at the UN, that Israel would seek alliances with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In so doing, therefore, Abbas slammed the door on the possibility of any negotiated deal with Israel in the near future.
Israelis are nervous about the shifting sands all around them, but most understand that just as Israel is going nowhere, so too the Palestinians are here to stay. Just as Israelis had national aspirations some 70 years ago and would not relent until they were realized, so too with the Palestinians. The difference is that Israelis have often been led by people who were willing to change their positions. Menachem Begin, sought by the British as Terrorist No. 1, made peace with Egypt and returned the Sinai Peninsula — even though he had to battle his own cabinet to get the deal approved. Ariel Sharon, the controversial military leader of Unit 101, pulled Israel out of Gaza, despite the move’s unpopularity. Netanyahu, who used to reject the mere idea of a Palestinian state, has now openly accepted it — much to the chagrin of some of his party’s leadership.
But as Abbas reminded us during his UN speech, there has been no similar movement on the Palestinian side. There are many reasons the Palestinians do not have a state, but chief among them is that the Palestinians have never had a genuine leader. They have figureheads, fearful of leading and unwilling to goad their citizens into thinking differently about Israel, refugees and their own future. So, they watch and wait, as those who call themselves leaders make mistake after mistake, consigning Palestinians to a life that sadly, once again, seems unlikely to change.

An open letter to Mahmoud Abbas

Genocide, Mr. Abbas, is what was done to my three cousins, Abraham, Jacob and Mordechai, who were between the ages of six and 12. Who were forced, together with their mother, Sarah, into the gas chambers at Birkenau. Who slowly suffocated. Who tried to scratch their way out through a concrete wall with their little fingernails, and who breathed their last with the question “why” on their innocent faces.
This is genocide, Mr. Abbas.
Some people argue that the use of such obscene terms in your speech stems from ignorance. But I have known you for quite some time, and you are not an ignorant person. I therefore think that your characterization of myself, my children and the people of Israel as “war criminals” guilty of committing “genocide” was a pure, malicious and evil act.
I would like to take this opportunity to point out that part of the duty of the president of the Palestinian Authority is to prevent attacks against Israel civilians, and also to prevent the use of Palestinian women and children as human shields by Hamas. It was your duty as Palestinian president to prevent the launching of rockets and mortars from schools and hospitals.
Finally, Mr. Abbas, please note that your inappropriate speech, following your attempts to slander the Israeli people, won’t stop me and many other people in Israel from continuing to search each and every crack to bring peace to the region.
This is our duty as parents, as grandparents, as human beings.

The beginning of the end of the Abbas era

The gap between Israel and the Palestinians remains unbridgeably vast. Israel’s security needs almost certainly preclude full Palestinian sovereignty when it comes to defense. Meanwhile, the Palestinian need to have a peace agreement that addresses and in some measure reverses the narrative of dispossession and calamity suggests that no Palestinian leader can agree to a Palestine without the Temple Mount and an explicit Israeli statement of culpability for refugees — demands no Israeli leader can deliver.
Yet these gaps don’t change the harsh truth, the bitter pill that Palestinian politics faces: that the Jews are at once their enemy and their unavoidable future.
For many years, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict held pride of place in the foreign policy discourse in Washington and other Western capitals. Foreign policy realists propounded the theory of “linkage,” that the challenges faced by the broader Middle East are intimately tied to what happens in Jerusalem and Ramallah.
“Of all the policy myths that have kept us from making real progress in the Middle East, one stands out for its impact and longevity: the idea that if only the Palestinian conflict were solved, all the other Middle East conflicts would melt away,” explained Dennis Ross and David Makovsky, whose 2009 book “Myths, Illusions, and Peace” took this theory to task.
The theory lost favor in the wake of the Arab Spring, which revealed vast tensions and processes underway in the region that had little to do with the tiny strip of Mediterranean coast shared by Palestinians and Jews.
Now, perhaps, a new theory of linkage is emerging — in reverse. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the key to the region’s troubles, but perhaps a troubled region will find a new reason to try to end this distraction, which stands in the way of an unprecedented alliance desperate to stem the chaos and violence that engulfs more of the region with each passing year.
At least, Netanyahu hopes so.

PM: For Palestinian state to emerge everyone needs to adjust concepts of sovereignty

If there is ever to be a Palestinian state, everyone is going to have to adjust their ideas of sovereignty, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview broadcast Sunday.
Netanyahu, who filmed the interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria during his stay last week in New York, said that the only way to ensure that territory ceded by Israel does not turn into a “third Iranian enclave around Israel’s border” is to have a long-term Israeli security presence inside a future Palestinian state.
The Palestinians, according to Netanyahu, “say: ‘Oh, you can’t do that. That offends our sovereignty. We can’t have the security presence or military presence of our former enemy on our soil. That doesn’t square with independence.’ I say: Really? How about American forces in Germany 70 years after the fact or in Japan or in South Korea?” While acknowledging that “no analogy is perfect and identical,” Netanyahu said that if Hamas takes over the West Bank, “they could stop our international airport with mortars, not rockets, not missiles.

Dutch police advise against allowing Sukkahs

From JTA:

Dutch police advised a municipality to forbid the public display of a sukkah out of concerns that it would be a target for vandalism, a Jewish resident said.

Fabrice Schomberg applied last month for a permit to erect a sukkah, a hut designated for meals during the holiday of Sukkot, outside his home in the predominantly Muslim neighborhood of Schilderswijk in The Hague.

On Tuesday, city official Karin Wilthagen told Schomberg that the police advised the city against allowing him to build the sukkah, warning that it could be vandalized, he told JTA.

Despite the objection from police, the city approved his request Friday.

Police declined to comment on the case and declined to say whether they considered Jewish symbols and the people who display them as being especially at risk. A city spokesperson told JTA Schomberg’s application is being processed.

In recent weeks, Schomberg has been featured in a series of articles about a Jewish-owned housing project of 200 apartments located among one of the Netherlands’ largest concentrations of Muslim immigrants. He is among only a dozen Jewish residents in the complex.

In one item, a news crew filmed Schomberg being verbally abused on the street outside his home because he put on a kippah. He usually conceals it to prevent such incidents.

Three times over the summer rioting took place in Schilderswijk, near the Jewish-owned area, and on each occasion there were flags identified with the ISIS Islamist group. Two of the rallies also featured calls to kill Jews, and in the third protesters hurled rocks at police and used municipal flowerbeds to barricade the neighborhood’s main street.

The rallies took place amid a series of attacks on Jews in the Netherlands in the wake of Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip with Hamas. Two people were physically assaulted for displaying an Israeli flag.

Separately, a Jewish man in the eastern city of Arnhem and identified in Dutch media only as Nathan was beaten on the street by seven men who heard him speaking on his cell phone in Hebrew, the De Telegraaf daily reported. He told the daily he would not speak the language in public again.

(Ian posted this story a couple of days ago)

During Yom Kippur I used the machzor (holiday prayer book) written by Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of Great Britain.

It is a very good machzor. Sacks uses it as an opportunity to highlight the contributions of Judaism to the world at large as a supremely moral religion.

One of the points he makes is that Judaism was the first guilt culture, as opposed to the shame culture of the rest of the world. He continues to make the case for the guilt culture today, as he writes here:

Judaism gets it right and the zeitgeist gets it spectacularly, dangerously wrong. Consider: guilt enters the world hand in hand with the spirit of forgiveness. God forgives: that is the message emblazoned all over Yom Kippur. God doesn’t expect us to get it right all the time. The greatest of the great, Abraham, Sarah, Moses, David, had their faults and failings, defeats and doubts. There is only one person in the Hebrew Bible who is said to have committed no sin: Job. And look what happened to him. So, because God forgives, we can be honest with Him and therefore with ourselves. Unlike a shame culture, a guilt culture separates agent from act, the person from the deed. What I did may be wrong, but I am still intact, still loved by God, still His child. In a guilt culture, acknowledging our mistakes is doable, and that makes all the difference.

Today’s secular environment is a shame culture. It involves trial by the media, or public opinion, or the courts, or economic necessity, all of which are unforgiving. When shame is involved, it’s us, not just our actions, that are found wanting. That’s why in a shame culture you don’t hear people saying, “I was wrong. It was my fault. I’m sorry. Forgive me.” Instead, people try to brazen it out. The only way to survive in a shame culture is to be shameless. Some people manage this quite well, but deep down we know that there’s something rotten in a system where no one is willing to accept responsibility.

Ultimately, guilt cultures produce strong individuals precisely because they force us to accept responsibility. When things go wrong we don’t waste time blaming others. We don’t luxuriate in the most addictive, destructive drug known to humankind, namely victimhood. We say, honestly and seriously, “I’m sorry. Forgive me. Now let me do what I can to put it right.” That way we and the people we offend can move on. Through our mistakes we discover the strength to heal, learn and grow. Shame cultures produce people who conform. Guilt cultures produces people with the courage to be free.

As we've noted many times before, the Arab world is suffused with the shame culture. And shame cultures value appearance over reality: they cannot separate the sin from the sinner, so instead of admitting mistakes all effort must be made to hide them.

We saw a perfect example of this yesterday. A senior researcher at B'Tselem, Atef Abu Roub, called the Holocaust a lie - on camera - but he insisted for over a month that he did no such thing. B'Tselem defended him for as long as it could until they could no longer deny the facts from the extended video that was released. (Even after the extended video was released, B'Tselem denied it for four more days, before grudgingly admitting it only in Hebrew.)

B'Tselem acted as part of the modern Western shame culture. Abu Roub acted as part of the long-standing Arab shame culture. The modern shame culture, when confronted with facts, reluctantly admits the truth; the Arab shame culture refuses to admit the truth no matter what, since admitting you are wrong is a fatal blow to one's honor.

The entire existence of "honor killings" is a reflection of a shame culture gone amok.

The guilt culture is morally superior to the shame culture. Guilt cultures allow individuals, and ultimately societies, to grow and improve, while shame cultures will remain stagnant and backwards.
If you wrong someone in a guilt culture, you can seek forgiveness and restore the relationship. If you wrong someone in a shame culture then the only solution is to suffer revenge, or to offer appeasement and abasement - there is no growth, no lessons learned. It is a culture based on appearance and not reality, and this is a paradigm that cannot be sustained.

Nominally, Western culture is mostly a guilt culture, although of course shame exists - one need only to look at how most famous actors, sports figures and politicians attempt to weasel out of accusations of misconduct. But even today's celebrities are slowly realizing that public reaction to them telling the truth and seeking forgiveness is much more positive than the reaction when they deny and try to cover it up. Those who continue to be brazen in the face of the facts look like fools and those who admit mistakes can move on - sometimes, even more successfully.

The shame culture has a major weakness: it itself can be shamed. When people from a shame culture are confronted with their shortcomings in a public way, and their lies cannot hold up in the glare of the spotlight, they are forced to change - to salvage what little honor they can, and to try to regain it. Within the shame culture the lies can be tolerated and expected, but from without they cannot and should not be.

This is how to defeat the honor-shame culture in the Arab world. And it is the exact opposite of what Western media and politicians and most "human rights" groups do. They are afraid to shame Arabs out of fear of causing a violent, shame-based reaction. The natural Arab reaction to being shamed is to threaten in response, to maintain their own honor. Those threats are almost always empty but they scare Westerners into adhering to the Arab rules of avoiding shame and shaming.

Yet there have been cases where shame has made an impact on the Arab psyche.

Immediately after 9/11, the Arab world was overwhelmingly supportive of terrorism. Al Jazeera openly praised Osama Bin Laden. But since then, polls have shown a steady decrease of support for suicide bombings and other terror acts throughout the Arab world. Part of the reason is, of course, that they have been the primary victims of terror since 9/11, but I think part of it is because of the Western disgust at terrorism and those who openly support it. People want to feel that their own culture is better than others', and it is hard to defend a culture that supports terror openly.

The culture changed, to a small extent. But it did change.

Another, almost comical example happened in 2008, when Hamas was publicly shamed by Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, in an interview, criticized Hamas for targeting children with its rockets. In response, Hamas denied aiming at civilians - and its press releases from then on pretended to be targeting soldiers with every rocket in Operation Cast Lead!

To be sure, Hamas' actual behavior didn't change, but it was forced to change its public position because of the shame of being berated by another terror group on grounds of morality. It is a small step, but when terrorists are forced to change their publicly stated positions there will be a trickle effect to the masses. Their people learn, over time, that lies are not acceptable.

Another example: Egyptian society now takes harassment against women seriously, something roundly ignored only a few years ago. The reason is because the story was highlighted in the West, especially when female Western reporters were assaulted. They were shamed into confronting it rather than pretending it doesn't exist, the first reaction by someone who is shamed.

The Western world needs to do a full-court press against the more repugnant aspects of the honor-shame culture - because it can be shamed into reforming. When the shame of being publicly exposed as immoral overwhelms the benefits of lying to hide your immorality, then a society can be shamed into abandoning the culture of shame altogether. But the pressure to do so from the West must be relentless, and each lie must be exposed and ridiculed, rather than accepted. The Arab shame society does not want to be publicly exposed as less moral than the hated West.

Imagine how different things could be if Palestinian Arab officials were forced to explain their obvious lies. Imagine if Hamas would be forced to justify every single rocket the way Israel is expected to account for every airstrike. Imagine if the world would automatically discount every statement made by Arab politicians who were already proven to have lied repeatedly and unabashedly.

Imagine if the Western world treated liars in a shame culture the same way it treats their own liars. They would have no choice but to admit to their lies - or look like fools, to even greater shame. The Arab world can be dragged, kicking and screaming, into a world where people take responsibility for their own actions when the alternative is feeling even more shameful.

A major reason that the West lets these lies slide is because the shame culture is being coddled, not confronted.

The shame culture can be shamed into behaving more morally - and it is the most effective, and least-used, weapon we have.

The Santa Claus Terrorists

In Gaza, Islamic Jihad terrorists are busy during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha giving out food, comfort and cheer for the poor Gazans, who seem quite happy to receive these items that are paid for by Iran.

This is of course how terror groups recruit new members. And it is how they convince clueless Westerners that they are "humanitarian organizations."

I would complain about the tiny portion size, but these guys are packing.

Where can I get one of those nifty ski masks?

The guy on the right seems a little too interested in these kids

"Watch your cholesterol."

We want to grow up to be just like them!

"You look just like my father!"

"One- two-three- Kill the Jews!"

"I might have a few daughters for you guys to marry, let me check"

"Open-air prison" news: 1500 Gazans going to Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem this week

1500 Gazans are going to Jerusalem on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday to celebrate Eid al Adha at the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. 500 are going each day.

They are leaving Gaza via the Erez crossing and being transported to Jerusalem. The pilgrims are all over 60 years old.

When there, they may see this banner on top of the "religious" site, erected on Yom Kippur,

It says:

Our next war - the War of Independence.

The Islamic Movement in the Haram gives blessings to the Islamic nation in general, and our Islamic movement in Palestine in particular,

Because of the blessed Eid Al-adha, Allah will return to us and liberate us, and Al-Aqsa.

Allah accepts the obedient. Gaza won, and the truth won out over power!

Here's video of the benner being placed and the cheers from the crowd:

(h/t Bob Knot)

Major Muslim clerics write theological-based denunciation of ISIS

A couple of weeks ago, I asked,"Is there any theologically sound flavor of Islam that could win the ideological battle with ISIS fundamentalism that would convince young Muslims that ISIS is completely wrong?"

The good news is that this seems to have happened.

120 Muslim scholars, including the Grand Mufti of Egypt, the dean of Sharia and Law at al-Azhar University, director of the Fiqh Council in the US, and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem published an open letter to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi decrying his state’s un-Islamic behavior in three languages: Arabic, English and German.

The letter is here.

I find it interesting that some of their arguments against Al Baghdadi seem also to apply to Hamas and many other terror movements that are considered praiseworthy by avergae Muslims, such as a the prohibition of killing innocents, that Jihad is meant to be defensive war only, the prohibition to mistreat "people of the Scripture" (Muslims and Jews,) the prohibition to deny women and children their rights, and the prohibition against torture.

That little bit of hypocrisy might weigh against people believing these scholars. But it is definitely good news that this happened, and the response will be worth following.

Notably, the scholars only call on Al Baghdadi to repent.

UPDATE: Robert Spencer shows that the "moderate" clerics are not exactly moderate by normal standards. Even so, I like to see jihadis put on the defensive from their own people; the problem of Islamism altogether is a much bigger issue and one that is not at all addressed by this letter. (h/t Henrik)

Peace Now founder's company invests in "settlements"

Dani Dayan reports, from a NRG story, that a founder of Peace Now actually profits from "settlements."

Tzali Reshef is one of the founders of the anti-settlement group Peace Now. He is also CEO of . Arledan, Ltd, "one of Israel's leading investiment companies," which boasts on its home page:

1. Real Estate and Construction - Arledan acts as a developer with regard to properties it owns, and also rents out various commercial and residential properties, primarily in the city of Jerusalem. Some of the projects Arledan has successfully developed over the years include residential projects in the neighbourhoods of French Hill, Gilo, Givat Oranim and Mevaseret Zion, as well as residential and commercial projects in downtown Jerusalem.

French Hill and Gilo are considered "settlements" and have been denounced by Peace Now. This is a map from a presentation on their website showing all these awful, "illegal" Jewish neighborhoods..

And its founder profits from them!

Don't you just love people who are so principled?

Last week I noted that the New York Times mindlessly repeats lies propagated by Peace Now.

(h/t Bob Knot, Yoel)

10/05 Links: Navy intercepts weapons bound for Gaza; IDF fires on cell crossing from Lebanon

From Ian:

Navy intercepts weapons-building material bound for Gaza as Hamas bids to rearm

The Israel Navy has intercepted multiple attempts to smuggle weapons manufacturing material into Gaza since the end of the war in August, a senior navy commander told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.
Cmdr. Eli Soholitski has commanded the navy’s Squadron 916 for two years. Squadron 916, the navy’s largest formation, is responsible for defending the whole sector from Ashdod to the Gaza Strip, and was involved heavily in the 50-day conflict with Hamas and Islamic Jihad last summer.
He is about to take command of Squadron 32, a missile-ship formation, that secures the northern naval sector.
“Our vessels are ready to go into offensive missions at any time. There have been more than a few attempts to infiltrate the naval closure. We’ve conducted activity against vessels that violated the closure,” Soholitski said.
Hamas fires rockets into the sea every few days, as part of its weapons upgrade program. The launches are used by Hamas arms designers to experiment with various projectile models.
The experiments naturally have attracted the attention of the Israel Navy.
“They are doing experiments and checking their rockets.
This is a part of their domestic weapons production. We did not doubt, at the end of the war, that their focus would be on building more weapons. We monitor every such launch, noting the quality of the rocket and its range,” Soholitski said.
This type of naval intelligence forms a central component of the IDF’s ability to map out future threats, he stated. “We won’t fight Operation Protective Edge again. The next war will be different. On any given day, we have intelligence-based targets that we can attack.”
“We continue to see attempts to smuggle weapons or material to build them. The sea is a very convenient platform for smuggling.

IDF opens fire on cell crossing into Israel from Lebanon

The IDF opened fire on a cell trying to infiltrate into Israel from Lebanon on Sunday.
The IDF said a unit dealing with operational border security identified the cell crossing the Israeli-Lebanese border (the Blue Line).
The unit opened fire with small arms fire, apparently striking one of the suspects.
"The cell fled back into Lebanese territory," the IDF added. "The circumstances of the incident are being checked. The IDF will continue to guard the state of Israel's sovereignty in the border region," it said.
According to Lebanese media reports, Israeli cross-border fire struck and injured a Lebanese soldier near Kfar Shouba.

Jerusalem court: Palestinian Authority must compensate families for 2001 terror attack

The Jerusalem District Court came out with a decision on Sunday that found the Palestinian Authority liable to pay compensation to the families of three people killed in a terror attack in 2001.
In 2009, the estates of Yaniv and Sharon Ben-Shalom, and that of Sharon's brother Doron Yosef Svari, who were killed in a shooting attack on highway 443 in August 2001, sued the PLO and the Palestinian Authority.
Justice Moshe's Drori's decision on Sunday held that the PA was legally obligated to pay damages to the victims' families and to those wounded in the attack.
Two daughters of Yaniv and Sharon Ben-Shalom were infants in 2001 and were wounded in the attack. The children have been adopted by their uncle.
"The weapons and the funding were transferred from the Palestinian Authority to the commanders in the terrorist organizations, and the PA knew and understood the purpose for these transfers," Drori stated in his decision that spanned some 1000 pages.

IDF Blog: Eleven Years Since the Maxim Restaurant Suicide Bombing

Eleven years have passed since Islamic Jihad terrorists attacked the Maxim Restaurant in Haifa. A suicide bomber exploded herself, indiscriminately killing Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike.
On October 4, 2003, two days before Yom Kippur – the holiest day of the Jewish calendar – several families gathered at the Maxim restaurant in Haifa for lunch. The restaurant was regularly described as the symbol of diversity in the metropolitan city of Haifa because Jewish and Arab Israeli customers frequently sat and dined together.
The day took a drastic turn as an Islamic Jihad terrorist armed with an explosive belt entered the restaurant and detonated the device. Twenty-one people were killed, including 3 children and a baby, and four Arab restaurant employees. Dozens of Jewish and Arab Israeli civilians were injured in the explosion.

The Obama administration has decided that while the Jews of the Middle East must put up with genocidally anti-Semitic barbarian Jihadis directly upon their doorstep, the United States has every right to bomb their ideological brothers half a world away, despite the fact that the Islamic State poses no direct threat to the United States.

The hypocrisy could hardly be more glaring.

It was the Obama administration, in the figure of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that inserted itself between the IDF and Hamas in the 2012 heinous go-around, known as Pillar of Defense, thereby ensuring that Hamas would live to fight another day... as it just did. This decision resulted in the deaths of thousands of Gazans even as it bolstered the influence of political Islam. And despite the fact that the western-left and its allies in the PLO and Fatah condemn Israel for committing a "genocide" in Gaza, the Gazan's themselves declare victory!

The Gazans and the other local Arabs cannot declare that Israel has committed a genocide upon them even as they rejoice in victory. Someone needs to let them know that it simply does not work that way. Hamas and its western allies need to get their stories straight if they wish for anyone who cares about rationality, not to mention Israel, to take them the least little bit seriously.

Responding to Benjamin Netanyahu's recent speech before the United Nations, US State Department Spokeswoman Jen Psaki made it very clear that if Israel wishes to defend its citizenry from Jihadi attack it will receive only pro forma support from the Obama administration, if that. In fact, as we have seen in the last two Gaza engagements, the Obama administration pressured Israel to spare the Islamists from the natural and foreseeable consequences of their own racist aggression against the Jews.

Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Michelle Malka Grossman, tells us this:

The U.S. State Department said Monday in a press conference that it disagrees with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s assertion during his UN speech on Monday that “ISIS and Hamas are branches of the same poisonous tree.”

“Obviously, we’ve designated both as terrorist organizations, but ISIL poses a different threat to Western interests and to the United States,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki. “And that’s just a fact.”

Of course, it is a fact.

There is simply no question that Hamas and the Islamic State pose different threats to "Western interests" and the United States than they do to Israel. Hamas poses a direct and immediate threat to Israelis, including Muslim and Christian Israelis, while the Islamic State is primarily a security irritant to the United States and to "Western interests." Hamas is right next door to Israel and Gazans favor genocidal violence against Jews, while the head-choppers in the Islamic State have to mainly content themselves with slaughtering other Muslims because they have little capacity to get at Americans, or Israeli Jews, who do not come to them.

The real problem, however, remains Obama's failure to square the Jihadi circle.

The Obama administration favored the Muslim Brotherhood, while opposing al-Qaeda. It defended Hamas twice, by demanding Israeli ceasefires, yet it bombs the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. And it had, from the beginning, a schizophrenic view on the rise of political Islam. It continues to suggest that there are somewhat reasonable Jihadis, like the Muslim Brotherhood, and entirely bad Jihadis, like al-Qaeda.

This is false, yet in Ynet we read the following:

Psaki also rejected Netanyahu's assertion that Hamas, ISIS, Iran, Hezbollah, Boko Haram and other militant Islamist groups all want the same thing – a Muslim caliphate dominating the world.

Obama believes in good Islamists and bad Islamists. But the fact of the matter is that all of these groups wish to impose al-Sharia upon all of us and that means the caliphate. It means all non-Muslims as servile dhimmis, all women as servants, and all openly Gay people as dead.

Even as I write this Islamists are chasing Christians out of the Middle East .

The fact is, Benjamin Netanyahu is correct and Barack Obama and his Department of State are mistaken. While Obama keeps trimming Jihadis, like the Brotherhood, into the "reasonable" camp, Netanyahu, as someone who lives in the region, understands that while the desire to impose al-Sharia may take different shapes and forms throughout that part of the world, it is unquestionably part of the same violently racist and sexist theocratic project that all liberals and "progressives" should oppose.

Meanwhile, as the Jihad arrives in America, the Obama administration and its friends in the mainstream media pretend that the recent head-chopping in Oklahoma was merely a case of "work place violence." It was, we are to believe, something akin to the popular non-sectarian 1990s fad of "going postal," except with a brand-spanking-new, emphatically non-Islamist twist to it... just for spice.

In a piece for the Washington Post by Mark Berman entitled, After a beheading in Oklahoma, debate over what to call it, we read:

Yet these officials also said that the FBI had found no link to terrorism. They also said there was no indication that Nolen was copying the beheadings of journalists in Syria carried out by the Islamic State. Instead, the officials said, they are treating this as an incident of workplace violence.

The FBI found no link to terrorism.

Did Nolen not screech Alahu Akbar loud enough as he brutally separated Colleen Hufford's head from the rest of her body before her horrified and flabbergasted co-workers? Head-chopping is a form of theocratically-based ritual murder associated with the Jihad. We all know this. It goes back to the Koran and its injunction to follow "the Prophet" in all manners of behavior and we all know what a fan of head-chopping Muhammad was.

We also know that Nolen was a convert into the faith and that he extolled the virtues of Holy War on his Facebook page. To pretend that this grotesque act of Jihad was anything other than Jihad is to be either dishonest or ideologically blinded.

This was not only an act of Jihad, it may be the very first high-profile Jihadi head-chopping in the history of the United States. We've seen Jihadi head-chopping in Europe for awhile, now, and Jihadi-style head-chopping in the Middle East is something of a national sport, but Americans aren't so familiar with this particular religious-political tradition. Neither are Canadians, nor Australians, I feel reasonably certain.

The problem, of course, is that because we are all so terrified of words like "racist" or "Islamophobe" we tend to keep our mouths shut and just look the other way. We just whistle past the proverbial graveyard. To be a counter-jihadi in the United States takes bravery because one's reputation will always be dragged through the mud by politically-correct cowards and there is always some chance of violence coming at you from out of the blue. To be a counter-Jihadi in Europe, on the other hand, is to risk one's life entirely. The example of Theo van Gogh is lost on no one and while the Jihadi who killed him failed to take his head, it was not for lack of trying.

All through the Clinton years I assumed that talk of terrorism and Jihad was just so much political smoke and blather and primarily right-wing political smoke and blather, at that.

Prior to 9/11 I considered Osama bin Laden to be a living contemporary equivalent of Emmanuel Goldstein, the target of George Orwell's famous two minutes of hate from Nineteen Eighty-Four. Even after 9/11 I was part of the American ten percent who still despised George W. Bush as a populist con-man in a cowboy hat.

There comes a point, however, wherein we must acknowledge the obvious.

The obvious in this case comes in several packages. In one package we have the obvious fact that Islamism is the single most significant rising political movement in the world today and it has taken over large swaths of the Middle East, even as it nurtures our newly home-grown, lone Jihadis like Alton Nolen. In another package we have the ugly, but also obvious fact that president Obama actively assisted the rise of political Islam when he threw his weight behind the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

In doing so he legitimized the Jihad.

I, as a former Democrat who voted for him in 2008, will not forgive him for it.

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.

B'Tselem admits its researcher denied the Holocaust

In August, Israeli journalist Tuvia Tenenbaum released a video where he pretended to be a German leftist to hear what Palestinian Arabs would say to him when they were among "friends."

One of the people he spoke with was Atef Abu Roub, a researcher for B'Tselem. At the 5:50 mark you can hear him say that the Holocaust was a "lie."

B'Tselem just admitted on their Facebook page that the story is true.

When the organization asked Abu Roub whether the video was accurate, he answered that he was merely quoting someone else that denied the Holocaust, but he wasn't saying it himself. Then the interview in context was released, and it was clear that not only is Abu Roub a Holocaust denier, but also a liar.

Post by Lilac Sigan.

Perfect qualifications for "human rights" activists!

Keep in mind that these are the kinds of researchers B'Tselem relies on to tell them the truth about what is going on in Gaza. B'Tselem is one of the organizations that the UN relied on for statistics of how many "civilians" were killed in the war over the summer.

B'Tselem said that it is disgusted by the incident and will investigate the matter.

This is far worse than when Human Rights Watch researcher Marc Garlasco was discovered to be a Nazi memorabilia enthusiast. If B'Tselem doesn't fire Abu Roub, and soon, it tells us more about B'Tselem than about Abu Roub.

(h/t Gidon Shaviv, Bob K)

Infiltrating an anti-Israel conference in San Diego

J.J. Surbeck, the Executive Director of T.E.A.M. (Training and Education About the Middle East) and others managed to attend the annual "End the Occupation" conference in San Diego last month.

Their report has just been released, and it sheds a lot of light on the lies that the haters like to tell themselves.

For example, Rabab Abdulhadi, “Senior Scholar of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora
Initiatives” at San Francisco State University, said that the tunnels meant to kidnap Israelis were "a lifeline for the Palestinians."

Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada tried to have it both ways, getting cheers for saying that "some of them [those killed in Gaza] were resistance fighters fighting heroically… a heroic and legitimate battle" before saying that the vast majority of those killed were innocent civilians.

Report on the 13th annual "End the Occupation" conference