Details, details, details: Telegraph misleads on Israeli settlement claim
The Telegraph’s claim is extremely misleading.
As reports in Reuters, International Business Times and BBC made clear, Israel did not approve the construction of 463 new homes.
The number 463 includes the following:
30 new houses in Beit AryeSo, the number 463 includes only 50 new homes, 234 units in one new nursing home building and the legalization of 179 already existing homes.
20 new homes in Givat Zeev
1 new 234-unit nursing home in Elkana
179 building permits which were issued retroactively, legalizing under Israeli law already existing housing units that were erected in the settlement of Ofarim
Oh, those pesky details.
Melanie Phillips: Accomplices in hate
People in the West are beginning to wake up to the fact that they are inadvertently helping fund Islamic terrorism.
There was widespread shock last month when Israel arrested the director of the Gaza branch of the giant aid agency World Vision.
He was accused of using humanitarian donations by Western governments such as Britain and the US to fund Hamas terrorism.
In Britain, newspaper articles have begun to ask why taxpayers are helping fund Palestinian terrorism and incitement through EU payments to the Palestinian Authority, which pays terrorists’ families and brainwashes Arab children to hate and murder Jews and Israelis.
This growing awareness, however, only scratches the surface of the free world’s complicity with evil. Western governments are effectively subsidizing epidemic, global Jew-hatred through that holy of progressive holies, the UN.
A report published this week by the UN watchdog Human Rights Voices and the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust exposes the extent to which the UN sponsors Jew-hatred and incitement to violence through accredited nongovernmental organizations.
Caroline Glick: Obama’s greatest achievement
For Israel, the question of what to do about Iran now is far more urgent than it is for Americans.
Today more and more commentators are voicing concern over the prospect that Obama will support an anti-Israel resolution at the UN Security Council as a parting shot at Israel.
But any such resolution will be small potatoes in comparison to the strategic devastation his nuclear deal, which is his main foreign policy legacy, has caused.
The rapidity of Iran’s advance makes clear that there is no justification for waiting to act until Obama has left office. If it doesn’t act soon, Israel is on the fast track to waking up one morning and discovering it has no means of thwarting the threat.
Indeed, with each passing month, its options for action become more and more limited.
After Israel’s security leadership undermined Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to attack Iran’s nuclear installations in 2010 and 2012, Netanyahu settled on a strategy of blocking Obama’s moves to appease Tehran.
That strategy of course failed last summer. Since then, Netanyahu has worked to build an anti-Iranian alliance with the Sunni Arab states. His efforts in this area have clearly met with some measure of success, as witnessed by public statements from prominent Saudis and others.
Whatever that success may be, and whatever the status of that burgeoning alliance of spurned US allies, the fact is that it’s time Israel and its new allies do something more than send signals. Time is a-wasting.
Last spring Brig.-Gen. Hossein Salami, the deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, said, “Today the grounds for the annihilation and collapse of the Zionist regime are more present than ever before.”
Thanks to Obama, he may be right.
It is time for Israel to make him eat his words.