Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, July 24, 2016

EoZTV: Harold Rhode on Jerusalem, Shiites and Sunnis

Here is part 2 of my interview with Islam expert Harold Rhode.

I asked him something I had always wondered: Does Jerusalem have any sanctity to Shiites?

He answered that it doesn't; Shiites consider Jerusalem to be a Sunni innovation to Islam and therefore forbidden.

However, Ayatollah Khomeini, a smart politician, chose to use Jerusalem as a rallying cry to attract Sunnis to Shiism. Hence, the annual Al Quds Day.

Rhode goes on to describe the incredible animosity between Arab Shiites, Persian Shiites and Sunnis.

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Quds News has a triumphant article, quoting Israel's Channel 10, that says that the number of French immigrants to Israel has not reached expectations this year because of the recent wave of stabbing, car ramming and shooting attacks against Jews.

Arabs consider every Jew who doesn't immigrate to Israel a victory, because they want to make Israel free of Jews.

But one sentence is interesting:

Some Jewish immigrants now prefer to emigrate to London or Montreal instead of "Israel", which did not assimilate them well and they have suffered bad economic conditions during the period of their stay in the occupied territories.

The French immigrants moved to the "occupied territories"? I thought that they mostly concentrated in Ashkelon, Ashdod, Netanya, Tel Aviv and Raanana.

A similar article last week at Erem News is entitled "Israel encourages Jews to emigrate to the occupied territories, taking advantage of the deteriorating security and economic situation around the world." Yet the article says nothing about immigrant Jews being encouraged to move across the Green Line.

The answer is obvious: to the Arab world, the entire state of Israel is "occupied Palestinian territory."

Once that basic fact is understood, then the entire idea of peace in the Middle East being dependent on Israel ceding more land to Arabs for a Palestinian state is shown to be absurd. On the contrary, ceding more land would result in greater demands for yet more land. See Hezbollah in Lebanon and Gaza as exhibits A and B.

Unfortunately, the "experts" who make such confident claims that a Palestinian state would bring peace don't seem to have the ability to look at what Arab newspapers say every day.

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07/24 Links: Economist Al Durah Cartoon Self-Destructs; The Terrifying Power of Muslim Interpreters

From Ian:

German University's course claims Israel harvests Palestinian organs

An academic seminar at a German university claims Israel’s military harvests organs from Palestinians and the Jewish state is responsible for a genocide.
“Our sons were robbed of their organs,” was the title of a part of the seminar’s course material, Rebecca Seidler, an academic who blew the whistle on the anti-Israel material, told the weekly German-Jewish newspaper Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung in a Thursday article.
The paper reported that the University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HAWK) offers a course on “The Social Situation of Youths in Palestine,” which contains the allegedly anti-Semitic material.
After reviewing the content of the course, Seidler, who was slated to conduct the seminar, complained to the university’s management. The Dean of the faculty of Social Work and Health, Christa Paulini, dismissed Seidler’s criticism in a telephone conversation as being overly-sensitive.
Seidler told the JAZ that material showed “a picture of a genocide on the Palestinians, an ethnic cleansing as well as a complete disenfranchisement of Palestinians by Israel.”
The seminar syllabus also covered the “victims of torture in Israeli prisons,” said Seidler. The JAZ wrote the seminar conveyed “anti-Semitic stereotypes.”

Syrian refugee arrested for killing woman in Germany machete attack

One woman was killed and two people were injured on Sunday by a man wielding a machete in the southwestern German city of Reutlingen, near Stuttgart.
Police said a 21-year-old Syrian asylum-seeker was arrested for the attack, according to German news service dpa.
According to Presse Portal, the suspect was known to authorities.
Bild reported that he attacked his victims outside a kebab shop in the city.
The attack comes as Germany is on edge, following a rampage at a Munich mall on Friday night in which nine people were killed, and an ax attack on a train earlier in the week that left five wounded.

Germany: The Terrifying Power of Muslim Interpreters

Interpreters Decide on Asylum
Non-Muslim refugees, in particular, complain of the pressure exerted on them by Muslim interpreters. As Gatestone Institute has already reported, Christians and other non-Muslims are beaten, threatened, and harassed in German refugee homes. One of the reasons that German authorities do not intervene has to do with the Muslim interpreters, says Paulus Kurt, head of the work groups for the Central Committee of Eastern Christians in Germany (ZOCD):
"Interpreters belonging to the Islamic religion often stick with the defendants. I am aware of statements in which interpreters have pressured and supposedly said to Christians, on the way to the police or beforehand: 'If you complain, you can forget your application for asylum.' I often noticed that statements were retracted because Christians were threatened."
The effects of these abuses of power are devastating: interpreters in Germany have great influence on who is granted asylum. In a November 2015 open letter to Frank-Jürgen Weise, the head of their agency, employees of the Federal Agency for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), pointed out the potential problems of this system within their agency:
"A Syrian is someone who identifies himself as a Syrian in writing (checks the proper box on the questionnaire), and the interpreter (usually not sworn in, or from Syria) confirms it. The interpreters are neither employed by the Federal Agency, nor are they in any way sworn in to the legal system of the Federal Republic of Germany. Ultimately, examination of the asylum application is left solely to these interpreters -- insofar as it involves the verification of nationality and, therefore, the country of persecution. In our view, a decision-making process such as this, which is practiced on a massive scale, is not in keeping with due process."

Most Westerners - left, right, and center - think of the never-ending conflict between Israel and the "Palestinians" as one between a country with one of the most prestigious and effective armed forces in the world versus a small and hapless, but plucky, indigenous population.

What we need to do is change the parameters of the discussion.

So long as people put the discussion within the context of a large military power versus a small indigenous population, we can never possibly win the argument. So long as the Arabs within the Land of Israel are seen as "Davids" with slingshots and the Jews of the Middle East are perceived as a "Goliath" than western sympathies will always go to feisty little David.

Thankfully, unlike the Palestinian Narrative of Perpetual Victim-hood, we actually have history and demographic reality on our side in terms of the discussion from an ethical standpoint.

History: the Jew as Dhimmi

The first thing that pro-Israel / pro-Jewish advocates need to do is put the conflict within historical context. An old pro-Israel acquaintance of mine used to say "history did not begin in 1967."

That is, in order to understand the Long Arab War Against the Jews, we need to place it within the long history of Jewish people living under Arab and Muslim imperial rule from the seventh-century until the demise of the Ottoman Empire with the conclusion of World War I.

From the time of Muhammad, until Islam ran head-first into modernity and the twentieth-century, the Jews of the Middle East were second and third-class non-citizens under the boot of Arab and Muslim imperial rule. However bad African-Americans had it in the United States under the vile rules of Jim Crow, it was never worse than Jewish people had it as dhimmis and what we call "dhimmitude" lasted one heck of a lot longer.

As dhimmis in Arab and Muslim lands, Jews (and Christians) could ride donkeys but horses were forbidden.

As dhimmis in Arab and Muslim lands, Jews (and Christians) were forbidden from building housing for themselves taller than Muslim housing.

As dhimmis in Arab and Muslim lands, Jews (and Christians) had no rights of self-defense.

As dhimmis in Arab and Muslim lands, Jews (and Christians) had no recourse to courts of law.

As dhimmis in Arab and Muslim lands, Jews (and Christians) had to pay protection money to keep their families safe from violence.

And this is one of my favorites, in certain times and places under Arab-Muslim imperial rule Jews were not even allowed to go outside during rainstorms lest their Jewish filth run into the street and infect their pure Muslim neighbors.

The point, however, is that just as we would never discuss African-American history without reference to both Jim Crow and slavery, so we must not discuss the Long Arab War against the Jews without reference to thirteen-centuries of Arab and Muslim oppression against all non-Muslims in the Middle East, including Christians and Jews.

This is not merely a political tactic. It is a matter of framing the conversation within something that resembles an historical context. The historical context is vital because without it the conflict is incomprehensible outside of the prominent western notion of mindless Jewish malice toward Arabs, presumably as unjust payback for the Shoah.

Demographic Reality: the Scope of the Conflict

Westerners think that this is a fight between big, strong, mean Israel against the innocent, thumb-sucking "indigenous Palestinians" over land.

It isn't.

What the struggle actually is is an ongoing attempt by the Arab peoples to force Jews back into dhimmitude out of a Koranic religious imperative.

This is a struggle not between Jews and "Palestinians" but between Jews and Arabs because of Arab-Muslim religious reasons. It is due to al-Sharia. If Israel were a 23rd Arab-Muslim country it would, indeed, be hailed the world over as a "light unto the nations."

The reason that the Arab peoples generally despise Israel has nothing to do with Jewish treatment of Arabs and Muslims within Israel. Arabs and Muslims within Israel are treated better than are Arabs and Muslims throughout the entire Middle East. The reason that Arabs and Muslims despise Israel is not due to Israeli behavior. They hate Israel because it is Jewish, a nation of infidels, who dare to hold land that was once part of the Umma.

And not just any infidels, but the very worst of the infidels, we children of orangutans and swine.

But the fact of the matter is that there are somewhere around 300 to 400 million Arabs within the Middle East. They outnumber the Jews by a factor of 60 to 70 to 1 and, for the most part, want those Jews either dead or gone.

This is not a war between a Jewish Goliath and a Palestinian David, as left-wing anti-Semitic anti-Zionists would have you believe.

This is a war against the Jews of the Middle East by the much larger and highly aggressive Arab and Muslim population in that part of the world. As far as Hamas and Hezbollah are concerned this is explicitly an Arab war of Jewish extermination.

But the demographics in the region are not with the Jews, not by a long-shot.

The Jews of the Middle East have been forced to create Fortress Israel, because the Arabs would not have it any other way. It is easy for the Arabs. Given the fact that they so outnumber the Jews it only takes a small percentage of their resources to put terrible pressure on the small Jewish population in the Middle East so that those Jews are forced to militarize.

And, needless to say, the local Arabs, the Palestinian-Arabs, are nothing but cannon fodder as far as their brothers and sisters throughout the rest of the region are concerned.

The Jews of Israel want peace more than anyone, because they are under constant threat and harassment in every single venue imaginable, from international sports to academia to the UN, the EU, and a continuing wave of little Arab kids with hand-axes.

Those of us who wish to stand up for the Jews of the Middle East, the Jews of Israel, need to frame the conversation in a manner that comports with history and the actual demographics of the fight.

We need to place our end of the conversation within an expanded context that includes centuries of Jewish history under Arab and Muslim imperial rule and that appreciates the actual geographic scope of the war against the Jews in the Middle East.

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.

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There is another Quartet.

The Arab Quartet consists of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain. It met on the eve of the Arab Summit to be held this week in Nouakchott, Mauritania.

The Ministerial Committee issued a statement after their third meeting, which was chaired by UAE Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Anwar Gargash, saying that they "noted an escalation of dangerous Iranian interference in the internal affairs of Arab countries recently, including the intensification of hostilities and inflammatory and provocative statements issued by Iranian officials towards the Arab countries. "

They called for Iran to stop incitement to violence and support for terror groups. Which is what the other Quartet did recently, to much criticism by Palestinians.

Their statement o Iran sounds a great deal like Israel's statements towards the Palestinian Authority.

Apparently, Arabs are against incitement and support for terrorism - sometimes.

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The Economist writes what we've been saying for several years now, that the Arab world has far higher priorities than the Palestinian issue.

This has contributed to a more general sense of unease among the Palestinians. Officials in other parts of the Arab world talk more about Iran’s meddling, the wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and their own domestic economic and political troubles. Such issues seem more pressing to their people. And besides, many Arabs are resigned to the stalemate in the peace process. Mr Netanyahu appears intransigent; Palestinian leaders are seen as divided, ineffective and corrupt.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, still makes the rounds in Arab capitals—and foreign leaders still profess their support. But the Palestinians are aware of their diminished status. In a recent poll 78% of them said their cause was no longer the top Arab priority, and 59% accused Arab states of allying themselves with Israel against Iran. The amount of aid flowing from Arab countries to the PA has fallen by well over half in recent years. Funds from the West have also declined.

The most telling part of the article is the very end:

What really stirs Arab emotions are scenes of Israelis killing Palestinians. Violence over the past year has left dozens of Israelis and more than 200 Palestinians dead. Most Palestinians, according to polls, back a return to an armed intifada (uprising). With the Arab world focused elsewhere, America in the throes of a presidential race and progress towards a two-state solution halted, they may see no other way to capture the world’s attention.

I don't think that The Economist quite realizes the truth of that last sentence.

The Palestinians are faced with declining support from their fellow Arabs, who are increasingly impatient with their lack of unity and apparent lack of caring about their own people, not to mention their complaints about how terrible their situation is when much of the Arab world that doesn't get the headlines has it far worse.

But instead of getting the message that they had better start to think seriously about peace while they can, the Palestinians always act as if the goal isn't a state - but to get themselves back on top of the news cycle.

The Economist has unwittingly revealed that Palestinians prefer war and terrorism to peace - because violence is where they gain sympathy. The price of hundreds or thousands dead is small compared to Palestinian Arab priorities, which are completely opposite what a real people who want a real state would assert.

This article shows that it is not only the Arab world that sees the truth about the selfish, forever entitled, whining Palestinians. The West knows this about them deep down as well. But the West is too heavily invested in the discredited memes that Abbas is a moderate, that Israel is intransigent, that "occupation" is what causes terrorism, and a litany of other Palestinian lies that have gained a foothold in the media, NGOs and academia. It is too good a story - a David and Goliath fantasy - to throw out based on mere facts.

Amazingly, the Arab world has woken up to the illusion of eternal Palestinian victimhood faster than the supposedly enlightened West. This is largely because the Arab world feels the consequences when attention and funding is diverted from places they are truly needed, like Syria and Iraq and Yemen, and instead wasted on yet more Palestinian gimmicks that only put a real solution further out of reach.

The Arab world shares with Israel the desire for stability, for a peace that can be counted on (whether official or not,) for war against terror and for a united front against the true regional villain, Iran. Compared to that, Palestinian demands before even talking with Israel are so obviously petty that Arab patience has worn very thin.

Palestinians see that they are losing support but instead of seeing what the real problems are, they are focused on how to make themselves appear relevant again. And they only have two tricks.

One is to gain more international recognition in world bodies that they then burn by placing themselves at the center at the expense of whatever good the organization had previously done. Everyone sees that for what it is, and you just know that UNESCO's leaders (for example) are fuming at how that organization has been subverted. Every cause from women's issues to children's issues to even cancer is simply another opportunity to bash Israel, and every one of those causes then loses support as a result of Palestinian selfishness.

The second trick is violence, whether it is the threat of another intifada or another war in Gaza.

One day very soon, a prominent Arab leader - probably from the Gulf - will say out loud what they have been saying privately for years, that Palestinians have been hijacking the world's attention to the detriment of everyone, not least the Palestinian Arabs themselves.

The Palestinians will respond by resorting to the gimmicks that have worked in the past - such as "Jerusalem is under attack" or "our children are being killed."

And the Arabs will simply respond that there are far more Muslims worshipping at Al Aqsa Mosque today than at any time it was under Jordanian control. That fewer Palestinians have been killed in 70 years than the number of Arabs killed by other Arabs in any given year. That the "genocide" that they claim they are suffering is somehow going in reverse.

The public solidarity with the puerile Palestinians is ending. The question is whether the Palestinians can learn to grow up before their cause disappears from Arab radar, and then from Western priorities as well.

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Looking for the "Talmudic Gardens" - and finding that Israel preserves Muslim history

The Palestinian Authority has claimed that Israel is building "Talmudic Gardens" all over Jerusalem.

I never quite figured out what that meant - the best I could guess is that the word "Talmud" is the equivalent of profanity in modern Arabic - but I sought them out nonetheless last Friday when I visited the Old City.

Just as we were about to exit the Old City through a small opening in the walls west of Dung Gate, I saw this:

Looking a bit closer at the signs, I saw that these were the remains of an Umayyad structure from the early Islamic period. Not the famous giant palaces adjacent to the Temple Mount, but another building from the time.

Israel has been constantly charged with "Judaizing" Jerusalem and destroying all evidence of Muslim history there. Yet here is a clear example that, meters from the holiest Jewish sites and spitting distance from the Jewish Quarter, the Israeli government is preserving Muslim heritage with the same respect that it treats Jewish and Christian heritage.

This is not a heavily traveled tourist spot. If Israel was as keen on erasing Islamic heritage as we are told, it could have easily destroyed this building and no Muslims would have known it ever existed to begin with.

It is worthwhile to mention this story that was first published in Biblical Archaeology Review in 1986:

[Archaeologist Meir ]Ben-Dov tells the story of a visit to the excavation [of the Umayyad palaces] by Rafiq Dajani, the deputy director of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities. Dajani remarked to Ben-Dov, “If we could leave politics to the politicians, I would heartily congratulate you on your work, revealing finds of which we knew very little up until now. The finds from the early Moslem period are thrilling, and frankly I’m surprised the Israeli scholars made them public.” A foreign correspondent overheard Dajani’s remarks and included them in his story. Two weeks later Dajani was summarily dismissed and later died in the prime of life.

It only takes a short stroll in Jerusalem to expose the lies of the Palestinian and other Arab leadership.

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07/23 Links: Is BDS headed for defeat?; Columnist Says Israel ‘Last Hope’ for Arab Christians Before Total Annihilation

From Ian:

Michael Lumish: "Occupy" is an Unusual Word

It is not a very nice word, either.
In terms of the never-ending Arab and Muslim violence against the Jews of the Middle East the word "occupy" has ominous connotations.
It implies the brutal military occupation of those heinous Jews upon another people's land.
The word "occupy" also, of course, has benign connotations when used in other contexts. For example, no one would have any problem, - other than Jihadis - with the fact that I am occupying my chair in my office.
The truth, however, is that Israel occupies Israel like France occupies France or the Czech Republic occupies the Czech Republic. There is nothing remotely illegal or illegitimate, to use Obama's term, about Jews living and building in the land Jewish people have lived in for over 3,500 years.
The Land of Israel is where Jews come from and to argue otherwise is to suggest that the Jews are, or should be, a forever wandering people.
The very word "Israel" means, along with the Jewish State, the Jewish people. Israel is the Jewish nation. So to argue that Israel is illegally occupying Israel is to argue that the Jews should have no home. And Israel includes that part of Israel that the Jordanians dubbed "West Bank" in order to rob the Jewish people of our posterity within our own homeland.
This is to say that the foundation of the conflict is an irrational and Koranically-based hatred toward the Jewish people, without whom Islam would never have emerged to begin with. Without Israel, which is to say without the Jewish people, there never would have been a Koran or the emergence of imperial Islam.

Is BDS headed for defeat?

From recent defeats, it appears that efforts by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement to undermine Israel’s legitimacy may have fallen on hard times. But appearances can be deceptive, and we – supporters of Israel as the secure, democratic nation-state of the Jewish people – cannot afford complacency.
It is true that BDS recently experienced a string of setbacks in the United States. These include an executive order from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo prohibiting his state from doing business with companies that boycott Israel, rejection by the American Anthropological Association (AAA) of a boycott resolution directed at all Israeli academic institutions, and the United Methodist Church’s repudiation of divestment and move to withdraw from the “US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation,” a pro-BDS coalition.
To understand the real threat posed by the BDS movement, however, we need to look at the forest and not just the trees. There have been and will continue to be both short-term “wins” and “losses.” The BDS movement’s long-term strategic objective is to erode the perception that Israel embodies those values underpinning its special alliance with the United States – democracy, human rights, equality under law and peace. In other words, their underlying aim is to turn Israel into a pariah state, viewed similarly to the apartheid South African regime.
While the BDS movement is very far from achieving its malicious agenda, we cannot ignore some worrisome trends. According to a Pew Research Center poll released in May 2016, overall American public support for Israel remains high. At the same time, liberal Democrats expressed greater sympathy for the Palestinians over Israel by a 40 percent to 33 percent margin. Millennials expressed greater sympathy for Israel, but even among them there has been a steady increase of sympathy for the Palestinians, from 9 percent in 2006, to 20 percent in July 2014, and 27 percent in this latest poll.

Is the BDS movement facing economic warfare?

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is staring down the barrel of economic warfare with financial assaults on BDS, replicating in many ways the sanctions architecture imposed on Iran to compel a change in its behavior over its illicit nuclear weapons program.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s now-famous anti-BDS comment from last month – “It’s very simple: If you boycott against Israel, New York will boycott you” – harks back to the strategy targeting European companies conducting business with Iran’s regime.
European banks and firms faced being frozen out of the lucrative US market if they continued trade relations with Tehran.
Cuomo’s executive order to punish companies which have state business who are engaged in BDS is part and parcel of a broader campaign unfolding in US state governments to turn BDS into a pariah movement. Robust anti-BDS legislation in Illinois coupled with State Sen. Mark Kirk’s call for an investigation into German BDS bank accounts has played a critical role in disrupting BDS funding.

A couple of years ago I blogged a long Twitter conversation between myself and a "peace activist" named Gary Spedding, as well as exchanges between him and Gilead Ini of CAMERA.

The text proves beyond any doubt that Spedding is a liar who enjoys scrubbing evidence of his hate. (He tried to say the Fogels were murdered by a domestic worker, not an Arab terrorist, for example. He then deleted the post, denied ever writing it, and when confronted with screen-shot evidence kept denying it.)

Later it was shown that Spedding had been involved in a violent anti-Israel demonstration in Belfast. As the Israeli embassy in London said then, “Mr Spedding’s entry into Israel was denied due to his involvement in organising a violent protest in Queens University, Belfast, in which an Israeli representative was attacked, and others were forced to take shelter to prevent being hurt. No country has an obligation to allow foreigners who have been involved in violent activities targeting its nationals to enter its territory.”

Spedding lied about this incident as well, claiming falsely that he was given a "ten year ban" to go to Israel merely for "lying" and being an unspecified "security threat."

You cannot grant Spedding any credibility after reading those posts of mine, or this other series.

But Haaretz can.

Spedding wrote an article about how he witnesses too much antisemitism on the pro-Palestinian side, and he is upset. Not so much because antisemitism is evil, but because the existence of antisemitism gives credence to the idea that most anti-Zionists are, deep down, antisemitic, which Spedding disputes. He says that "Israel advocacy groups weaponize anti-Semitism to stifle and shut down debate and legitimate criticism of Israel" and "activists will sometimes inadvertently share anti-Semitic or deeply offensive posts. This is the product of ignorance as opposed to malicious intent towards Jews."

The most hilarious part is where Spedding, who went to great lengths to delete his offensive writings from the Internet, self-righteously says "Whatever the motivation, it's the words that matter; this is what makes the public record."

The bulk of the op-ed isn't that terrible; Spedding does call out a real problem. But the entire op-ed is a pathetic way for Spedding to try to rehabilitate himself, and Haaretz is all too happy to allow this violent anti-Israel activist to use its platform to try to make him sound like a peacemaker.

Haaretz and Spedding belong together.

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07/22 Links: Phillips: The invisible Jewish victims; Netanyahu: LGBTs an integral part of Israeli society

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The invisible Jewish victims

As a Western, ethnically based nation, Israel is therefore damned in the liberal mind three times over, and its military actions against “oppressed” Arabs to protect its people from further attack place it automatically beyond the pale.
It isn’t just Israelis who are thus airbrushed out of the victim picture but Diaspora Jews too. In Britain, there was widespread surprise that French Jews were targeted in the attack on the kosher supermarket in Paris following the atrocity at Charlie Hebdo.
In similar vein, there is shock at the vicious Jew-hatred which has openly erupted within the British Labour Party under the leadership of the ultra-left “friend” of Hamas and Hezbollah, Jeremy Corbyn.
Yet for many years French Jews have been under murderous attack by Muslims which the British media have for the most part failed to report at all. As for Jew-hatred in Britain, this has been rampant within British progressive circles for more than 15 years.
With their minds twisted by the demonization and delegitimization of Israel which is the default narrative of the liberal establishment, the British have failed to grasp that this is merely a fresh mutation of the oldest hatred – hatred of the collective Jew.
Refusing to see Israel or the Jewish people as victims is part of the moral sickness of the West. This has blinded people in the West to the threat they themselves face.
It guarantees the impotent shock with which they will continue to respond to the atrocities and challenges which are undoubtedly and tragically yet to come.

Caroline Glick: Turkey – Roger out

To make a long story short then, the Turkish military is no longer capable of cooperating in any meaningful way with the US or NATO . Erdogan, never a reliable ally, is now openly hostile.
He is in the midst of committing aggression against NATO forces at Incirlik. And he is embracing Turkish jihadists who are ideologically indistinguishable from ISIS.
The US surrender to Russia means that America cannot protect Turkey from Russia. And Erdogan has chosen to blame American for Turkey’s fast approaching economic doomsday.
Under the circumstances, if NATO takes its job of protecting the free world seriously, it has no choice but to quit with the business as usual routine and kick Turkey out of the alliance, withdraw its personnel and either remove or disable the nuclear weapons it fields in the country.
As for anti-ISIS operations, the US will have to move its bases to Iraqi Kurdistan and embrace the Kurds as the strategic allies they have clearly become.
In the aftermath of the failed coup, Turkey is a time bomb. It cannot be defused. It will go off. The only way to protect the free world from the aftershocks is by closing the border and battening down the hatches.

Abbas Hugs War Criminal President of Sudan, Aims to “Restrain Israeli Movements” in Africa

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is coordinating with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, a wanted war criminal, in order to “restrain Israeli movements” in the African continent, the PA’s foreign minister said on Wednesday. The International Criminal Court charged al-Bashir with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Darfur, where he is accused of seeking to exterminate three non-Arab ethnic groups.
“President Mahmoud Abbas and his Sudanese counterpart Omar al-Bashir discussed developing a strategy for the African continent and coordinating to restrain Israeli attempts to make a breakthrough in Africa,” Riyad al-Maliki told reporters in Khartoum.
Abbas kicked off his three-day visit to Sudan on Tuesday, embracing al-Bashir upon his arrival and signing a number of bilateral agreements — including one to create a mechanism for consultation between the PA and Sudan.
In a Facebook post published after their meeting, Abbas extended his support to the Sudanese government and expressed “solidarity with Sudan against unjust economic sanction [sic].”

Palestinian writer angry at Bibi's message to Abbas

Last week, Benjamin Netanyahu sent this message to Mahmoud Abbas:

I hadn't noticed any reaction until today.

Al Quds al Arabi, a pan-Arab site, said that Bibi had the ultimate impudence and Zionist arrogance to mention how Abbas' people support terror. After all, the author says, Israel is a fascist terrorist state that is so racist that it is now "post-fascist" and "beyond racist."

Then he gives us a history lesson, where we learn that the Palestinians aren't Canaanites or Jebusites at all:

Palestinian Arabs live Palestine for thousands of years, and particularly since the third century BC, when they came from the island of Crete in and founded the cities of Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod , and Ekron.

He is saying that they are Philistines, and he says the Jewish scripture proves it!

Of course, if they are from Crete, they aren't Arab....

The we learn something even more amazing. The first Jews only came to the land in the 19th century, when 1500 came to a Jew-free land in 1840! They have no relationship to the Jews of the Bible, of course - they are Khazars. He helpfully tells the readers to check out Israel Shahak and Roger Garaudy for juicy details.

He then quotes some supposed Israeli archaeologists who say that they have dug for years and still not found any evidence of Jews in Jerusalem. I guess that this artifact I photographed last week from the Second Temple in Hebrew was fake:

The author ends off with, "In the end, I demand you take your things, and get out of our land. Conditions have changed and you'll have to implement our demands."

I am always amazed how people suffering from genocide and torture and land theft and oppression have the ability to demand things from the oppressing party. Aren't they afraid that they will be wiped out by the immoral torturers for their insolence?

Apparently not.

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Barely reported earlier this month:

United Nations Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk will undertake his first official mission from 10 to 15 July to gather first-hand information on the current human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. He will visit Amman, Jordan, due to Israel’s lack of response to his request to travel to the OPT.

Mr. Lynk is the new independent expert designated by the UN Human Rights Council to monitor and report on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.

“I am very much looking forward to meeting with the many representatives of civil society, government officials and UN officers to learn more about recent developments in the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territory,” he said. “Their work is invaluable, and it will shape my understanding of what is happening on the ground.”

Israel doesn't let the UNHRC enter because of its extreme anti-Israel bias. So Lynk had to come to his conclusions without stepping foot in the Palestinian territories.

Which wasn't hard, because the conclusions are foregone.

Ma'an Arabic quotes him as saying exactly the same memes that the UN has been spouting for years:

"The people who live in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, are suffering more and more from feelings of despair, especially among young people. It is clear that the continued occupation has become more entrenched than ever, and that this had a significant impact on a large segment on the path of development in the occupied Palestinian territory for human rights issues."

He called the Israeli authorities conduct a thorough investigation of excessive use of force and extrajudicial killings.

He expressed particular concern about recently published police procedures which state that the Israeli police forces can use live ammunition in response to stone throwing. The use of lethal ammunition should only be done in limited cases and only when facing a life-threatening risk to law enforcement.

Said Link, "The existence and the spread of Israeli settlements amounts to a serious violation of international law , which results in a host of other violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law.

The 50 years anniversary of this occupation in 2017 makes it obligatory for the world to pay more attention to the situation which is the heart of this seemingly intractable situation.

His other memes that he regurgitated from his predecessors based on talking to professional propagandists in Jordan included the "kids can't go to schools" meme, the "patients can't reach hospitals" meme, the "NGO law is awful" meme, and "Israel really should let me in so I can lie about them with more impunity" meme.

The lack of any coverage to this visit and his statements (at least so far) seem to indicate that the world is really fatigued with this disproportionate attention given to Israel from a human rights body that all but ignores 99.5% of the world in its zeal to zero in on one nation.

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