Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, August 23, 2015

Matisyahu Excoriated and Redeemed (Mike Lumish)

I was on the number 7 bus heading up Haight Street in San Francisco talking to one of my more interesting and edgy students from City College of SF a few years ago.

For reasons that elude me, now, I mentioned the great American Jewish Reggae musician, Matisyahu.

We were sitting opposite one another on a loud and bouncy MUNI bus and I said something like, "Matisyahu is an absolutely terrific Jewish performer who is merging Chasidic Judaism with Reggae music. The man is unique."

At that moment, just as the bus was easing into my stop, at the corner of Haight and Broderick, some stranger, a black man, spit me straight in the face.

I have no idea what offended him other than the fact that a Jew was doing Reggae and, apparently, he did not appreciate it.

It was a very weird moment. The bus came to a halt, the guy spit on me, and cursed me, as I was rising to depart, and then my student, a young non-Jewish man in his twenties, arose to confront my assaulter. I thought that he was going to slug him. I stood up, wiping the phlegm from my face, and put myself between my student and the hideous schmuck. I told him to not get into a fight and then I simply hopped off of the bus, heading home.

I probably should have slugged the racist in the face, myself, but G-d only knows what happened after that and we never spoke of it, afterward.

But I will remember that moment for the rest of my life.

I have no idea what upset that individual other than the fact that a Jewish man, Matisyahu, was excelling at a traditional black musical art-form. Normally that kind of thing upsets no one but the racists. Plus, of course, Matisyahu was not merely a Jew, but a hard-core practicing Jew dressed in black, although I understand that he has in recent years gone to a more secular style and has left the Chassids.

On the day that I write this, in the middle of last week, we learn from Douglas Murray that Matisyahu has been disinvited to the Rototom Sunsplash Reggae festival in Spain because he refused to endorse a political point-of-view concerning the Arab-Israel conflict.

The Spanish seem to be among the least friendly European people toward the Jewish people and polling data bares this out.

Murray writes:

This week the news came in that a Spanish music festival had cancelled a planned performance by Matisyahu, an American reggae star. Matisyahu became famous as the "hassidic reggae star," although he left Orthodox Judaism in 2011. He no longer has a beard of wears a skullcap, but he does remain proud of his Jewish identity. Next weekend, on August 22, he was due to perform at the Rototom Sunsplash festival in Benicassim, north of Valencia.
Unfortunately for anyone simply interested in music, a group of local Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activists found out about Matisyahu's upcoming performance. They claimed that Matisyahu is a supporter of "an apartheid state that practices ethnic cleansing," and demanded that the festival cancel the performance.

If this was the US I would call them up and scream my bloody head off. I harassed the Met over the The Death of Klinghoffer, so why not these guys?

Matisyahu is of course not the first Jew to suffer this type of pressure. In Europe, and increasingly in America too, any and all performers who come from Israel can be abused and vilified in the name of "progressive" values. In London, the Jerusalem String Quartet and Israel Philharmonic Orchestra have been the targets of attempts to cancel their performances. When the performances have gone ahead, they have had to suffer obscene and threatening performance interruptions by protesters.
The ironic thing is that Matisyahu is a deeply caring humanitarian. This video, King Without A Crown, demonstrates that quite clearly, does it not?

Matisyahu is an American Jew who grew up in White Plains, New York, a stone's throw from my parents' house in Bardonia, New York, when I was a kid.

It is obvious that what we are seeing now - via BDS and western-left anti-Zionism - is an attack on Jewry, in general.

The good thing, of course, was that by overreaching BDS invited significant push-back which resulted in the music festival capitulating and re-inviting Matisyahu. As Jared Samilow writes in the Jewish Journal:

Looking back, the whole episode seems dryly amusing. Spain’s BDS coterie should have known better, really. Discretion is the better part of valor. It was entirely predictable that openly discriminating against an American Jew would not fly in front of a broad public. Such garish anti-Semitism might cut it among certain benighted precincts, but was bound to get the cold shoulder from ordinary concert-goers and the political elite.

Well, I don't how amusing it is.

The Spanish Reggae festival spit Matisyahu straight in the face. Unlike with my little encounter with flat-out physically hostile anti-Jewish racism on a bus in San Francisco, we know how this one ended up.

The good guy won.

{And I'm guessing that this may be the last we hear of this story. Maybe. In any case, I am bringing up the rear.}

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.

UNRWA school encourages running over Jews with cars

An UNRWA school in Syria has featured posters encouraging Arabs to kill Jews with cars.

The Rameh school in Damascus has included this poster, which translates to "car intifada - run over"

And also this antisemitic cartoon with the frightened religious Jew running away from a toy car controlled by the happy Palestinian Arab:

This is from the official Facebook page of an UNRWA school, not of individual UNRWA teachers.

Last week UNRWA announced that it had managed to scare a number of nations into paying some $79 million to allow it to open its schools on time this year.

But it looks like its Gaza schools won't open on time.

UNRWA teachers are upset that they have to make some compromises, like larger class sizes. So the Gaza UNRWA teachers' union announced that they will go on strike on the first day of school, scheduled for Monday.

The same union organized large protests last week in the face of the possibility of the school year being delayed four months.

The head of the union for Gaza UNRWA teachers is Suhail Hindi. He is a known Hamas member. In 2011, UNRWA - under Western pressure -said that it dismissed Hindi, causing large protests and teacher strikes in Gaza. UNRWA then caved, and he is still the head of the union and still an UNRWA principal (with an UNRWA.org email address.)

As far as I know, no one has asked Chris Gunness why they still employ a known Hamas member as a school principal, against all UNRWA rules.

Rats in Hamas hospital - how long before Israel is blamed?

Here's a video of a mouse or rat running around the equipment at Al Aqsa Hospital, in Deir al Balah, Gaza.

The hospital director blames the cleaning crews, saying that they were responsible for keeping the hospital rat-free. That's taking responsibility for you.

Oh, and he also said that if it is found that a hospital employee too the video, there will be punishment.

I figure it will take a couple of hours before Israel is blamed for this.

But it can also explain why Hamas sends its own people outside Gaza for medical care, something that others have been complaining about.

08/22 Links: Khamenei: Islamic unity against real enemies - US and Israel; Frank Sinatra and Israel

From Ian:

Israel’s leaders ‘furious’ over Barak tapes describing aborted plans to hit Iran

Israel’s leadership, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on down, is reportedly furious with former defense minister Ehud Barak for having detailed on tape three occasions in 2010-2012 when Israel was ostensibly on the point of striking Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Israel’s Channel 2, which broadcast the bombshell recordings on Friday night, said Saturday that the “anger” at Barak was widespread in the Israeli leadership, and that numerous senior political and security officials were also privately intimating that Barak’s version of events was not entirely accurate. The Prime Minister’s Office did not issue an official response to the broadcast.
In the tapes, whose broadcast Barak fought unsuccessfully to block, he claims that he and Netanyahu wanted to attack Iran in 2010, but that then-chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi indicated that there was no viable plan for such an operation; that they were thwarted in 2011 by the opposition of fellow ministers Moshe Ya’alon and Yuval Steinitz; and that a planned 2012 strike was aborted because it happened to coincide with a joint Israel-US military exercise and Israel did not want to drag the US into the fray.
In the aftermath of the broadcast of the tapes, Channel 2 said Saturday, various key Israeli figures had indicated that Ashkenazi did not rule out an operation as decisively as Barak suggested, and that a great deal of preparatory work had been done. Furthermore, the TV report Saturday said, Ashkenazi was by no means the only senior Israeli figure who was not decisively supportive of a strike at that time. Others included then-Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who later made public his opposition, and top ministers including Dan Meridor and Eli Yishai.

Khamenei urges Islamic unity against real enemies: US and Israel

Iran’s supreme leader claimed Saturday that Islamic nations were being manipulated into internal strife by the world’s “bullies” and urged Islamic unity in the face of what he identified as the Umma’s two greatest enemies: the US and Israel.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the US had long sought to incite “third-party” states against Iran but “such third parties are only deceived puppets,” the Islamic republic’s Fars news agency reported.
“The root cause of the problems returns to their real enemies, the US and Israel,” he said.
The bullying powers, as he called them, are conspiring “against the Quran and not Shiism and Iran, because they know that the Quran and Islam are the center of awakening nations.”
Iranians, he said, “have realized that their real stubborn enemy is the world arrogance and Zionism and that’s why they chant slogans against the US and Zionism.”

Iranian Official: We “Reject the Existence of Any Israeli on This Earth”

Hussein Sheikholeslam, a senior adviser to Iran’s Speaker of Parliament, told the Hamas-affiliated newspaper al-Resalah that Tehran “reject[s] the existence of any Israeli on this earth,” a position he says Iran relayed to the P5+1 powers during the nuclear negotiations, The Times of Israel reported Wednesday. According to Sheikholeslam, Iran “will do everything to renew” its support for Hamas, which Tehran lessened in retaliation to the Sunni group’s opposition to the regime of Bashar al-Assad after the outbreak of the Syrian civil war.
Sheikholeslam’s comments are the latest in a series of threats issued against Israel by Iran since the Islamic Republic signed a nuclear agreement with the P5+1 powers last month.
A video posted on a website linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), titled “Preparation of the complete destruction of Israel by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Islamic Revolution in Iran,” called for Israel’s “erasure from the annals of history,” according to another report in The Times of Israel on Wednesday. The clip depicts an invasion of Jerusalem by an Islamic army that includes Hamas and Hezbollah among its ranks

08/21 Links Pt2: Anti-Zionism’s Mask Falls; UN-istan; Jews, lies and olive trees

From Ian:

Anti-Zionism’s Mask Falls

The first Saturday in September will see Israel’s national soccer team travel to Cardiff, the capital of Wales, for a vital qualifying game for next year’s European Championship in France. As is becoming the norm when any Israeli athletes travel abroad, the team will also face protests off the field, led by activists who believe that Israel has no right to compete internationally in the first place.
I mention this forthcoming event because one of the speakers addressing the anti-Israel rally outside the soccer stadium is Jeremy Corbyn, a far-left member of the U.K. parliament for the opposition Labour Party and, more importantly, the current front-runner in the battle for that party’s leadership. If Corbyn ends up winning the contest— triggered by the resignation of former leader Ed Miliband, following his poor showing in the U.K.’s general election earlier this year—we will have a vocal supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement at the helm of one of Europe’s more august left-wing parties.
Corbyn is a patron of the U.K.’s pro-BDS Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which is well known for its anti-Semitic targeting of Israel through its constant comparisons of the Jewish state with Nazi Germany and apartheid-era South Africa. But that, arguably, is the least of it.
During the last week, Corbyn has been confronted in the media over his connections to a London-based Holocaust denier and “Palestine solidarity” activist named Paul Eisen. In the past, he has vocally defended Ra’ed Salah, the leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel, despite Salah’s endorsement of the anti-Semitic blood libel and his claim that Jews were warned in advance of the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda terrorist atrocities. When Salah got into a legal tussle with the British authorities during an extended stay in the U.K., Corbyn urged a parliamentary inquiry into the influence of the “pro-Israel Lobby” on government policy. This sinister statement was made after it emerged that the Community Security Trust (CST), a professional and highly-respected body that deals with security for the U.K.’s Jewish community, had provided evidence of Salah’s toxic views to the government.

UN-istan: occupation above and beyond morals and ethics

Now just consider the following before you decide how to do away with this insidious UN occupation.
During the Jordanian occupation, and following that Israel’s return of Jews to their lands, and after the PA was granted full administrative responsibilities under the Oslo Accords, it turns out that little industry has been created in “Palestine”; the UN-funded and UN-run education programme is a case study in mass indoctrination in hatred, racism and violence; the economy is kept alive by the UN thanks to the fact that the UN employs 25,000 locals to maintain the permanent refugee status of the local population; the UN provides the funding and training for the PA’s almost two dozen different internal and external security agencies; the UN runs many of the medical services and, if the PA’s own claims and that of the UN are to be believed, then even issues as basic as food, water supply and nutrition would be non-existent without the UN.
So it turns out the UN is the de facto government of “Palestine”. But since it hasn’t been elected to the post – any more than Mahmud Abbas has – we can rightly claim that “Palestine” is fully, totally, occupied by the UN. In terms of its security, economy, education, food, water, foreign policy, diplomatic cover – everything that makes a nation.
“Palestine” is UN-istan.
And it turns out that UN-istan is one of only a handful of countries that is NOT a member of the UN. Along with North Korea, among others…
Now THAT says a whole lot.

Edgar Davidson: Could this be the most obvious example yet of anti-Israel bias in news reporting?

At roughly the same time today the following two international incidents happened
1 North Korea fired a shell into South Korea. South Korea responded by firing missiles at where the shell was fired from
2 Syria (in the form of Iranian backed Islamic Jihad) fired 4 rockets into Israel. Israel responded with artillery fire at where the rockets were launched from.
Clearly these incidents were very similar - a terrorist regime launching an unprovoked attack against its democratic neighbour leading the latter to respond. The only qualitative differences were that
1 The South Korea response was far more 'disproportionate' (several missiles in response to a single shell) than Israel's (minor artillery shelling in response to 4 rockets)
2 The attack against Israel was far more serious and newsworthy because it was the most serious attack against Israel from Syria in many years and was authorised and funded by Iran at the very time the world is rewarding Iran with nuclear weapons and the ending of sanctions.
So how did the main stream media report these incidents?
- The attack on Israel was almost completely ignored - not a word on the BBC News or even its Middle East News website, while the Korea attack was covered everywhere.
- But, more important, look at how the only British newspaper to cover the Israel story (the Financial Times) described it compared to the way the Korea story was covered.

Radio gaga

The ABC [Australia] has allowed Radio National to be used by fanatics pushing a virulently anti-Israel agenda
A series of programs on ABC Radio National, produced by a long-standing anti-Israel activist, has undermined the objectivity of the national broadcaster and exposed serious failings in its editorial process. The programs may also have put the ABC in breach of its statutory obligation of ‘maintaining independence and integrity’, and its Code of Practice requiring ‘impartiality’ in current affairs.
The programs, Jerusalem: a divine crime scene, and An unholy mix – Jerusalem, religion and archaeology, produced by former Greens Marrickville Councillor Cathy Peters, presented the views of a parade of veteran anti-Israel propagandists, whose unstated purpose was to discredit the historical connection between Jerusalem and the Jewish people, and to level an array of unchallenged and inaccurate accusations against Israel in the guise of expert analysis.
An editor’s note published online described Peters as a member of the NSW Greens, an executive member of the Coalition For Justice and Peace in Palestine and a member of Jews Against the Occupation. What the ABC failed to disclose is that Peters is also a fierce proponent of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. She was the instigator of the 2010 Marrickville Council motion urging the Council to consider boycotting all goods made in any part of Israel, as well as Israeli artists, athletes and academics. The motion, which also called on state and federal governments to adopt BDS, provoked a surge of protest and derision, especially from ratepayers unimpressed that the Council was being used as a vehicle to prosecute a pet international cause of a few Councillors.

Gaza medical professionals crossed into Israel 1300 times this year for seminars

Just another story from "concentration camp Gaza" that you won't read in the media...

Between January and June, 1,300 medical professionals entered into Israel to take educational seminars.

This is besides the professional seminars Israel holds for Gaza farmers and others.

For some reason, these thousands of people are unwilling to adhere to the boycott demands of "Palestinian civil society." Perhaps they are not as civil as the rock throwers and firebombers who are supported by the BDS movement.

From CNN:

Hamas believes it has captured Israel's most sophisticated new surveillance technology -- a dolphin spy. That's according to an article in the Palestinian daily al-Quds published Wednesday.

"Israel did not just stop at the bloody attacks against the Gaza Strip," the Arabic-language article reads, "Now it has recruited a watery pet, the dolphin, known for his friendship with humans, to use for operations to kill Qassam Brigade Naval Commandos."

The Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, which controls Gaza, refused to comment on the story to CNN on Thursday.

The article claims Qassam operatives on a training exercise along the beach confiscated camera equipment and spying devices mounted on the back of the dolphin.

"The Israeli security apparatus took advantage of dolphins' love for humans, and how the animals like to play with people on the water, or in the depths of the sea, to reach members of the Qassam's marine unit," the article read.

A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces contacted by CNN declined to comment on the report.

The story doesn't mention that Hamas also claims that the dolphin was carrying a device to shoot arrows at people.

It doesn't mention the long history of Arabs (and Muslims) claiming Israeli animal spies.

In other words - this reporter actually believes that the story is true.

Compare this CNN story with how it was covered in The Evening Standard, The Express, the Washington Post and others. All of them mentioned the previous absurd stories, although some did note that militaries have researched using dolphins for espionage. All of them treated this story as humorous.

Except for CNN.

Even Russia Today provided more context than CNN did.

Who is this reporter for CNN?

Salma Abdelaziz.

In 2008, she interned at The Carter Center.

In 2009, she interned at Amnesty International.

So she has been steeped in a culture of assuming the worst about Israel - and is so brainwashed that she believes this story and wrote it as straight news.

This is the quality of CNN's Middle East reporting.

We've seen similar quality in the past as CNN parroted other Arab propaganda as fact without doing the least amount of fact-checking.

Abdelaziz says she won a Peabody Award for news editing.

(h/t Ian)

08/21 Links Pt1: Glick: The power of Jewish indignation; A Shariah-approved nuclear attack

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: The power of Jewish indignation

Perhaps we should thank Spain’s Rotodom Sunsplash reggae festival organizers. They just provided us with a textbook case both of the nature of today’s anti-Semitism and of how to defeat it.
Last weekend, the festival organizers canceled their invitation to Matisyahu, the American-Jewish reggae artist, because he refused to bow to the organizers’ demand that he publicly support “Palestine.”
Matisyahu was the only known Jew in the festival line-up and the only performer asked to produce such a statement.
Rather than take this lying down, on Monday Matisyahu recounted the episode on his Facebook page, writing, “It was appalling and offensive that as the one publicly Jewish-American artist scheduled for the festival they were trying to coerce me into political statements.”
Matisyahu’s disinvitation prompted a worldwide Jewish outcry. The Foreign Ministry registered a complaint with the Spanish government.
Every major American Jewish organization and several European Jewish organizations condemned the blatant discrimination against Matisyahu.

Melanie Phillips: Israel and the culture wars

The banning of rapper Matisyahu by the Sunsplash reggae festival in Spain – subsequently rescinded after protests – was an “aha!” moment.
After pressure from the Israel-bashing Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, the festival organizers disinvited the singer because he refused to support “the right of Palestinians to have their own state.”
Matisyahu is, however, not an Israeli but a Jewish American. Aha! people exclaimed; now BDS stands exposed as demonstrably anti-Jew.
Well yes; and so too is the wider anti-Israel obsession which shares the unique characteristics of Jew-hatred down the ages: a frenzied agenda of lies and libels, grotesque fantasies of covert global conspiracy and accusations of behavior of which its targets are not only innocent but are in fact the victims.
However, there’s rather more to the demonization of Israel than just Jew-hatred.
Across the Western world old-fashioned liberalism, based on reason and truth, is disappearing. It has been hijacked by hardleft attitudes based on eradicating the difference between right and wrong, truth and lies, tyrant and victim, in favor of the only distinction that matters: the powerless versus the “imperialist” West.
Through that distorted prism, it inverts reality and punishes any who disagree.
This has bent the minds of millions of “progressives” as effectively as the brainwashing by the Spanish Inquisition, Soviet communism or modern-day Islamism. And just as under those closed thought-systems, today’s progressives are inherently unable to perceive how twisted they have become.

Obama played Catch-22 on Iran deal, fumes Israeli expert

The maintenance and intensification of the American sanctions regime imposed on Iran, even in the absence of a tight international sanctions regime, could lead to a better deal than the one reached last month in Vienna, an Israeli expert on arms said.
Emily Landau, head of the arms control and regional security program at the Institute for National Security Studies based at Tel Aviv University, is one of Israel’s most respected expert observers on the Iranian nuclear program. In an interview, she said that the nuclear accord struck between the P5+1 powers and Iran on July 14 was the result of “failed negotiations.”
An adequate deal, she said, would include the dismantling of most of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure; the imposition of “anytime, anywhere” inspections in response to suspicious activities; requiring the regime to answer 12 critical questions posed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regarding past military nuclear work to the satisfaction of the agency; and explicitly tying sanctions relief to Iran doing so.
But, she stressed, her concerns about the deal also relate to “ambiguous language” in the agreement that could “enable Iran to manipulate the deal in ways they have with past agreements.”
For an hour in her Tel Aviv office, Landau elaborated on the flaws of the deal; on the ongoing debate among American legislators; and on what options will remain if the agreement is rejected.

Typhoid in Syria - Jews to blame

Electronic Intifada writes about a typhoid outbreak near Yarmouk, Syria, where Palestinian Arabs are concentrated. And it concludes (and tweets):

"None of this would be happening to Palestinians in Syria if they were allowed to return to Palestine" http://t.co/wRQXDWDCCc

— Electronic Intifada (@intifada) August 20, 2015

“None of this would be happening to Palestinians in Syria if they were allowed to return to Palestine. The world doesn’t dare to mention that.”

OK, let's mention it.

In January 2013, AP reported:

Abbas said he asked U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon last month to seek Israeli permission to bring Palestinians caught in Syria's civil war to the Palestinian territories. The request came after fighting between Syrian troops and rebel fighters in Yarmouk, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. About half of the camp's 150,000 residents have fled, according to a U.N. aid agency.

Abbas told a group of Egyptian journalists in Cairo late Wednesday that Ban contacted Israel on his behalf.

Abbas said Ban was told Israel "agreed to the return of those refugees to Gaza and the West Bank, but on condition that each refugee ... sign a statement that he doesn't have the right of return (to Israel)."

"So we rejected that and said it's better they die in Syria than give up their right of return," Abbas told the group. Some of his comments were published Thursday by the Palestinian news website Sama.

Abbas has bragged that he rejected Israel's offer to save hundreds of lives because of a principle that has no basis in law or logic.

Electronic Intifada doesn't dare to mention that.

Israel complains about biased UN official - for good reason

AP reports:

Israel's ambassador is urging the U.N.'s internal watchdog to investigate the head of a U.N. agency for misconduct, accusing her of "modern day anti-Semitism." Last year, he tried unsuccessfully to get Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to suspend Rima Khalaf.

Ambassador Ron Prosor met Carmen Lapointe, the head of the Office of Internal Oversight Services, late last month and called for a disciplinary hearing against Khalaf, a Jordanian who heads the Beirut-based U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, which promotes economic and social development in 17 Arab countries.

A letter from the ambassador to Lapointe obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press said "Ms. Khalaf has abused her position in order to promote an anti-Israel agenda, in a flagrant violation of U.N. obligations and principles."

Prosor gave a series of examples including her support for the June 29 "illegal and provocative attempt" to break Israel's naval blockade of the Gaza Strip, a July 7 reference which he said equated "terrorism with a fight for 'justice'," and what he called "a hate fueled report" on Arab integration in March 2014 "that once again promotes anti-Israel incitement by blaming Israel for shortcomings in the Arab world."

"Ms. Khalaf's outrageous criticism against the state of Israel and the discrediting of its government undermine the integrity of the United Nations and amount to serious misconduct, by U.N. standards," Prosor said in the July 27 letter. "I call on you to initiate an urgent investigation into this matter."

Some more details from Arutz-7:

The issues with Khalaf are not new. Last year, Prosor asked UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to fire Khalaf, after she indirectly compared Israel with Nazi Germany, and blamed Israel for all of the Arab world's problems in the area of development.

Ban spoke with Khalaf about the matter but did not fire her.

Several weeks ago, Khalaf again made provocative statements against Israel.

She expressed support for the hostile “flotilla” that sought to breach Israel's maritime blockade on Gaza in June, and said the move was legitimate. She compared the Israeli response to an act of terror, saying: “The Israeli response to the flotilla is like the violent abductions carried out by pirates at sea, in the air and on land, which the world does not hesitate to call terror.”

At another event, which took place at the UN HQ in New York, she said that “terror activities” constitute “a war for justice.”

“In Palestine,” she said in the July speech, “international indifference not only allowed the Israeli occupation to keep on grinding for half a century, but spread instability in the region. This eroded the faith in global justice and pushed some people to take justice into their own hands.”

Last year, Khalaf's agency issued a series of 181 tweets/posts for the "International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People." Many of their "facts" were anything but.. For example, #2:

The linked article has a footnote that links to a UN report which in turn links to an Israeli NGO report that further links to Israeli Freedom of Information disclosures that show that the people referred to here are mostly Arabs who left the region for seven years and didn't check back in with Israeli authorities (all of this was before the 1994 Oslo accords) and therefore lost their residency status. They were not "expelled" in any sense of the word and the UN document linked does not use that word at all.

That's just one example of how anti-Israel UN-ESCWA is. There's lots more:

"In spite of the occupation"? Every university in the territories opened up after 1967! (And one college that became a university in 2007 was founded in 1930 by a Jewish philanthropist.)

And here this UN agency twists Israeli humanitarianism into proof of Israeli evil:

How exactly 15,000 people were allowed to leave the "prison" of Gaza is not quite explained.

This is a UN agency that is going out of its way to propagate anti-Israel lies. No doubt Ms. Khalaf had a lot to do with this initiative.

And the UN can lie with impunity as long as the target is Israel.

Amnesty's own research in Gaza is just as bad as their sources

We are almost finished with the one-year anniversary of Operation Protective Edge, but amnesty International still has a few lies up its sleeve.

It tweeted:

#DeirAlBalah: family home bombed. 8 civilians killed. 2 children found on roof: http://t.co/A9ZPlxmS0E #50Days4Gaza pic.twitter.com/SYiBtu9dRl
— AmnestyInternational (@AmnestyOnline) August 20, 2015

Soon afterwards, Amnesty-USA-Israel/OPT tweeted this:

20 Aug: #DeirAlBalah Al Louh family HOME bombed. 8 civilians killed; 4 children http://t.co/6E0OsxuGzd #50Days4Justice...
— AIUSA Israel/OPT/PA (@IOTPA) August 20, 2015

When you check out this incident in Amnesty's Gaza Platform, you see that unlike most incidents, this is one that Amnesty investigated themselves, rather than copying from PCHR and Al Mezan.

Here's how they describe it:

On Wednesday 20 August 2014, at approximately 5am, an Israeli aircraft dropped a large aerial bomb on the al-Louh family’s two-storey home in the al-Hikr neighbourhood in southern Deir al-Balah. The home of Ra’fat Mustafa Mahmoud al-Louh and his family was completely destroyed and the adjacent home of his father, Mustafa Mahmoud al-Louh, was severely damaged. The two houses are separated by a narrow walkway only a couple of metres wide and share a zinc roof. Ra’fat al-Louh, his heavily pregnant wife, Nabeela Eid al-Louh, and their three children, Mustafa, Maysara and Farah, were all killed in the attack. Ra’fat’s younger brother, Ahmad, who worked with him selling vegetables and was staying in his home, was also killed in the attack. Another brother, Mohammad, was killed when the asbestos roof and walls collapsed on him as he was sleeping in his bedroom in the adjacent house of his father, Mustafa Mahmoud al-Louh, who, along with another son, Mu’min, and his daughter Wafa’ sustained serious injuries. Iman Yunis al-Louh, 18, a niece of Ra’fat’s, died the following day of the injuries she sustained in the attack.

...All witnesses who gave statements said that none of the family members was involved with armed groups.

Ra’fat’s brother Mu’min al-Louh said: “Earlier Ra’fat had gone out with a torch to investigate a rocket that he thought had gone up from the olive fields east of our house. He thought a rocket had fallen on the house. They probably thought that Ra’fat had shot the rocket from the field and thought he was from the resistance.”

... The names of the killed family members are mentioned as “civilians” in the news reporting on the websites of Hamas’ al-Qassam Brigades and Islamic Jihad’s al-Quds Brigades.

So Amnesty investigated - they sent out a field worker, they interviewed family members and they all said that there were no members of militant groups in the family, and Amnesty looked at the terror websites at some point and saw that the casualties were listed as "civilian."

It took me literally one minute to Google the name of Mohammed Mustafa al-Louh, and I saw this "martyr's poster" on a fan page that was put up for him.

The "fans" didn't put up his photo with the gun in August. They waited until October 3. Hamas themselves hid many of their members as "mujahideen" for several weeks after the fighting.

But his family members were all buried in Hamas flags, indicating a connection between the family and Hamas. Mohammed was buried wearing a Hamas headband..

And Amnesty documented elsewhere in that same report that sometimes family members lie. (The Al Bayoumi family swore that no one on their building jihadists, bur neighbors said that there were four terrorists who had a command center there.)

Now, how come I could find this in no time and Amnesty could not do something as simple as Googling the Arabic name of the dead who were of military age?

Because Amnesty's "research" is limited to confirming their existing biases, not honestly uncovering the truth.

It is an astonishing coincidence that for practically every example of family houses bombed that Amnesty tweeted, I found at least one militant among the dead. What are the odds that this could happen when Amnesty maintains that Israel's attacks were random and indiscriminate?

08/20 Links Pt2: Matisyahu Debacle Highlights ‘Anti-Jewish Bigotry’ of BDS in Europe

From Ian:

Amnesty found biased in series of reports you probably have not read

Anonymous blogger, Elder of Ziyon, the internet’s Mike Royko has been uncovering and reporting a pattern of bias and seemingly intentional misinformation by Amnesty International. Some of the reporting has been factual correction caused by Amnesty for being at minimum far too credulous with reportage from Gaza such as this article from July 10th, “@Amnesty says this house had no terrorists. Wrong again.” Amnesty accepts Tawfiq Abu Jame’s claim their house was no involved in the fighting but was bombed anyhow but B’Tselem, an NGO and frequent critic of Israel reported that Ahmad Sahoud was living there and listed as a Hamas Operative. The original post appears to no longer be on the B’Tselem website but the family is listed here, but an archive of the site shows the listing of the Abu Jame’ family as reported by Eder of Ziyon here. To my untrained eye, the dropping off of the Abu Jame family by B’Tselem looks like collusion with Amnesty International to remove an embarrassing fact from the B’Tselem website.
In a July 31st Article, “Amnesty ignores Amnesty's own research in anti-Israel tweets” noted that while Amnesty accused Israel of attacking a house without warning, neighbors reported to Amnesty that Hamas was using the empty apartment “for some time prior to the attack” and then the Elder of Ziyon further noted,
As we have shown, under international law, an attack on a communications hub in Serbia that was only knocked out for a single day was not considered a violation of the laws of armed conflict even though the number of fatalities were higher than this instance. Amnesty's claim of "clearly disproportionate" is flatly wrong. The entire reason Israel did not give warning in this case - as opposed to hundreds of other cases - was obviously because this was a high-value military target.

Phyllis Chesler: Why Worry About Yazidis when You can Focus on Palestinian "Refugees"

Even as the Western intelligentsia continue to focus upon the fake and inflated refugee crisis among Palestinians, the world’s real refugee crisis– Christians and Yazidis persecuted by ISIS– has become both overwhelming and hidden in plain sight.
There may be sixty million refugees and “internally displaced people” in all, primarily from Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Congo, and other countries. Nine and a half million“refugees” and “internally displaced people” are Syrians. Some now live in refugee camps in Jordan, Israel (where they are also treated in hospitals), Lebanon, Iraq, and on the Syrian-Turkish border.
Half are children. Most of the children are no longer in school; worse, unvaccinated, they remain in deadly danger of contracting polio and measles in addition to other camp related diseases such as dysentery. Families are destitute and cannot afford the emergency surgeries that will save young lives, limbs, or eyes.
One young Yazidi girl, “Dilleen”, has been suffering from retinal blastoma which, according to her advocate, Gulie Khalaf, “has moved to her other eye and, without surgery, will move to her brain. She is unable to see from either eye.” Surgeons will perform the operation in Dohuk and her advocates are trying to raise money for it.
Many children are also starving and at best, severely undernourished. “Lucky” young Muslim virgin girls are being given in marriage to much older Muslim men in Jordan and the Gulf States in the hope that they will be fed and cared for. “Unlucky” Christian and Yazidi girls and women are being kidnapped and used as sex slaves by ISIS–something these barbarians view as an Islamic religious right.

British tourist under attack for expressing love for Israel

Emma Carter, 34, from London fell utterly in love with Israel and its people during her first visit to the Holy Land. She took to social media to share her new found passion for Israel, but found herself under attack by her friends. It got so bad that she had to close her Facebook account altogether.
Carter's good friend, Dafna Endoditch-Rau, a young Jew who lives in the British capital, decided to celebrate her 40th birthday in Tel Aviv and invited her to join her for the trip.
"I was worried about visiting Israel and I hesitated quite a bit before I agreed," Carter said. "As an Englishwoman, all I knew about Israel were the wars in Gaza. But Dafna told me that I would be safer in Israel than in London, and I decided to go and see the country for myself."
Twenty-four hours is all it took for Carter to fall in love with Israel. She said she clicked with Tel Aviv on the very first night.
"Everything I saw was completely different from the way Israel is portrayed in the media," she recounted. "Tel Aviv is a vibrant and liberal city, people here are kind, and the welcome I have received here was more incredible than any other place I have ever visited in the world. Strangers invited me to visit their homes. Israelis are warm and inviting, not aggressive or bad as described in the news."
Carter ended her post with a recommendation to her friends: "I've just finished spending an amazing day in a country the BBC describes as barbaric just to pander to Muslim viewers. I recommend you place a question mark next to any piece of news, especially when you are watching a news network financed by the government."
When Carter wrote the post, she never could have imagined the wave of opposition it would provoke. Within a short amount of time, a couple of her Facebook friends started to attack her: "Israel murders innocent Palestinian children and steals their land," wrote one of them. Another added: "You're justifying an apartheid state."
A little while later Carter even received a message from Facebook, in which she was told that her post was described as offensive. An hour later she received another message with the same information. (h/t Yoel)

An op-ed by Salman Mohammed Buhairi in Al Riyadh looks at the death of the baby in Duma - and finds the real villain is Judaism itself.

In fact this crime is a result of the Jewish religion which urges racism, extremism and killing Gentiles who are not Jews; rabbis urge them to kill non-Jews, and to loot their money and their wives and engage in usury as in the story of The Merchant of Venice, as well as theft and adultery and murder and lying and breaking covenants These are all taboo among themselves; they God's chosen people, but with the non-Jews are things permissible."

..They urge the hatred and aggression against non-Jews, and this is evident in their curriculum for children and young people, especially against the Arabs in Israel, and creating a culture of terrorism and genocide, racism and colonization which instilled in the hearts of children and the Israeli street and Jewish communities in the world, and hatred of Arabs, racism and the sanctification of terrorism in the curriculum.

Zionism exploited the September 11 attacks to demand a change in education curricula in Arab and Islamic countries and change the books of religious education, and delete some of the verses and the hadith which it alleges calls for terrorism and hatred and to the destruction of Israel, and funny that Israel does not see in their curricula and religious beliefs of Judaism their own urge to instill hatred and contempt for Arabs and Muslims, starting from the preliminary Children middle and high schools and Israeli universities, schools, and in Hebrew children's literature, novels, songs, poems, stories, that describe Arabs as lying and malicious and stupid and backward.

Jews reverse the facts, and focus on the description of Arabs as terrorists and say that they are killers and animal-like predators, while the Jews describe their courage and excellence, boldness but instilling in them the ideas of racism and concepts meant to raise the myths and lies and ambitions of Zionism to the status of religious holiness, and the Hebrew literature to install awareness in children and adults that Arab Palestine is their home and their Promised Land, and they are the legacy of their ancestors from time immemorial; they highlight stories in Hebrew literature saying the Arab face is ugly and frightening, and hunchbacked and laughable and stupid and lice-infested.

They distort the image of the Arab and Muslim rights to sow hatred towards them ..the textbooks in Israel play a key role in deepening the culture of conflict with the Arabs and the sanctification of practice of terrorism and genocidal settlements, colonization and destruction towards them.

The textbooks stress the importance of the use of force because the Arabs understand only the language of force, and focus the curriculum on the Book of Joshua, which is full of murder and genocide, which is the source of Zionist terrorism and the first school of terrorist ideas in human history, and the source of contemporary Zionism is faith-based terrorism and racism.

I only published excerpts and edited it for clarity, but the entire article was three very long run-on sentences.

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column:

Take up the White Man's burden, The savage wars of peace—

Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease;

And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought,

Watch sloth and heathen Folly Bring all your hopes to nought.
– Rudyard Kipling, 1899

The other day I was talking with friends and the discussion turned to the unique situation of Israel as a nation-state that constantly has to justify its existence. Other countries may be engaged in struggles over who will be the dictator, president or ruling party, but I can’t think of another one whose very being is controversial.

For example, last year Iranian ‘Supreme Leader’ Ali Khamenei called for the destruction of the “barbaric, wolflike & infanticidal regime of Israel” and the dispersal of the Jews that had emigrated to Israel from some other place:

All the original people of Palestine including Muslims, Christians and Jews wherever they are, in Palestine or in refugee camps in other countries or just anywhere else take part in a public and organized referendum. Naturally the Jewish immigrants who have been persuaded into emigration to Palestine do not have the right to take part in the referendum. …

the ensuing government … will decide whether the non-Palestinian emigrants … can continue living in Palestine or should return to their home countries.

This is illuminating, because it exposes the narrative that underlies most anti-Israel arguments. You know, when you say “Israel is completely legitimate under international law” and they say “who cares, you stole Palestinian land and colonized the indigenous inhabitants.”

That is the line that always ends the discussion. Israel is gay-friendly? Who cares, you are just bringing that up to distract us from your crimes against the Palestinian people. Israel is a democracy? Who cares, it’s built on someone else’s property. Because Israel is said to be a “settler-colonial state,” a European interloper parasitizing an indigenous Middle Eastern people, we have no moral or legal right to be here.

In the 19^th century, colonialism was considered legitimate. “Take up the White Man’s burden,” wrote Kipling, and do the natives a favor despite their often violently-expressed ingratitude. But today, there is no greater national sin than exploitation of indigenous peoples.

There is only one small flaw in this argument, so beloved by leftists and academics: the Jewish people are indigenous to the Land of Israel, and the so-called ‘Palestinians’ are the colonists, invaders and occupiers of other people’s land. Like so much of their rhetoric, Arabs calling themselves ‘indigenous’ to our land is a precise inversion of reality, an employment of the big lie technique.

Here is one modern definition of ‘indigenous people’:

Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal system.

This historical continuity may consist of the continuation, for an extended period reaching into the present of one or more of the following factors:

· Occupation of ancestral lands, or at least of part of them

· Common ancestry with the original occupants of these lands

· Culture in general, or in specific manifestations (such as religion, living under a tribal system, membership of an indigenous community, dress, means of livelihood, lifestyle, etc.)

· Language (whether used as the only language, as mother-tongue, as the habitual means of communication at home or in the family, or as the main, preferred, habitual, general or normal language)

· Residence in certain parts of the country, or in certain regions of the world

· Other relevant factors.

The Jewish people in Israel are occupying their ancestral lands, and they have a common ancestry with the only ‘original inhabitants’ that still exist as a people. There are no more Philistines, Jebusites, Hivites, etc. (despite the fantasies of the Arabs). There are still Jews, with a religion, culture and language whose connection to the original inhabitants is well-documented.

It is true that the Jewish population of Israel and Judea fluctuated throughout the centuries, as the land was invaded and colonized by Romans, Arabs, Ottomans, British, etc. But the continuity was unbroken while the Jewish people suffered the vicissitudes of an indigenous people oppressed by colonial powers. Some Jews remained in the land and others went into exile throughout the world, but our peoplehood persisted.

The Arabs consider Western support for the establishment of a Jewish state a colonialist usurpation of their indigenous rights. But in fact it was the recognition, by Balfour and others, of the truly indigenous status of the Jewish people that justified the formalization of the Jewish people’s right to the land, from the river to the sea, which was ultimately expressed by the Mandate for Palestine.

The Mandate for the first time concretized our moral right to the land as its historical owners into a legal right under international law. It is ironic that Israel, whose right to exist is seen as controversial, actually has a stronger moral and legal justification for its sovereignty than others – like Jordan, truly created by colonial fiat, or Saudi Arabia, the product of violent conquest.

On the other hand, the so-called ‘Palestinians’ – although they make wild claims to be descended from ‘original’ inhabitants like Canaanites or Philistines – are primarily descendents of people who migrated into the land, a few going back as far as the Arab conquest in the 7^th century. Most of them, however, arrived after Muhammad Ali’s expedition from Egypt into Syria around 1830; and the migration accelerated after the Zionists began to improve and develop the land in the 1880s.

Jewish nationalism has existed for thousands of years. But a strictly ‘Palestinian’ consciousness did not develop among the Arabs in the region until they began to confront what they saw as the threat of Jewish sovereignty in the early 20^th century; and even then, much of the opposition to a Jewish state was based on a more diffuse Arab nationalism. A distinct Palestinian people didn’t emerge until the mid-1960s with the advent of the PLO. And the central tenet of ‘Palestinian’ culture is its violent hatred for and struggle against Jewish sovereignty.

Yasser Arafat and others have done their best to deny Jewish provenance in the land of Israel, claiming that there was no Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, and so forth. But thearchaeological evidence – which continues to be discovered – is overwhelming, despite pseudo-academic attempts to refute it.

Unfortunately, it’s not only our enemies who have adopted the upside-down narrative of indigenous Arabs and colonizing Jews. When our own government rests its argument for our continued presence in Judea and Samaria on security considerations rather than our moral and legal right to the land, it is as if someone has stolen your car and then asks to keep it because he needs a car to drive to work.

When our own government agrees to limit construction in certain parts of the land of Israel or agrees that any ‘settlements’ we keep after a peace agreement must be swapped for other bits of land, the implication is that we do not truly own the land even though we control it. But while we certainly may decide that we want to waive the right to some of our land in the interest of peace – assuming that this is possible – we are not morally obligated to do so.

The Europeans, with a history of being colonial oppressors, smugly insist that we are morally obligated to give away part (or all) of our country. But we are not them. Although some of our ancestors were exiled to Europe and other places, we did not give up our peoplehood in exile. We belong to the land of Israel and it belongs to us.

The Zionists did not arrive as colonists from Europe after 1945 and dispossess the long-rooted Palestinian people, as their narrative tells us. The true story is that Jews were here all along, an oppressed and colonized indigenous people like many others. One of our distinctions, though, is that we succeeded in throwing out the European colonialists and achieving the self-determination that is the highest political goal of an indigenous people.

Now it’s up to us to keep it against those, like Khamenei, who wish to end it.