Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, July 31, 2016

NYT headline says Bibi is "crushing Israel's free press" - article itself proves otherwise

The headline in the New York Times says "How Benjamin Netanyahu Is Crushing Israel’s Free Press."

So how is Israel's free press being "crushed"?

The article gives exactly three examples:

1. The Israel Hayom newspaper is unabashedly (and embarrassingly) pro-Bibi. While it might chill any staffers on the paper from writing anything against the prime minister, that does not "crush" Israel's free press.

2. Walla News became more pro-Netanyahu when its parent company, the Bezeq communications company, benefited from some government legislation.

3. The government has tried to open up TV channels to more competition, which is regarded by the op-ed writer as a cynical ploy to kill networks that Bibi doesn't like.

So how is the Israeli press responding to being "crushed"?

Although for years the most widely read daily, Yediot Ahronot, and its owner took a decidedly anti-Netanyahu line, claims of left-wing bias fall flat these days, when most Israelis are getting their news from Israel Hayom or Walla News, and when the only remaining liberal bastion — Haaretz — struggles to stay afloat. And yet Mr. Netanyahu continues to present himself as a victim of a vindictive press.

But Yediot is still around. Haaretz is still around. No one is pressuring them to change their editorial line. The success of Israel Hayom and the poor performance of Haaretz have nothing to do with governmental policies, and everything to do with Israelis considering Haaretz to be way too far left and Israel Hayom being free.

There must be more evidence for this crushing of free press , right?

The only heartening thing in all this is that news outlets are pushing back to maintain their independence. Investigative “60 Minutes”-type programs like “Uvda” (“Fact”) and “Hamakor” (“The Source”) continue to delve into government corruption and to air in prime-time slots. “Despite the assault on the press, the Israeli media remains very critical, very aggressive, and has a lot of chutzpah. It’s a kind of basic instinct that’s part of our DNA,” Ms. Dayan, who hosts Uvda, told me.

OK. We determined that major TV and newspaper outlets are quite harsh on Bibi even after he's "crushed" the free press. But at least the article proved that Walla is firmly under Bibi's control, right?

Earlier this year, Walla News’ diplomatic correspondent Amir Tibon wrote an article critical of Mr. Netanyahu’s response to the latest wave of Palestinian violence under the headline “Netanyahu’s Promises of Calm Replaced by Cheerleading.” Soon after the piece was published, Mr. Tibon was told that the prime minister’s office was pressuring editors to remove it from the website. Taking to Twitter, Mr. Tibon wrote of the prime minister’s “attempts to silence criticism.” Apparently as a result, his article remained in place. One thing did change, however: The word “Netanyahu” was removed from its headline.

Hold on - Walla published an anti-Netanyahu article? But I thought they were in his pocket! You know, the whole Bezeq thing?

I don't know why the headline was changed, but could it be that it was not accurate? Hell, I've prompted the New York Times to make changes in its articles - does that mean that I am crushing America's free press?

So, there you have it. Free speech is being "crushed" by Bibi while a vibrant, free press continues to attack him with no fear - and that free press is documented in the very article that claims the opposite.

Words have no meaning any more when dealing with Israel.

(h/t Yenta, Leo dam Hofshi)

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Reporter Ariel Kahane heard my talk in Jerusalem a couple of weeks ago, and wrote about it in Makor Rishon's magazine.

The atmosphere was reminiscent of an underground meeting in the pre-state days. Late at night, in a remote synagogue at the southern outskirts of Jerusalem, about two dozen people gathered. [I counted over 30 - EoZ] They came to hear a man whose name they do not know and whose picture they were not allowed to take. Not only Orthodox Jews were there, even a German government official took the trouble to come from one of the Arab countries in the region. Like the rest of those who came, she too has been following for years the man who lives in New Jersey but calls himself Elder of Ziyon, a US high-tech worker who has become a one-man hasbara machine.

"Elder," as he calls himself after the famous protocols, has for years run a free blog that is witty, tenacious and knowledgeable. On a daily basis he crushes Palestinian anti-Israel propaganda, and ridicules the hypocrisy of its liberal supports. You could say he's one of the few that does not succumb to political correctness and refutes it with intelligent and well reasoned arguments.

Here's a typical example from Tuesday. In this short but well-sourced article, Eldar established how the New York Times ignored the murder attacks on the 'Hyper-Cacher' market and the Jewish school in Toulouse in its reports on Islamic terrorism in France. "According to the New York Times and others Muslim attacks on non-Jews belong to a different, more outrageous, category than attacks on Jews. There's a kind of understanding for anti-Semitism" he says, touching the root of the matter.

His achievements include exposing the Nazi tendencies of a researcher at Human Rights Watch; discovering anti-Semitic teachers and anti-Semitic content at UNRWA's institutions in Gaza; the discovery that Omar Mashrawi, a Gazan child whose father works for the BBC, was killed by a Hamas rocket and not by IDF fire, and more.

This record may not cross the threshold of the mainstream media but it is certainly familiar with the insiders, both supporters of Israel and its opponents. Therefore, when Elder announced he was coming to Jerusalem and that he would give a lecture there, it was obvious that one should go hear it. In the overview he gave he turned a spotlight on the permanent anti-Semitism published daily in Arab media, and which isn't reported in Israel.

"One still has to say that European anti-Semitism was far worse," he said, "but the Arabs have permanent anti-Semitism, including Holocaust denial. In Egypt, Jordan, and by Mahmoud Abbas, of course. Anti-Semitism in the Arab world today is the worst it has ever been". Elder buttressed these arguments with clear-cut cartoons and quotes from Arab media.

His words were surprisingly reinforced by the German representative. "You talk about everything that appears in the Arab media for all to see, but it's nothing compared to what is said in mosques. I've been living in Arab countries for ten years. I was in Yemen, Jordan and other places. You have no idea about the things they say about you. For them you were and still are sons of monkeys and pigs". In a personal conversation with her later she was shocked to hear that most Israelis do not speak Arabic, so we do not know how our neighbors are talking about us.

For his part, Elder stressed that Arab anti-Semitism gets routinely ignored by the civilized world, "except for one situation. When the Israeli government shouts and calls attention to displays of anti-Semitism in the Arab world or the Palestinian Authority, the international media wakes up. When Israel is silent, the West is silent as well. But that's what needs to be done to combat the phenomenon, to expose them and shame them, and that's what I, with my dull resources, intend to continue doing.

"From the place I am today I would like to reveal myself, institutionalize my activity and immigrate to Israel. I'm happy each moment I'm here. I don't reveal myself because I still need to make a living" says the still anonymous blogger, hoping his words reach wealthy Israel supporters who are looking for new avenues for their donations.

If you are one of those wealthy Israel supporters....let's talk!

(h/t Yoel)

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07/31 Links: Fatah cartoon: Long-nosed Jew explodes Muslim world; Santana wows Israel

From Ian:

PMW: Fatah cartoon: Long-nosed Jew explodes Muslim world

Fatah posted a cartoon showing a long-nosed Jew with an Israeli flag on his arm lighting a fuse to blow up a bomb. Inside the bomb, a Shi'ite Muslim and a Sunni Muslim are lighting fuses to blow up each other.
The cartoon, which was posted on Fatah's Information and Culture Commission website, expresses the libel that Jews/Israel seek to destroy the Muslim world, and are possibly taking advantage of the internal Muslim fighting to do so. The cartoon is also critical of the Muslim world, which is depicted as so focused on killing each other that they do not see the Jews taking advantage of it to kill them.
Palestinian Media Watch has documented the PA libels that Israel/Jews are behind all conflicts in the world and that Israel/Jews are to blame for all bad in the world.

Netanyahu accuses France of funding anti-Israel groups

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said he ordered an investigation into French-funded organizations that he labeled anti-Israel, as Paris moved to limit the foreign financing of mosques.
After a spate of deadly jihadist attacks, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls on Saturday announced Paris was considering banning foreign funding of mosques.
“This sounds familiar to us. We are also disturbed by such donations to organizations that deny the State of Israel’s right to exist,” Netanyahu said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday.
A preliminary inquiry has revealed that several European countries, including France, directly support organizations that engage in anti-Israel incitement, call to boycott the country and do not recognize Israel’s right to exist, Netanyahu said.
“We will discuss this with them because terror is terror everywhere and incitement is incitement which, apparently, encompasses the world, [and] governments must be as united as possible in dealing with them,” the prime minister said.
Netanyahu said the findings of the completed investigation would be submitted to the French government.

B'Tselem's Gaza war site lets you filter deaths by many criteria. Even though they tend to avoid labeling people as militants if they can, something interesting can be seen when you look at men between 20 and 30 killed during Protective Edge:

A total of 771 men in that age group were killed during the war, according to B'Tselem. Of those, the site says, only 184 did not participate in hostilities. About 3 out of 4 of all men killed in that category were terrorists.

Now, Gaza has about 200,000 men between 20 and 30. Perhaps 10% of those men are members of terror groups. So Israel did an excellent job in targeting terrorists in that age group - even though terrorists generally wouldn't wear uniforms during the war.

Some of the "civilians" in that age group appear to be miscategorized:

'Abd a-Rahman Muhammad 'Odeh Barrak. 24 years old, resident of Wadi a-Salqa, Deir al-Balah district. Killed on 19 Jul 2014, in Deir al-Balah, by gunfire. Did not participate in hostilities. Additional information: Killed along with three other operatives in a military branch in the bombing of farmland in the east of the city of Deir al-Balah.

Some of the "civilians" were probably not so innocent, as B'Tselem's description of this man shows:

'Udai Rafiq Sa'id a-Sultan. 21 years old, resident of Beit Lahiya, North Gaza district. Killed on 10 Jul 2014, in Jabalya, North Gaza district, by missile fired from an aircraft, during the course of a targeted killing. Did not participate in hostilities. Additional information: Killed along with two people he was driving in his car, one of them an operative in the Islamic Jihad's military branch.

If you are driving terrorists around during wartime, that pretty much makes you a combatant under international law.

Many others of the Gazans between 20-30 who were killed happened to be nearby when Israel targeted terrorists, such as this guy:

Saleh a-Zgheibi, 21 years old
Killed on 18 Jul 2014, in Rafah, by gunfire from a tank.
Saleh Suliman Muhammad a-Zgheibi. 21 years old, resident of Rafah. Killed on 18 Jul 2014, in Rafah, by gunfire from a tank. Did not participate in hostilities. Additional information: Killed in the Bahraini neighborhood together with an operative in the military branch of Fatah.

While there are certainly some who cannot be identified as having done anything wrong, the statistics within that age group show very clearly that Israel was targeting only militants among a much larger population.

Which strongly indicates that the children and women and elderly who were killed were also the victims of Hamas' human shield policy far more than of any sort of carelessness on the IDF's part. It makes no sense to assert that Israel would be so efficient at targeting terrorists out of the young adult male group and at the same time randomly tossing bombs at houses filled with innocent people, as the NGOs are trying very hard to imply.

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I put subtitles on this video that has been going around. I'm not sure when it was originally shot.

It reveals the depths of immorality in parts of Palestinian Arab society as a father urges soldiers to kill his son, whom he is demanding to throw stones.

The father clearly wants his son to be killed on video, with his Palestinian flag. He wants to create another Mohammed Al Dura for his "cause."

This child abuse and desire to use children's lives for cynical public relations purposes is sickness that is simply not reported.

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

UPDATE: The subtitles are a bit off in timing, apologies.

UPDATE 2: It was recorded from a different angle and posted top an Arab site on Facebook, where the "high five" that the boy gave the soldier was edited out while the caption says that the boy refused to shake the soldier's hand.

(h/t Bob Knot)

UPDATE 3: IBA asked Amnesty and Human Rights Watch to comment. They didn't.

Palestinian father urged IDF to shoot his child. @amnesty refused to comment. @hrw ignored requests for statement. pic.twitter.com/EaqB9M8Cg0
— Eylon Aslan-Levy (@EylonALevy) July 31, 2016

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Egypt's Sky News has an interview with Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki.

In a TV appearance, Zaki said that the purpose of the Balfour Declaration was for the West to place a Jewish state in a position where it would divide the Asian and North African Arab worlds. And that the US is now pursuing a policy to keep the Arabs fighting each other in order to ensure that Israel is the most powerful nation in the region.

The conspiracy theories don't stop there for this Fatah official. He also says that the purpose of Netanyahu's visit to African nations earlier this month was to threaten Egypt with cutting off the supply of water upstream of the Nile with the Renaissance Dam being constructed now in Ethiopia.

This is yet another example of how Palestinian officials can say outrageous things and the world media is silent, while every statement from every Israeli politician is examined in minute detail to look for evidence of anything unprofessional.

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The Hamas government closed 6 swimming pools in northern Gaza on Saturday, because the water was not being properly filtered.

This came after an expose by Palestine Today (Islamic Jihad) about numerous private swimming pools in Gaza that did not have adequate filtering or chlorination. Swimmers complain about itching after swimming in those pools.

In other news - Gaza seems to have quite a few swimming pools, even as the media and NGOs talk about their water shortages.

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07/30 Links: Israel fires back at US over criticism of settlement building; Douglas Murray - The Origins of Islamic Violence

From Ian:

Israel fires back at US over criticism of settlement building

The Israeli government on Friday fired back at the US State Department over its criticism a day earlier that Israeli construction over the Green Line is “provocative and counterproductive.”
In a statement, the Israeli Foreign Ministry rejected the US argument that recently announced plans to build in East Jerusalem were undermining the prospects for a two-state solution, calling that argument “factually baseless.”
On Wednesday, Israel announced the approval of 323 tenders for housing units in East Jerusalem, and plans to build 770 units in Gilo. While much of the international community considers Gilo a settlement, Israel considers it a neighborhood of annexed East Jerusalem and argues that it will be part of Israel in any negotiated peace agreement.
The international outcry, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Emanuel Nachshon on Friday according to Haaretz, “was done with the full knowledge that the neighborhood of Gilo in Jerusalem will be part of Israel in any conceivable agreement reached through negotiations. The argument that building in Gilo undermines the two-state solution is factually baseless and distracts from the real obstacle to peace — the persistent Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, under any borders.”

Golan Druze leader disputes UN statement on ‘hardship of Israeli occupation’

A leader of the Druze population of the Golan Heights disputed the assertion of a United Nations committee that accused Israel of imposing economic and social hardships on his community.
Dulan abu-Saleh, the mayor of Majdal Shams, the largest Druze town in the Golan, told Makor Rishon that the UN Economic and Social Council’s recent statement on the area was “a total joke,” the daily reported Friday.
Unlike other Druze populations in Israel who serve in the Israel Defense Forces, the Golan’s Druze population of some 20,000 has been careful not to align itself publicly with the Jewish state, which annexed the Golan Heights in 1981 after capturing it from Syria during the Six-Day War in 1967.
The eruption in 2011 of a civil war in Syria changed that, causing a sharp increase in the number of Golan Druze who applied for Israeli citizenship, which has been available to them since 1981.
Abu-Saleh objected to the inclusion of his native area in the UN panel’s statement earlier this month, which said that “economic and social repercussions of the occupation on the living conditions of the Palestinian people in the occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem and the Arab population in the occupied Syrian Golan.”

The UN Funds Repressive Regimes at the Expense of US Taxpayers

A new report shows how the U.S. contributes more money to the U.N. than it spends on shipbuilding for the Navy, yet there is a huge disparity in what it receives back compared to many repressive countries.
The United Nations recently released a report detailing the countries of registration of the recipient vendors of $17.6 billion the U.N. system spent on goods and services in 2015.
The report received some modest attention in the press. However, the general unfamiliarity with the U.N. can lead to misunderstandings about what information this report was actually providing. For instance, a Forbes article misinterpreted the report as one listing which countries contribute most to the U.N. system. This misinterpretation inspired this article piece to illustrate the difference.
Unfortunately, the U.N. system does not report its revenues as frequently as it does procurement. Analysis requires going back to 2013, which is the last year that both procurement and revenue data were published by the U.N. Chief Executives Board for Coordination.
In 2013, the U.N. system procured $16.38 billion in goods and services (the summary page for procurement of goods says $16.1 billion, but the dataset yields the higher number) and (after eliminating duplicate information for Aruba, the “State of Palestine,” the Republic of Korea, and the Holy See) $53.9 billion in revenues from governments in 2013. In other words, in 2013 the U.N. system spent about 30 percent of the revenues received from governments on goods and services.
Many nations benefit significantly from this system, receiving far more from the U.N. than they pay into the system in contributions. For instance, a Swiss news outlet observed, “Switzerland is the United Nation’s fourth-biggest supplier, behind only the United States, India, and the United Arab Emirates, providing almost 5 percent of all the world body’s goods and services in 2015.”

07/29 Links Pt2: Anti-Zionism: 21st Century Avatar of the Longest Hatred; How a Muslim also became a Zionist

From Ian:

Richard Landes: Anti-Zionism: 21st Century Avatar of the Longest Hatred

The supersessionism among progressives rests on a morally sadistic ‘secular’ replacement narrative: Israel has replaced the Nazis while the Palestinians have replaced the Holocaust-era Jews. As pleasing an historical irony as such moral inversions may seem to Nobel Prize winners, it would be dangerous to mistake it for the reality on the ground, where Israel does everything it can to avoid behaving like Nazis, while some of its enemies openly admire Nazis.
This replacement narrative offers not only freedom from Holocaust guilt; it also offers moral elevation, the chance to tower over Israel and judge her harshly. ‘Israel has lost all moral high ground,’ pronounced UN envoy Terje Roed-Larsen in response to the Jenin ‘massacre,’ when in fact, he was looking at the lowest score for civilian casualty ratios in the history of urban warfare. Deep moral disorientation ensues: a mainstream news commentator claims that the picture of 12-year-old Muhammad al Durah, caught in a crossfire, ‘symbolically replaces, erases the image of the boy in the Warsaw Ghetto.’
From these heights, European moral superpowers like Sweden, and individuals like Jostein Gaarder, sit in judgment on Israel, despising these sovereign Jews, feeding their supersessionist fantasies at the price of becoming untethered from reality. It is a small step to transforming Holocaust Commemorations into platforms for attacking Israel as the new genocidal force on the planet.
The megaphone effect
‘Leftist’ anti-Zionism has allowed internet-empowered Jihadis to spread their memes and icons of hatred the world over. Activist journalists, post-colonial scholars, feminists, ASHamed Jews, NGO activists, all reaffirm and reinforce the narrative: Blame Israel; exculpate the Palestinian ‘resistance’; conversely do not exculpate Israel and do not blame Jihadi extremism. Indeed, the more sincere the Western anti-Zionism, the better is the cover under which the hatreds spread. Progressives introduce the campus to virulent ‘human-rights’ anti-Zionism and mobilise the ensuing indignation to make Israel an international pariah.
It is common wisdom on today’s global progressive left to consider anti-Zionism as unrelated to anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia as the new anti-Semitism. The evidence presented at the Bloomington conference suggested that this is a serious misreading. In the 21st century anti–Zionism plays, mutatis mutandis, the role that anti-Semitism played in early 20th century Europe. The papers delivered at Bloomington made clear that in this current climate, being a vocal anti-Zionist, laboring to see the global humiliation or elimination of Israel, means you put wind in the sails of real-live exterminationist Jew-haters, with people who harbor paranoid, genocidal fantasies. When Leftists chant ‘We are all Hezbollah, Now!’ or ‘Muqtada al Sadr – Anti-Imperialist Solidarity!’ they encourage and empower the real 21st century avatars of the Nazi delirium, namely the triumphalist Jihadis.

DNC Featured Denial of the Existence of Israel

It wouldn't be the DNC convention without an anti-Israel theme. And, in tune with the theme, it's thinly disguised as positivity.
The Democratic convention audience erupted in cheers Thursday night when the Rev. William Barber II urged them to love Jews and Palestinians equally.
"When we love the Jewish child and the Palestinian child ... we are reviving the heart of our democracy," said Barber, who is also the president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP.
"Jesus, a brown-skinned Palestinian Jew, called us to preach good news to the poor, the broken and the bruised and all those who are made to feel unaccepted," he said.
Barber denied the historical existence of Israel in typical PLO propaganda fashion. Jesus was not a Palestinian. He was a Judean.
Palestine was a Roman colonialist term and the term Palestine has no reference and no relevance to the current Muslim settlers and colonialists who call themselves "Palestinians". (h/t dabney)

RJC Ad Hammers ‘Today’s Democratic Party’ for Anti-Israel Displays

The Republican Jewish Coalition released an ad Friday charging that the Democratic Party of today is hardly the one of old when it comes to support for Israel.
Citing the Washington Free Beacon report that Rep. Hank Johnson (D., Ga.), a Hillary Clinton superdelegate, called Jewish settlers “termites” before an anti-Israeli group, the narrator said “anti-Israeli Democrats are on full display at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia.” Johnson offered up a half-hearted apology for the comment, calling it a “poor choice of words.”
While Democrats waved the Palestinian flag at the convention, the Israeli flag was burned outside the arena while onlookers chanted in support of the intifada. The Clinton campaign condemned the burning.
However, the ad featured other activists around the convention in Philadelphia speaking out against Israel, including one woman who said the U.S. was acting like a “terrorist” by giving money to Israel and another making the oft-repeated slur against Israel as an “apartheid” state.
Secretary of State John Kerry used this slur in 2014, remarking his concern that Israel could become an apartheid state if a two-state solution was not reached soon.
“Radical Democrats. Stridently anti-Israel,” the narrator said. “Sadly, this isn’t the old Democratic Party. It’s today’s Democratic Party.”

Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan, is the only sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court, on five counts of crimes against humanity (murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture and rape.)

This week, the government of Mahmoud Abbas, in its weekly cabinet meeting, announced:

The Council welcomed the agreement between Mr. President, Mahmoud Abbas, and his Sudanese counterpart Omar al-Bashir, on the establishment of a joint ministerial committee between the two countries. Four agreements were signed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs with Sudanese officials: a political consultation agreement, a convention on the Joint Ministerial Committee, a protocol of political consultation and the Convention on General Education and the Convention on Cultural and Academic Cooperation in the field of higher education between the two countries, stressing that these signed agreements will lead to the strengthening of relations and increasing cooperation between the two countries for the benefit of the two brotherly peoples.

For some reason this wasn't considered to be newsworthy.

Even the "human rights" NGOs who are agitating to have Bashir arrested have nothing bad to say about Mahmoud Abbas treating him like a respected head of state.

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"Occupy" is an Unusual Word (Michael Lumish)

An extra column by Mike 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 occupied for over 3,500 years.

The Land of Israel is where Jews come from.

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.

Muslims who care about Islam owe everything to the Jewish people because were it not for the Jewish people Islam could never have developed.

Understand, of course, that I take no particular pride in the Jewish roots of the Islamic faith, but it is historically undeniable. Islam, as George W. Bush famously misstated, is not a "religion of peace." On the contrary, Islam is a religion of war and submission that divides the world into Dar al-Islam, the Home of Islam, and Dar al-Harb, which is the Realm of War or House of the Heathens.

Christianity, despite the historical behavior of Christians, actually is a religion of peace because its founding figure, Jesus the Jew, was a philosopher of peace.

Judaism is a religion of law, which is to say, a religion of justice.

There are mystical and spiritual aspects to the faith, such as QBL (Qabalah) or Tikkun Olam, a notion which derives from the former and that means to "repair the world," but at its core Judaism is grounded in Torah, just as Islam is grounded in al-Sharia.

The difference is that the Torah does not require its imposition on other people while al-Sharia insists upon its imposition upon all non-Muslims.

And that is the very definition of Jihad.

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07/29 Links Pt1: Glick: Time to walk away from US aid; The Palestinian Distortion of the Balfour Declaration

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Time to walk away from US aid

Today, both economics and strategic arguments indicate that the opposite is the case, even if walking away involves ending US military aid.
If Israel cuts its losses and begins to develop a fifth generation jet fighter that meets its own specific needs, rather than one designed by a committee to meet other countries’ needs poorly, it will end up both far safer and far more prosperous than if it goes ahead with the F-35 project. It will produce a better plane, better suited for Israeli defense needs, and simultaneously stimulate the growth of Israeli military industries, providing jobs for thousands of Israelis.
If Israel walks away from the military assistance package currently under discussion, it will be in a position to sign joint development deals with the US and other governments on a project by project basis and so ensure that we develop the weapons systems we need, not the ones the US thinks we should have, as we need them. Just as India is investing billions of dollars in joint projects with Israel, so will the US in the future.
It is far from clear that the US can afford its $400b. white elephant. It is abundantly clear that Israel cannot afford it.
Whether or not a Trump or Clinton administration will be more forthcoming is really beside the point. The point is that the US aid deal is really a deal for Lockheed Martin, not for Israel. And we need to say no.

Elliott Abrams: The New State Department Assault on Israel

Why is this approach stupid? For two reasons. First, it’s false: construction in outlying areas of the West Bank may indeed appear to be a problem in creating a Palestinian state, but construction in Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem is not, nor is construction in major blocs Israel will keep. Second, this failure to make distinctions means Israelis will disregard U.S. complaints instead of listening to them. If the State Department criticized construction by settler groups in remote West Bank areas, it would actually have most Israelis on its side. But when it treats Jerusalem neighborhoods and a place like Maale Adumim as indistinguishable from any and every settler activity no matter how remote, Israelis will mostly shrug and wonder why the Americans are so dumb.
And that’s actually a good question. Why are we, or rather why is the State Department? I suppose State is just following orders from the White House, but that only raises the stakes; it does not answer the question. Who is the intended audience for this attack on Israel? If the answer is Israelis and their government, it will fail due to its continuing refusal to make logical distinctions. If the answer is Americans, including members of Congress, then this attack–launched by a lame duck administration during this convention week– will have zero effect.
So here’s a theory: the intended audience is European governments, and others around the world. This kind of assault makes their own assaults on Israel easier: they can see us and raise us in the level of criticism of Israel. They can be encouraged in planning attacks on Israel in the UN General Assembly in September. They can offer six-paragraph screeds where they explain how these new housing units threaten peace, security, and the two-state solution.
The State Department statement came the same week that the Palestinian Authority announced it would sue the British government over the Balfour declaration. It is true that this was in many ways a comic announcement, but it displayed a complete lack of serious intent to move forward toward peace or peace negotiations. In that sense it is completely consistent with the way the Palestinian Authority and the PLO have behaved throughout the Obama years.
With all the misery and bloodshed in the Middle East; with all the terrorist attacks Israel must face; with chaos in Iraq and Syria; with a PLO thinking not about talks but about lawsuits against the UK, it’s remarkable that housing construction strikes State as the critical problem we face. Meanwhile, also this week, a Saudi delegation visited Jerusalem. As The Times of Israel reported, “a retired Saudi general visited Israel this week, heading a delegation of academics and businessmen seeking to encourage discussion of the Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative.”
When the Saudis have a more realistic approach to Israel than the State Department, American policy is far out of whack.