And Judah means "thanksgiving."
Happy Thanksgiving!
While we are at it, here is a stunning photo of a rainbow taken at the Nevatim Air Force base in the Negev on Tuesday morning.
The Shin Bet and IDF thwarted a large-scale, transnational Hamas terrorism network that was preparing to carry out an array of deadly attacks against Israelis.Netanyahu after foiled terror plot: Hamas challenges existence of Jews, Israel
It was cleared for publication on Thursday that the network planned to target the landmark Teddy soccer stadium in Jerusalem, the capital's light rail system, car bombings, and kidnappings of Israelis in the West Bank and overseas.
The nerve center of the network was situated in Hamas's headquarters in Turkey, the Shin Bet added. Additional intended targets included infiltrations into Israeli communities, shooting and bombing attacks against Israeli traffic and military targets in the West Bank, and setting up terrorist cells in Jordan in order to carry out cross-border attacks into Israel.
The plot, uncovered in September, involved the assembly of multiple terror cells in the West Bank, as well as the training of Hamas members overseas.
More than 30 Hamas members are under arrest, and the Shin Bet has seized two M-16 firearms, ammunition, and bomb-making equipment.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday praised the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and IDF after it was announced that security forces had thwarted a large-scale Hamas cell in the West Bank that "could have claimed the lives of many victims in our country."Sarah Honig: Transcending All Other Considerations
While the premier noted that despite the announcement of the deterred plot in September, many others remain unrevealed.
The premier lauded those involved in counter-terrorism work and operations "against Hamas that seeks to challenge the existence of a Jewish national state and essentially challenges the existence of Jews in general."
He vowed that Israel was working "day in day out to ensure the safety of Israeli citizens."
On Israel’s first day, Arab League Secretary-General Abdul-Rahman Azzam Pasha, confirmed Arab priorities. Sending forth seven Arab armies to wipe out the “Zionist entity,” he declared: “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”
The Arab agenda and intentions were unambiguous. The creation of a Palestinian state wasn’t even considered. Syria, Jordan and Egypt had even devised their own plan for the partition of Palestine – among themselves.
The unvarnished truth is that even now the last thing Palestinians desire is an Arab Palestinian state dwelling in idyllic coexistence alongside a secure, accepted and recognized Jewish state. Honchos in both Ramallah and Gaza may cynically exploit the two-state catchphrase, but they never genuinely espoused the cause of two-state harmony.
But what do Lofven and Wallström care that the Arabs brazenly spawned and successfully market a lie?
Forgetting Resolution 181 is exceedingly expedient for the brainwashed Mideast and voluntarily gullible moral relativists in capitals like Stockholm. It’s too useful – even in snow-white Sweden – not to remember that the Arabs were never interested in a Palestinian state. All they ever wanted and still want is to destroy the Jewish state.
In a recent TV interview, Syrian Islamist scholar Muaz Al-Safouk said that the world is shaped by the Jews, "the kings of gold, sex, and the media, who spread immorality, atheism, apostasy, and discord," and that only the Islamist Jihadi movements can break their backs.
“The coming year will be crucial to achieving the two-State solution,” Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson said in his remarks to the UN General Assembly’s Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.Well, by these criteria, the year has been an utter failure. And, as sure as night follows day, the UN had a session blaming Israel.
“The Secretary-General and I urge all in the international community to work together to translate the solidarity and desire for peace expressed on this occasion into positive action for security and for justice.”
Last November, the General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming 2014 as the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, and requested the Committee to organize activities around the observance.
General Assembly President John Ashe told today’s meeting that he hoped the Year leads to “robust” support for the people of Palestine. “I am sure I speak for many when I say that I hope the Year helps foster an atmosphere of dialogue and mutual understanding between the two sides of this decades-long conflict,” he said.
“We live in an international context that requires cooperation among all parties, entities and beings to find solutions to the challenges facing the human family. There are no exceptions; Israel and Palestine must find agreement on the conditions in which they can live side by side in peace and security.”
UN officials, including Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, have noted that 2014 could be a an important year in the Middle East peace process, if both sides are willing to take bold steps and refrain from actions that undermine progress in the peace talks that resumed last year.
A recently uncovered internal document of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Binghamton University SUNY sheds new light on the anti-Semitic bigotry of SJP groups across the country, as well as SJP’s ties to international campaigns to harm the Jewish state and the Jewish people.Ben-Dror Yemini: Evil spirit taking over Middle Eastern studies
Entitled “Declaration of Principles and Strategies,” the document specifically outlines strategies for targeting, ostracizing, harassing, and silencing students on campus who oppose the boycott of Israel or who simply attend a pro-Israel event. In a lengthy section on “Tactics and Strategies Used to Counter Zionist Normalization,” the document gives detailed instructions for when and how to disrupt “Zionist” events and activities on campus. Disrupting an event is a direct violation of others’ right to freedom of expression and assembly, and a blatant violation of New York law.
The internal Binghamton-SJP Declaration is a window into “anti-Zionist normalization” campaigns being waged by SJP groups across the country, whose explicit purpose is to delegitimize all pro-Israel perspectives and actively suppress their expression on college campuses. These campaigns have resulted in dozens of Jewish and pro-Israel students’ events being disrupted, and Jewish and pro-Israel students feeling harassed, intimidated, and stripped of their constitutionally-protected freedom of expression and association.
One of the main reasons for imposing a boycott on Israel is the "oppression of higher education" among the Palestinians. That's an interesting reason. In practice, when Israel entered the territories there were zero – zero! – higher education institutions there. This isn't Zionist propaganda. It's what Birzeit University President Gabi Baramki said.Hero’s Welcome for Hater of Israel at MESA
In recent years, following the horrible oppression, the Palestinians have ranked first in the percentage of people with higher education in the Arab world. Again, this is the conclusion of a joint research conducted by two people, an anti-Zionist Jew and a Palestinian researcher. World Bank data reflect the same conclusion.
These are the facts. Of course they won't confuse the big experts on Middle Eastern studies. They will continue to blame Israel for almost every crime in the world. (h/t Elder of Lobby)
So Steven Salaita isn’t a critic of Israel. Tom Friedman is a critic of Israel. Steven Salaita is a hater of Israel, it’s a title he’s proud to claim, and that hatred runs like a thread through all he writes and says.
Now if you aren’t a hater of Israel, you still might think that Steven Salaita deserves your support—not because of his hatred of Israel, but despite it. Academic life, once famous for its guarantees of job security, isn’t what it used to be, and the way Salaita was “de-hired” by the University of Illinois is the sum of every academic’s fears. If that’s you, and Steven Salaita enters the hall, you might offer up some polite (“civil”) applause, as a gesture of labor solidarity. But if Steven Salaita enters the room, and you rise to your feet in an enthusiastic standing ovation reserved for a true hero, that’s not a gesture of support. It’s an outpouring of adulation, because Salaita has been brash enough to say what you think: what exactly is wrong with hating Israel?
So at this year’s Middle East Studies Association (MESA) conference, on the very first day, I found myself in a standing-room-only audience of Israel-haters wearing MESA badges, who received Steven Salaita with a standing ovation. When I last attended MESA, in 1998, Edward Said got just such an ovation. Said was larger than life. Salaita is smaller than life—an indifferent speaker whose every other sentence ends in “right?”—but he is the anti-Israel, and in the yawning void left by the passing of Said, even a Salaita will do.
As already reported, the Chief Justice, Sir Thomas Haycraft, and Mr. Justice Corrie, heard on Saturday last the complaint preferred by Mr. Jamal Husseini against the Palestine Government. The plaintiff demanded that the Court should oblige the Government to remove on "stamps" and other official documents the Hebrew letters "E-I" (being the initials for the Hebrew word, "Eretz-Israel," leaving only the word "Palestine" in Hebrew.That last sentence says volumes.
Counsel for the plaintiff based his prosecution on Article 22 of the British Mandate for Palestine that states that anything inscribed in one of the official languages must be transcribed into the other two languages. The initials "E-I" (Eretz Israel) were inscribed in Hebrew only, in contravention to the provisions of the Mandate. The Chief Justice asked Counsel whether he would agree that the initials "E-I" be also inscribed in Arabic and English. Counsel replied in the negative. Their Honours then pointed out that the initials "E-I" was the translation of Palestine. Counsel contended that "E-I" was not the right translation of "Palestine" their meaning being "The Land of the Jews." He said that "Palestina" was already inscribed, and that the affixing of the initials "E-I" was tautological. He was of opinion that their addition constituted a political point to prove that the land was that of the Jews. The Philistines and the Jews were two separate nations, existing at separate times, and the meaning of one did not apply to the other. He requested the Court therefore that: it should order the deletion of the initials "E-I" from stamps and other official documents in Palestine - or alternatively, to order the inscription of the words "Suria El Jenobia" (Southern Syria), Palestine's Arabic cognomen.
Part of the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is pretending to hold actors and institutions involved to a higher set of expectations than experience would dictate. Over the course of last summer’s war between Hamas in Gaza and the Israel Defense Forces, this meant propagating the idea that it was in any way shocking when the terrorist organization’s weapons–stockpiled for the express purpose of killing Jews in a maniacal, genocidal campaign–turned up, repeatedly, at schools run by UNRWA: the UN agency dedicated to keeping Palestinians living like refugees in perpetuity.Bernard-Henri Lévy: Israel, Palestine, and the French Legislature: ‘He Who Would Act the Angel, Acts the Brute’
So now it’s unclear precisely how to react to a raft of stories demonstrating the reason it wasn’t surprising to find Hamas weapons in UNRWA schools: because UNRWA teachers and principles share Hamas’s violently anti-Semitic ideology. Yet in fact this is newsworthy, for an important reason beyond the obvious. First, though, it’s instructive to see just what American taxpayers are getting for their UNRWA money.
On November 20, after the Har Nof massacre in which Palestinian terrorists murdered four rabbis in a Jerusalem synagogue, the Algemeiner reported:
Popular Jewish blogger Elder of Ziyon has amassed evidence of UNRWA employees lauding the Jerusalem attack, among them Maha al Mosa, an UNRWA teacher in Syria who prayed for the two terrorists to be accepted in “paradise” as “martyrs,” Ibrahim Hajjar, another teacher based in Hebron, who published a poem praising the terrorists, and another Syrian-based teacher who, using a pseudonym, posted a celebratory picture of Adolf Hitler on his Facebook page.
For nearly half a century I have favored the two-state solution. But I believe that the “unilateral recognition” of Palestine under consideration in the French parliament is a bad idea for three reasons.Amb. Prosor addresses UNGA debate on the Question of Palestine (h/t Irene)
1. Hamas.
Its charter and its agenda.
The fact that, for the time being at least, Hamas administers one of the two territories that make up the state that supposedly must be recognized immediately and with great fanfare. The fact that Hamas’s doctrine is that Israel must be destroyed.
One does not recognize, even symbolically, a state in which half of the government denies another state’s right to exist.
One does not recognize, especially not symbolically, a government in which half of the ministers dream of annihilating that state.
Israeli jails are known to be brutal and the Palestinian Prisoner’s Club, a group that campaigns for Palestinians arrested inside Israel, recently released a report saying that 40 percent of Palestinian children detained in Jerusalem have been sexually abused.His link for the report goes to an article in International Business Times by Tabatha Kinder:
A justice group for Palestinians arrested in Israel has released an explosive report claiming that 40% of children detained by Israeli authorities in Jerusalem have been subjected to sexual abuse at the hands of Israeli police.That report links to Muslim News UK, which copied word for word an article from the rabidly anti-Israel IMEMC website.
Around 600 Palestinian children have been arrested in Jerusalem since June 2013, the International Middle East Media Centre news agency reports. This means approximately 240 minors could have been abused during their arrest or investigation by Israeli authorities, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Club (PCC).
Abuse!!!!!! |
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The Apartheid charge, the Abraham Accords and the "right side of history"
With Palestinians, there is no need to exaggerate: they really support murdering random Jews
Great news for Yom HaShoah! There are no antisemites!