Thursday, January 01, 2015

  • Thursday, January 01, 2015
  • Elder of Ziyon
  • Thursday, January 01, 2015
From Ian:

New study of UN Resolution 242 could alter views of Israeli-Arab conflict
As the UN Security Council and International Criminal Court return to focusing on Israel, a new about-to-be published study reveals new sides to UN Resolution 242, recognized as the key UN resolution relating to the Israeli-Arab conflict which could alter how many reveal the issues in dispute especially as regards to borders.
According to an article by Professor Eugene Kontorovich of Northwestern University to be published soon in the Chicago Journal of International Law, a brand new side has emerged in the unending debate over the meaning of UN Resolution 242 which relates, among other things, to setting Israeli borders and withdrawal from territories conquered in 1967.
Kontorovich's study compares UN Resolution 242 to all 18 other UN Security Council resolutions which dealt with territorial withdrawals and finds that the resolution was unique in its ambiguity as to how much territory Israel needs to withdraw from, with other resolutions being explicit about a full withdrawal.
In the article, Kontorovich writes that there has always been a debate as to whether the phrase in UN Resolution 242 "withdrawal from territories" obligates Israel to withdraw from the entire West Bank and Golan Heights, or merely some portion of them as agreed upon in negotiations.
Mordechai Kedar: Summing Up 2014 in the Middle East
The Palestinians are turning to the international stage, trying with all their might to get a recognized state. The Arab world, distracted by problems such as ISIS, has neither the time or the patience to deal with the Palestinian issue, leading the PA to turn to the world for recognition. European politicians are falling over themselves to recognize a Palestinian state so as to please Muslim voters. Israel may find itself facing a Palestinian state – which will without doubt become a Hamas state – just because some unemployment-frightened European politicians vote for establishing that state on the hills of Judea and Samaria, the birthplace of the Jewish people.
The world is still impressed by the existence of a Palestinian nation, created just recently, partly as a result of the idea of some holier-than-thou Israelis. Jerusalem is considered part of the Palestinian state for one reason only – so as to uproot the holy city from the Jewish entity, knowing full well that without Jerusalem, the entire state will cease to exist. The world must awaken, understand the problem and realize that if Israel falls to Islam, Europe will be next - and not much later.
In summary: the year 2014 was a challenging one for Israel, Europe and the rest of the world. These challenges will only get bigger, crises deepen, disputes spread, Iran will obtain nuclear arms, ISIS will grow, America will not have the first place it held until four years ago and Europe will continue sinking under waves of Islamic immigration that are turning European culture into something that is a far cry from liberal values, openness, modernity and democracy.
The challenges facing the state of Israel are becoming more and more complex. Syria's demise has lessened the threat on Israel, but other threats are on the horizon: Iran and ISIS gaining strength on the one side, Europe and America getting weaker and weaker on the other.
The soon to be elected Israeli leadership will have to give its attention to all of them. (h/t Elder of Lobby)
Iconoclast Arab supporter of IDF seeks Knesset seat
The bid by iconoclast Anett Haskia, a 45-year-old hairdresser and mother of three, comes after she gave a series of bombastic television interviews in support of Israel’s military this summer during its war against Hamas in Gaza. Now she is the lone Arab vying for a spot on the Jewish Home party’s list ahead of its January primary.
Arab citizens of Israel, who make up 20 percent of the country’s population, strongly identify with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. They generally oppose Israeli military actions, do not serve in the Israeli army and complain of deep-seated discrimination.
Haskia’s children, however, voluntarily enlisted in the Israeli army — including one son who served in an elite unit in Gaza during the summer war.
“Just because I was born in the Jewish state doesn’t mean a Jew is better than me,” Haskia recently told The Associated Press in Hebrew. “I sent the children to war, and nobody can tell me that I, Anett, the Arab, am second class.” (h/t Elder of Lobby)
Richard Millett: And I only asked why Jews can’t live next to Palestinians on the West Bank….
The panel consisted of Sara Apps, Campaigns Officer for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Martin “tentacles” Linton, chair of Labour Friends of Palestine, Murad Qureshi, a Labour Party Member of the London Mayoral Assembly and, finally, a representative from the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS – UK).
The panel was chaired by Dr. Dibyesh Anand, Head of Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster.
As ever there were repeated calls from the panel for a boycott of Israeli “settlements”. When it came to the Q&A I raised my arm and asked one simple question:
“Isn’t it racist to call for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the West Bank especially when considering that 1.7 million Muslim and Christian Arabs reside fairly happily in Israel ?”
Chaos ensued.
I was then referred to as “the enemy” by a man who walked out while giving me a rather unpleasant look. He also said, referring to me, “We are fighting these people”. Here’s the clip:


  • Thursday, January 01, 2015
  • Elder of Ziyon
A number of Arab media outlets published an extended harangue on how evil Jews are.

Dr. Mustafa Yusuf Leddawi, who lives in Gaza, uses the holiday season to say that Jewish rabbis hate Christmas and Christians. How can it be any other way, since Jews persecuted and crucified Jesus? Not only that, but he informs us that Jews tortured early Christians with iron combs, ripped out their limbs, gouged out their eyes and cut off their tongues?

Christians, we are told, know about how much Jews hate them, and about how Jews murder their children to get blood for their matzoh. Even today, Jews are stopping Christians from getting to Bethlehem to celebrate Christmas!

There are root causes, of course.

"Jews today are not happy and elated, but they angry and disgruntled and envious and disgusted, and Christians of all denominations know it," Leddawi says. "Jews do not give up their habits, they do not like the goodness of others, nor hopefulness in others."

But some Jews are happy during Christmas season. These are the greedy Jewish businessmen who take advantage of this holiday to earn more money, and sell a lot of products, and take advantage of tourist traffic, renting out their Jew hotels, and promoting their Jew goods, and increasing the income of their airlines, greedy and insatiable, and with their greedy monopolies, and seamy exploitation and ill-treatment of gentiles, reflecting their ugly habits which has caused enlightened Europeans who suffered under these Jews and complained of their behavior, and have tasted the bitterness of Jewish treachery.

Unfortunately some Christians have been brainwashed not to hate Jews, but most Christians are aware of how evil Jews are, and "the Palestinians are hoping to win these honest Christians over to their cause, and to stand by their side, and to support their steadfastness, and support the resistance, as we believe [that Jesus] was the first Palestinian fedayeen, who called to resist injustice to counter the aggression and called for he who does not have a weapon to sell his cloak and buy a sword.

One of the media outlets that published this hate is based in Sweden.
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UPDATE: Bob Knot identified him as a Hamas representative in Lebanon and Syria, see the comments.

  • Thursday, January 01, 2015
  • Elder of Ziyon
Writing in Al Riyadh, Fahd Amir Ahmadi fondly recalls his trip to Mecca as a child to perform Hajj.

During the long bus trip he needed reading material and he chose to read Mein Kampf, with Hitlers photo and the swastika on the cover, causing an Indian Muslim colleague of his father on the bus to smile.

Not that Ahmadi is unaware of the racism in the book. In fact, he points out that it is ironic how popular the book is among many in Third world countries, even though they had no place in Hitler's worldview as non-Aryans. But, he insists, it is still an important book to read to understand Nazi poitical philosophy, just as the works of Karl Marx and Mao Zedong and Adam Smith are important.

Clearly, this liberal Saudi is against censorship. Although I don't know how he would feel about allowing children to watch Exodus: Gods and Kings or Noah, two of the movies censored this year in the Arab world. 

As a humorous postscript, Ahmadi adds that he read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion on the return trip. He doesn't have anything negative to say about that book.


  • Thursday, January 01, 2015
From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Palestinian interests
Most important, the Jewish state was led by an honest, selfless political leadership with a vision of the Jewish people living in freedom as a sovereign, self-sufficient people in its historical homeland. Thanks to a combination of meticulous planning and ambitious goals and against tremendous odds, Israel has become an amazing success story. Few, if any, other nations born into the 20th century as a third-world countries have risen to be on par with the most developed Western nations as Israel has, with one of the world’s most innovative economies and most vibrant democracies that protects freedom of the press, gay rights, religious rights and women’s rights.
Those countries in the UN Security Council that voted in favor of the Palestinian motion – France and Luxembourg particularly – should ask themselves if they want to bring into being a corrupt Palestinian state in which basic human rights are trampled and the institutions capable of protecting them are nonexistent.
Palestinians have received hundreds of billions of dollars in aid, which, if used properly, could have laid the foundation for a stable, free Palestinian state-in-the-making that would have broken with the direction taken by the 21 existing Arab states.
Perhaps it is still not too late. But by pushing for the creation of yet another failed Arab state that would become an existential threat to a thriving, successful liberal democracy – the only in the Middle East – France, Luxembourg and the other countries that voted in favor of Tuesday’s proposal (such as those luminaries of human rights China and Russia) are not just working against the interests of Israel, they are working against the interests of the Palestinian people.
J Street laments failure of Palestinian UN bid
The US liberal Jewish group J Street said Wednesday that the failure of an attempt to pass a UN Security Council resolution aimed at establishing a timetable for a Palestinian state lay with the international community and the US for not drafting a text with broader appeal.
In Tuesday’s vote the Palestinians were unable to muster the support of nine out of the 15 Security Council members, with eight voting in favor, two opposing and five abstaining.
“It was the failure of the United States and the international community to take a positive step toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict diplomatically by crafting a resolution that could have gained broad international consensus,” J Street said in a statement.
The group stressed that it had not taken a stance on the validity of the draft in the form in which it was submitted but noted “alternative drafts did a better job of balancing Israeli and Palestinian concerns, particularly around security.”
Netanyahu: The Palestinians have more to fear from the ICC than Israel
Netanyahu, in his initial reaction to the move, said the Palestinian Authority, which is in a unity government with Hamas, should be more concerned about the ICC than Israel. Netanyahu said that Israel would respond – though he did not give any indication of how it would do so – and would defend the soldiers of the IDF, which he called “the most moral soldiers in the world.”
By contrast, Netanyahu said Hamas was an avowed terrorist organization that – like Islamic State – commits war crimes. “We will rebuff this additional effort to impose a diktat on us, just as we rebuffed Palestinian efforts in the UN Security Council,” he said.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman was more blunt in his response, saying that even a “deaf, blind and mute judge” knows that the Palestinians are responsible for the “indiscriminate murder of men, women, children and babies for the last 100 years.”
Abbas can sign onto all the treaties he wants to, Liberman said in a Facebook post, “the only ones committing war crimes in this conflict are the Palestinians themselves.”
'Abbas Only Able to Go to ICC as a Defendant'
Ministers and MKs have strongly condemned Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's application to join the International Criminal Court (ICC) Wednesday, with many remarking that it is the Palestinian Arabs, not the Israelis, who are liable to be found guilty of war crimes.
"Abbas, a leading inciter of terror and a long-time Holocaust denier, would only be able to come to the ICC as a defendant," Jewish Home Chairman and Economics Minister Naftali Bennett stated. "Someone with terrorism spread on his head should not come out into the sunshine."
Tekuma Chairman and Housing Minister Uri Ariel (Jewish Home) added, "it's time to dispel the Palestinian lie and to declare - loud and clear - that the land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel."
"Judea and Samaria are not occupied territories, and it is Israel's right and duty to continue building there and in Jerusalem," Ariel continued. "Freezing construction only encourages Arab greed, while building, on the other hand, proves that we have returned to our country to stay."

  • Thursday, January 01, 2015
  • Elder of Ziyon
While the headlines announce that Mahmoud Abbas signed the Rome Statute today in order to be able to join the International Criminal Court, we can learn a lot about the PLO's real goals from some of the other statutes that he is said to gave signed on Wednesday.



They include the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions Relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts (Protocol II), plus a Convention on the Safety of UN and Other Personnel.

It appears that these specific conventions, protocols and treaties were chosen for one reason only: to attack Israel diplomatically by bringing up accusation upon accusation, using the procedures around these treaties for the PLO's narrow political aim of demonizing Israel.

This is exactly what the PLO did with the previous groups it joined or has proxies doing its bidding. It has pushed UNESCO into introducing anti-Israel resolutions, and has even used UNESCO to erase Jewish history,  irreversibly politicizing that organization. Its Arab League partners have turned the UN Human Rights Council into a joke with its obsession with Israel.

Based on this list, it seems clear that the PLO is planning to accuse Israel of war crimes, of nuclear proliferation, of endangering UN employees, and of using prohibited weapons, effectively hijacking the agendas of organizations and groups that don't have the political will to fight back for fear of how Arab nations might retaliate.

One can only imagine how thrilled the many people who have worked for years to create these protocols and treaties are to know that their hard work is about to be subverted by the PLO. Since the committees behind these treaties never thought about how their official rules and procedures could be used to subvert the purposes of these treaties, they don't have any defenses against being hijacked.

This is the fruit of rewarding terrorists. While Fatah is today celebrating the 50th anniversary of their first terror attack, the government it heads is using diplomatic terrorism using the legitimacy that nations conferred upon it - to avoid being blackmailed by terror and the oil weapon.

Abbas' signing these treaties is an exact diplomatic equivalent of what the Palestinians have been doing since 1948: doing nothing to build a state but doing everything to destroy one.

(h/t Gidon Shaviv, Grant Rumley)
  • Thursday, January 01, 2015
  • Elder of Ziyon
From Gideon Levy in Ha'aretz:

Here comes the new Israeli, a man’s man; with a tiny skullcap, service in an elite army unit, high-tech, English and a swimming pool, with the coolest and most up-to-date message: “Stop apologizing, we love Israel” (rhymes in Hebrew); the poster is already in evidence on several balconies.

On Monday night, at a meeting convened by Ayelet Shaked (Habayit Hayehudi), the most successful politician in Israel at present explained: “This election is between those who apologize and those who are proud ... those who are objective and those who are in favor of the State of Israel.” Drum roll.

Well, [Habayit Hayehudi chairman] Naftali Bennett, I apologize and I love Israel (of course not your Israel and not the present Israel); I’m objective and I’m in favor of (a just) State of Israel; I apologize and I’m proud.
Levy has an interesting definition of "love."

Let's see how he might apply it to his Swedish girlfriend whom he starred with in a reality TV show a couple of years ago:



  • Thursday, January 01, 2015
  • Elder of Ziyon
Roger Cohen once again shows that he is way out of his depth in his latest clueless New York Times op-ed.

This paragraph is intended to be a showcase for his astuteness yet it reveals the opposite:
Nobody wants to talk about Gaza because it reeks of failure — the failure of Israeli withdrawal; the failure of a long-ago election that ushered Hamas to power; the failure to achieve the Palestinian unity necessary for serious peace talks; the failure to prevent repetitive war; the failure of the Arab Spring that led to that sealed Egyptian border; the failure to be coherent about Hamas (negotiated with by Israel to end the war and to secure the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit but otherwise viewed as a terrorist group with which negotiation is impossible); the failure to offer decency to 1.8 million trapped human beings.
Nobody wants to talk about Gaza?

The New York Times search engine estimates that Gaza was mentioned in its pages 9,500 times in 2014, ten times the number of, say, the Central African Republic which is in the middle of a devastating civil war - and a place that Roger Cohen would never consider visiting, when going into Gaza for a day is so much easier.

The failure of the Israeli withdrawal? But Cohen wants Israel to do a similar withdrawal from the West Bank!

But most ignorant is his characterization of negotiations with Hamas. Israel didn't directly negotiate with Hamas over Shalit just as Israel did not directly negotiate with Hamas over the many cease fire agreements over the summer that Hamas broke. But beyond that, Hamas' leadership, quite explicitly and nearly daily, calls to utterly destroy Israel. Cohen even admits this in his next paragraph.

Just what exactly is Israel supposed to directly negotiate with Hamas over - the timeframe of its destruction?

He goes on:
My Gaza road ended at the Shuhadaa al Shejaeya Secondary School for boys. ...Hasan al-Zeyada, a psychologist, showed me around. He lost six close relatives, including his mother and three brothers, in an Israeli airstrike on July 20. Of the students at the school, he said that they had no need to be taught history: “They have lived it. They can teach it to me.”
Hasan al-Zeyada's house was almost certainly a terrorist base and his brother Omar was a Hamas terrorist.

Here is screenshot from Omar Ziyada's martyr video:


Here's a Hamas "martyr" poster of Mohammed Mahmoud al-Maqadma who was killed in the same airstrike:


Two unrelated Hamas terrorists being killed in the same house indicates that they weren't exactly having tea there. The Zeyada house was being used as a control center or weapons depot.

And as we've documented, two of Zeyada's other siblings enthusiastically posted his "martyr video" on their Facebook pages, showing that they knew quite well that he was a Hamas terrorist. which means that Hasan knew this as well.

But this same Hasan lied and  told the same New York Times that none of his relatives were militants!

This is the third time the NYT is uncritically quoting Hasan Zeyada. Not once did they check out any of this publicly available information about his Hamas brother, which casts considerable doubt over Hasan's own believability.

If Roger Cohen were a journalist, he would have done a little research, perhaps asked Hasan about why he lied to Cohen's  own newspaper. Maybe probe him as to what else he knows about Hamas activities in Gaza during the war.

But Cohen is no journalist. He doesn't travel to Gaza in order to investigate anything; He goes to Gaza to confirm the myths that have been in his head beforehand and ignore everything else. He wants to be duped by the people he interviews, because that way he pretends to have more evidence to support his ignorant theories about Israel and Gaza.

(h/t Ronald, EBoZ)

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

  • Wednesday, December 31, 2014
  • Elder of Ziyon
Last night I went to a Harlem Globetrotters game. It was enjoyable, although they did not seem to be quite as skilled as the Globetrotters I had seen on TV decades ago when they had Curly Neal and Meadowlark Lemon. There was some excellent passing and alley-oops, but not too much of the trick shots or dazzling dribbling that I recall seeing as a kid.

But I also watched their opponents, the team that always loses, the Washington Generals.

During this year's tour, the shtick is that the Generals have regrouped and are thirsting for revenge, wanting to recapture the glory of their last win, in 1971. It is called the "Washington Generals Revenge Tour."

Of course, the Generals lost. That's what they are meant to do. They are booed when they are introduced, and in this particular show, they openly "cheated" and lost (of course) anyway.

But I was interested in their history, and the history of the Generals has an interesting tie to US Jewish sports history.

The original owner of the Washington Generals was Louis Herman "Red" Klotz, Klotz was an early basketball star in Philadelphia high schools and colleges, winning player of the year in 1939 and 1940. He was part of the Baltimore Bullets championship team in 1948, making him - at 5'7" - the shortest player ever to win an NBA championship.


Afterwards, Klotz bought one of the original basketball teams, the Philadelphia Sphas. of the now defunct American Basketball Association.


"SPHA" was an acronym for South Philadelphia Hebrew Association. Their original uniforms even had those initials in Hebrew!

In the late 1920s and 1930s, the Sphas were the best basketball team in the world.

The original owner and coach, Eddie Gottlieb, sold the Sphas so he could buy the Philadelphia Warriors in the new NBA, and the ABL became a minor league.

In the early 1950s, the Sphas played the Globetrotters a couple of times:

[Klotz] won many games with the Sphas, and one day on the ballroom at the old Broadwood Hotel in Philadelphia they beat the Harlem Globetrotters in a straight up game. The great Goose Tatum, the first clown prince of basketball, the man who invented the skyhook, met Klotz at half-court and said in a threatening voice: “That will never happen again.” And the next time they played, the Sphas won again. And that is about the time when Globetrotters owner Abe Saperstein approached Klotz and asked him to put together a team that would play the Globetrotters night after night all over the country, all over the world. Of course, there would be an understanding. People were coming, after all, to see the World Famous Harlem Globetrotters. It was one of those moments in a man’s life. Red Klotz loved to play basketball. He loved to coach basketball. And he loved to win. The Globetrotters would give him a chance to do the first two.

“We’ll give you a run for your money,” Red Klotz said to Saperstein.

“I’m counting on it,” Saperstein said in return.

Klotz then borrowed some cash to buy a Green De Soto — the Green Hornet, they would all call it — and he began his life as a player, owner, coach, driver, psychiatrist, motivator and inspirational leader for a team he decided to name after Dwight D. Eisenhower: The Washington Generals.

Besides owning and coaching the Generals, Red Klotz was also a player. He would willingly allow the Globetrotters to make a fool out of him. But he always took his role seriously.

There are rules for being a Washington General (to use their most general name).

1. The Generals are allowed — expected, even — to play completely legit on offense. There are no limitations. If they can beat the Globetrotters defense, they can score every single time down the court.

2. The Generals are allowed to play defense as hard as they want when the Globetrotters are not in one of their reams. For about 40% of every Globetrotters game, the basketball is straight up.

3. When the Globetrotters DO go into one of their reams, it is the Generals’ responsibility to play the stooge and make the Globetrotters look as good as possible. They are expected to play their roles with gusto and verve. Red Klotz had his pants pulled down thousands of times — he would always take pants duty first few games of every tour to give the other players time to settle in. He always tried to look as shocked and embarrassed as possible. In his mind, Red often said, his job was to play Ginger Rogers to the Globetrotters’ Fred Astaire, that is to do everything the Globetrotters did with the same joy and expertise but to do it going backward.

Then there was that now legendary game in January, 1971, in Martin, Tennessee - the last game the Generals ever won (possibly under the name the New Jersey Reds; they had a number of different team names even as they never had a home game).

Klotz’s place was not in the paint. He was a shooter, still is a shooter, and on that day in Tennessee he started to make a few long jumpers. Eddie Mahar, a shooting guard from Brooklyn, made a few shots. Sam Sawyer, a forward from Atlantic City and someone who would become one of Klotz’s closest friends, worked hard inside. The Globetrotters seemed weary or uninterested. And nobody noticed the scoreboard.

Nobody noticed, that is, except for Red Klotz.

The game stayed close. The Globetrotters did not do as much show as usual that day in Martin, Tenn. The great dribbler Curly Neal wasn’t playing — he apparently had an injury of some sort — and the showman Meadowlark Lemon seemed to Klotz and others to be in a bit of of a fog. So they played basketball. In the fourth quarter, the New Jersey Reds got hot. Every one of their shots seemed to drop. The Globetrotters kept missing. This much everyone agrees upon. The score tightened.

The Globetrotters could have gone into their show at any point, scored every time down the floor, and put an end to the drama. The Reds would not have been able to do a thing to stop it. But for reasons that were never revealed, and perhaps never quite understood, the Globetrotters played the final minutes straight up. There were 3,600 people in the stands that day, and not one of them was quite sure what was happening. The players themselves were not quite sure what they were doing. Maybe the monotony had simply crumbled their resolve. Maybe they all just wanted something different, something that was unlike the day before and the day before that and the day before that. Whatever, the game grew close.

And then … well, nobody would ever seem to remember the details. In one version of the story, the Reds built a startling 12 point lead in the final minutes and the Globetrotters had to stage a furious comeback. In another, the game was tied at the end of regulation and went into overtime. Fairy tales, you know, have different endings in different parts of the world. The only thing anyone seems certain about is that the Globetrotters led 99-98 with scant seconds left when Red Klotz got the ball about 25 feet away from the basket and fired one of those two-handed set shots that had made him the best in the city and won him the girl and carried him through a war and landed him the childhood dream of traveling around the world. It went in of course, like it went in when he was 12 years old. The Reds led 100-99.

There were, according to the newspapers, three seconds on the clock. The timekeepers stalled the clock long enough for Meadowlark Lemon to take the game-winning shot, a hook shot, the sort he had made about as many times as Red Klotz’s set shot. The buzzer sounded. The ball bounced away. The New Jersey Reds or Washington Generals or International All-Stars or whatever you would like to call them had won the game. It was, mathematically, the greatest upset in the history of sport. Red Klotz and his team ran off the court in triumph. The crowd’s reaction was some mix of shock and uncertainty. In time, Red Klotz would remember them booing (“It was like killing Santa Claus,” he would say many, many times), and certainly most did boo. But in the days afterward, when he talked to the small-town reporters who asked, he would remember that some people cheered too.
Klotz was 50 years old when he made that game-winning shot.

He died this past July, at the age of 93, and I hadn't seen his name in any of the lists of notable people we lost this year. But while he holds the record for the most basketball games lost, he knew exactly what he was doing.

From Ian:

CAMERA's Top Ten MidEast Media Mangles for 2014
1. Hate-Indoctrination and Incitement Ignored
No issue was more glaringly and indefensibly neglected by most of the media than theoften grotesque demonizing of Israel and the Jewish peopleby the Palestinians and the wider Muslim/Arab world. Instead of reporting the hate-indoctrination prominently and continuously for what it is -- a central driving force for violence and fundamental threat to peace -- media outlets such as The New York Times typically ignored the phenomenon orcharacterized it as merely an accusation by Israelis rather than an objective reality.
Few instances of such media malpractice were as blatant as The Times' censoring of Secretary of State John Kerry's strong denunciation of incitement as the cause of the massacre of Jews at prayer in Jerusalem's Har Nof synagogue. Kerry's emphatic statement was first included in an online version of the New York Times story but later entirely excised by the time the printedaccount reached readers.
Lydda 1948: The Dog That Didn’t Bark
In his July 2014 Mosaic essay, Martin Kramer dismantled Ari Shavit’s assertion that “Zionism carrie[d] out a massacre” at Lydda in 1948 – a claim Shavit has spread not only in his book, My Promised Land, but in his New Yorker article, “Lydda, 1948: A City, a Massacre, and the Middle East Today.” Kramer recently presented his findings to an Israeli audience that included Lydda veterans and others intimately familiar with the 1948 war – who expressed surprise and anger at Shavit’s allegation. This post provides still another reason to doubt Shavit’s claim: in 1948, The New York Times covered the April “massacre” at Deir Yassin and the later operation at Lydda – but reported no “massacre” at Lydda. And for the reasons set forth below, it is virtually certain that the Times would have reported it if it had occurred at Lydda.
Currivan and his editors would have considered a Lydda “massacre” the following day “news fit to print” – to put it mildly. But Currivan’s next report on Lydda, datelined July 12 (published on July 13) reported the capture of Lydda and Ramleh “on this all-important front” and noted that Lydda “had offered considerable resistance at first and suffered heavy casualties as a result.” Currivan’s succeeding report, datelined July 13 (published July 14) reported “the complete capture of Lydda,” with the exception of a holdout of Arab fighters at the police station, and noted that Arab civilians had suddenly departed Lydda after its capture. In none of his reports did Currivan report anything remotely approaching a “massacre.”
This is the journalistic equivalent of the non-barking dog: (1) the Lydda operation occurred three months after Deir Yassin, which the Times had covered; (2) Lydda was a significant strategic site; (3) the Times had an experienced war correspondent covering the Lydda operation; and yet (4) the Times reported no “massacre” there. A massacre at Lydda would have been a major development and important news. But there was no bark from the Times.
Lies and Falestine
A while ago I came across a paper written by Jeremy R. Hammond entitled “The Myth of the U.N. Creation of Israel.” In his diatribe he begins his bitter prolonged discourse based on the assumption, purveyed by those ever so sad losers of Nachba fame, that there was an entity, a “country” if you may, called “Palestine”. So allow me to debunk the false claim of a existence of a country whose sole inhabitants were “unjustly” usurped of “their” land known as “Falestine”.
Here are true historical facts.
The word ‘Palestinian’ is never found in Scripture. The term ‘Palestine’ is used four times in the King James Version (Exodus 15:14) Philistia (פְּלָשֶׁת); Isaiah 14:29, 31 (O Philistia) but never as synonymous with either the land of Canaan or the land of Israel. The Hebrew word is פְּלִשְׁתִּים, Plištim and referred to a small region also known as Philistia (Psalms 60:10, 87:4, 108:10), the land of the Pelishtee, or Philistines. It occurs 286 times in the Masoretic text of the Hebrew bible (of which 152 times in Samuel 1), whereas in the Greek Septuagint version of the Hebrew Bible, the equivalent term phylistiim occurs only 12 times, with the remaining 269 references instead using the term “allophylos” (“of another tribe”).
“In the New Testament, the term Palestine is never used. The term Israel is primarily used to refer to the people of Israel, rather than the Land. However, in at least two passages, Israel is used to refer to the Land: (Matt. 2:20-21)

  • Wednesday, December 31, 2014
  • Elder of Ziyon
This was on Fatah's Facebook page today:


The text is "We remain on your skulls." I am told that the first word, "baqiya," is often associated with ISIS.

This reminds me of a political cartoon published in Syria during the Six Day War, entitled "The Barricades of Tel Aviv:"


I've seen some people argue that the Fateh Facebook page isn't "official." I have no way of knowing who posts to the page, but I can tell you one thing: not a single fan of that Facebook page, out of 130,000 "Likes," objected to this image, nor to the many other equally militaristic images on the site.

There was another interesting picture posted there, as a bit of nostalgia. Since tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of Fatah's first terror attack, someone dug up a poster celebrating the fifth anniversary:



Then, everyone knew that "occupation" wasn't the issue - Jews having their own country was the issue. And that is just as obvious looking at this latest poster, even if the entire West chooses to be blind on that topic.

Finding offensive pictures like these are not proof that the entire society approves of violence. You can find equally offensive graphics that are racist and anti-Muslim.

The difference is that that there is immediate revulsion and condemnation when it happens in the West. And there is net to none when it happens in Palestinian territories of Arab countries.

But the complete lack of pushback for these images - the almost total lack of Arabs complaining that these are offensive and disgusting - does reveal a lot about Arab society in general and Palestinian Arab society in particular.

(h/t David G, Grant Rumley)

  • Wednesday, December 31, 2014
  • Elder of Ziyon
Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory

Check out their Facebook page. And congratulate them on making the big time!


Brussels, December 31 - Officials at the European Commission have approved a grant to underwrite the design and manufacture of a better-insulated echo chamber for politicians, activists, and academics who oppose Israel. EC spokesman Wyrol Yessmen told representatives of several anti-Israel organizations today that the Commission had approved their application, and that work on the design and production could begin within weeks.

Critics of Israel have for years complained that they have been unable to insulate themselves completely from information or opinions that do not dovetail with their preconceived negative view of Israel, despite surrounding themselves with like-minded colleagues, blocking social media contact by opponents, and similar strategies to maintain a monolithic, self-congratulatory circle of anti-Zionists. The existing echo chamber was effective in stroking the egos of the personalities inside it, according to the organizations, but its ability to remove all dissenting viewpoints and facts contradictory to their position was less than satisfactory.

To eliminate the penetration of poisonous notions that Israel and its policies might represent positive phenomena, a group of activists, academics, and politicians formed an organization called Progressive Rights and Education Activists Combating Hard Teachings Opposing True, Honest Ethnic Cleansing of Hebrew Occupation in Indigenous Regions (PREACHTOTHECHOIR). PREACHTOTHECHOIR applied for European Commission funding earlier this year as the fighting in and around the Gaza Strip raged and organization members came to realize how difficult it was with their current resources to completely drown out or shout down people or groups who insist on justifying Israeli self-defense and legitimacy.

A more effective echo chamber, argued the proposal, would further European values by allowing critics and enemies of Israel to proceed unimpeded in their quest to pursue the removal of Jews as a significant presence from the map, a quintessentially European endeavor. "The danger posed by dissenting voices can be eliminated by preventing those voices from reaching our ears," wrote linguistics professor Noam Chomsky, in his letter of recommendation supporting the proposal.

PREACHTOTHECHOIR intends to contract with an engineer to develop the chamber. As the appropriate engineering field is acoustics, the proposal naturally mentions as its preferred candidate Professor Arthur Butz of Northwestern University, whose expertise is electrical engineering, completely unrelated to acoustics, but who has used his laurels as an "engineer" to lend credence to his 1976 book denying the Holocaust, in which expertise in electrical engineering is similarly irrelevant.
From Ian:

UN Security Council rejects unilateral Palestinian statehood bid
The resolution needed nine votes in favor (out of 15) to pass. It fell one vote short, obtaining eight votes in favor (Russia, China, France, Jordan, Chad, Luxembourg, Argentina and Chile), two against (the United States and Australia), and five abstentions (Britain, Rwanda, Nigeria, Lithuania and South Korea). However, even if the resolution had passed, the U.S. would have vetoed it.
Before the vote, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with the leaders of three of the nations that ended up abstaining, including Rwanda and Nigeria, and asked them to not vote in favor of the Palestinian resolution.
On Wednesday morning, Netanyahu said, "I want to express appreciation and thanks to the U.S. and Australia, and also special appreciation to the president of Rwanda, my friend Paul Kagame, and the president of Nigeria, my friend Goodluck Jonathan. I spoke with both of them. They personally promised me they would not support this resolution. They stood by their word, and that is what decided this battle. This was very important for the State of Israel."
After Tuesday's vote, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power said, "In recent years, no government has invested more in the effort to achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace than the United States. Peace, however difficult it may be to forge, is too important to give up on.
"Regrettably, instead of giving voice to the aspirations of both Palestinians and Israelis, this text [the Palestinian resolution] addresses the concerns of only one side. It is deeply imbalanced and contains many elements that are not conducive to negotiations between the parties, including unconstructive deadlines that take no account of Israel's legitimate security concerns.
"We must proceed responsibly, not take actions that would risk a downward spiral. We voted against this resolution not because we are comfortable with the status quo. We voted against it because we know what everyone here knows as well -- peace will come from hard choices and compromises that must be made at the negotiating table. Today's staged confrontation in the U.N. Security Council will not bring the parties closer to achieving a two-state solution."
Khaled Abu Toameh: Why Palestinians Opposed Abbas's Statehood Bid
The widespread opposition among Palestinians to Abbas's statehood bid at the Security Council is a clear sign that many Palestinians remain opposed to any form of concessions to Israel. It is also an indication of fierce opposition among Palestinians to the resumption of peace talks with Israel.
Those who opposed the Palestinian resolution also argue that Abbas should have gone instead to the International Criminal Court to file "war crimes" charges against Israel. For many Palestinians, punishing Israel should take priority over any peaceful establishment of a Palestinian state.
But the opposition to the resolution, which envisaged a two-state solution, also shows that many Palestinians continue to believe that violence, and not diplomacy, will bring them closer to achieving their goals.
As Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar put it, "This Palestinian resolution is catastrophic and has no future on the land of Palestine. The future belongs to the resistance. We will continue to work to liberate all the land and achieve the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Hamas will not accept anything less than all the lands that were occupied in 1948."
Israel calls Palestinian actions at UN ‘embarrassing’
The Security Council on Tuesday rejected a resolution on Palestinian statehood, with the Palestinians failing to get the minimum nine “yes” votes (required for either adoption by the 15-member council or to prompt a possible veto by one of the five permanent members): Eight voted for the resolution and two voted against, with five abstentions.
“The Palestinians seek — and find — every opportunity to avoid direct negotiations and to walk circumventing paths,” Israel Nitzan of the Israeli mission to the UN said in a short statement. “We’ve become accustomed to their political maneuvers. But today they surpassed themselves by going all the way to the Security Council to make a mockery of it with embarrassing resolutions.
“We have news for the Palestinians – the way to achieve statehood is not paved with provocations,” he said.
Israel's Statement Following the Defeat of the Palestinian Draft Resolution


  • Wednesday, December 31, 2014
  • Elder of Ziyon
We're reported on Sheik Yassin Al-'Ajlouni, the Jordanian preacher who ruled that Jews should have a place of prayer on the Temple Mount - and then retracted the ruling when he was heavily criticized.

Silly Yassin, thinking that he could get out of trouble by merely repenting for his horrible idea that Jews have a right to worship on their holiest spot.

Sheikh Al-'Ajlouni has been arrested for issuing his original fatwa, on the orders of the Administrative Governor of the Irbid Governorate.

I'm not sure what law he violated.

At the same time, the "General Mufti Department" Attorney General filed a lawsuit against Sheikh Ajlouni demanding that the Ministry of Education take "appropriate administrative action" against him "for issuing random fatwas that hurt the feelings of Muslims, and affected the Jordanian efforts to protect the Al-Aqsa Mosque from Zionist attacks."

Ajlouni is a physics teacher,

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

  • Wednesday, December 31, 2014
  • Elder of Ziyon
Egyptian courts may have decided this week that they don't want Jews to visit the gravesite of Yaakov Abuhatzeira, making up ludicrous excuses to bar Jews from the country, but not all Arab countries are following suit.

There are a series of pilgrimages to the gravesites of famous rabbis in Morocco throughout the year. One of them is happening around now, as Jews of Moroccan origin from around the world are visiting the grave of Rabbi David Ben Baruch Hakohen Azogh.

These pilgrimages are known as hiloulot and they take place on the anniversaries of the rabbi's deaths. Many are also celebrated at Lag B'Omer in the spring.

Moroccan news media are quite supportive of the influx of Jewish pilgrims, even the ones from Israel. There were a number of sympathetic articles about this most recent pilgrimage to the town of Taroudant where Rabbi Azogh's grave is. The articles note how these pilgrimages are opportunities for members of Moroccan Jewish families now spread throughout the world to have reunions.

There is even a ten minute news video about the visits that seems to be very supportive of the influx of Jews to Morocco. Note one interviewee is clearly from Israel.

  • Wednesday, December 31, 2014
  • Elder of Ziyon

From The Telegraph:

HarperCollins, one of the world's largest publishing houses, sells English-language atlases to schools in the Middle East that omit Israel.

Collins Middle East Atlases show Jordan and Syria extending to the Mediterranean but do mark the position of the West Bank.

“The publication of this atlas will confirm Israel’s belief that there exists a hostility towards their country from parts of the Arab world. It will not help to build up a spirit of trust leading to peaceful co-existence,” said Bishop Declan Lang, the chairman of the Bishops' Conference Department of International Affairs, to The Tablet.

“Maps can be a very powerful tool in terms of de-legitimising 'the other' and can lead to confusion rather than clarity. We would be keen to see relevant bodies ensure that all atlases anywhere reflect the official United Nations position on nations, boundaries and all political features," added Dr Jane Clements, director of the Council of Christians and Jews.

However, Collins Bartholomew, the subsidiary of HarperCollins that specialises in maps, said that including Israel would have been “unacceptable” to their customers in the Gulf and the amendment incorporated “local preferences”.

The Tablet said it had discovered the customs officers in one unnamed Gulf country only permitting the import of school atlases once Israel had been deleted by hand.
The description of the book at their resellers emphasizes that it is meant only for schools in "Middle East" countries. well, all of them except one:

An ideal school atlas for young primary school geographers. Content is specifically designed for schools in Middle East countries. It enables students to learn about the world today by exploring clear and engaging maps, study satellite imagery, understand key facts and statistics, and learn how maps and atlases work.

The atlas has been developed specifically for schools in the Middle East. It has been designed to stimulate and inspire students with its syllabus specific content.

The maps give in-depth coverage of the region and its issues. Topics included in the atlas help pupils to understand the relationship between the social and physical environment, the regions’s challenges, its socio-economic development and inter-relationships with neighbouring regions and the wider world.
But their main webpage for the book doesn't mention the caveat of its intended audience.

HarperCollins describes itself this way:
We love maps! We have done for almost 200 years, and we've been a leading publisher of maps and atlases all that time. Our focus is to produce clear, up-to-date, and informative map products to enable you to find the information you need quickly and easily.
"Informative" being a relative term.

People who produce schoolbooks, as well as people who create maps, have an obligation to their profession to ensure accuracy. To hear HarperCollins defend itself because the intended audience doesn't like reality is as poor an excuse as one can imagine. Should science textbooks include creationism for that reason?

Here's another map from the book.

(h/t Adam Levick)


UPDATE: HarperCollins responds:
HarperCollins regrets the omission of the name Israel from their Collins Middle East Atlas. This product has now been removed from sale in all territories and all remaining stock will be pulped. HarperCollins sincerely apologises for this omission and for any offence caused.

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

From Ian:

PA official news and Fatah: Synagogue killers glorified as Islamic Martyrs
Posting a picture of the graves of the two terrorists who murdered 5 Israelis in a synagogue in West Jerusalem last month, Abbas’ Fatah movement glorified them with the supreme Islamic status of Shahids - “Martyrs... who ascended [to heaven]”:
“This is the place of eternal rest of Martyrs (Shahids) Ghassan and Uday Abu Jamal of Jabel Mukaber [neighborhood] in occupied Jerusalem, who ascended [to heaven] a month and a half ago during an operation (i.e., terror attack) at an occupation synagogue in occupied Jerusalem. Early morning today, they were escorted to their graves at Al-Sawahreh Al- Sharqiyeh.”
[Fatah’s Facebook page, “Fatah - The Main Page”, Dec. 25, 2014]
Fatah called the terror attack “an operation at an occupation synagogue in occupied Jerusalem.” On Nov. 18, 2014, the two Arab terrorists from East Jerusalem entered a synagogue in Jerusalem and attacked worshippers with guns, knives and axes, killing 4 worshippers and a police officer. 7 people were injured, 3 of them seriously. The terrorists were killed in an exchange of fire with Israeli police that arrived on the scene.
The Palestinian Authority’s official news agency WAFA likewise honored the murderers with the supreme Islamic status of “Shahids” who were “escorted... to the place of their final rest”:
“Yesterday [Dec. 25, 2014], the citizens of Jerusalem escorted the bodies of Martyrs (Shahids) Ghassan and Uday Abu Jamal, from the Jabel Mukaber neighborhood of south-east Jerusalem, to the place of their final rest in the Al-Sawahreh Al-Sharqiyeh cemetery, after they were held by the occupation for 37 days, and transferred to their relatives after midnight.” [From WAFA, official PA news agency, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Dec. 26, 2014]
Is Israel an apartheid state? Answers from someone who’d know
Today living in Jerusalem, [Benjamin] Pogrund, 81, is arguably the most vocal — and perhaps best placed — critic of equating Israel with apartheid South Africa. “The apartheid accusation is a deadly one,” he said. “It’s something that people can relate to. It sounds so straightforward and direct and easy. The fact that it’s built on a foundation of simple untruths and exaggeration and distortion is another matter.”
Pogrund knows apartheid up close, the original kind. One of the most prominent Jewish opponents of the South African apartheid regime, he was a close confidant and personal friend of Nelson Mandela. In 1961, as his paper’s African affairs reporter, Pogrund helped the future president organize an illegal strike.
“Mandela and I met secretly and regularly,” Pogrund recalled in David Saks’s 2011 book “Jewish Memories of Mandela.” “We had a system of sending messages to arrange to meet, which would either be at a friend’s house in Fordsburg, or when I would drive to a street corner at night, pick up Mandela — his worker’s overalls disguise did little to hide his tall, imposing figure — and we would sit in my car in a dark street and talk about the strike campaign.”
In “Drawing Fire: Investigating the Accusations of Apartheid in Israel,” which came out in July, Pogrund ardently argues against comparing South Africa with the Jewish state. At the same time, he makes plain his utter disapproval of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.
 Western leftists stand up for their comrades in Islam
Islamic State’s totalitarian ideology is clarified in Dabiq magazine and Flames of War, a documentary that justifies its genocidal barbarity using propaganda concocted by the 1960s communist Left. In socialist and Islamist propaganda, the West is portrayed as an imperialist colonial leviathan that stands between eternally oppressed minorities and the second coming of international socialism. The utopian socialists and Islamists both promise world peace — after their bloody revolutions, of course.
Reality is an enduring irritant in the smooth passage of totalitarian propaganda from its political elite to the masses. The internet has revealed the intimate violence of life in socialist and Islamist states, whose totalitarian ethos descends on the wings of a promise of peace and equality.
North Korea uses the UN to market itself as a champion of peace. Islamists claim to represent a religion of peace. Socialism is sold as the politics of peace. On December 16, as Australians mourned our first victims of Islamic State terror on home soil, the jihadist who terrorised our nation, Monis, could be found on Wikipedia’s list of peace activists, cited as an “Australian Muslim cleric, anti-war activist”. The list includes socialist Noam Chomsky, pedophilia advocate Allen Ginsberg and anarchist Emma Goldman.
In November, members of Britain’s socialist-communist party Left Unity proclaimed that the Islamic State caliphate had “progressive potential” because it opposed “Western-imposed nation-states” in the Middle East. Repeating the ignoble lie that “Western domination” gave rise to Islamic State, Left Unity socialists John Tummon and Mark Anthony France issued a diktat: “The European Left has to acknowledge and accept the widespread call for a caliphate among Muslims” as “an authentic expression of their emancipatory, anti-imperialist aspirations”. They praised the caliphate for its “strong internationalism” while heaping criticism on the West for its dedication to secularism. (h/t Alexi)

  • Tuesday, December 30, 2014
  • Elder of Ziyon
Palestine Today reports that while some 350 truckfuls of goods were scheduled to be imported into Gaza from Israel today, there is no fuel being pumped for the Gaza power plant, for the third day in a row.

This is not because of any Israeli limitations on fuel. Gasoline and cooking gas are being pumped today. It is all a question of whether there are any buyers in Gaza who are paying for it.

Hamas and the PA have been arguing for weeks over the price of fuel for the power plant. It appears that sometimes, some other nations have been paying for the fuel for Gaza.

Right now, it seems, no one is paying.

COGAT tells me that so far this year, 62,888,584 liters of fuel have been transferred from Israel to Gaza for the power plant, including 7,276,227 liters in December alone.

When the Gaza power plant does not have fuel, electricity outages reach 12 hours a day in Gaza. Israel provides 125 MW a day and Egypt another 32 MW a day.

  • Tuesday, December 30, 2014
  • Elder of Ziyon
Did you hear the news? Hamas is turning moderate!

Hamas is reviewing its strategy with the changing times. It is conducting an internal debate, with proposals which have had to be officially refuted.

One such proposal was for direct negotiations with the Israelis, currently forbidden by the movement’s constitution. A statement was issued saying direct negotiations with Israel is not the movement’s policy and is not on the table for discussion. The call, however, had come from none other than Mousa Abu Marzouk, the deputy political chief of Hamas. “We have negotiated with Israel using weapons; so it is possible to negotiate with words,” he stressed.

There is a need, say some senior figures, to break entirely from old precepts in foreign relations. Sheikh Ahmad Yousef, one of the movement’s ideologues, told me that direct talks should not only be held with Israel but the West as well. “We have to acknowledge that there is a negative image of us among some in Europe and America. We can carry on and let that continue, or we can talk to these countries, put forward our case, exchange ideas: that seems to us to be the practical way forward.”

Hamas needs to rethink its whole strategy, held Sheikh Ahmad, looking at what has been learnt from successive rounds of conflicts and negotiations and also be prepared to make changes to its 27-year-old manifesto, especially the parts in it which can be viewed as anti-Semitic. At the same time everything possible must be done to distance the movement from al-Qaeda and Isis, “making it very clear that the Islam we believe in is very different from theirs”.
Wow, this sounds familiar...oh yes. It happens every year or so. Hamas says something that sounds potentially not genocidal, and reporters eat it up, reporting how peaceful Hamas is. The Guardian had this meme as early as 2006. In 2011 the NYT said, without proof, that Hamas accepts Israel as a state. NPR talks about a mythical 100 year hudna that Hamas is supposedly willing to adhere to.

But none of these media outlets and pundits bother to consider that Hamas, explicitly and publicly, forcefully rejects  any idea of accepting Israel every single day. They ignore Hamas' words in favor of believing and reporting  the lies.

Here are all Hamas leaders on the podium of their anniversary rally just this month:



Khalil Al-Hayya: Our basic principles are: Palestine, all of Palestine, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, is pure Arab Islamic land, which we will share with no one.

Hamas member: Allah Akbar! All praise to Allah!

Khalil Al-Hayya: Our principles say that the land of Palestine belongs to its residents – the Palestinians, the progeny of the Prophet's companions, his disciples, and the early Muslims. There is no solution for these Palestinians, who were dispersed hither and thither, and there is no possible solution for them other than return of them all to the land of Palestine. This is an axiom.

We shall never agree to compromise on this, nor shall we accept any agreement with the enemy with regard to it. We shall not accept any agreement with the Zionist entity with regard to the return of the refugees. It is our right for all of us to return, and the Zionists will compensate us after we drive them out in humiliation, for all the years that we have suffered in the wilderness of oppression and injustice.

Our principle is that Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque belong to us, and there is no room for the Zionists there. There is no room for the occupation of even a single inch of it. Jerusalem is the untied capital of the Arab Islamic Palestine. Jerusalem is the focal point of the Islamic-Zionist conflict. This is an unchangeable principle, and as we have been taught by the annals of history and its lessons, the occupation will come to an end only by means of the gun and of resistance.
When Hamas leaders say this to crowds of thousands of people, they are just posturing. When they speak to Western reporters parroting what the reporters want to hear and to misinterpret - that's the reality, if you believe the Independent and NPR and the New York Times. No matter how many terror attacks and rockets have been launched since the previous "peaceful Hamas" reports.

That is the fantasy that the media has been pushing on its readers for a decade now. And they will never admit that they have been wrong.

The PLO spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on public relations, Hamas doesn't need to, because the worlds major media outlets are happy to burnish Hamas' reputation for free.
From Ian:

Mahmoud Abbas is again insisting on failure
What could explain such maneuvering? Some diplomats suspect Mr. Abbas wants his maximalist resolution to be voted down — just as previous Palestinian attempts failed to obtain the necessary eight of 15 votes. By not forcing the United States into a veto, the Palestinian leader could preserve his lines of communication with Washington while obtaining a pretext to move on to his next pointless initiative — which could be seeking Palestinian membership in the International Criminal Court.
Accession to the court wouldn’t bring Palestinians any closer to statehood, and it might expose the Hamas movement to war crimes prosecution. It could cause Congress to cut off the U.S. aid that now sustains the Palestinian Authority. But Mr. Abbas and his aides have recently been suggesting they would have “no choice” but to proceed if they obtain no satisfaction from the Security Council.
Mr. Abbas does, of course, have a choice. He could endorse the framework laboriously negotiated by Secretary of State John F. Kerry and challenge Mr. Netanyahu — or his successor after Israel’s upcoming election — to resume negotiations. Statehood would then be on the table — but the 79-year-old Palestinian leader would have to commit himself formally to compromises he has until now discussed only in private with U.S. and Israeli leaders. Rather than lobby at the United Nations, he would have to attempt for the first time to sell those concessions to his own people.
Mr. Abbas has, on several previous occasions, dodged that challenge. So no one should be surprised if he now insists on losing another vote at the United Nations.
Israel’s enemies reload
Continuing to show utter contempt for Israel as it seeks a durable peace with its neighbors, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are again working to perpetuate an endless war with the Jewish state.
Monday, Jordan submitted to the UN Security Council, on behalf of Mahmoud Abbas’ PA, a draft resolution creating a strict timeline for Israeli withdrawal to pre-1967 borders.
Never mind profound and legitimate Israeli fears about security — rubbed raw by an elaborate network of Gaza terror tunnels exposed during this year’s hostilities with Hamas, followed by a fresh wave of PA-incited terrorist attacks against innocent civilians in recent weeks.
Never mind that Israel has been ready and willing to negotiate a deal in good faith — only to run head-first into a Palestinian leadership with no interest whatsoever in coexistence.
Fortunately, the United States sees through the ruse, with the State Department condemning the resolution for setting “arbitrary deadlines,” which are “more likely to curtail useful negotiations than to bring them to a successful conclusion.”
Former Swedish PM tweets satire as news
The official Twitter account of the former prime minister of Sweden tweeted a satirical news report about an Israeli travel warning to Sweden as fact on Monday.
Carl Bildt, who served as Sweden’s prime minister from 1991-1994 and as foreign minister between 2006 and September of this year, tweeted the article by the Onion-style blog PreOccupied Territory, titled “Israel Issues Travel Warning For US, France, Sweden,” saying: “Israel has officially warned its citizens not to travel to Sweden. That’s somewhat of an overreaction.”
After about an hour, during which many users tweeted at him to tell him that the article was satirical, Bildt removed the link.
The report, published on Thursday, fictitiously reported that Jerusalem’s Foreign Ministry had issued a travel warning for Israeli tourists to stay out of several First World countries for fear of ethnic violence, highlighting internal turmoil in the United States, France and Sweden.

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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 14 years and 30,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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