Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, August 07, 2017

Mahmoud Abbas continues to withhold medicines from Gaza patients; world yawns

The situation at Gaza hospitals is getting more and more desperate, while the world ignores what "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas is doing to his own people.

It has now been four months since the Palestinian Authority decided to withhold medicines and medical equipment from Gaza hospitals.

According to the Gaza ministry of health, some 516 medicines are completely unavailable in Gaza hospitals, representing 40% of the medicines that are normally used. Additionally, some 291 medical supplies (out of 853 total) are unavailable.

Patients in Gaza hospitals who need painkillers and similar medicines are told to go to private pharmacies and pay for them themselves.

Every day, Gaza hospitals run out of more medicines and medical supplies.

Yet Doctors Without Borders, which has blamed Israel for Gaza medicine shortages in the past, is silent.

The World Health Organization issued a statement last month about how the medicine and electricity shortage is affecting Gaza hospitals, but the only party it blamed was Israel. This is even though the Palestinian Authority has publicly bragged about reducing electricity to Gaza!

A couple of reporters mentioned the medicine crisis a month or two ago, and then promptly dropped the story.

Other "Palestine activists" are also suddenly silent about this human rights violation by the "moderate man of peace" Mahmoud Abbas, who has promised to further cut off supplies to Gaza.

The hypocrisy is stunning, but normal and expected.

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.

PCHR, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, held a workshop last month entitled “Consequences of Former Prisoners’ Salary Suspension on their Economic and Social Rights.”

The conference centered on some 277 former prisoners in Gaza, all of them Hamas as far as I can tell, who lost their permanent salaries from the Palestinian Authority. But the arguments that PCHR is putting forth in defending them are the same arguments that they would use to defend paying the thousands of prisoners and former prisoners, including murderers, who take up a significant part of the PA budget.

The workshop was opened by Dr. Fadel Muzeini, a researcher at PCHR’s Economic and Social Rights Unit. Muzeini emphasized that PCHR has paid special attention to prisoners and former prisoners over their years of work and always supported their just causes. He also stressed that the Palestinian Authority’s decision to suspend the salaries of former prisoners is unfair and in violation of former prisoners and their families’ right to a decent life. He added the decision is unconstitutional and explicitly violates the Basic Law and Prisoners and Former Prisoners Law No. 19/2004 and its amendments, which guarantee former prisoners’ rights to be monthly paid a salary according to a specific system.

Lawyer Raji Sourani, PCHR’s Director, reviewed PCHR’s position on the suspension of former prisoners’ salaries. He said that the decision of suspending former prisoners’ salaries was shocking to the prisoners, their families and all Palestinians as it is illegal, immoral, and violates the Basic Law and the international human rights law. Sourani also demanded the Palestinian Authority to apologize for this unjust decision, end this abnormal situation and regularly re-pay the former prisoners’ salaries, considering all of this as a lawful right for the prisoners and former prisoners.

The director of a lavishly funded human rights NGO says that "international human rights law" demands that people who murder Jews must be paid a lifetime salary for their efforts.

The Palestinian Basic Law indeed provides that terrorists should get rewarded:

Article 22
Social, health, disability and retirement insurance shall be regulated by law.
Maintaining the welfare of families of martyrs, prisoners of war, the injured and the disabled is a duty that shall be regulated by law. The National Authority shall guarantee these persons education, health and social insurance.

And apparently there are other more detailed Palestinian laws guaranteeing their salaries as well.

However, PCHR is going further, asserting that the right for people who tried or succeeded in murdering Jews to be given salaries is protected under international law! Not only that, but this NGO says that not paying them is immoral.

Rewarding terrorists is moral. Not rewarding them is immoral. That is the position of perhaps the most prestigious Palestinian human rights NGO.

The list of funders to PCHR is impressive. It includes the European Union, UN OCHA, Ireland, Norway, Finland, Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Secretariat (joint funding from the governments of Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Denmark), Spain, George Soros' Open Society Foundations (US), Christian Aid (UK), Grassroots International (US), Kvina Till Kvina (Sweden), Al-Quds Association Malaga (Spain), Oxfam Novib (Netherlands), Norwegian Refugee Council (Norway), Trocaire, and DanChurchAid (Denmark).

All of these funders and nations are indirectly supporting financial incentives for murdering Jews.

Out of all the egregious, immoral actions of "human rights" groups, this is the most shocking. Answers must be demanded from not only PCHR but also from every one of its funders. And the answers must not be of the "let's sweep it under the rug" type where PCHR makes a half-hearted statement that gets eagerly swallowed by these governments and non-government funders so they can continue to throw money - often taxpayer money - to a "human rights" group that has just proven that it is the antithesis of human rights.

As long as you consider Jews to be human, that is.

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.

Hamas' "military wing" beating up people who insult them

From PCHR:

‘Abed al-Rahman Ahmed Barakah (59), from Deir al-Balah, said to PCHR’s fieldworker that, at approximately 19:40 on Monday, 31 July 2017, while he along with his two sons, Shadi (36) and Mohammed 31, was training some young men in the Equestrian Club he owns in al-Bassa area, northwest of Deir al-Balah, around 30 masked armed men from Al-Qassam Brigades entered the Club. The armed men pointed their firearms at ‘Abed al-Rahman’s sons and then started beating him with batons and the riffels’ butts. Around 30 minutes later, the armed men pushed ‘Abed al-Rahman into their jeep, took him to al-Barouq neighborhood, southwest of the city, where he lives. They then threw him near his house, telling him, “This is what you get for cursing Al-Qassam Brigades.” ‘Abed al-Rahman’s relatives saw that and attempted to approach him, but al-Qassam Members opened fire in the air and withdrew from the area. ‘Abed al-Rahman was then taken via an ambulance belonging to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) to al-Aqsa Hospital, and he underwent medical tests which showed that ‘Abed al-Rahman sustained bruises and fractures to his hands.

Of course, the "moderate" Palestinian Authority does the same with those it deems enemies.

But the "pro-Palestinian" groups somehow never manage to utter a word about these sorts of incidents. I wonder why?

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.

Kurdish independence opposed - because Kurdistan wouldn't be anti-Israel

From Al Monitor:

Objections to the Iraqi Kurdistan’s referendum scheduled for Sept. 25 have gone beyond the political arena. Mosques are now involved, and religion is being inserted into the equation of supporting or opposing the calls for an independent state.

Oh? For example?

Mohammad Mahdi al-Khalsi, the religious authority in al-Kazimiya, called on all Iraqis July 7 to stand up against “divisive projects” and asked to put a nail in the coffin of this "suspicious" project. He also warned the Islamic world against forming a new Zionist entity that is Kurdistan.

Ammar al-Hakim, who heads the Shiite alliance, the largest political Shiite coalition in Iraq, said on TV in Egypt April 19, “I personally do not know any country that might recognize a Kurdish state — if announced — other than Israel. The Arab countries have Iraq’s unity at heart.”

Remarkably, linking Israel to a Kurdish state goes as far back as the Baathists, when the Kurdish movement was described as “Israel’s spy.”

These don't sound like religious arguments to me!

In the end, of course, no one is thinking about whether Kurds deserve a state considering their history and their fierce ties to the land. They are, as always, looking out for their own self-interests and pretending that their positions on Kurdistan is aligned with high sounding principles like "unity".

By any sane measure, Kurds deserve a nation far more than Palestinians. But sanity is not the deciding factor in the world we live in.

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.

08/06 Links: Israel slanderer waits for Israeli transplant; Stone-throwers ambush bus filled with children

From Ian:

Israel slanderer waits for Israeli transplant

Legal human rights organization Shurat Hadin, joined by 50 IDF reserve officers and soldiers, wrote to the Health Ministry and the National Transplant Center requesting that PA diplomat Saeb Erekat be removed from the waiting list for transplants in Israel.
About 50 soldiers and officers who fought in Operation Defensive Shield and who hold organ donor cards today petitioned the Health Ministry and the National Transplant Center to immediately remove Saeb Erekat from the list of transplants in Israel, due to the fact that Erekat has repeatedly slandered IDF soldiers, called for the boycott of the State of Israel, campaigned for sanctions against it, and led the BDS movement to isolate and harm the State of Israel.
Yesterday the media reported that an application had been filed on behalf of Saeb Erekat, a senior PA official, for a lung transplant in Israel.
In the wake of Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, and the reserve soldiers battle in Jenin in which 13 IDF soldiers were killed, a propaganda film by director Muhammad Bakri, entitled Jenin Jenin, was released. The film purports to provide prima facie evidence of war crimes committed by the IDF in Jenin which turned out to be wholly spurious, as was decided by the Central District Court.
Erekat took a large part in disseminating the blood libel embodied in the film, which portrayed the story as if a massacre took place in Jenin. He appeared at the time in the various media, mainly on foreign television channels, and disseminated the lie of the massacre.
In addition, in November 2010, Erekat wrote a letter praising the planner of then Minister Rechavam Ze'evi's assassination, and in December 2015 he paid a condolence visit to another terrorist family who carried out a shooting attack against IDF forces.
In addition, Erekat is an enthusiastic supporter of the boycott movement against Israel - BDS. He has visited EU representatives in the past because they did not support BDS, and asserted that all their support for the two-state solution is meaningless if they do not support the boycott of Israel.

Seth Frantzman: Israel is at its most and least integrated moment in the Mideast

The discussion in Israel, from the Right to the Left, is primarily an internal one. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel has shared interests in Saudi Arabia, the UAE or Egypt, it isn’t because he enjoys meeting with leaders from there, it’s simply a statement of fact. One gets the feeling that previous generations of Israelis, with the exception of the cultural Eurocentric elites, felt more a part of the Middle East, more comfortable in it. That is ironic, since Israel was more isolated in the 1950s, surrounded by real Arab armies. Today Israel has peace with two Arab countries, and relationships with others, yet it is less integrated in the region in some ways.
Israel was always going to be a janus-faced country because of its nature. Founded primarily by Eastern European Jewish nationalists, it was a gathering place for Jews from the Middle East and has the food, music and culture of the region ingrained in it. Many of its cultural elites still see the region as “primitive” and their cultural leanings are toward Europe. It’s no surprise some of them and their children emigrate to places like Berlin.
In the 1960s many Arab nationalists believed Israel was a colonial implant in the Middle East and would go the way of Algeria. They didn’t understand that it was not colonial in foundation, but seeking to reconnect an indigenous people with their land. The problem the indigenous people have had is that some of them do not feel comfortable in the land.
Ben-Gurion thought the problem was an education system in need of modernizing “primitives.” He was wrong. The problem was creating an education system that roots people in the Middle East and makes them feel a part of it and teaches them to respect and be interested in it. After all, Israelis are all supposed to learn Arabic in school, but few of them actually end up understanding it.
That in itself is a symbol of how it is more integrated, but also less integrated.

Forward: ZOA head more worrying for Jews than Linda Sarsour

A recent piece published by the Forward claims that Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) president Morton Klein is more worrying for Jews than controversial Palestinian Arab-American firebrand Linda Sarsour.
"As leader of the Zionist Organization of America, Klein has embraced and defended alt-right figures like Bannon and Gorka for their unabashedly pro-Israel-at-any-costs position, cozying up to anti-Semitic forces if it advances the ZOA’s ardent Zionist goals." wrote Forward editorial fellow Steven Davidson in an article titled "19 People Jews Should Worry About More Than Linda Sarsour."
"It would require a book replete with exclamation points to fully explain the dangers of an ostensibly Jewish organization aligning with xenophobic elements to accomplish narrow political goals."
Also present on Davidson's list are Hamas head Ismail Haniyeh, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah,and former KKK Imperial Wizard David Duke. Bottoming out the list was United States President Donald Trump, whose campaign Davidson wrote "either rode the coattails of the alt-right or allowed the alt-right to follow his nativist coattails."
Davidson had penned the article as a defense for Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian Arab-American activist who has turned into the face of the anti-Trump movement. Many of her comments have made Jews uneasy, such as saying that "nothing is creepier than Zionism" and claiming that supporting Israel and being a feminist are incompatible.

Ma'an last week published a story (in Arabic) about the obstacles to building a desalination plant on the Gaza coat to alleviate the severe water shortages there.

The governor of the central Gaza Strip, Abdullah Abu Samhadana, on Wednesday called on Hamas to overcome all obstacles to start work on the project to build the largest desalination plant in the Gaza Strip, describing the project as strategic.
"The importance of this project is that it serves 2 million Palestinians and delivers desalinated water to every house in the Gaza Strip," Abu Samhadana said during an inspection tour conducted by the delegation of the Water Authority. The report comes in light of international reports that Gaza lacks drinking water.
He called on the media to shed light on this issue because of its importance and to use public opinion to exert pressure to accomplish this project.
He said that President Mahmoud Abbas had issued a presidential decree allocating 100 dunums of land west of the city of Khan Younis to establish an alternative power plant to operate the desalination plant in the light of the worsening electricity crisis, while the Hamas land authority in the Gaza Strip refuses to implement the decree.
He explained the importance of working to remove the obstacles that prevent the allocation of this land to establish the project to establish the station without delay.
He added that what prevents the start of work is the position of the Land Authority in Gaza on the grounds that the financiers see in the project all integrated and they refuse to start before overcoming all obstacles.
Abu Samhadana said the project would cost $ 600 million, and the national consensus government headed by Rami Hamdallah is continuing to communicate with financiers to keep this project a priority.

Notice what word is missing from this story? Israel. No one thinks for even a minute that Israel would block such an important project.

Hamas and the PA are fighting about where to build such a plant. If they could get past their differences, the donors would rush in to help. But Hamas doesn't want the PA to run the project, and the terror group certainly cannot raise those sorts of funds itself (Iran pays Hamas to buy equipment to kill people, not to help people.)

Meanwhile, the PA itself is doing even more to hurt the residents of Gaza in order to assert its own authority. Both Hamas and the PA are eager to play with the lives of Gazans for their own political purposes.

Mahmoud Abbas even insulted those, like the US, who were against his cutting electricity to Gaza - endangering hospital patients and ordinary citizens.

Palestinian Arabs have been pawns since 1948, played by Arab leaders for their own selfish purposes. Why should their own leaders behave any differently? It isn't like the world really cares about Palestinian lives unless Jews can be blamed.

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.

There have been plenty of articles on this site about how many NGOs use their halo of supporting human rights as a chakram to bash Israel to the point of appearing antisemitic.

But sometimes one can find an NGO that actually tries to help people - and to create peace.

The Jerusalem Post reports:

Growing up in Syria, Shadi Martini was taught to stay away from Israelis: they were evil enemies seeking to kill him and his people.

Today, he works with them to help Syrians survive the devastating conflict in his country.

Earlier this month, the IDF disclosed the scope of its aid to Syrians affected by the bloodletting as part of Operation Good Neighbor, an initiative begun in June 2016 to increase civilian aid while maintaining the principle of noninvolvement in the civil war. More than 110 aid operations have been conducted since August 2016.

The IDF said it has begun working with international organizations and donors to transfer aid to more than 200,000 Syrians living close to the Israeli border.

One of these organizations is the Multifaith Alliance, an umbrella group of some 90 faith-based organizations in the United States coming together for Syrians in need. Martini is the alliance’s director of humanitarian relief and regional relations.

Martini begun his humanitarian work in 2011, as the Arab Spring was unfolding in the region and demonstrations begun in his hometown of Aleppo. At the time, he was managing a hospital there.

“We started seeing more and more people getting hurt and avoiding hospitals for fear of getting arrested,” he said. “We were seeing increased pressure from the government and security agencies who told us that if anyone comes to our facility, we have to report them and they will come to pick them up immediately.”

Martini and his team began disobeying the orders and smuggled people in and out of the facility, treating the wounded.

“They needed medical supplies and couldn’t get them, some people needed to be treated secretly,” he told The Jerusalem Post last week. “So we developed a network with friends inside Syria, and we helped people, we started smuggling things to the besieged areas.”

A year later, Martini’s operation was discovered and he had to flee Syria.

He moved to the United States, where his family had arrived earlier. Despite the danger, he continued to travel to his country, into zones where the government had no control, in order to provide aid.

“It’s a choice I had to make,” he said. “Some people chose to do nothing, just observe. I thought it was the wrong thing to do, I saw that people needed help, and regardless of who they are, if someone is suffering and injured, he should receive help.”

In 2013, Martini was approached by Israelis who wanted to send aid into Syria. He was skeptical.

“I thought maybe they were Mossad, maybe they wanted information,” he told the Post. “We were always told they are the devil, not to believe whatever they say, that they want to kill us. In a society that is not a free society, you tend not to question it. If everyone is saying that, even if it’s not true, who cares? It was part of the norm.”

But he did not want to pass on valuable aid and decided to take a chance.

He would receive the unlabeled Israeli products and distribute them into Syria. That’s when the Multifaith Alliance, which had just formed, learned about this activity, and approached him.

The organization has a three-part mission: to collect aid and raise money for organizations that help Syrian war victims, increase awareness of the crisis, and plant the seeds for stability in the region by fostering people-to-people engagement.

The alliance launched in 2013 as the Jewish Coalition for Syrian Refugees, which at that time was made up of 16 organizations and quickly scaled up to a multi-faith initiative.

With 90 organizations now involved, it collects aid in the US and ships it to Israel where the IDF now distributes it to Syrian NGOs, as part of the Good Neighbor policy.

When the Multifaith Alliance learned about existing collaborations between Syrian and Israeli NGO s, it knew that the partnerships could have important implications not just in the immediate need of delivering aid, but for long-term relations in the region.

Dr. Georgette Bennett, a daughter of Holocaust survivors who founded the alliance, told the Post, “Israel shares a border with four of the most affected countries [by the Syrian war] and therefore it makes enormous sense for Israel to be used as a staging area for the delivery of outbound international humanitarian aid, because Israel is a reliable partner, it’s got geographical proximity, it’s got tremendous expertise in search and rescue and it’s got technology that is designed to address disaster situations.”

The Multifaith Alliance includes these organizations, representing Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu and Christian groups:

The idea of not only helping Syrians but of also looking for long-term contacts that can facilitate peace between Israel and whatever Syria becomes is exactly what makes this organization different from so many other NGOs. Too many "human rights" groups pander to Arab antisemitism, and the idea of "normalization" with Israelis - anathema to so many Arabs - has morphed into support for boycotting the Jewish state, the modern manifestation of antisemitism that cloaks its hate as being "pro-human rights" and "supporting justice."

Seeing an organization with real people trying to do real humanitarian work is inspiring in a world where so many so-called humanitarian groups actually work against peace.

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.

Today's unreported Arab antisemitism comes from a Tunisian writer, Sufian Ben Hassan, who writes in Al Watan Voice that the tiny amount of remaining Tunisian Jews are in fact the enemy of all proud Arab people.

He starts off by saying that the fact that so many Tunisian Jews left the country in the years after 1948, many to Israel, is proof positive that they were all really pro-Israel and anti-Arab all the time. The idea that the Tunisian government issued anti-Jewish laws after independence in 1956 and destroyed synagogues and Jewish cemeteries clearly is not a factor to Ben Hassan, who insists that the Tunisian Jews were always treated with full respect.

But what really gets Ben Hassan's blood boiling is the recent controversy over a Jewish French Tunisian comedian, Michel Boujenah, who was invited to perform at the International Festival of Carthage last month. Tunisian labor unions and and some prominent political figures were against his performance because he is pro-Israel, and at least one Tunisian Jewish community leader criticized those who were against his performance.

That fact is what Ben Hassan, in the tradition of all antisemites, uses to claim that all Tunisian Jews are therefore really little more than Israeli spies fighting against the nation that has treated them so well. "[The Jews] who remain today have strong ties to the enemy" he writes. even while he protests that he is not someone who groups all people in one bucket, he calls all Tunisian Jews "a poisoned dagger in the hands of the enemy."

One of the ironies of Jew-haters is how they explicitly show their hate while at the same time protesting that they are not at all bigoted.

Notably, the protest against Michel Boujenah failed badly. Some 50 people screamed insults at the Tunisians who attended the performance, which was to a full house of 600 fans.

“A performance of shame,” shouted some 50 protesters outside the tightly guarded Carthage Museum. “Tunisia for all,” others retorted in support of the event’s host, Tunisian-born French comedian Michel Boujenah.
Boujenah, one of the thousands of native Tunisians with Jewish origins, became a controversial figure in his homeland after making statements in support of Israel. When it was announced that Boujenah would perform at the International Festival of Carthage this year, the event drew an unprecedented level of controversy and many called for it to be boycotted.
The show, titled “Ma vie Rêvée” (“My Dream Life”), ended up selling out, with many Tunisians rallying around the comedian’s right to express himself freely. Despite the presence of protesters outside the venue, Boujenah’s performance July 19 proceeded with few disturbances.
“I love you,” Boujenah said to the crowd near the end of his performance. “Tunisia is a small country without oil resources but it is a big nation with its people.”

More than 600 people attended the show. Some introduced themselves to The Arab Weekly as devoted fans of the stand-up comic. Others said they came to honour Boujenah and show their solidarity.
Not everything was peaceful and heartening. Regardless of the attendees’ intentions, they were subjected to a barrage of insults from dozens of angry protesters outside the venue.
“Zionists! Traitors,” demonstrators shouted as police tried to keep them at a distance.

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.

Saudi newspaper, after criticism, removes story calling Hamas "terrorist" 4 times

Saudi Arabia's Al Riyadh reported on Friday:

A delegation from the leadership of the Hamas terrorist movement to attend an inauguration ceremony [in Iran]

The "Hamas" terrorist group announced on Friday the arrival of a delegation to Tehran to attend the a constitutional ceremony for the President-elect of the Republic of Iran Hassan Rowhani.

The terrorist group said in a press statement that the visit of its delegation, headed by its political bureau member Izzat al-Rishq and includes three of its leaders, including Saleh Aruri, are coming in response to an invitation from Iran.

Hamas is a terrorist group as classified by the United States and the European Union.

That is a lot of emphasis that Hamas is a terror group!

Hamas complained about this, as did its fans on social media and even non-Hamas media outlets. Afterwards, the newspaper silently removed the story.

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.

08/05 Links: The War Against H.R. McMaster State Department Is Broken

From Ian:

State Department Is Broken

Among the many stories of internecine battles within the Trump administration is the supposed discord between the White House and the State Department. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is reportedly frustrated with White House vetoes of his staff picks, the encroachment of Trump aides and family in the traditional business of diplomacy, and resents Trump’s unprofessional attacks on colleagues. Critics both inside and outside the State Department have questioned his leadership style and judgment, and some foreign policy watchers have speculated that Tillerson may be “the weakest secretary of state ever.” Others have written about growing State Department dysfunction, as well as Tillerson’s brusqueness and incompetence.
The State Department may be broken but, even if Tillerson’s tenure has highlighted its problems, the dysfunction in the State Department is deep-seated and extends well before Trump’s antics and Tillerson’s questionable management style.
Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief-of-staff Lawrence Wilkerson, for example, was a conspiracy theorist who has peddled in anti-Semitic dog whistles and has since found himself on the Academic Board of the Ron Paul Institute. In hindsight, while Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage proved himself a serial leaker in efforts to win bureaucratic battles against the Pentagon, the sustenance for many of the more outlandish conspiracies appears to have come from Wilkerson.
A whiff of corruption surrounds Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Department because of the Clinton Foundation and the diplomatic favors which foreign states apparently believed they could receive if they made a donation. But, beyond that, Clinton appeared to base her decisions about when and where to travel on personal vanity rather than strategic necessity.

EXCLUSIVE: ‘Everything The President Wants To Do, McMaster Opposes,’ Former NSC Officials Say

National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster is thwarting President Donald Trump’s foreign policy prescriptions, two former senior NSC officials told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Everything the president wants to do, McMaster opposes,” a former senior official said in a wide-ranging interview. “Trump wants to get us out of Afghanistan — McMaster wants to go in. Trump wants to get us out of Syria — McMaster wants to go in. Trump wants to deal with the China issue — McMaster doesn’t. Trump wants to deal with the Islam issue — McMaster doesn’t. You know, across the board, we want to get rid of the Iran deal — McMaster doesn’t. It is incredible to watch it happening right in front of your face. Absolutely stunning.”
One former official characterized McMaster as a “sycophant” of retired Army Gen. David Petraeus.
“I know that the president isn’t a big fan of what McMaster’s doing,” the former official declared. “I don’t understand why he’s allowing a guy who is subverting his foreign policy at every turn to remain in place.” he added.
The official continued that he expects a purge of “campaign Trump” loyalists to continue with particular intensity within the next two weeks.

The War Against H.R. McMaster

Long-simmering tensions within the White House burst into public view this week after the firings of three National Security Council officials, resulting in National-Security Adviser H.R. McMaster becoming Public Enemy No. 1 of the pro-Trump online brigades.
McMaster has cleaned house at the NSC over the past few weeks. Via his deputy Ricky Waddell, he fired director of strategic planning Rich Higgins last month over a memo Higgins wrote alleging a deep-state conspiracy against President Trump. McMaster then dismissed two top officials brought on by the previous national-security adviser, Michael Flynn: the NSC’s senior director for the Middle East, Derek Harvey, who was fired last week; and the senior director for intelligence programs, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, who was let go on Wednesday.
“I’m watching the elephants trample the grass as they fight each other,” said one senior White House official. “There is some collateral damage when the elephants fight.”
The dismissals have shaken up the NSC during a period of tumult in the White House. Press secretary Sean Spicer recently quit in protest of Anthony Scaramucci’s installation as communications director. Scaramucci was himself fired because of a profane rant he delivered to a reporter about White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and chief of staff Reince Priebus, who was also let go. Priebus’s replacement, former Department of Homeland Security chief John Kelly, has begun to formalize the chaotic Trump White House, limiting staff members’ direct access to the president. His entrance also gives McMaster—who has been at odds with Trump and has battled in particular with Bannon—a powerful new ally.

08/04 Links Pt2: As on the Temple Mount, so in Australia; Indoctrinating America's youth against Israel

From Ian:

The Left and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: The path to righteous hatred

In this timely and eloquent essay, Jamie Palmer explores the impact on the politics of the Left of desperately simplistic narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that have been designed to protect the Palestinian’s preordained status as wholly blameless victims, lacking either political agency or moral responsibility. Over the years, he argues, as the explanatory limitations of these narratives have encountered unfolding complexities on the ground – Arab terrorism, Palestinian maximalism and rejectionism, the suicide bombers of the Second Intifada, the rise of Islamist violence, popular eliminationist antisemitism – they have only produced new crises of understanding, and a requirement for ever more conspiratorial explanations of Israeli behaviour. Tendentious and conspiratorial anti-Zionist analyses have rushed into the vacuum of understanding, and have been absorbed by ever-larger sections of the Left. The wilful selectivity of an analysis that allows for no credit in the Israeli column, nor any debit in the Palestinian column, has produced a distorted view of the conflict, as tragic as it is unnecessary.
At the start of last year I wrote a column for Quillette about accusations of ‘pinkwashing’ made against the State of Israel and her supporters. This charge holds that (a) Israel uses a progressive record on gay rights as a means of distracting world attention from its treatment of Palestinians and (b) any attempt to universalise Western LGBT norms is a form of cultural imperialism intended to stigmatise Arab countries as backward and barbaric. It struck me as particularly odd that arguments like these were being made by left-wing activists and academics, many of whom self-identify as ‘queer’. Why would people ostensibly devoted to gay rights advocacy defend a lamentable record on LGBT issues and denounce a laudable one?
Among Palestine’s progressive supporters, I theorised, we are seeing a manifestation of the same perverse phenomenon George Orwell had observed among Western Stalinists at the end of the Second World War. Communism was believed by its adherents to be a more ethical and just system than capitalism and nothing Communist states actually did would be allowed to capsize this foundational moral judgement – not the gulags, not the famines, not the purges, not the pitiless persecution of free-thinkers and dissidents, and not the imperial subjugation of satellite states and their wretched populations. The failings and imperfections of the West’s liberal democracies, meanwhile, would be pored over at length, paradoxically aided by a free press and culture of self-criticism, the absence of which stymied open discussion in the Communist bloc.

Petra Marquardt-Bigman: As on the Temple Mount, so in Australia

Disbelief, disappointment and even fury erupted on social media in response to the news that a local council in Sydney, Australia, “has blocked plans for a new synagogue, saying it may become a terrorist target and poses an unacceptable security risk.” But perhaps all the people fuming about Australian cowardice and the failure to uphold freedom of worship should keep in mind that the “status quo” at Judaism’s holiest place, i.e. the Temple Mount, reflects the same eagerness to prevent “security risks:” while Israel’s Supreme Court has theoretically upheld Jewish prayer rights at the Temple Mount, Jews are effectively barred from exercising these rights whenever there is reason to fear that this might result in a “disturbance to the public order.”
And there has never been a day when there was no reason to fear that Jews praying at their holiest site wouldn’t result in a truly apocalyptic “disturbance to the public order.”
What is regarded all around the world as the sacrosanct “status quo” at Jerusalem’s holiest site means in practice that by threatening violence, Muslims can deny Jews the right to worship at the Temple Mount.
As I noted in a related post years ago, it is supposedly “Islamophobic” to assume “that Muslims are inclined to violence,” and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Australian authorities were to find themselves accused of such “Islamophobia.” But when it comes to the Temple Mount, which Muslims nowadays often call the “Al Aqsa compound,” or even simply Al Aqsa, Muslims like nothing better than to threaten massive violence in response to any perceived Jewish infringement. As we have recently seen, even “Jewish” metal detectors or security cameras at the entrances to the site can cause riots and violence.

The American Press Is Afraid to Report on Anti-Semitism When It Comes from Muslims

Responding to Israel’s installation of metal detectors on the Temple Mount, the California imam Ammar Shahin gave a sermon in which he explained the duty of Muslims everywhere—“not only in Palestine”—to exterminate the Jews, and then prayed for Allah to make this possible. While reports of the sermon soon appeared in Jewish and Israeli publications, as well as in right-leaning American ones, the imam’s words were first ignored, and then downplayed, by the mainstream media. Clifford May writes:
Imagine if a priest, minister, or rabbi were to call for Muslims to be annihilated. It would be a scandal [that] would spark a nation-wide controversy over Islamophobia, hate speech, and incitement to violence. So why is that not the case when an imam calls for the annihilation of Jews? . . .
On Thursday, the Los Angeles Times did run a piece. Its reluctance to do so was apparent from the first line: “A Northern California mosque that was targeted in a vandalism hate crime found itself at the center of controversy this week after an imam delivered a sermon with inflammatory remarks about Jews.” The vandalism—two bicycles destroyed and bacon draped over a door handle—occurred in January. The woman responsible was sentenced to five years’ probation. What this has to do with the imam calling for the killing of Jews was not explained. . . .
At a press event, the imam said he was “deeply sorry for the pain that I have caused. The last thing I would do is intentionally hurt anyone, Muslim, Jewish or otherwise. It is not in my heart, nor does my religion allow it.”

Gaza celebrates diversity

There was a military parade in Gaza recently, and all the terror groups got together to show how much they love Al Aqsa.

Look how diverse they are: two different kinds of black bandannas, dark blue, green and red!

Who says they aren't liberal?

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.