Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, July 25, 2016

Visiting the Kotel Hakatan - the most ignored sacred site in Jerusalem

On Friday, Mrs. Elder and I visited the Kotel HaKatan for the first time since 2007.

The famous Kotel, the Western Wall, only comprises a small section of the entire western wall of the foundations of the second Temple. Most of the wall is used for various Arab buildings in the area.

The most northern yet accessible part of the actual western wall is the Kotel Hakatan, a small area that is in fact even closer to the site of the Holy of Holies in the first and second Temples. It is the holiest site in the world that is freely accessible to Jews.

Yet it is almost always deserted.

Occasionally, some Jews organize a prayer session there, and Muslims complain about the "Talmudic rituals."

It is certainly more difficult to get to than the Kotel plaza. It is outside the security perimeter of the Kotel, and one has to walk through a section of the Muslim quarter to get there.

However, there is a police presence there that was not there when we visited nine years ago. There is a small police station as well as guards both at the entrance to the alleyway to get there and next to the adjacent Temple Mount gate (to ensure that no Jews walk into the Temple Mount itself. Really.)

There has been controversy there. A Jew who blew a shofar there was arrested by Israeli police in 2006, presumably to placate the Arabs who live nearby. But the incident was too similar to the days in the 1930s when the British would arrest Jews who blew the shofar at the Kotel.

The Kotel HaKatan is a hugely important part of Jewish heritage. Everyone should make a point of visiting it when they come to Israel.

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Islamic Jihad's Al Quds Brigades announces their latest "martyr."

Bassem Fawzi Al -Lihama, 38, suffered a "mistaken" fatal gunshot wound "during the performance of a task of jihad," according to the Islamic Jihad military website.

"We call on Allah Almighty to grant the soul of the martyr Mujahid al-Lihama His mercy and eternal peace, accompanied by the prophets and the saints and martyrs and the Companions, and that he inspires his family and his comrades in his path of beautiful patience and fortitude." the statement read.

"The Al-Quds Brigades confirmed that the blood of the martyrs will remain the fuel for the lamp illuminating the Mujahideen on the trail of pride and dignity to press ahead with the resistance until the liberation of the entire beloved Palestine," the statement added.

Hamas' "martyr notices" are essentially the same flowery language extolling jihad in the name of Allah and the destruction of Israel.

Someone much smarter than I needs to explain once again how the philosophy of groups that write these words are significantly different from that of ISIS. They both employ terrorists, they both target civilians, they both use Islam to justify their attacks, they are both murdering in the name of jihad, they both say they want to create an Islamic state they both glorify death.

I mean, they must be different, because the West considers only ISIS to be terrorist while Islamic Jihad and Hamas are "terrorist" Europeans are victims of terror attacks while Israeli Jews are victims of "what Israel considers 'terror attacks'."

I know there must be some reason why the supremacist Islamic jihadist ideology of a group literally called Islamic Jihad is considered somehow by the world to be more legitimate than the supremacist Islamic jihadist ideology of Al Qaeda or Boku Haram or ISIS.

It couldn't have anything to do with the victims, could it?

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Looking a little closer at the B'Tselem website that claims to catalogue the civilian status of all people killed in Gaza two years ago, we see this:

'Issam Muhammad 'Ata a-Najar. 23 years old, resident of Qizan a-Najar, Khan Yunis district. Killed on 29 Jul 2014, in Qizan a-Najar, Khan Yunis district, by gunfire from an aircraft. Did not participate in hostilities. Additional information: Killed in his home together with 15 other members of his family in a strike on the homes of the a-Najar extended family. The strike destroyed two of the family's homes, in each of which eight people were killed. Other houses were damaged.

Ata Muhammad 'Ata a-Najar. 28 years old, resident of Qizan a-Najar, Khan Yunis district. Killed on 29 Jul 2014, in Qizan a-Najar, Khan Yunis district, by gunfire from an aircraft. Did not participate in hostilities.

The IDF, in a report released last year, disagrees in a couple of aspects of this categorization:

According to the factual findings collated by the FFA Mechanism and presented to the MAG, at the time in question the IDF had attacked a Hamas military command and control center located in a building in Khan Younis, as well as senior Hamas operatives who were manning the center at that time. During the attack planning process, it was assessed that there might be a number of civilians present in the building, but that the potential harm to them would not be excessive in relation to the significant military advantage anticipated to result from the attack. The attack on the building was planned for execution by means of a precise munition, and in a manner that would allow the operational purpose of the attack to be achieved, whilst minimizing the potential harm to the surrounding buildings. As a result of the attack, eight individuals were killed, among them two Hamas operatives, Asam Mohammad Ata Al Najjar and Ata Mohammad Ata Al Najjar.

After reviewing the factual findings and the material collated by the FFA Mechanism, the MAG found that the targeting process in question accorded with Israeli domestic law and international law requirements. The decision to attack was taken by the competent authorities, and was aimed at lawful targets. The attack complied with the principle of proportionality, as at the time the decision to attack was made, it was considered that the collateral damage expected from the attack would not be excessive in relation to the military advantage anticipated from it, and this estimation was not unreasonable under the circumstances. Moreover, the attack was carried out after a number of precautionary measures had been undertaken, which aimed to minimize the potential for civilian harm, particularly with regard to any civilians present in adjoining buildings. It was also found that the provision of a specific warning prior to the attack, to the persons present in the structure, was not required by law and would have been expected to result in the frustration of the attack's objective.

In light of these findings, the MAG did not find that the actions of IDF forces gave rise to reasonable grounds for suspicion of criminal misconduct. As a result, the MAG ordered the case to be closed, without opening a criminal investigation or ordering further action against those involved in the incident. Nonetheless, the MAG found it appropriate to recommend to the command authorities that a number of aspects relating to the implementation of the relevant operational instructions be clarified, with an emphasis on improving the documentation of planning procedures for attacks on targets of this type.

Interestingly, the Meir Amit center identified both Issam and Ata as members of Hamas, but could not identify them as militants.

(UPDATE): However, amazing researcher Bob Knot could. Here is Issam:

Here is Ata:

Were they legitimate targets?

The IDF says it was not only targeting the two Hamas members, but also their command and control center that they were running in their house, effectively making their civilian family members human shields. There is no way B'Tselem (or any other NGO) could know whether the house was a command center. Nevertheless, the IDF clearly was targeting Ata and Issam, or else they could not say that a warning "would have been expected to result in the frustration of the attack's objective."

It sure seems like the IDF is correct and B'Tselem is wrong in identifying whether this was a legitimate target.

This is one of the cases where NGOs who confidently publish what seem to be exact figures could easily be wrong, since they cannot possibly know all the details. The media reports the NGO figures without question. Of course any survivors would claim that the victims were all innocent, but interviews seem to be B'Tselem's main method of determining whether a target was legitimate or not.

What is clear is that B'Tselem had read the IDF account of the incident from a full year ago and chose not to even mention it as a possibility when they were writing up their data claiming that Ata and Issam were certainly civilians. B'Tselem simply decided that the IDF account is wrong and their investigation, almost certainly based on interviews, is more accurate.

It is unethical to not even mention the results of the IDF investigation into the incident. If this is B'Tselem's methodology, then the methodology is proven to be flawed from just this case. It should at the very least put these two Hamas members in their "Unknown" category for those that they were unsure about.

There is another major discrepancy between the IDF and B'Tselem accounts: the number of victims. It is possible that both are telling the truth; the IDF only referring to the specific family home that the two Najjar Hamas operatives were in, and B'Tselem including the neighboring home that was also destroyed. Yet there is a third possibility - that B'Tselem is wrong about the number of victims, since it seems to be at the mercy of Palestinian records, and we have seen exaggerations (even with names) of the number of victims of previous attacks.

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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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