Thursday, February 02, 2017

From Ian:

UN Watch: 130-page report: UNRWA teachers incite terrorism & antisemitism
Before a joint subcommittee hearing today of the U.S. Congress concerning the U.N., Israel, and the Palestinians, the director of the independent monitoring group UN Watch will testify and present a new report showing 40 alarming new cases of UNRWA school teachers in Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria whose Facebook pages incite to Jihadist terrorism and antisemitism, including by posting Holocaust-denying videos and pictures celebrating Hitler.
UN Watch sent letters this morning to U.N. chief António Guterres, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and U.S. envoy to the U.N. Nikki Haley, urging them to take action and demand U.N. and UNRWA condemnation of the incitement, and the immediate termination of the implicated employees.
“We need to see zero tolerance in the U.N. for terrorism and antisemitism,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based UN Watch.
Click here for the PDF of the report.

The Cautionary Tale of Samantha Power
T here are two situations in the world that should shame Power, the anti-genocide activist. The first, and less obvious one, is Burma. The Obama administration cites this country as one of its foreign-policy successes, because the ruling junta took steps toward liberalization in return for lifting some sanctions against it. But then everybody seems to have forgotten about it, and in doing so forgot about the Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority currently being subjected to an unmistakable genocide—among the clearest examples ever to emerge in real time. This is genocide on Power’s watch, and we don’t hear a peep about it.
The other, of course, is Syria. Whether or not the Assad regime has fully crossed over the line to having committed genocide, America’s inaction already flunks Power’s test. As longtime Levant correspondent Michael Totten has written, we’ve seen the warnings. The first was Assad’s use of chemical weapons, a chilling callback to Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds. Another was the credible reporting of Shiite Iranian militias’ ethnically cleansing Sunni Arabs in core cities, atrocities that were then repeated in other strategic areas.
If Power would station troops in Israel because she worries the Palestinians could plausibly be victims of genocide in the near future, what could she possibly say about Syria? Well, she’d likely say, “We tried.” President Obama declared that Assad’s use of chemical weapons would be a “red line” that, once crossed, would earn American military intervention. When it became public that Assad had deployed chemical weapons, Obama put the word out: As the Germans used to say during World War II, the Amis are coming.
Daniel Pearl was murdered 15 years ago today
“My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish. I am Jewish.”
In my memory, there are certain place markers in the history of terrorism that led to where we are today.
The 1972 Munich Massacre of Israeli athletes (1972); the bombing of the Beirut Marine Barracks (1983), the World Trade Center attacks (1993 and 2001); the Jerusalem Sbarro Pizza bombing (2001) and the videotaped beheading of Daniel Pearl, February 1, 2002.
I don’t diminish the significance and horror of other attacks, it’s just that these are memory reference points for me.
In searching our archives, I can’t find a post we devoted to providing what happened to Daniel Pearl, though we have mentioned him. Shame on us.
This article from The Telegraph in May 2004 relates some of the basic details, Daniel Pearl ‘refused to be sedated before his throat was cut’


 Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

Tuesday afternoon we started to hear that the IDF was preparing to remove the 40 families that live in the community of Amona, in the Binyamin region of Judea. Just now, a few moments ago, I heard on the radio that the evacuation (some prefer “expulsion”) is beginning. It doesn’t look like it will go smoothly.

To explain the situation in the fewest possible words, the community was built 20 years ago. A portion of it, about one half acre out of a total of 125 acres, is owned by Palestinian Arabs who were given title to the land by the King of Jordan, during the 19-year Jordanian occupation. About 15 more acres are registered in the names of Arabs who apparently do not exist.

The Supreme Court of Israel decided that the only acceptable remedy was to bulldoze the entire community. The Court did not accept the suggestion that the Arab “owners,” who had never utilized the land, could be paid compensation for it. The government developed a compromise that would have provided an alternative location nearby for some of the families, which the community agreed to. But this was stymied when additional Palestinians petitioned the court claiming to own that land. The residents were only told that the deal was off a few days ago.

The Palestinians have been assisted in their legal proceedings by the Israeli organization “Yesh Din.” Yesh Din received more than $4.6 million from foreign government bodies between 2012 and 2016. Foreign sources accounted for 93.5% of their total donations.  Yesh Din specializes in “lawfare” against Israel and the IDF.

This raises, yet again, a very fundamental question for the State of Israel. In a sentence, what are we?

Are we the nation-state of the Jewish people in its historical homeland, which derives its right to the land from both the biblical promise made to us by Hashem and the modern promise made by the international community in the Palestine Mandate, a right that we defended more than once by force of arms? Are we a Zionist state, in other words?

Or are we something else – a multinational state which exists at the pleasure of today’s post-nationalist, anti-Jewish international establishment? 

It would seem that the answer should be obvious, and it is to the great majority of Israeli Jews. But the state has not acted as though it believes in its own Zionist principles.

When the Jordanian occupation and its illegal annexation of land set aside for the Jewish people was ended in 1967, Israel did not annex Judea and Samaria, because its leadership was forced by its “friends” in Europe and the US to accept the idea of “land for peace.” Israel would give Judea and Samaria “back” to Jordan, for example, and Jordan would give us a peace treaty. 

The injustice inherent in this is obvious. Who gave Jordan the right to take that land in violation of international law and to ethnically cleanse it of Jews? How can we be asked to give something “back” that was ours in the first place? But this was our policy until King Hussein decided in 1988 that he didn’t want the hassle of trying to control the PLO, and transferred his “ownership” of the land to the PLO. And shortly thereafter, the Israeli government tried to continue the “land for peace” process with the PLO via the Oslo accords.

Israel never annexed the land it regained in 1967 (except for Jerusalem) and it even retained Jordanian law in Judea and Samaria. Because Israeli governments believed that some or all of the territory would ultimately be returned to Arab control, it treated it as occupied territory, despite the fact that, by the most reasonable interpretation of international law, for the first time since 1948 it was not under occupation.

24 years later and several wars and intifadas later, Israelis have finally come to realize that an exchange of land for peace won’t bring peace. Anyone with half a brain who looks at recent history (especially the results of the withdrawal from Gaza) and listens to what the Palestinians themselves say and do, understands that.

It’s often said that “surveys show that a majority of Israelis favor a 2-state solution.” That is correct, if the survey question is something like “Do you favor giving up the territories in return for peace and security?” The unfairness of this question is manifest if we rewrite it as follows: “If giving up the territories would bring peace and security, would you favor it?” 

Since giving up the territories would put a terrorist entity next door to Tel Aviv, and since the Arabs won’t even pretend to agree that they would give up their claims on Israel in return for the territories, and since the PLO is unstable and easily overthrown, the “if” clause of the conditional statement is certainly false. And virtually every Israeli knows this.

A religious Zionist also understands the importance to his or her spiritual life of the places mentioned in the tanach, like Hevron and many others. But even a secular Zionist appreciates the first words of the Declaration of Independence: 

ERETZ-ISRAEL was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

Virtually every Israeli knows this as well – except possibly much of our leadership and our legal establishment.

If the lessons of history, international law, and Zionist ideology (both religious and secular) were translated into action, the courts would find a way to legalize Amona and other communities that would also be fair to the Arabs. Ultimately, we would annex all of Eretz Israel.

Unfortunately, the government has yet to get clear of the “land for peace” mentality; and the legal establishment seems dedicated to beating us into the mold of the multinational, secular democratic state that former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak so much admired.

This needs to change. Fear of the international community is not a reason to deny our own birthright. Politicized institutions like the UN and the International Criminal Court have no moral authority, and no practical way to punish Israel. And there is absolutely no reason we must allow foreign agents like Yesh Din to continue to subvert our country.

In fact, now, while there is an American government that for the first time may itself be able to shake off the ideas of land for peace and the 2-state solution, is the perfect time for Israel to finally become the truly Zionist state that Jabotinsky, Begin and Ben-Gurion dreamed of.





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From Ian:


Hamas Apologist Beinart: Orthodox Jews Should Be Ashamed Of Jared Kushner
This is rather rich coming from the same fellow who routinely blames Israeli settlements for Palestinian Arab terrorism against Jews, who has shilled on behalf of Barack Obama’s Iran deal. Jewish history teaches many valuable lessons.
Beinart concludes:
Kushner’s moral failure challenges the Modern Orthodox community — a community for which I have enormous admiration — to ask why it is often more stringent about ritual lapses than it is about ethical ones. Why do many Modern Orthodox Jews shudder at the thought of eating nonkosher cheese, yet proudly support Trump?
Halakha is pretty clear on non-kosher cheese. But it isn't quite as clear on Trump. Perhaps many orthodox Jews support Trump because there’s nothing in halacha that says that voting for a more secure border is a violation of duty. Perhaps Beinart’s moral standards, which tut-tut Hamas while ripping Trump’s non-Muslim ban, aren’t the Torah’s. Perhaps the Torah's standard frowns more on hugging the Obama administration's pro-Iran dealmaking and anti-Israel UN policy than a policy suggesting better vetting for people from terror-rich countries.
If this piece had been written by an alt-right anti-Semite, it would have quickly been condemned by Beinart. But Beinart’s writing it from the left, so he’s free to insult orthodox Jews as religious bigots.

PMW: UN Sec-Gen "sinned" when he acknowledged Jewish Temple
On Jan. 29, 2017, new UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stated that it is "clear" that "the Temple of Jerusalem that was destroyed by the Romans was a Jewish temple." In his interview on Israeli radio, Guterres also emphasized that "Jerusalem is today a holy city for three religions. These are the facts that nobody can deny." [Voice of Israel radio, Jan. 29, 2017]
These comments have led to sharp criticism and condemnations in the Palestinian Authority because they contradict the PA narrative, which denies any Jewish historical ties to Jerusalem and rejects the existence of the Jewish Temple, always referring to it as "the alleged Temple."
An op-ed in the PA daily accused Guterres of having "sinned against peace" by attesting to the Jewish tie to Jerusalem:
"Antonio Guterres clearly and explicitly sinned against peace and the Palestinian-Israeli political agreement when he claimed... that he 'believes in the connection between Jerusalem and the Jews.'"
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Jan. 30, 2017]
The writer reiterated the Palestinian stance that Jerusalem belongs only to Muslims (and Christians), and that Israel does not have a right to exist in any borders, lecturing Guterres that "Palestine" is "from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea":

  • Thursday, February 02, 2017
  • Elder of Ziyon
Elite Chocolit chocolate milk mix is on sale at Gaza's Metro Market.


Here's the version of this favorite in Gaza that you can get yourself in the US:



Gaza stores that sell Israeli products do not get threatened or boycotted or picketed.

That only happens in Europe and the US.





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  • Thursday, February 02, 2017
  • Elder of Ziyon
Bloomberg has a fascinating article on Saudi-Israeli business ties which are under the table but thriving.

[Shmuel Bar, head of an Israeli software intelligence company] says he meets freely these days with Saudis and other Gulf Arabs at overseas conferences and private events. Trade and collaboration in technology and intelligence are flourishing between Israel and a host of Arab states, even if the people and companies involved rarely talk about it publicly. When a London think tank recently disinvited Bar from speaking on a panel, explaining that a senior Saudi official was also coming and it wasn’t possible to have them appear together, Bar told the organizers that he and the Saudi gentleman had in fact been planning to have lunch together at a Moroccan restaurant nearby before walking over to the event together. “They were out-Saudi-ing the Saudis,” he says.

Peace hasn’t come to the Middle East. This isn’t beating swords into plowshares but a logical coalescence of interests based on shared fears: of an Iranian bomb, jihadi terror, popular insurgency, and an American retreat from the region. IntuView has Israeli export licenses and the full support of its government to help any country facing threats from Iran and militant Islamic groups. “If it’s a country which is not hostile to Israel that we can help, we’ll do it,” Bar says. Only Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Iraq are off-limits.

The Saudis and other oil-rich Arab states are only too happy to pay for the help. “The Arab boycott?” Bar says. “It doesn’t exist.”

The Arab embargo of Israel, nominally in force since the Jewish state’s founding in 1948, necessitates that all business between Israel and most Arab states remain strictly off the books, cloaked by intermediaries in other countries. But the volume and range of Israeli activity in at least six Gulf countries is getting hard to hide. One Israeli entrepreneur set up companies in Europe and the U.S. that installed more than $6 billion in security infrastructure for the United Arab Emirates, using Israeli engineers. The same companies then pitched Saudi Arabia to manage overcrowding in Mecca. Other Israeli businesses are working in the Gulf, through front companies, on desalination, infrastructure protection, cybersecurity, and intelligence gathering.

But what about the Palestinian issue? While on the record it is still the prerequisite for normal ties, Gulf countries are only paying it lip service. This section of the article is most telling:
Salman al-Ansari, a former banker and media executive who runs a new Saudi advocacy group in Washington, sent an even stronger signal in October. In an article for the Hill, he wrote that Saudi Arabia and Israel should form a “collaborative alliance,” rooted in open business ties, to assert their rightful place as the “twin pillars of regional stability.” Arab critics skewered al-Ansari for not mentioning the Palestinians in the article. He says the omission was intentional, reflecting his wish to change the old narrative of conditioning everything on Palestinian statehood.
The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs published an article about how much Arab governments care about the US embassy move to Jerusalem. This part was most interesting:
We recently received from Palestinian sources, a report about what happened in a meeting between Abbas and King Salman at their December 21, 2016, meeting. According to this report, while the two were sitting in the king’s palace in Riyadh, a telephone call from President Sisi of Egypt was received to update the king that he had decided, while Mahmoud Abbas was in the king’s presence, to withdraw the Egyptian Security Council resolution against Israel. [It was submitted later by other Security Council members.] The King told Sisi, “Go ahead.” Abu Mazen said, “At least resist Trump’s decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem,” but Sisi said, according to the sources, “I am with Trump,” while the King of Saudi Arabia kept silent.

In fact, Saudi Arabia has reason to want Israel to continue to control Jerusalem:
Augmenting the importance of Jerusalem may play on the nerves of Saudi Arabia as well, especially since the Saudis are anxious to preserve the supreme holy status of Mecca on the background of the Shiite-Sunnite split and the targeting of Mecca by Shiite missiles from the Yemen.

Actually, Jerusalem is very important to the Palestinian Authority and the Muslim Brotherhood and is less important to other Arab countries and Saudi Arabia in particular, since the status of Mecca is now challenged by the Shia. The Saudis cannot tolerate a rivalry posed by Jerusalem.
Only a couple of weeks ago, Tzipi Livni openly met with Saudi Prince Turki al Faisal in Davos at the World Economic Conference:




Palestinian supporters are really upset. Electronic Intifada gave a great, mournful summary:
BDS Gulf, an activist group that supports the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign, said the meeting in Davos was part of “repeated and escalating violations” of the boycott of Israel.“What compounds our concern and dismay is that this violation is not the first of its kind by Turki al-Faisal and others, but is part of a series of flirtations between the prince and Zionist officials,” BDS Gulf added.Turki al-Faisal has been leading a rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia rooted in their common hostility toward Iran. This warming embrace included a high-level delegation to Israel led last summer by former Saudi general Anwar Eskhi.Last February, al-Faisal publicly shook hands with Israel’s then-defense minister Moshe Yaalon at a conference in Germany.In May, al-Faisal held a public discussion with former Israeli national security advisor Yaakov Amidror at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank affiliated with the Israel lobby group AIPAC.Previously, al-Faisal has appeared publicly with Amos Yadlin, the former head of Israeli military intelligence.recent report by one of Israel’s most influential think tanks – headed by Yadlin – noted the growing ties with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf regimes as one of the positive regional trends for Israel.
While they whine, they know the truth: Israel has a lot to offer Saudi Arabia and the other Arab countries, and "Palestine" has nothing at all positive to offer. Instead, it would be another avenue for the Muslim Brotherhood, via Hamas, to get a toehold in the region.

It seems certain that behind the scenes, Gulf countries are telling Abbas that if he doesn't accept a peace plan then he will risk losing Arab support altogether.

(h/t Zvi)



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  • Thursday, February 02, 2017
  • Elder of Ziyon


Reuters reports:
Israel said on Wednesday it would establish a new settlement in the occupied West Bank, the first since the late 1990s, to rehouse settlers evicted on the same day from an outpost built on private Palestinian land.

A statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said he was making good on a commitment to the settlers of Amona and had ordered the formation of a committee to locate a site where they could rebuild their homes.

"As promised a month and a half ago to the settlers, (Netanyahu) has set up a committee that will promote the establishment of a new settlement... It will begin work immediately to locate a spot and to establish the settlement," a statement from the Prime Minister's Office said.

The announcement was made shortly after Israel's Supreme Court rejected a government plan to rehouse some of the Amona settlers on an adjacent plot because it ruled that homes built there would also encroach on land owned by Palestinians.

According to the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, Israel last established new settlements in the West Bank in 1999, although outposts such as Amona, that settlers set up without official permission, have been built far more recently.

I also showed that the New York Times reported, parenthetically, that there has been "little building" over the past eight years in the territories.

But if you have read Reuters and the NYT and all major news media during the past ten years, you would think that Israel has been building "settlements" non-stop and at breakneck speed.

In fact, all they were reporting was some small increases in existing settlements to accommodate natural growth and some approvals of buildings many of which never made it to actually being built. In a small number of cases they retroactively legalized outposts that were built against the Israeli government's wishes.

Suddenly, the media is reporting a completely different story. Only now is Israel barely starting to do what they have blamed Israel for over the past decade. (And it is also only in the planning stage. The new community doesn't even have a name.)

Thousands of international journalists have passed through Israel in the past twenty years, and as far as I know, not one of them reported how little actual building was going on. Suddenly, in the past week, they are noticing - because they want to show their readers that Israel is acting even more against peace than it was during all those years of supposed Israeli "intransigence" and "extreme right wing Likud government."

No one is asking why this story as ignored for so long.

But it now brings up the next question that the media is not bothering to ask: If Israel really has been building so little, then why have the Palestinians refused to negotiate?

The conventional wisdom, of course, is that Palestinians refused to negotiate because of Israeli settlement building. They insisted that construction be frozen completely. And over at least two periods, Israel did exactly that - once for ten months and once for 18 months. The rest of the time Israel merely slowed down construction and most of it was in areas that would be part of Israel under any conceivable agreement.

This new reluctant realization by the media that Israel had done very little "settlement activity" is not because they suddenly saw the error of their ways. They simply want to frame Israel as acting even worse than they were framing Israel before and the only way to do that is by comparing it with before. But when they need to back up their new assertions, they are forced to admit that they were lying to their readers and news consumers for so long with Palestinian Arab propaganda, so the truth is obscured behind the news of "new settlements."

What the newfound discoveries of these professional reporters show is that it is the Palestinians who have been becoming more and more intransigent by refusing to negotiate even when settlement activity was frozen or nearly frozen. But since this contradicts the meme that they must push above all else - that Israel is the intransigent party - this is not going to be reported either.





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Wednesday, February 01, 2017

  • Wednesday, February 01, 2017
  • Elder of Ziyon


On Wednesday, Gaza building suppliers refused to accept building materials being imported from Israel through the Kerem Shalom crossing.

The reason was because Hamas unilaterally added a major tax on all such materials, and they did not believe they coul dpay the taxes and still make a profit. (Cement and other materials in Gaza have a fixed price.)

The materials that the Gaza suppliers refused to accept included cement, aggregate and iron.

From the mainstream media, you wouldn't know that Israel is bringing truckloads of cement every day, that Hamas is interfering with the distribution of those materials by imposing arbitrary taxes, and that Gaza suppliers are angry at Hamas, not Israel.




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From Ian:

IsraellyCool: Stop Comparing Trump To Hitler
One thing I am seeing more and more of during these turbulent and crazy times is the pronouncement – mostly by liberal friends – that Donald Trump is the new Hitler. Or at least is on his way.
Whatever misgivings I may have about Donald Trump, I am disgusted by such pronouncements. Here’s a few reasons why.
He’s not
Donald Trump seems to be a lot of things. Arrogant. Impulsive. And even then, there are many who will disagree with me there. Nevertheless, there is no doubt he is not Hitler. Not even close.
True story. 6 million Jews murdered, and about another 5 million non-Jewish victims. That’s 11 million people murdered as a result of Hitler’s extermination program.
Donald Trump has murdered approximately 0 people that we know of. Oh, and wait, he does not have an extermination program.
I can’t believe I have to point this out. What the hell is wrong with you?
Douglas Murray: Nine questions those protesting against Donald Trump’s immigration ban must answer
In my own view it would help immensely if the people who are lambasting the Trump administration had at least given some thought to the following questions and could go some way to giving answers to such questions as:
1 – Do you accept that America (like many other countries in the world today) has security problems? Do you recognise that despite the giggly charts on social media showing lawnmowers to be more of a threat to American life than terrorism, there are legitimate security concerns that reasonable Americans might hold?
2 – Do you recognise that Islamic terrorism is not a figment of a fevered imagination, but a real thing that exists and which causes a risk to human life in America and many other countries? This isn’t to say that other forms of terrorism don’t exist – they obviously do. But how might you address this one (assuming you can’t immediately solve global peace, poverty, unhappiness, lack of satisfactory sex, masculinity etc)?
3 – If you do recognise the above fact then would you concede that large scale immigration from Islamic countries into the US might bring a larger number of potential challenges than, say, large scale immigration from New Zealand or Iceland?
4 – Is everybody who wants to visit Disney World morally akin to Jews fleeing the Holocaust? If not then what are the differences, and is it always wise to conflate the two?
5 – Would you recognise that Iran is one of the world’s leading state-sponsors of terror, and that, for example, an Iranian-born American citizen in 2011 was caught planning to carry out a terror attack in Washington (against the Saudi Ambassador)? Would you recognise that aggravating though a temporary halt on all Iranian nationals visiting the US might be, and many good people though it will undoubtedly stop, there is a reason that some countries cause a greater security concern than others? Might citizens of a country whose leadership regularly chants ‘Death to America’ present a larger number of questions for border security than, say, citizens of Denmark whose government rarely says the same? What would your vetting policy be to distinguish between different Iranians seeking to enter the US?
6 – Does the whole world have the right to live in America? This is a variant of the same question we Europeans should have been asking for years. If you do not think that the whole world has the right to live in the USA then who should be allowed to live there and who should not? Who might be given priority?
7 – If you believe in giving some people asylum, as I do, who should be given priority? Should asylum be forever? Or should there be a time-limit (such as up until such a time as your country of origin is deemed safe)? How do you deal with people who have been given asylum, whose reason for asylum is over (i.e. their country has returned to peace) but whose children have entered the school system (for instance)?
8 – Is it wrong that the Trump administration says it wishes to favour Christian refugees over Muslim refugees? This is a fascinating and difficult moral question. Many Christians refuse to accept that the plight of Christians – even when they are the specific target of persecution – should be given priority over anyone else. This is a noble example of Christian universalism, but is it wise or moral when you consider the limited numbers that can come in and if you accept that the entire persecuted world cannot arrive in America?
9 – How do you identify the type of Muslims who America should indeed welcome? And how do you distinguish them from the sort of Muslims who the country could well do without? In other words, what would your vetting procedures be? There are some people who have thought about this. But what is your policy?
If you think all of the above questions are simply ‘racist’ or ‘bigoted’ then I suppose the rest of us will just have to accept that we’re going to lose you to four years of shouting on the streets in vagina hats. But the rest of us should try to address these questions. We’re not going to be able to shout them away you know.
Brendan O'Neill: Anti-Trump hysteria lets others whitewash their own crimes
Then there’s Hillary Clinton, who was retweeted tens of thousands of times for saying of Trump’s order: ‘This is not who we are.’ But it is who she is. This is the woman who spearheaded the bombing of Libya, helping to plunge that nation into mayhem and creating hundreds of thousands of refugees in the process. Ed Miliband spoke at the Downing St demo. He was a fulsome supporter of the bombing of Libya. The people who helped to make swathes of humanity into refugees are virtue-signalling about Trump’s tough line on refugees. The people who caused, or okayed, instability in Muslim nations are pontificating about Trump’s tough words on Muslim nations. It is morally perverse. By any objective moral measurement, Clinton and Miliband did something worse to the people of Libya than Trump has, and yet this is ignored, or overlooked, drowned in the joyous moral kick that comes from hating Trump.
This is the true danger of historical illiteracy. To describe Trump as abnormal, as a break with proper American politics, makes normal the horrors of the past, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of Vietnam, of McCarthyism, of Iraq, Afghanistan and all the rest. It tells us, implicitly, that all of that was normal, better even.
This is my problem with the protests: they promote emotional fury at the expense of historical thinking, and in the process they play down the sins of the past. This is really bad for younger, fresher protesters in particular. They’re encouraged to think that until now, from the war to today, between Hitler and Trump, things had been pretty much okay, or at least ‘normal’. The protests aren’t radical at all. In fact they’re a boon for the warmongers and liars in the corridors of power who spy in the ‘Trump is Hitler’ cry an opportunity to rebuild their own moral standing. The out-of-control hatred for Trump doubles up, unwittingly perhaps, as an uncritical, conformist apology for pre-Trump, for the rot that came before him. It redeems barbarism.


Moral panic. It's a term that was coined by Stanley Cohen in 1987 in his seminal work, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, and it perfectly describes the great uproar over Trump's immigration ban (not to mention his election). A moral panic, according to Cohen, is a random or intermittent event generating widespread concern that societal norms may be in peril. The moral panic is characterized by, “a condition, episode, person or group of persons [who] become defined as a threat to societal values and interests."

Now a moral panic doesn't just up and set itself on fire. It needs the media to light the match. The mass media, as Cohen explains, seizes on a potential episode of moral panic and styles things so as to exaggerate or amplify the facts. Soon enough, the event becomes a national issue (or as in the case of the immigration ban, international).

Cohen's theory goes that had the media stayed uninvolved, the issue at the center of the moral panic would have, of a certain, have remained a piddling local story, relevant only to those directly affected. The media's involvement is the sole catalyst for any moral panic, the only reason any issue (an immigration ban, Trump's election) can end up causing widespread fear and fascination.

So what you have with a moral panic is an event sensationalized by the media. The mass media then follows things up by putting out a call for action, a demand for some sort of punitive action, a response. This, Cohen calls, "control culture."

It is moral panic that drove the Women's March on Washington as a response to Trump's election. It is moral panic that motivated the protests at airports, and had synagogues issuing heartfelt statements of umbrage over the immigration ban. And it is the mass media that inflamed the masses and fomented these mass responses. It is the media controlling the culture.

It is upsetting to know that people are so easily maneuvered and exploited into making a hullabaloo over something simply because the media desires it so. To think that people allow themselves to serve as puppets, letting their strings be pulled this way and that in obeisance to someone else's agenda so far away out of sight that the common man doesn't even know it exists! But that is the way of all effective moral panics.

And of course, any moral panic worth its salt has a whole bunch of Jews clamoring for their outrage over the issue to be seen and heard. Like a fish, this Jewish response stinks from the head down, with rabbis culling comparisons to Jewish history as reason enough to organize and demonstrate. "We were refugees, too!" they cry, dignity and righteousness in their shrill collective voices.

Just like Cohen says, had the media not run with this, sensationalized it and demanded action, you would not now have rabbis up in arms and marching with signs. Without the media, the immigration ban would have been but a momentary blip on the screen, unnoticed, and unseen.

You know how I know this?

I know this because in 2005, 11,000 Jews were expelled from their homes in the Jewish State and there were no American rabbis protesting (save for the Modern Orthodox), no Conservative or Reform Jews holding signs or expressing indignation. These 11,000 of their Jewish brethren who were forcibly dragged out of their homes consisted of 8,000 Jewish settlers in Gaza and another 3,000 from Northern Samaria. They were expelled from their beautiful homes after a national referendum in the democratic State of Israel in which 65% of the Israeli people voted against the plan.
By Israel Defense Forces (The Evacuation of Neve Dekalim) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
The effects of this expulsion reverberate until today. There remains a few hundred people who UNTIL NOW have no permanent housing solution. In the wake of the expulsion, families fell apart at the seams, with divorce rampant among the expellees. Heads of households had heart attacks and died, children lost their faith in God. It's documented.
By Israel Defense Forces (The Evacuation of Bedolach) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons 
Worst of all, rather than bring peace, the Expulsion, A/K/A "Disengagement" brought tens of thousands of missiles raining down on Israel from the very territory it ceded, from the place where those who were expelled had built beautiful homes and  businesses and schools and synagogues. The Arabs, instead of building homes and schools in the "gift" we gave them, built a terrorist enclave using what we gave them to target and kill us.
By Israel Defense Forces (The Evacuation of Shirat Hayam) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
But the Washington Post, CNN, and the New York Times, don't see the expulsion and subsequent homelessness, loss of income, and unemployment of 11,000 Jews in the same light as 90,000 people who have had their plans postponed for 120 days. And they don't care about the tens of thousands of missiles shot at us from the territory we gave them, from which we uprooted 11,000 Jewish people against their will, only 60 years after we were uprooted from Europe in the West, and Arab countries in the East.
By Israel Defense Forces (The Evacuation of Ganei Tal) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
The Expulsion isn't on the media's list of moral panic material.

Because Jews.

And so, no rabbis (other than the settler-loving Modern Orthodox) marched on behalf of the 11,000 Jews forcibly taken from their homes and left homeless with nothing. No indignation was expressed at the pulpit. No marches took place. No signs were held. No aid extended.
By Israel Defense Forces (The Evacuation of Kfar Hayam) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
No interviews appeared. It wasn't seen as a Jewish cause. No parallels in Jewish history were found. 

No rabbis issued heartfelt words about Jews expelled from Speyer, Germany, or Spain, or England.
A street in the Judengasse in Speyer, Germany. (Wikimedia Commons)
There was no moral panic. Because no media. And so the Expulsion, known so mildly when it is spoken of at all as "Disengagement" remained and remains a local blip. A painful Israeli problem that doesn't touch the Jews in New York or Boston or Washington, outside of the Modern Orthodox that is, that last bastion, the final vestige of caring for Jews who live in places Arabs covet.

It is like science fiction to me, these puppets of the media, JINO's who cannot generate their own umbrage but can only be lit up by an outside force possessing interests completely at odds with Jewish philosophy. Trump's immigration ban may be awkwardly implemented and a serious inconvenience to 90,000, some of them leaving a war zone, but it is temporary, whereas the expulsion from Gaza was forever.

And still, you don't hear a peep. No Reform rabbi mentions them in a Rosh Hashana sermon. No Conservative congregation sends them things, the expellees. No one says boo. It's not even in their consciousness. They'd sooner have an empty seat at the Seder table for Harvey Milk than Anita Tucker, whose only crime was making the desert bloom with celery. (Dollars to donuts they've heard of him, but not of her.)
By Harvey Milk in 1978 at Mayor Moscone's Desk.jpg: Daniel Nicoletta derivative work: Hekerui (Harvey Milk in 1978 at Mayor Moscone's Desk.jpg) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Anita Tucker
All of this is especially relevant and ironic today, considering what is happening right now in Amona, as I write this blog piece. Israel expels 42 families from their homes because some "human rights" organization makes a claim their homes are built on private land, though no deed must be provided as proof, and though there is actually no proof that the homes were ever owned by Arabs. Flawed law is the only reason for this expulsion as no Arabs lost their homes as a result of the construction of these Jewish homes. No one lost property, no one was hurt.

Israel expels 42 families from Amona over a contrived legal technicality, but oh the irony, takes in 100 Syrian babies. And the mass media? Silent. Not on its agenda, so not on its clipboard of moral panic material. And so the Jews of America say nothing. Do nothing. Care nothing at all about the pain of these 42 families with nowhere to go, Jews like them.


They scorn their own—Jews—in favor of a moral panic about Arab refugees, typically the enemy of their people (as they are in Gaza, the place we gave them, and the reason for the expulsion of 11,000 innocent Jewish people against their will and the will of the people of Israel).

Such is the power of the media's hold over these empty-headed Jews. They have no brains of their own. They have no impetus to do a thing, unless the media tells them to do it.

It is sick and sad and scary and did I say sick?

Because it makes me want to vomit.

Because if you are susceptible to being drawn into a moral panic, but fail to be moved by the expulsion of the 11,000 Jews of Israel and their plight, then you are no longer human, let alone Jewish. Because Jews should only be accountable to their maker, and not to the media.

American Jewry, it is certain, is in extremis.



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Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory

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Whenever I Need A Laugh, I Think Of All Those People Assuming Palestine Will Be A Liberal Democracy

By Mahmoud Abbas

AbbasNobody ever promised me the position of President of the Palestinian National Authority would be easy. I never expected it to be. Combine it with - or consider it a subsidiary role of - my position as Chairman of the Fatah faction and Palestine Liberation Organization, and you get one long work day after another. Tensions run high. Usually I thrive on that - it gives me a sense of vitality - but occasionally I need to dissipate that tension, and there's no better way to do that than to laugh. When I need a good laugh, I think of all those fools who see the nascent State of Palestine as a liberal democracy.

It never fails to crack me up. Other people's idiocy can be an amazing thing to behold, and a hilarious one. In the almost twenty-four years since the Authority was created, there has been a steady erosion - one might describe it as an active weakening - of any semblance of democratic values, leaving precious little around which one might build a democratic state. We've had the occasional elections - I was voted into this four-year term twelve years ago, and the Palestinian parliamentarians a year later - but other than that, I chuckle every time I consider what our supporters in the West believe will happen once we gain full state status. Somehow our violent political culture, our endemic corruption, our all-important tribal loyalties, and our irrational genocidal hatred of Jews will dissipate in favor of transparency, robust institutions, and rule of law. Excuse me for a moment, I'm about to lose my composure...

Well. As you can see, that stuff is hella funny. It just doesn't get old. I could spend hours rewatching clips of my advisers pontificating on democratic values being trampled by Israel, and how all the dysfunction of our society going back a thousand years is all Israel's fault - and these people eat it up! they can't get enough! We started playing a game back in the 1980's who could get the Western press to take the most outrageous thing at face value, and we've yet to hit rock bottom. Most of us thought we'd grow tired of it, or discover the limits those imbeciles' credulousness, within a couple of months, but we've yet to encounter either phenomenon. New vistas of ridiculousness open up daily.

Don't ever stop, Western liberals. Please. We desperately need you for comic relief.




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From Ian:

PMW: Terror poems for kids on PA TV
Twice this month Palestinian Authority TV’s children’s program The Best Home had young children recite poems encouraging violence. One poem called for murder of Israelis “as we slaughtered them in your streets, Beirut.” The poem also urged Palestinians to seek death, emphasizing that if you are a member of Fatah, Mahmoud Abbas’ party, your “blood is food for the revolution”:
Boy: “Today, O our West Bank, our Gaza, raise your voice
O our land, the time has still not passed
As we expelled them from Gaza and Sderot
As we slaughtered them in your streets, Beirut
For you, Yasser Arafat, for you we shall die
After the night comes the light of day, and the fig leave will be removed...
Tomorrow we will take our vengeance, and their leader will be carried in a coffin
We, Fatah, are a storm, and our blood is food for the revolution...”
PA TV host: “Bravo, Muhammad, thank you, thank you, thank you!”
[Official PA TV, The Best Home, Jan. 6, 2017]
What's Holding the Arab World Back?
What's holding the Arab world back? Why, by nearly every measure, are Muslim nations so far behind the West economically, culturally and scientifically? Bret Stephens, Global View columnist for the Wall Street Journal, explains.


Nikki Haley Pledges to Block Anti-Israel Actions by United Nations
Nikki Haley, the newly appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, phoned her Israeli counterpart on Monday to reinforce America's "ironclad support" for the Jewish state.
Haley pledged to Ambassador Danny Danon that she would block anti-Israel actions taken by the U.N., citing the security council's decision last month to condemn Israel for erecting settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
During her confirmation hearing before the Senate earlier this month, Haley vowed a pivot in U.S. policy toward Israel. The former South Carolina governor criticized the Obama administration's decision to abstain from the U.N. vote, calling the resolution a "terrible mistake."
"I will not go to New York and abstain when the U.N. seeks to create an international environment that encourages boycotts of Israel," Haley said on Jan. 18. "I will never abstain when the United Nations takes any action that comes in direct conflict with the interests and values of the United States."

  • Wednesday, February 01, 2017
  • Elder of Ziyon
At the Amnesty International Australia Facebook page, after they criticized the US ban on some travelers from some countries, someone asked if they were also against Arab states banning Israelis.

Their response? Not at all!


After people complained, Amnesty removed the post and claimed that it was a mistake:


So Amnesty Australia staffs its official social media accounts with volunteers who know absolutely nothing about what they are talking about? Who think that Arab nations started boycotting Israel after "occupation"? Who think that Palestinians are being displaced from their homes by "illegal settlements"?

And even the apology doesn't include a specific condemnation of Arab nations. It was just a backtrack saying that freedom of movement is a human right, and that Amnesty won't speak out against Arab violations of human rights because they only have finite resources.

You know how expensive it is to post a statement on your own Facebook account. It would strain the resources of any multi-million dollar NGO.

Even with this poor apology, we can see that Amnesty will hire people who are reflexively anti-Israel. You will never see any "mistake" that is pro-Israel on any of  their social media accounts. 

You cannot blame the poor "volunteers" either. They only know what they see from Amnesty, after all, and while Amnesty's official statements strive to be technically accurate, they know very well that their readers won't parse the statements to the degree necessary to figure out the truth. Any casual reader of Amnesty and HRW press releases would be convinced, just like this supposed volunteer, that Israel is evil, that Arab nations bravely stand behind Palestinians with their boycott of Israel that began before there was a state of Israel, that "illegal settlements" are displacing hundreds of thousands of Arabs, and that the IDF routinely engages in "atrocities." 

This is the message that Amnesty gives out even if they won't say it explicitly, and they know very well how their statements are read.

But Arab antisemitism? PA arrests of dissidents? Hamas expelling people from homes? The PLO  paying terrorists? No, that cannot be discussed - because there are only so many hours in the day and so many dollars in their budget, and the 741st anti-Israel report takes precedence over any research that might show Arabs as being anything other than poor victims of Israeli brutality.

(h/t Yenta)



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  • Wednesday, February 01, 2017
  • Elder of Ziyon
I noted on Sunday that Fatah and a Palestinian Authority minister had slammed UN Secretary General António Guterres for mentioning the Temple in Jerusalem during his Holocaust Remembrance Day speech.

Now the PLO itself (which is the self-styled representative of all Palestinians worldwide and which the Palestinian Authority reports to) has officially stated that Jews have no history to speak of in Jerusalem, by denying that there was ever any Temple on the Temple Mount.

Guterres had told Israel Radio that it is “completely clear that the Temple that the Romans destroyed in Jerusalem was a Jewish temple.”

The PLO issued a statement saying that the entire area (including the "walls," a reference to the Western Wall) is entirely Muslim and no others have any claim, and that UNESCO agrees with this.

The PLO slammed the Secretary-General, questioning his neutrality, saying that his remarks showed that he openly sides with the state of the Israel and its "occupation" and that his words "betrays his ignorance of clear international resolutions on Jerusalem."

The PLO went on to demand an apology from the United Nations and from Gutteres himself for "these dangerous statements, which are contrary to international law, which the United Nations has the task of maintaining and applying."

It went further, calling on the international community and NGOs in general, and Arab and Islamic countries in particular, to "play their role and respond to those allegations."

This isn't the first time that major Palestinian officials have denied any Jewish history in Jerusalem. Yasir Arafat famously denied that the Jewish Temple was in Jerusalem during peace negotiations. There are many other examples.  Yet I had never seen it as an official statement from the PLO before.

This is a perfect topic to ask Saeb Erekat or Hanan Ashrawi about the next time they are interviewed. Too bad reporters aren't willing to challenge these liars on basic questions.

Fantasy and lies are part and parcel of the PLO's positions. Which means that any agreement with them is impossible, since they cannot be trusted to tell the truth about anything.




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Mondoweiss has an article that says that there is a "Zionist connection" to the Quebec mosque shooter - because he "liked" the IDF on his Facebook page.

Ali Abunimah, of Electronic Intifada, made the same claim.

This is the level of discourse that the anti-Israel crowd uses. They know it is garbage but they always try to find the most ridiculous connections between anything Israel-related and any mass murderer or reprehensible human being in a pathetic attempt to discredit Zionists. (In one example they tried to link me to mass murderer Anders Breivik by falsely claiming that I praised his manifesto in an article where I called him "evil" and a "psychopath.")

I tweeted how ridiculous this logic is after Max Blumenthal did the same thing:



So I decided to see how easy it is to link Mondoweiss and Electronic Intifada and Blumenthal to the neo-Nazi site, Stormfront, using their own methods.


Stormfront doesn't just put a Facebook "like" to these anti-Israel sites. It quotes them repeatedly.

Stormfront has quoted both Mondoweiss and Electronic Intifada over 100 times each! Ali Abunimah himself is quoted by the neo-Nazi site some 36 times. Philip Weiss manages to get quoted 90 times. Max Blumenthal gets quoted  (almost always approvingly) over 80 times.  

Clearly, neo-Nazis have a warm space in their hearts for Philip Weiss, Ali Abunimah and Max Blumenthal. 

Keep in mind that I am in no way saying that these anti-Israel sites and writers are neo-Nazi. They are politically distant from the far-Right (except for the fact that both the far Left and far Right are antisemitic.)

But I am saying that if you accept the stupid methodologies of Mondoweiss and EI and Blumenthal, then you must accept that they themselves have a lot in common with and inspire neo-Nazis, by their own stunning pseudo-logic.

Joking aside, the neo-Nazi ties to these individuals and sites are far deeper than the supposed Zionist links of the neo-Nazis. Hundreds of quotes linking them are far more significant than a Facebook "like."

EI and Mondoweiss truly are the research arm for neo-Nazis. And that is beyond dispute.

So every time they claim that some far right murderer and terrorist is linked to Zionists, point out that they are much more "guilty" of this linkage than Zionists are - by their own methodology. Feel free to use the image I created. Let's see how much they like taking their own medicine.

(By the way, I'm quoted in Stormfront too a couple of times. For example, they were excited that I discovered a UNRWA official posting [fake] Hitler quotes on Facebook. In other words, they were on the UNRWA official's side, not mine.) 



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