Wednesday, February 03, 2016

  • Wednesday, February 03, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon
From Fatah's Facebook page:



And:


I guess celebrating the murder of a 19 year old woman is "natural."

Hadar Cohen is, of course, a real martyr, who helped stop what would have been a much worse attack.



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From Ian:

Border Police officer, 19, dies after Jerusalem terror attack
A Border Police officer succumbed to wounds suffered during a shooting and stabbing attack near Jerusalem’s Old City Wednesday, after efforts to save her life at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus failed.
The woman was identified as Hadar Cohen, 19, from Or Yehuda.
Cohen was rushed to hospital in critical condition after she was wounded in the attack shortly after 2 p.m. local time. Paramedics who treated her at the scene said she was fighting for her life.
Hospital officials said she was shot in the head. “We succeeded in stabilizing her condition for a time, but her head wound was so severe she never had a chance,” a hospital spokeswoman said.
Another policewomen was in serious but stable condition at the hospital, with wounds all over her body, including her head, the spokeswoman said.
After attack, Jerusalem mayor urges residents to ‘engage’ terrorists
Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat told residents of the capital not to fear “engaging” with suspected Palestinian attackers, after three Palestinians carried out a shooting and stabbing attack, killing one border policewoman and wounding another outside the city’s Damascus Gate on Wednesday afternoon.
Officials said the quick response of security forces in shooting and killing the terrorists prevented a much larger attack by the three.
“I spoke to the brave fighters who were not afraid to engage,” the mayor said of the team of Border Police officers who shot and killed the three Palestinians attackers within moments of the attack.
“The preparedness of the policemen is what led to the engagement and saved lives. The residents of Jerusalem need to open their eyes, and in a case like this, not to fear engaging [the attackers]. This vigilance is what will thwart attacks.”
A Mosque as Extremist Megaphone
Despite Al Aqsa’s importance to Islam—it is considered the religion’s holiest site outside Saudi Arabia—few Westerners are aware of the content of the sermons, lectures and lessons offered there. Many of these sermons are posted on the mosque’s two official YouTube channels and have been translated from the Arabic by my organization, the Middle East Media Research Institute.
What we have found at Al Aqsa is a steady stream of calls for jihad and martyrdom, venomous attacks on Jews, Christians and other non-Muslims, and praise for al Qaeda, Islamic State, or ISIS, and other jihadist groups.
Calls for the destruction of the U.S. and the West, including promises that Islam will take over the world, are other common themes. On July 24 last year, Sheikh Ahmad Al-Dweik—a frequent lecturer at the mosque and Palestinian cleric, like the other religious leaders quoted here—said: “The caliphate will come to be, and the nuclear bomb will be produced,” adding that this future Islamic caliphate—will “fight the U.S. and will bring it down” and “eliminate the West in its entirety.”
On July 6, 2015, Sheikh Muhammad Abed, known as “ Abu Abdallah,” declared that from “the land of the Prophet’s nocturnal journey”—a reference to Jerusalem—“armies will set out to conquer Rome, to conquer Constantinople,” and then he added to the list “Washington and London.”
In an Oct. 27 address at Al Aqsa, Sheikh Khaled Al-Maghrabi called for the annihilation of the Jews all over the world, providing justification by quoting the well-known hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) of the stone and the tree: “Oh Muslim there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” Earlier at the mosque, on May 29, Sheikh Al-Maghrabi explained why Jews were killed in the Holocaust. “On Passover,” he said, the Jews “would knead the dough for these matzos with children’s blood. When this was discovered, the Israelites were expelled across Europe . . . It got to the point where they were burned in Germany.”

  • Wednesday, February 03, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon
Yesterday was yet another "work accident" where two Hamas terrorists were killed in a tunnel collapse.

Last week seven were killed in a similar collapse.

The tunnel was located "east of Deir al Balah." Since that is not so close to Egypt and not in an urban area, this indicates that this tunnel wasn't meant for smuggling weapons nor as part of a network of urban bunkers used to store weapons and travel from house to house during war.

Meaning that this tunnel could only have been used for one purpose: to attack Israelis by tunneling under the boundary between Gaza and Israel, perhaps towards the communities of Kisufim or Re'im.

Hamas' press release celebrating the deaths of the "martyrs" almost admits this, by saying "the men of the tunnels continue on the same path of jihad and sacrifice, ...both the defensive and offensive tunnels, which gives them the advantage of the resistance and enables them to painfully strike the enemy..."

Here are the latest "martyrs" at their workplace. One was a field commander.





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  • Wednesday, February 03, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon
Member of Knesset Ayman Odeh, who was described as a "rock star" when he spoke at the HaaretzQ conference in New York last December, has officially come out as supporting BDS.

When asked a question about that at a seminar, Odeh responded, "First, I would like to salute the people who are working on BDS, I think this really puts Israel on the spot in world public opinion."

He then made an intentionally vague statement that could be interpreted as possibly "only" supporting the boycott of Jewish businesses in Judea and Samaria, saying, "So long as it is focused on the occupation it is going in the right direction. For instance, the boycott of settlement products is extremely important. " But he didn't limit his comments to only a boycott of settlement products.

He then went on to say that it is important not to boycott Jews, but the Jewish state, saying, "If we can mobilize as many Jews as we could that would be a win for us."

Of course, the people who claim to "only" boycott settlements are really only boycotting Jewish businesses in Judea and Samaria, not those of Israeli Arabs in various industrial zones, as we have discussed previously. Even the BDSers who want to boycott Israel altogether never say to boycott Arab owned businesses in Israel.

Odeh has been hailed as a "moderate" and even compared to a "saint" in the fawning leftist media. The media often compares him to his supposed hero Martin Luther King.

The bar for Arabs to be considered moderate or saintly by the mainstream media is quite low. Any Israeli politician who would call for a boycott of Arab or Palestinian products would be considered an extremist and criticized as a bigot, but an Arab who calls to boycott Jewish businesses in Israel - which is what he is doing, and everyone knows it - is considered tantamount to a saint. I guess the fact that he is not calling to stab every Jew in Israel is what passes for "moderate" nowadays.

Watch the video here:



(h/t Yoel)

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  • Wednesday, February 03, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon


Jordan has announced that it will no longer allow imports of Palestinian olive oil into the country.

This is apparently to protect its own local olive oil market. Jordan used to be a big importer but now it is an exporter of olive oil.

See how much they care about their fellow Arabs? They dully support the Palestinian cause - right up until such support might slightly affect the life of a single Jordanian.

Israel does apparently buy some of the olive oil that grows under PA control. which means that Israel often treats Palestinians better than their brothers in Jordan do. But we already knew that.


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Tuesday, February 02, 2016

  • Tuesday, February 02, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon
I just stumbled onto this from AllAcronyms.com:

And also Abbreviations.com:




But I do have competition from the code of the Elorza airport in Venezuela. And a company that makes pushbuttons and switches.


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From Ian:

Pro-Palestinians create parody 'New York Times' to slam 'pro-Israel bias'
A group of pro-Palestinian sympathizers fanned out across New York City
earlier on Tuesday and distributed thousands of parodied copies of The New York Times bearing headlines and stories that contradict what they claim to be the newspaper's pro-Israel bias in its coverage of the Middle East conflict.
Commuters in the Big Apple could be forgiven for thinking that the "supplement" they were handed was an actual copy of the Grey Lady, since it uses the Times' famous masthead as well as the same headline fonts, page design, and layout.
The "supplement" – which is titled "Rethinking our 2015 coverage on Israel-Palestine" - was also posted online. It was even given a Twitter account.
The Jerusalem Post was unable to determine the identity of the individuals behind the initiative. The only response given was that the fake newspaper was the brainchild of followers of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement – an ad hoc alliance of pro-Palestinian activists seeking to punish Israel financially over its policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. (h/t Yenta Press)
Shmuley Boteach: Hillary Clinton’s Advisers Gave Nothing But Anti-Israel Advice
It’s already been established that one of Hillary Clinton’s most trusted advisers, Sid Blumenthal, sent her dozens of anti-Israel articles, ideas and pieces of advice during her time as secretary of state. But the stream of anti-Israel advice received by Hillary was much more comprehensive than that which came from just one adviser. In the entire batch of Hillary’s emails, you will be hard pressed to find a single email that is sympathetic towards the Jewish state, from any of the people on whom she relied.
The negative, poisonous approach towards Israel throughout this cache of emails shows the atmosphere that Hillary had established around herself. These emails seem to demonstrate that a huge segment of her close advisers and confidants were attacking Israel, condemning Netanyahu, and strategizing about how to force Israel to withdraw from Judea and Samaria at all costs.
Take a look at a sampling of the advice being sent to Hillary from her many advisers.
NGO Monitor: HRW´s "World Report 2016": Selective Narrative on Israel and Middle East
On January 27, 2016, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released its “World Report 2016,” with a section devoted to “Israel/Palestine: Events of 2015.” Following a long-running pattern, HRW presents a highly selective political narrative and omits any facts that challenge it.
Lack of Methodology: Inconsistent Statistics
The statistics presented by HRW, in particular those on Israeli casualties, are ambiguous and appear to be internally inconsistent. In the absence of footnotes and given the unclear writing, it is impossible to confirm most of HRW’s data.
Distorted Narrative on Gaza
In the Gaza subsection, HRW claims “Israel’s punitive closure of the Gaza Strip, particularly the near-total blocking of outgoing goods, continued to have severe consequences for the civilian population and impeded reconstruction of the 17,000 housing units severely damaged or destroyed during the 2014 war.”
Contrary to these claims, delays in Gaza reconstruction were primarily due to Palestinian infighting (Fatah wanted full oversight over the process); failure of donor countries (mostly Arab) in paying pledges; and diversion by Hamas of cement and other materials to rebuild their own infrastructure and terror tunnels. (h/t Yenta Press)

  • Tuesday, February 02, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon
For years, most Iranian athletes have refused to compete against Israeli athletes in international competitions.

And for years, most of the governing authorities of sports federations have turned a blind eye and accepted the excuses of the athletes that they suddenly became "sick" or otherwise couldn't attend.

Now, Ayatollah Khamenei has made it crystal clear that these athletes are doing his bidding, and he has praised them. From Tasnim News:

Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei admired the Iranian athletes who safeguard the religious and moral values in the sports events, irrespective of the delusive wave that may prevail in the international arenas.

The Iranian athletes that explicitly safeguard the values in the championship games do a valued deed, Ayatollah Khamenei said in a gathering of officials involved in holding a congress to commemorate the Iranian athletes that have been martyred.

What is even worthier than standing on the championship stage or raising of the country’s flag is an Iranian athlete’s refusal to wrestle with a Zionist Israeli opponent or a female athlete’s decision to attend the medal award ceremony while respecting the Islamic code of dressing and wearing hijab, Imam Khamenei underlined.

In fact, Khamenei released a poster making that same point:


According to the "Supreme Leader," an athlete refusing to compete against Israelis is a greater honor than representing Iran as a champion in international sports.

That's some serious hate there.

Ironically, this photo was taken as Khamenei was honoring Iranian Paralympics athletes, yet last year at the Special Olympics the Iranian and Israeli competitors became friends and the torch was passed from the Iranians to the Israelis at the opening ceremony.


Nonetheless, Khamenei's words prove that it is no coincidence that Iranian competitors refuse to play against Israelis on principle, not due to illness.

Last month, an Iranian chess champion refused to play any Israelis in a Swiss contest and was not allowed to compete for the rest of the competition.


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As most of Elder’s readers will be aware, a week or so ago the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism (NECSS) rescinded its invitation to Professor Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist and high-profile atheist, to address it this year.  His offence in its eyes was “his approving retweeting of a highly offensive video”.  The video in question is this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecJUqhm2g08, entitled “Feminists Love Islamists”.  Apparently, when Professor Dawkins posted it, he was unaware (as I was, too, when, quite coincidentally, I linked to it on my blog) that the feminist caricature depicted in the animation is based on an actual American activist who claims to have suffered harassment over the depiction.  When he was apprised of that fact, Professor Dawkins did the gentlemanly thing and took it down.

However, the NECSS were determined to exact condign punishment, advising in a purse-lipped little statement (http://necss.org/2016/01/27/a-statement-concerning-richard-dawkins/):

“We believe strongly in freedom of speech and freedom to express unpopular, and even offensive, views. However, unnecessarily divisive, counterproductive, and even hateful speech runs contrary to our mission and the environment we wish to foster at NECSS. The sentiments expressed in the video do not represent the values of NECSS or its sponsoring organizations.”

When one Twitter user demanded to know what precisely is wrong with the video he got fobbed off (http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/sceptics-drop-atheist-richard-dawkins-retweeting-video-mocking-feminists-islamists-1540729):

‘I have specifically challenged the people in NECSS to explain exactly what their issue is with the video ("which line exactly and what's your issue with it?"). They responded that it was inappropriate because the woman had received abuse, so Dawkins was promoting her further

I say “fobbed off” because the NECSS statement quoted does not appear to be referring to the perceived insult to the women’s movement activist on whom the video is based (and now that I know who she is and what she looks like I see that it’s obviously meant to be her: she’s much prettier, by the way, if she’ll forgive me for saying so).  The statement, despite its avowed espousal of freedom of speech, is condemning the sentiments expressed in the video as “divisive, counterproductive … hate speech” and distancing itself and its “sponsoring organizations” from those views.

I don’t know what, if anything, the activist depicted in the video has had to say regarding Islam and the Quran, but I do know that there’s a video in the public domain that shows she doesn’t mince words when expressing her robust contempt for Christianity and the Bible.  However, it appears that the NECSS, for all its adherence to scepticism and what I suppose I may call “the rational,” is too afraid of offending Islam to be seen to support scepticism and – er – rational criticism of it, or to tolerate commentary on the irony of Western “feminist” fondness for an ideology that believes women are inferior to men and must be appropriately subordinate to men.

Such hypocrisy, such Orwellian doublespeak, such claptrap, as appears in the NECSS’s statement are par for the course among leftists, of course.  For instance, this is how that politically correct Israel-bashing British newspaper The Independent (home to such delightful types as Robert Fisk) reported matters (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/richard-dawkins-vdeo-twitter-necss-event-feminism-a6841161.html):

‘The video … was shared by Dawkins on [January 27], alongside the explainer: “Obviously doesn’t apply to vast majority of feminists, among whom I count myself. But the minority are pernicious.”. Dawkins later deleted the tweet but the NECSS shared a screengrab of it. The distasteful video, which compares Islamists to feminists and shows two cartoon characters singing about having things in common, was deleted by Dawkins after he apparently learnt the ‘feminist’ character in the song was based on a real person who was subsequently “threatened with violence”. Additionally, he later attempted to defend his post by telling a Twitter user the video was a "joke song satirising the alliance between radical Islamism and radical feminism".’
Now, I’m not an atheist and I’m no fan of Professor Dawkins’ atheistic stance, but his views regarding the strange love that many of today’s “feminists” have towards Islamism are hard for anyone except a perverse blinkered leftist/”pernicious feminists” to fault.  On Twitter Dawkins has fought his corner convincingly, and includes this very pertinent tweet (video of Islamists disrupting a speech by an Iranian-born British feminist in the linked article):


Dear @NECSS this is the kind of thing being satirised by the "Feminists Love Islamists" vid for which you banned me 
As for that strange love that “pernicious feminists” the Western world over have for the Muslim abusers of their sex, here’s the correct response, hurled by the genuine feminist Ann-Marie Waters of the UK-based Mothers against Sharia at a bunch of foolish Danish women in Copenhagen who were there to heckle her speech that warned of the burgeoning encroachments of Islam on the culture and polity of Europe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTVpyCOmcKY   


And the incredible excuses some Western women make for the perpetrators of the “Rape Jihad” seen on New Year’s Eve in Cologne and elsewhere?  Consider this obscenity, made by Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/08/cologne-attacks-hard-questions-new-years-eve):

Young German women thankfully enjoy historically unprecedented economic and sexual freedom, with their expensive smartphones and their right to celebrate New Year’s Eve however they want. The same isn’t always true of young male migrants exchanging life under repressive regimes, where they may at least have enjoyed superiority over women, for scraping by at the bottom of Europe’s social and economic food chain. It is not madness to ask if this has anything to do with attacks that render confident, seemingly lucky young women humiliated and powerless. But even if it does, the answer wouldn’t be to halt immigration …’
 And compare it with this excuse for domestic violence, made very recently by a former Australian Labor politician, Mark Latham (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-22/mark-latham-under-fire-for-triple-m-podcast-domestic-violence/7107650):
"The patriarchy argument is that men beat up women in some cases because they hate women.  But I don't think it is about how men look at women, it is about how men look at themselves.  They have lost their self-esteem, their job, are welfare-dependent, on drugs or alcohol in their life.  They use domestic violence as a coping mechanism to get over all the other crap they have in their lives.  Demonising men and making them feel worse about themselves is not going to solve the problem."
No prizes for guessing that the distaff side of the Islam-loving (anti-Israel) Australian Greens/Left Alliance, as silent concerning the attacks by Muslim gangs on women in Europe as they are vociferous in condemning the “patriarchal attitudes” and “misogyny”of white culture, have been down on Latham like the proverbial ton of bricks.

But back to Europe.  Lawyer, writer and blogger Phillip Mark McGough has written as incisive a commentary on the situation there as I have ever read (http://quillette.com/2016/01/18/after-cologne-feminism-is-dead/).  Inter alia, he observes:
‘[O]ne of the few tragi-comic chapters in the horror story of Nazism concerns a strange little organization called the Association of German National Jews. They were a pro-National Socialist Jewish group whose membership not only welcomed Hitler’s accession but actively promoted the self-eradication of Jewish identity and its absorption into the new, heroic, master-culture represented by the Nazis (it was said of them, tongue only partly in cheek, that their motto was “down with us”). In 1935, predictably and forcibly, the group was disbanded. Whereas Stalin had his useful idiots, for Hitler there could be no useful Jews. 
With the above in mind, Marx needs revision. History repeats itself: First as farce, then as tragedy. No longer the unofficial motto of a handful of obscure pre-war self-hating Jews, Down With Us has latterly been adopted (or so it seems) as an official article of policy by the German government itself. Here is a country whose improvident approach to Near Eastern immigration these past few months is quite literally threatening its future as a liberal, progressive, democratically-viable European nation-state. It wouldn’t take an especially imaginative political cartoonist to show Frau Merkel as Frankenstein-throwing levers and blowing fuses as she botches an attempt to graft a million (and counting) Muslim refugees onto the body politic of an increasingly mutilated society. In politics as in cheap Gothic literature, such experiments breed monsters. 
Some of us are old enough to remember when refugees consisted almost entirely (and by definition) of the most vulnerable members of any given country in crisis: Women, children, the elderly, and so forth. Today, on the other hand, most of the Muslims arriving in Europe from the Near East seem to be young men of fighting age: Young men whose views regarding Jews, gays, and of course women are completely at odds with Europe’s liberal tradition as it’s evolved these past few centuries; a liberal tradition which Germany, for obvious reasons, has sought to reify in its approach to domestic and international affairs ever since the end of the war. But thanks in no small measure to mass Muslim immigration, antisemitism in its most predatory incarnation is once again the norm on German streets, while misogyny is more or less accepted, even expected. It is to choke on the irony of it all. In the name of a long-cherished tradition of tolerance, Germany is becoming savagely intolerant: Totally unsafe for Jews who dare to display their Judaism in public, and increasingly unsafe for women who dare even to go out in public at all after nightfall (or use a swimming pool; or attend a carnival; or do pretty much anything short of redacting their identity behind a hijab and never leaving the house again)….
We now know that law-enforcement authorities throughout Europe have been conniving for some time in similarly clumsy attempts to neutralize news of the scale of the violence (particularly sexual violence against women) at large within certain sections of newly-arrived migrant communities. Across Europe, citizens are being asked by their own governments to accept that complicity in a conspiracy of silence is the highest form of tolerance. Fortunately, most people aren’t buying into it. Sadly, however, some people are: And, oddly enough, not a few of them are women….’



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From Ian:

The emotional post that conquered Israelis' hearts overnight
Dafna Meir's young daughters win second, third place in gymnastics competition - then break down in tears after returning home.
Natan Meir, the husband of terror victim Dafna, published an emotional Facebook post last night, which has already received numerous shares and reached Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Dafna Meir was recently murdered in her Otniel home.
"My sweet daughters, Noa (11.5) and Ahava (10.5) competed in an internal gymnastics competition in Otniel today. They both won medals for second and third place. Two mothers, loving neighbors, escorted them and greatly cheered them up," he wrote.
"When evening came, so did the tears - their mother wasn't able to see this achievement. Where is her hug? Why isn't she here to see? I suggested that I would post a picture of them with their medals so they could receive a warm embrace and love from the entire Jewish People."
Caroline Glick: The IDF's misplaced trust in the PA
In the past, both Abbas and his predecessor Yassir Arafat assessed at various points that they were better off cooperating with Hamas against Israel than with Israel against Hamas. Their decisions in 1996, from 2000 to 2007, and intermittently ever since, have had little to do with Israel's positions. Indeed, their shifts from Israel to Hamas have often occurred at times when Israel did the most to support them.
As for Abbas's control over his forces, this too can change on a dime. For years, Palestinian sources have insisted that these forces feel no intrinsic loyalty to Abbas. They stay with Abbas because he pays them.
Ideologically, these men under arms are free floaters. Nothing they believe is a bar for shifting their loyalties to Hamas. More to the point, all the US financial transfers to the PA security forces won't stop any of the US-trained Palestinian forces from moonlighting as Hamas, Fatah or Hezbollah terrorists. They've done it in the past and they will do it again.
The instrumental, and necessarily temporary nature of Palestinian security cooperation with the IDF tells us three things.
First, the IDF needs to ditch its current counterterror strategy which is based on the wrongheaded assumption that we can rely on the PA security forces. Central Command needs to develop contingency plans for neutralizing these forces. These contingency plans don’t need to be made public. But to the extent that aspects of the plans can be quietly implemented, they should be implemented as quickly as possible.
Second, IDF commanders need to stop praising these hostile forces. At some point in the not so distant future the IDF will be required to fight these forces. When that day comes, the IDF's enthusiastic tributes to their great cooperation with these terror-supporting forces will come back to haunt us. How will we be able to explain why our actions are necessary to allies to whom we have praised these hostile forces? This brings us to the final thing we need to recognize about these Palestinian forces. It was a major strategic blinder for Israel to support the US's decision to train them. By supporting the US training program, Israel has given the US an incentive to deny the hostile nature of these forces.
Even worse than guaranteeing that the US will be unwilling to accept that in training these forces its military built a terror army, is that threat these forces pose. Today seven US-trained Palestinian combat battalions are deployed close to Israel's major urban centers. Their fighting skills far surpass anything Israel has had to deal with in campaigns to date against Palestinian terror onslaughts.
Khaled Abu Toameh: Hamas: The "Merchants of War" Who Seek to Destroy Israel
The myth that Hamas uses tunnels to smuggle food and other necessities to the "besieged" Gaza Strip has been buried under the rubble of the tunnel that collapsed last week east of Gaza City.
The incident, in which seven members of Hamas's armed wing, Ezaddin Al-Qassam, were killed when the tunnel they were working in collapsed, provides further proof that the Islamist movement has stayed true to its charter, which calls for the total destruction of Israel.
The Hamas men who were killed in the tunnel collapse belonged to the movement's elite "Tunnel Unit." According to Ezaddin Al-Qassam, the men were busy repairing one of the tunnels (damaged during the 2014 war with Israel) when it collapsed due to severe weather conditions.
Contrary to popular belief, the tunnel was not being renovated to allow Palestinians to smuggle basic goods from Egypt to the Gaza Strip. This was one of many tunnels that Hamas has dug over the past few years to infiltrate Israel and carry out terror attacks.
Hamas makes no secret of the goal of its renovations. Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar readily admits that the tunnels are being rebuilt to target Israel.

  • Tuesday, February 02, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon
In the wake of last week's politically motivated "reminder notice" that goods from Jewish settlements cannot be labeled "Made in Israel," EoZ reader Irene emailed to the US Customs and Border Protection and asked them a simple question - are there any rules that goods from Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara be labeled as such, or are they labeled as Morocco as their country of origin?

The answer:

Thank you for your outreach. Currently, I’m not aware of any C/O marking requirements from Western Sahara.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Randy Mitchell
(Acting) Director, Commercial Operations and Entry Division
Trade Policy and Programs, Office of International Trade
1400 L Street NW 4th Floor, Washington DC
202-863-6532
Randy.mitchell@cbp.dhs.gov
In fact, the official State Department policy towards Western Sahara is completely different from its policy towards Judea and Samaria:

The United States’ policy toward the Western Sahara has remained consistent for many years. The United States has made clear that Morocco’s autonomy plan is serious, realistic, and credible, and that it represents a potential approach that could satisfy the aspirations of the people in the Western Sahara to run their own affairs in peace and dignity.
Autonomy - sort of like what Palestinian Arabs enjoy today which is considered by the UN's Secretary General to be so oppressive that terror attacks are a natural reaction.

Moroccan settlements in Western Sahara - whose population now exceeds that of the indigenous Sahwari people - are not considered a problem at all. The Geneva Conventions that everyone cites regarding Jews moving voluntarily to their historic lands do not seem to apply to Morocco moving hundreds of thousands of people to occupied territory.

Can you say "double standards?"


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  • Tuesday, February 02, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon
From Middle East Eye:
The Palestinian Authority's security cooperation with Israel is being pushed to the brink after the recent attack by an off-duty Palestinian staff sergeant who shot and wounded three Israeli soldiers, analysts say.

The Sunday morning attack, which took place at a Ramallah-area checkpoint, was the most recent to be carried out against Israeli forces. The attacker was identified as Amjad Sukkari, 34, from Jamaain village in the northern Nablus district. He was shot dead at the scene.

Thousands of people took to the streets of Nablus on Monday for Sukkari’s funeral after Israeli forces, in what was arguably a surprise move, released his body just a few hours after the shooting.

Two of Sukkari’s brothers, both Palestinian police officers, carried the casket from the Nablus-area hospital to the city’s cemetery as crowds waved flags and chanted “martyr”.

While some PA officials were present at the procession, and some mourners were seen waving Fatah flags, the PA officials have stayed mute on the matter. Several PA offices, including the PA’s security spokesperson Adnan Dmiri, all declined MEE’s repeated requests for comment.

In stark contrast, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have both come out in support of Sukkari, publically endorsing his actions and calling them a natural reaction of occupation.

“This attack showcases the rejection of security coordination with the occupation, even among members of the PA security forces,” Hamas movement's spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri, said on Sunday.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – a left faction of the PLO – dubbed the attack a “heroic operation,” and called for the end of PA security coordination with Israel, saying the attack by a PA police officer was “a slap in the face of security coordination with the occupation”.

The PA chose to honour him with a military funeral, a move that was in question until a few hours before the burial.

According to Islamic rites, a body should be buried on the day of death before sunset, but the funeral was delayed in order to wait and see if the PA would come through with the official burial, his brother told MEE.

The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (Fatah) also praised the attack, and used the same words that Hamas and Islamic Jihad used to describe it - as a "natural reaction" to occupation.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon used very similar terminology to describe Palestinian terror attacks, saying that it is "human nature to react to occupation."

While Ban didn't create that terminology - terror groups have been calling their attacks "natural reactions" to Israel for years -  so far in this uprising the reason for the attacks in Arabic have been either the Al Aqsa Mosque or revenge for other people killed while trying to kill Jews. It seems that when terror groups are using this terminology today, they are relying on the idea that Ban Ki Moon has legitimized "natural reaction to occupation" as now a UN-sanctioned reason to attack Jews.


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