Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, August 21, 2016

08/21 Links: From The Sbarro Bombing To ISIS : Islamist Terror Fed At The Trough Of Western Appeasement

From Ian:

From The Sbarro Bombing To ISIS : Islamist Terror Fed At The Trough Of Western Appeasement

Fifteen years ago Palestinian terrorists blew up a pizza place in the heart of Jerusalem. One month later, other Islamist terrorists blew up the World Trade Centers in NY, the Pentagon Building in Washington DC, and were foiled in their attempt to destroy the Capital building by the brave passengers of Flight 93.
It is important to remember these acts, not simply to memorialize the innocent victims whose only crime was to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, but as a reminder that even today, fifteen years later terrorism still suckles at the teat of political correctness and Western World appeasement.
From ” A Personal Account of the Bombing” by Rabbi Binny Freedman:
Her eyes, I think, will stay with me forever. Imploring, beseeching, full of so much sadness. I think the shock of where and how she was, was sinking in. I can’t begin to describe all that was in those eyes.

Jewish settlements are legal

The misperceptions, misrepresentations and ignorance over the legal status of Jewish settlements in the disputed ‎area of Judea and Samaria reflect the general attitude ‎toward the unique phenomenon of the reconstruction of the Jewish national ‎home in Israel.‎
‎"Fidelity to law is the essence of peace," opined Professor Eugene Rostow, a former dean of the Yale University Law School, undersecretary of state and a co-author of ‎the Nov. 22, 1967, U.N. Security Council Resolution 242. Rostow resolved ‎that under international law, "Jews have the same right to settle in the West ‎Bank as they have in Haifa." ‎
Rostow determined that according to Resolution 242, "Israel is required to withdraw 'from territories,' not 'the' territories, ‎nor from 'all' the territories, but 'some' of the territories, which included the ‎West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Desert and the Golan ‎Heights."
Moreover, "resolutions calling for withdrawal from 'all' the territories ‎were defeated in the Security Council and the General Assembly. ... Israel was ‎not to be forced back to the 'fragile and vulnerable' [9- to 15-mile wide] lines ... but ‎to 'secure and recognized' boundaries, agreed to by the parties. ... In making ‎peace with Egypt in 1979, Israel withdrew from the entire Sinai ... [which ‎amounts to] more than 90% of the territories occupied in 1967."‎
Former International Court of Justice President Judge Stephen ‎M. Schwebel stated: "[The 1967] Israeli conquest of territory was defensive ‎rather than aggressive ... [as] indicated by Egypt's prior closure of the Straits of ‎Tiran, blockade of the Israeli port of Eilat, and the amassing of [Egyptian] ‎troops in Sinai, coupled with its ejection of the U.N. Emergency Force ... [and] ‎Jordan's initiated hostilities against Israel. ... The 1948 Arab invasion of the ‎nascent State of Israel further demonstrated that Egypt's seizure of the Gaza ‎Strip, and Jordan's seizure and subsequent annexation of the West Bank and ‎the Old city of Jerusalem, were unlawful. ... Between Israel, acting defensively ‎in 1948 and 1967 ‎‏]‏according to Article 52 of the U.N. Charter‏[‏‎, on the one hand, ‎and her Arab neighbors, acting aggressively in 1948 and 1967, on the other, ‎Israel has better title in the territory of what was [British Mandate] Palestine, ‎including the whole of Jerusalem. ... It follows that modifications of the 1949 ‎armistice lines among those states within former Palestinian territory are ‎lawful." ‎

PMW: PA crossword puzzle: Israeli city Haifa is “port in occupied Palestine”

A crossword puzzle clue in yesterday’s official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida reiterated the Palestinian Authority ideology that teaches Palestinians to see all of Israel as “occupied territory.”
Clue (9 down): “A port in occupied Palestine”
Solution: “Haifa,” (i.e., Israeli port city in Northern Israel).
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Aug. 20, 2016]
The PA avoids expressing legitimacy for Israel in any borders by using euphemisms to replace “Israel.” The official PA daily regularly presents all of Israel as “occupied Palestine,” “occupied Palestinian Interior” or “1948 territories,” and defines Israeli cities as “occupied” cities.
Recently, the official PA daily reported on an invention by Israeli Arabs who were studying in a university in Haifa. The PA daily defined the Arabs of Israel as “Palestinian students from the Interior that was occupied in 1948.” Haifa, where they were studying, was defined as “the occupied city of Haifa”:
"Three Palestinian students from the Interior that was occupied in 1948 (i.e., Israel), who are studying software engineering at the College of Applied Sciences at Technion University in the occupied city of Haifa, have succeeded in inventing a small device that reveals the quality of the watermelon before the purchase."
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, June 28, 2016]

PA TV teaches kids to hope that "all Palestine will return to us"

JeffwithaJ mentioned The Big O over at Israel Thrives in reference to a Tablet article written by Daniel May, a doctoral candidate in Religion, Ethics and Politics at Princeton University and a former director of J Street U entitled, "The Problem Isn’t Black Lives Matter. It’s the Occupation."

I responded as follows:

"The Occupation with the Big O.

What is the significance of the Big O?

It is the Big Daddy of all Occupations.

It is the means by which some Jews, particularly in diaspora, make themselves feel superior to Arabs and Muslims.

After all, if 6 million Jews in the Middle East can defeat the Palestinian-Arabs, via the Big O, despite the serious objections of 400 million Arabs and 1.5 billion Muslims, what does that say about Jewish strength?

It says that, # 1, Jews kick ass and, # 2, we're humble enough to regret it.

It's a means by which goodhearted and intellectually-inclined Jewish boys and girls get, on the one hand, to feel powerful even while, on the other hand, they burnish moral credentials. There is a kind-of arrogance to the use of the Big O by Jews when discussing those few of us who choose to live in the lands of our heritage.

It raises us and diminishes us, both, at the same time."

The first time that I came across the term was in a children's book by Shel Silverstein called The Missing Piece Meets the Big O... which, although it has been awhile since I read it, I am pretty sure it had nothing to do with sex.

Today, however, when I think of The Big O, sadly, I tend to think of the capitalized word "Occupation."

As any linguist - including Noam Chomsky - will tell you, the terminology within which we discuss any topic, particularly highly charged topics, like political topics, gives away our biases. When people use "The Big O" to discuss the presence of Jewish people in Judea (and Samaria) it indicates something more than disdain for Jews.

It indicates an off-handed contempt for the Arabs, who are wrongly thought of as weak, and a true dislike for the Jews of Israel who are thought of as racist imperialists.

The very first thing that must be acknowledged is that Jews cannot "illegally occupy" the very land where Jews come from. It is as if they want to bring us back to medieval wandering status. The Wandering Jew.

Jews occupy the Land of Israel in the ways that the French occupy France or the ways in which Czechs occupy the Czech Republic.

Arabs, and many Muslims, may despise Jews for traditional religious reasons - embedded in fourteen centuries of hostile Islamic theocratic doctrine and dogma - but that does not mean that we are going to surrender the only small place that we have, as our own, on this planet.

The problem, however, is not just the Arabs.

It is the Jews who swing around The Big O.

Progressive-left, Democratic-Party-Leaning, navel-gazing, guilt-ridden, white-western, upwardly-mobile, American and European Jews, are so riddled with humanitarian racism that they cannot even begin to imagine that non-Jews "of color" have agency. It seldom occurs to them that non-white people should not be reduced to mere victims of the progressive-left imagination. It seldom occurs to them that by insisting that people "of color" are merely victims of Whitey that they robbing these people of their dignity.

In the meantime, many will point the trembling finger of blame toward their fellow Jews on the other side of the planet and accuse them of genocide, ethnic cleaning, and the Big O.

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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El Badil, an Egyptian news site, has been publishing a series called "Zionist Lies" written by Maher Shayyal.

Part one denies that Jews are a people altogether, claims that Ashkenazic Jews are Khazars,

Part two says that the Jews use the myth of being called "the chosen people" to manipulate the world to do their bidding.

Part three denies that Israel is the Promised Land, and says Jews have no particular historic attachment to the land.

Part four, published yesterday, denies the Holocaust, quoting famous Holocaust deniers like Fred Leuchter, David Irving and Ernst Zundel. It claims that "experts" like Leuchter proved that there couldn't have been any gas chambers and that there were only 3 million Jews in Europe before World War II.

Wattan News, a Palestinian TV network, has been republishing these articles.

But don't call them antisemites.

Denial that Jewish people exist and that Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis are framed as if they are merely anti-Zionist positions.

Meanwhile, Arab media are complaining that Arab refugees in Germany are being escorted to the sites of death camps to learn a little history, and are being scolded by their tour guides when they try to compare Israeli actions to those of the Nazis.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

On August 21, 1969, a mentally ill Australian Christian names Denis Michael Rohan set fire to the pulpit of the Al Aqsa Mosque, causing lots of damage.

Ever since then, the Palestinians have tried to blame Israel and Jews for the attack. And this year's anniversary is no exception.

The official PA Wafa news agency has many articles on this anniversary.

One says that Israel has enacted security measures and says that there will be a meeting today of senior figures to condemn "as well as continuous provocative incursions, and the accompanying attempts to perform the rituals and prayers of the Talmud, and the statements and declarations to demolish the mosque and build a "temple" on its ruins."

The Islamic Christian Commission used this anniversary to denounce "Judaization projects by the Israeli government against the al-Aqsa mosque and the holy city as a whole, including the daily incursions of the blessed mosqu , preventing worshipers from entering, continued tunneling beneath the foundations of the mosque, and more outposts and settlement blocs, and building of more Talmudic gardens, which combine to the Israeli goal to set up a Temple....The burning of Al-Aqsa Mosque 47 years ago was the beginning to outline a comprehensive and dangerous Judaization of the mosque..."

The official PA government statement used the anniversary to say "the series of crimes of the occupation against the first Qiblah and the third holiest shrine has not stopped from 1967 to today."

Another article said that "settlers" visited the Temple Mount today to celebrate the anniversary of the attack. The Supreme Muslim Council condemned the peaceful visits by Jews to their holiest site, calling the visits "aggressive intrusions" and saying that Jews have no rights on the area.

The PA foreign ministry also used the anniversary to issue a statement condemning "Benjamin Netanyahu's extremist government" for "continuing the Judaization of occupied East Jerusalem and its environs, through the creation of fake Talmudic Jewish landmarks that have nothing to do with history and religion, but politics through the use of force." It also complained about how there are now over 100 synagogues near the Temple Mount and how Israel is oppressing Muslims by limiting the noise level of calls to prayer in mosques "because it disturbs the settlers."

Perhaps the most telling article at the official Wafa site was written in English, where the author clearly knows that the arsonist in 1969 was not Jewish, but wants to give readers the impression that he was:

Israeli police Sunday intensified what it called, security measures in the Old City of Jerusalem as this day marks the 47th anniversary of Al-Aqsa Mosque arson at the hands ofan Australian man who studied Torah and wanted to build a new temple....Presented in front of the court, Rohan stated that he was acting as “the Lord’s emissary” following the divine instructions and also stated that his reason for trying to destruct Al-Aqsa Mosque was in order to give a chance to rebuild it as the Jewish Temple.

Taken together, it is obvious that the PA is trying yet again to incite violence to "defend Al Aqsa" - the same kind of incitement that led to last year's knifing and car ramming spree against Jews throughout Israel.

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The geography textbook that I recently mentioned was filled with anti-Israel lies was the fourth edition of World Regional Geography.

In response to my initial criticism, the main author released this statement:

OK, let's look at the sixth edition.

It doesn't include some of the more egregious lies (like blaming Jews for modern terrorism,) but it still has plenty.

Here are the major errors - all against Israel - that can be seen in its three main pages on the topic. (Click to enlarge the pages.)

1. The choice of statistics gives a skewed picture. Why not compare Palestinian vital statistics with those of Egypt and Jordan, who controlled those territories before? Why not compare their statistics from 1967 with those in 1993, while they were under full Israeli control? The choice of what to show shows a bias and does not explain the entire story.

2. What is the source for this? Palestinians are far better educated than their Arab counterparts in most countries, and I think they are less impoverished as well.

3. The book pretends that Palestinians controlled their own land before 1948, and it is not true. But this passage is worse, because it pretends that Israel has continuously been taking more and more land away from them over the years, when the only other event of significance happened in 1967 when the land was controlled by Egypt and Jordan.

4. The separation barrier does not encircle the territories. Or any part of them.

5. The purpose of the barrier was to curtail Palestinian access? What is the source for that? It was purely for security. Israel allows tens of thousands of Palestinians to work in Israel every day.

6. The number of Arabs displaced by Zionist land purchases was quite small. A British report in 1931 found only 664 landless Arabs. The Peel Commission noted that most Jewish land purchases were in areas that had never been cultivated before, saying "The Arab claims that the Jews have obtained too large a proportion of good land cannot be maintained. Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamps and uncultivated when it was bought."

7. What is missing is far more important than the errors in the text. How can it not mention the Arab riots in 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1936-9, aiming at killing Jews? How can it not mention the British White Paper that blocked hundreds of thousands of Jews from migrating to Israel from Europe, instead dooming them to being gassed to death? Which, incidentally, really was a breach of the Balfour Declaration!

8. It was not "warfare between the Jews and Palestinians" that began. The Arabs in Palestine attacked Jews immediately after the 1947 partition plan passed in 1947, way before May 1948. The Jewish defenders only went on the offense months later after absorbing many losses that no one else cared to stop.

1. Although the text now accurately says that the Arabs rejected the partition plan, the map caption says the Jews did and started the war. This is completely false.

2. The Oslo Accords specifically said nothing about settlement expansion. I don't know anything about "verbal agreements in the Oslo Accords" - the phrase makes no sense, either they were part of the Accords or not, and they were not. Also, Oslo had nothing to do with the Golan Heights.

3. We could argue whether the settlements are "extralegal" but at least mention that Israel says that they are not illegal, and no Israeli court has ruled them illegal.

4. It is curious that in a page of maps it does not show Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

1. There was no "Palestinian" land to shrink. The area of British Mandate Palestine was British, then Israeli/Egyptian/Jordanian. It was never "Palestinian."

2. Who, exactly, forced them into refugee camps? It certainly wasn't Israel. Why does the text not mention how Arabs have discriminated against Palestinians for six decades?

3. Under Israeli law, they are equal, certainly since 1967. One can claim that there is de facto discrimination against Arabs by the Jewish majority, but saying that the state discriminates against Arab Israelis is not true.

4. To blame the second intifada on the settlements is simply false.

5. The Golan Heights is not "Palestinian territory" under any definition.

6. The term "occupied Palestinian territories" was not coined nor used by the UN until the 1990s. The Palestinian Arabs were not mentioned once in UNSC 242.

7. See above. UN 242 had nothing to do with any Palestinian state, and it was not even envisioned when it was written - it was for peace between Israel and the Arab states, especially Egypt and Jordan. Interestingly, the text here does not mention that Israel and Jordan are at peace, and only implies Israel's peace agreement with Egypt.

8. Not a word about Hamas coup, and their rockets and terror, that caused the closure of Gaza. Instead, the authors say that Israel "negated" its withdrawal. This is an outrageous assertion.

9. Thousands of Palestinians were not displaced by settlements. Essentially all settlements outside Hebron and Jerusalem were built in areas where no one ever lived before, and the numbers of Arabs displaced in those two cities is quite small, not to mention that the purchase of the houses was done legally.

10. This number, claiming 30,000 farmers separated from their land by the security barrier, is absolute fiction. I would be surprised if the number of landowners affected by the fence is 1% of that number.

There is more. A couple of pages later the authors claim that the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s was a spillover from the Arab-Israeli conflict, which is false. And then the authors claim that regional stability would naturally follow a peace agreement between Israel and Palestinians (plus an end to Syria's civil war.)

Plus, students who purchase the book have access to videos mentioned in the text, and who knows what errors are in those.

But these three pages show quite clearly that at least this college textbook is riddled with errors - nearly two dozen in only three pages - and all the errors seem to be in one direction, against Israel.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

08/20 Links: Real Tikkun Olam; Elie Wiesel: A Life in Pictures

From Ian:

Ben-Dror Yemini: Looking a gift horse in the mouth

After billionaire George Soros was discovered to be behind a plot to influence Israeli NGOs, practical action must be taken to prevent such a threat in the future.
Anyone who follows NGO Monitor’s reports on Soros knows that he isn’t involved in projects that promote peace, solidarity and conciliation among different peoples. That’s not his what he’s about. Rather, what Soros has focused on was the funding of different bodies, most of them Palestinian, which had all taken part in a campaign that delegitimized and demonized Israel. This is already known to whoever wishes to look into Soros' track record, as Soros himself has admitted that his actions promote anti-Semitism. This evil man, who has been indicted in France for insider trading, was reportedly behind financial speculation that threatened to topple entire nations. Noted philosopher Slavoj Žižek said of him that “Soros’ daily routine is a lie embodied: half of his working time is devoted to financial speculation, the other half to ‘humanitarian’ activities (the inside quotes are my own).” Žižek is admittedy a well-known anti-Zionist himself, but even anti-Zionists can get it right some of the time.
For a moment, a sneaking suspicion makes you wonder whether the relative quiet with which Solos’ leaked documents were received here was the work of some of the organizations that he had backed, such as the New Israel Fund and breaking the Silence. This only further stresses the ridiculousness of the “NGO Law” passed by the Right, which demands that all NOGs be transparent only in regard to the backing they receive from organizations outside of Israel, when private organizations and citizens intent on ushering in a new world order can be far more dangerous.
The take-home message from the Soros affair is that a practical response must be carried out. There has to be some legislation the deals more seriously with NGO donations. When private or governmental bodies, be they Soros or Sweden or an Irish church fund, begin assisting organizations that deny Israel’s very existence, or that support racism, they should not be allowed to donate to politically-affiliated NGOs in Israel. It is simply unacceptable that a body that denies Israel’s right to exist should be allowed to interfere in its inner workings through a generous donation to an NGO that supports, for instance, the Palestinian right of return. A country cannot stay indifferent to a campaign that works toward its undoing. Israel's Basic Law: the Knesset, which limits the extent of any body denying Israel’s right to exist to act as an elected representative, must also be implemented in regard to NGO funding.

Real Tikkun Olam

From the Economist.
Tiny Israel gives aid to 76 countries.

Just so you know.....

08/19 Link Pt2: Five Things You Need to Know About World Vision

From Ian:

Five Things You Need to Know About World Vision

The allegations against World Vision's man in the Gaza Strip are lethal to the organization's credibility. World Vision collects money through a child-sponsorship program in which donors give money to assist and benefit individual children and here is Halabi allegedly confessing to turning these donations into some sort of terrorist-sponsorship program.
What makes the accusation so bothersome is that World Vision has a well-documented tendency to portray Israel as singularly responsible for the suffering of children in the Gaza Strip (and for the Arab-Israeli conflict) while giving Hamas a pass.
Here are a five things that people need to know about World Vision.
1. World Vision is a conglomeration of local affiliates that operate in countries throughout the world. Its umbrella organization, World Vision International (WVI), is not just a humanitarian agency, but a church.
2. World Vision's affiliates have a troubling tendency to use stories of Israeli villainy as part of its fundraising narrative. It has also supported anti-Israel propaganda in a number of different venues.
3. World Vision's reticence is not restricted to Hamas. Staffers in the Middle East have historically spoken in much harsher terms about Israel than they have about bad actors in the region, such as Bashar Al Assad or ISIS.
4. If the allegations against Halabi are proven in court, World Vision will undoubtedly hear from its U.S. donors in a big way.
5. Experts who pay attention to the humanitarian aid industry have repeatedly documented how humanitarian organizations working in war zones have been corrupted by the circumstances in which they operate. Diversion of goods provided by humanitarian organizations is inevitable in places like the Gaza Strip. It is part of the business. That being said, the allegations against Halabi are beyond the pale, way beyond the pale.

UEFA probing Celtic for Palestinian flags at Hapoel match

The European soccer’s ruling body UEFA is to hold an investigation into Scotland’s Celtic soccer club, after its fans waved hundreds of Palestinian flags during a Champions League game in Glasgow against Israeli team Hapoel Beersheba on Wednesday.
UEFA’s regulations ban “any message that is not fit for a sports event, particularly messages that are of a political, ideological, religious, offensive or provocative nature,” the BBC said Friday.
According to the BBC, Celtic has been penalized eight times in five seasons for poor behavior by its fans.
Scotland’s Daily Record news website said UEFA will hear the case on September 22, and Celtic could be forced to close one of its stands if the governing body decides to take a hard stance over the incident.

NZ Advertising Watchdog Reaffirms Defence of Propaganda Lies

The New Zealand Advertising Standards Authority appeals board has reaffirmed its original ruling that maps are just opinion. The historic and geographic facts are of no relevance to the industry watchdog. It seems content to undermine its own Code of Ethics and allow anyone to publish an advert, no matter how misleading or inaccurate, as long as they claim their image is the expression of a political perspective.
Last December, the “map of lies” billboard in Auckland was taken down after one day. The Advertising Standards Authority said “this is the best outcome we could hope for”, presumably because they, and the advertising company which removed the billboard, understood how misleading the maps were.
Since then, the billboard reappeared in the Auckland CBD. Unlike Ad-Vantage, Go Media refused to remove the billboard, saying they had been threatened with legal action from the Palestinian Human Rights Campaign (PHRC). The ASA has now ruled that the maps are ‘robust opinion’ and allowable because:
"when it comes to strong political perspectives, there are no absolute truth or lies, just political standpoints”
NZ Advertising Standards Authority decision 11/085
This statement will no doubt come as a shock to any serious cartographer.

Can you believe the Palestinians once made whiskey?

In May, JTA reported that "The Golan Heights Distillery is the first whiskey to be bottled and sold in Israel. "

Maybe - but there was a whiskey once made in Palestine:

Bozwin, which roughly translates to "Beauty of Zion" was a brand created in the late 1920s by Mendel Chaikin, a Russian immigrant who founded M. Chaikin & Company, a London-based wine and spirit merchant. The company purchased kosher wine, spirits, and liquers in bulk from what is now modern day Israel, and shipped them back to London for bottling and sale to a growing Jewish community in the East End of London.

Here's the label:

See how Israel is stealing the history of the proud Palestinians who lived there before 1948?

There is a scandal here, though, and it has nothing to do with the fact that Palestinian Jews happily made whiskey before Israel was reborn.

The scandal is that the Hebrew on the labels say that the product is kosher for Passover.

How can a whiskey be kosher for Passover?

This snippet from an ad in the Jewish Monthly of 1951 shows that Bozwin was still being made after 1948, and it still claimed that it was used on Passover.

I know that theoretically it can be made from corn, but even that would not be acceptable to British Jews for Passover in the 1920s and 1930s.

Now, there's a story that needs to be researched.

(h/t Rob)

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08/19 Link Pt1: The price of powerlessness; The Temple Mount and UNESCO

From Ian:

Charles Krauthammer: The price of powerlessness

This week Russian bombers flew out of Iranian air bases to attack rebel positions in Syria. The State Department pretended not to be surprised. It should be. It should be alarmed. Iran’s intensely nationalistic revolutionary regime had never permitted foreign forces to operate from its soil. Until now.
The reordering of the Middle East is proceeding apace. Where for 40 years the U.S.-Egypt alliance anchored the region, a Russia-Iran condominium is now dictating events. That’s what you get after eight years of U.S. retrenchment and withdrawal. That’s what results from the nuclear deal with Iran, the evacuation of Iraq and utter U.S. immobility on Syria. Consider:
● Iran
The nuclear deal was supposed to begin a rapprochement between Washington and Tehran. Instead, it has solidified a strategic-military alliance between Moscow and Tehran. With the lifting of sanctions and the normalizing of Iran’s international relations, Russia rushed in with major deals, including the shipment of S-300 ground-to-air missiles. Russian use of Iranian bases now marks a new level of cooperation and joint power projection.
● Iraq
These bombing runs cross Iraqi airspace. Before President Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq, that could not have happened. The resulting vacuum has not only created a corridor for Russian bombing, it has gradually allowed a hard-won post-Saddam Iraq to slip into Iran’s orbit. According to a Baghdad-based U.S. military spokesman, there are 100,000 Shiite militia fighters operating inside Iraq, 80 percent of them Iranian-backed.
● Syria
When Russia dramatically intervened last year, establishing air bases and launching a savage bombing campaign, Obama did nothing. Indeed, he smugly predicted that Vladimir Putin had entered a quagmire. Some quagmire. Bashar al-Assad’s regime is not only saved. It encircled Aleppo and has seized the upper hand in the civil war. Meanwhile, our hapless secretary of state is running around trying to sue for peace, offering to share intelligence and legitimize Russian intervention if only Putin will promise to conquer gently.

The Temple Mount and UNESCO

Is this really what it boils down to? The Islamic State rules the international community? Including UNESCO?
On April 15 this year, the Executive Board of UNESCO's Programme and External Relations Commission convened for its 199th session. The earlier Temple Mount resolution was moved by Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and Sudan -- all members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. That vote then passed to the 21 members of the World Heritage Committee during its 40th session in Istanbul, which had been scheduled to run from July 10 to July 20.
By mere chance, July's military coup attempt in Turkey disrupted the event, and the vote has now been scheduled for an autumn meeting. That may be based on a draft resolution created by the European Union, which is, in fact, just another denial of the historical Jewish connection to the Temple Mount. But, considering the one-sidedness of this resolution, just where is UNESCO's above-stated commitment to bring about "a dialogue between all stakeholders"?
Turning the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, Rachel's Tomb, the Cave of the Patriarchs, and other sites into exclusively Muslim holy places is directly linked to the growth of Islamisation in the modern era. By destroying churches, shrines, tombs, whole sites of antiquity deemed idolatrous, and even mosques deemed heretical, the Islamic State seeks to wipe out all traces of what is termed the era of Jahiliyya, the "Age of Ignorance" that held the world in its grip before the advent of Islam.
The world is outraged when it sees the stones of Palmyra tumble, or other great monuments of human civilization turn to dust. But that same world is silent when the Palestinian Arabs and their supporters Islamise everything by calling into question the very presence of the Jewish people in the Holy Land.

PA: There's no proof of Jewish existence in Jerusalem

Adnan al-Husayni, the Minister of Jerusalem Affairs in the Palestinian Authority (PA) government, on Thursday accused Jewish organizations of preparing plans to demolish the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and to establish an "imaginary" Holy Temple in its place.
Speaking with the Hamas-affiliated Palestine newspaper, Husayni claimed that Israel is aware that the demolition of the Al-Aqsa Mosque will result in a firestorm that would spread to all parts of the country.
But despite the fact that Israel is aware of this, he continued, Israel’s policy is meant to deliberately expel the “original” inhabitants of Jerusalem from their homes, including by demolishing their houses and imposing taxes on them.
Husayni called on UNESCO, the UN’s cultural organization, to act immediately against the excavations carried out by Israel in the Old City of Jerusalem.
Israel, he claimed, is digging tunnels in the area in an attempt to find historical evidence of Jewish existence in the region, "but they failed to do so despite all their attempts to falsify the history and the Palestinian historical sites."
PA officials often make unfounded and ridiculous claims with regards to Israel’s intentions on the Temple Mount. The false claim that Israel plans to demolish the Al-Aqsa Mosque and replace it with a Jewish temple is often repeated by these officials.

Israel gets blamed for any force it uses in searching for terrorists, but here's something that you won't hear about often:

Two members of the Palestinian security forces were killed on Thursday, and two more were injured during clashes with wanted Palestinians in Nablus city in the northern occupied West Bank, while Palestinian security forces killed two Palestinians on Friday during overnight raids in the Old City of Nablus.

Four members of the Palestinian security forces were reported as injured, with two in critical condition after one was shot in the head, and the other in the chest. The Palestinian shot in the chest was announced dead shortly after, while the other was reported dead later in the evening.

A Palestinian security official told Ma'an early Friday that two of the armed men were killed in the Old City of Nablus overnight during armed clashes as security forces attempted to arrest them. The two were initially reported as injured, and were taken to a hospital in Nablus city where they were pronounced dead.

The official added that three M16 guns were found with the armed assailants who were killed.

A Palestinian security official told Ma’an that Palestinian security forces have launched a concerted campaign to detain the Palestinians responsible for the shooting.

The spokesperson for the Palestinian security forces Adnan Dmeiri confirmed Thursday that security forces were searching communities and trying to find and capture those responsible for killing the officers, adding that the security forces would continue to carry out arrests and raids on Palestinians engaged in illegal activities.

According to Dmeiri, five security officers have been killed in the past month.

Apparently, Palestinians have more than just rocks.

This is the type of story that the Western media shies away from. The main reason is because Israel isn't involved, but also because it highlights the fact that the IDF is quite justified in its rules of engagement when trying to arrest terrorists. Even Palestinian security has the same issues in their daily work, and five of them were killed in the past month!

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Jibril Rajoub, head of the head of the Supreme Council for Sport and Youth Affairs as well as the president of the Palestinian Football Association and the Palestinian Olympic Committee, has seized on another incident as an excuse to use sports to castigate Israel.

Earlier this week, a 17-year old youth named Mohammed Abu Hashhash was killed while he was throwing stones at Israeli forces during a raid in a camp near Hebron.

One of the photos that popped up of Hashhash showed him with a sports trophy.

Naturally, Rajoub seized on that to say that he wants an 'international investigation" into the incident and claims that Hashhash was targeted because of his sports activities.

"The crime of the killing of player Abu Hashhash is added to a series of racist crimes that the Israeli occupation army commits continuously to destroy the Palestinian sports, in violation of the laws and charters of the world of sports," Rajoub declared, adding "The Israeli army liquidation of the player on his way back to his home is a crime that international sports institutions cannot tolerate and overlook. They must be move quickly in order to protect the sports in Palestine from the oppression of the Israeli army."

A glance at Hashhash's Facebook page does not show a single photo of him playing sports, or indeed any interest in sports whatsoever - unlike a large number of Palestinian youths on Facebook, he was not following any sports teams.

But he did use this as his profile photo a few months ago:

Hashhash was definitely a fan, but the object of his affections had nothing to do with sports.

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Macmillan geography textbook filled with anti-Israel lies: "Jews were first modern terrorists," Palestinian terror justified (updated)

Here are the first paragraphs of a section on terrorism written in the textbook World Regional Geography (with Subregions), 4th edition by Lydia Mihelic Pulsipher, Alex Pulsipher, and Conrad M. Goodwin, published by Macmillan:

This section seems to be gone from the 6th edition.

Seriously? The first modern terrorist attack in the Middle East was done by Jews? Whether the King David bombing - targeting a military headquarters - was terror is debatable, but it was by no means the first terror attack in the region. What was the 1929 massacres of Jewish civilians if not terrorism? What about the many terror attacks perpetrated by the Black Hand, the terror group founded by Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam in the late 1920s to kill Jews and the British in Palestine? (Outside the region, there were many terror groups in the 19th century, including in the Ottoman Empire and the US.)

But this passage is much worse than that. It justifies Palestinian terrorism and Arab aggression (saying that Israel provoked each war - yes, I guess that if breathing is provocation, this may be true.)

It says that Israel was created on "Palestinian lands," a falsehood that is seen throughout the textbook as the headline on this page shows:

They were "Palestinian" lands? What contemporaneous source from before 1948 ever referred them to them that way? (The book makes the same claim in several other places, like page 49, and most egregiously on page 38 where the claim is that the land "belonged to Palestinians," which is false in every sense.) (These claims don't seem to be in the 6th edition. Instead, the newer edition refers to the territories Israel gained in 1967 as "Palestinian lands" rather than lands controlled by Jordan and Egypt.)

The outrageous lies don't end there. The caption beneath the maps on page above says that it was the "Jewish settlers" who didn't agree to the 1947 UN partition plan, and they started a war themselves - exactly 180 degrees from the truth. (The 6th edition has the identical caption under the map, although the text is more accurate.)

Another section, filled with the usual anti-Israel propaganda, claims that "thousands of Palestinians have been displaced" by Jewish settlements. This is another absolute lie, the vast majority of Jewish communities did not displace a single person, and in the rare cases that they did, it was because the land belongs to Jews either to begin with or via purchase.

There is plenty of other bias to be seen in that page, such as the bizarre opinion that Israel "negated" its withdrawal from Gaza by imposing a blockade - without mentioning Hamas or rockets.

This section is verbatim in the 6th edition as well.

The separation barrier's purpose to stop terror attacks isn't mentioned, the authors make it appear that the barrier was built to grab land (without mentioning the any settlements that are on the east side of the fence.)

Also, as far as I can tell, the figure of 30,000 farmers separated from their land is fiction. The best number I can glean is that there are a total of about 120,000 Palestinians who work in agriculture in both the West Bank and Gaza, the idea that such a high percentage happen to farm on lands that happen to be divided by a fence is simply incredible. I would love to know the source for this.

What is clear is that the authors have an anti-Israel bias in this textbook, and that many of the facts that they are teaching students are simply lies.

The main author is roundly criticized by her students for her intolerance for other opinions and her liberal/socialist, anti-American stance.

The book was published by WH Freeman which is owned by Macmillan. You can contact Macmillan Education at this webpage.

(h/t @nevillechmbrln)

UPDATE: I got a copy of the 6th edition, which removed some of the examples here but kept others, annotated in the post.

UPDATE 2: See my detailed discussion of the 6th edition.

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