Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, November 01, 2017

11/01 Links Pt2: Palestinian leaders need to have ‘that’ Santa conversation with their people; Judo Shame

From Ian:

Britain’s Hard Left Has Come to Resemble a Religion, in Which “Zionists” Are among the Devils

Secularization has dramatically reduced the autonomy of this social sphere, as whole areas of social life have become the business of the state to police. The state is fast becoming a secular church, the fount of moral legislation, and is busy imposing a uniformity of belief on its citizens every bit as intrusive as the theocratic states of the past, where the distinction between church and state was likewise unknown.

From this development, it has followed that politicians have been only too willing to step into the role of prophets or high priests; and it is not surprising, therefore, that someone like Corbyn, who appears to offer a coherent worldview and gives clear guidance as to what people should believe, should be able to acquire a following.

That is one part of the story. The other major trend is simply the wholesale abandonment of the moral teaching associated with the Bible. For it is the first rule of Judeo-Christian morality that evil is to be found within us. . . . It is a prescription for humility which may be considered to be the very foundation of a gentle and harmonious social life.

The strength of this moral teaching is that it inoculates us against the self-righteousness that sees the world in dualistic terms, as divided between us and them, between the children of light and the children of darkness. For in the . . . vision of the Corbynistas, we are wholly virtuous, wholly pure, and wholly innocent; evil has nothing to do with us, but wholly to do with them, those wicked bankers, capitalists, neo-imperialists, Zionists, Tories, and racists, who must in due time be punished for their sins.

Alan Dershowitz: The Forward’s Defense of an Antisemitic Cartoon Is Unacceptable

When the official newspaper of Berkeley published a color caricature of me as a spider-like creature with one leg stomping on a Palestinian child and another holding an IDF soldier spilling the blood of an unarmed Palestinian, there was universal condemnation of what was widely seen as a throwback to the antisemitic imagery of the Nazi era. The chancellor condemned the cartoon, stating that, “its antisemitic imagery connects directly to the centuries-old ‘blood libel’ that falsely accused Jews of engaging in ritual murder.”

Writing in the Daily Cal, students from a pro-Israel organization at Berkeley debunked the claim that the cartoonist and the student paper editors at the Daily Cal could not have known that this cartoon was seeped in traditional antisemitic stereotyping, when considering its deep roots in European, and even American, publications.

In the cartoon, Dershowitz is depicted with a hooked nose and a body of a large amorphous black sphere. His exaggerated head and contorted legs and hands evoke images of a spider. The rhetoric of Jews as ‘invasive’ insects in society, trying to take over resources and power, has long been used to justify violence, persecution and murder. The two elements of the cartoon, with Dershowitz’s face in the front and the black body in the back, plays into the antisemitic trope of Jews as shape-shifting, sub-human entities using deception and trickery in order to advance their own agendas. This rhetoric is nowhere more common than in Nazi propaganda, and can be traced far beyond WWII in European and American media.

The students also wrote about the “pain” the antisemitic cartoon had caused them:
To a Jewish student on this campus, seeing this cartoon in the Daily Cal is a reminder that we are not always welcome in the spaces we call home…

Telling Jews that we can or cannot define what is offensive to us, because of our status as privileged minority in the United States, is antisemitic.
Some students also pointed to the swastika that had defaced my picture on a poster outside Berkeley Law School, as evidence of a pervasive antisemitism disguised as anti-Zionism on that campus.

Not surprisingly, it was only an op-ed writer for the Forward who not only denied that the imagery was antisemitic, but actually justified it:
The mere appearance of blood near a Jew is not a blood libel. The State of Israel has an army, and that army sometimes kills Palestinians, including women and children. When you prick those people, I am told, they bleed. It is perverse to demand of artists that they represent actual, real Israeli violence without blood, just because European Christians invented a fake accusation.

Palestinian leaders need to have ‘that’ Santa conversation with their people

It can’t be easy for a parent to tell their child, after years of excitement, that in fact there’s no rotund, white-bearded man who lives at the North Pole, flies around the world on a sleigh with supersonic reindeer, comes down chimneys, drinks milk, eats a cookie then leaves you presents. The news must be devastating, and at least for a while, there must be a distinct lack of trust between parent and child. That’s presumably why most parents put off telling their children for as long as possible.

I’m not comparing the Palestinian population to children, but certainly their leadership is selling their own version of the Santa story to them.

“The problem for Palestinians is that we are surrounded by Israel” said a Palestinian commentator on radio this week. This throwaway remark, amid a series of rehearsed and anodyne platitudes about Palestinian national unity flowing from the rapprochement of Hamas and Fatah in Gaza and the West Bank, revealed the real motives of this entente.

Let’s think about that opening sentence for a minute. That’s a bit like saying that the problem with the Czech Republic is that it is “surrounded by Germany and Poland.” Does the Palestinian commentator regard a future Palestinian State as an island like Tristan de Cunha, devoid of neighbors? A blissfully isolated utopia? Sadly, the answer is much less fanciful, but just as absurd.

The Palestinian leadership, and by proxy the population as a whole, cannot get their heads around the fact that the “Nakba” (the disaster, as they refer to the creation of the State of Israel) is not a flash in the pan, and that some 70 years later, Israel exists, is flourishing and isn’t going anywhere.

Y. Ben-David was the pseudonym of a man who was quiet and unassuming in his everyday life. A talented engineer, he eschewed the ways of the big names in his field, preferring to go about his work with diligence but without fanfare, as a relatively unknown, but loyal cog in the wheel. Like Clark Kent, however, he was leading a double life.

Everyone thought Clark Kent a mild-mannered reporter. No one knew that in reality, he was Superman, a guy with superpowers who battled the most monstrous people and evils imaginable—and WON.

Superman was this buff handsome guy with a cape, while Clark? He was just this nice guy with

glasses. Even the woman Kent loved, Lois Lane, overlooked him. Lois was, meanwhile, nursing a serious yen for Superman, never suspecting that Clark and Superman were one and the same guy/superhero.

You'd think it would make Clark Kent boiling mad. But he just sucked it up. It came with the superhero territory.

Y. Ben-David, a secret superhero in the flesh, would put in a day's work at the office, then come home to battle evil antisemites at night, online. Armed with nothing but a keen knowledge of Jewish history and current events, he would confront the haters. And just like Superman, when and where he was needed, Y. Ben-David was there.

Meanwhile, no one at the office had any inkling of his extracurricular superhero work.

I first learned of Y. Ben-David's true identity 10 months ago, the day after he left a lengthy and intelligent comment on my piece, Ten Most Hateful Points About Kerry's Post-Abstention Speech. He wrote, in part:

I was not surprised at all at what Obama and Kerry did. I was expecting it. They both view Israel as an anachronistic, colonialist vestige that has no right to exist. However, as smart politicians who reached high positions without having any real credentials they, as Democrats, felt they had to play up to influential Jews by pretending they "love Israel" (BTW-any time anyone like them or TV commentators prefaces his comments with "I love Israel", you can know they really despise Israel).

There were open hints of this in the past...when Obama refused to send a high-ranking official to the big Paris demonstration in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo Massacre. Obama didn't view the attack as terrorism, he thinks of it as understandable payback for the legacy of French colonialism Same with his comment about the Jewish victims of the Hypercachere attack as "random folks in a deli".

Kerry also showed what his real views are when he snuck in an underhanded antisemitic comment which was "while the US is cutting its budget, it in increasing its aid to Israel" thereby implying that Jews are taking food out of the mouths of hungry Americans...which is nonsense since virtually all the aid money is spent in the US as a subsidy for the American defense industries.

Now, I always note a thoughtful, intelligent commenter, so I filed the name Y. Ben-David in my mind for future reference. But it wasn't long before I heard the name again. In fact, it was the very next evening.

A friend and I were in a car on the highway coming home from an event, when my friend shyly asked if I'd seen a comment from Y. Ben-David on my latest blog. Knowing that my friend, while deeply Zionist, is not especially political, I wondered how she knew this.

"Y. Ben-David is my son," she told me, a note of pride in her voice. "He goes on all the anti-Israel websites to fight the haters. He knows everything about the State of Israel, everything about Jewish history. He fights the haters with facts.

"I kept telling him he had to read your blogs. So he did. He likes what you write," said my friend, who added, "No one knows he does this, so don't tell anyone. It's why he doesn't use his real name. He doesn't want anyone to know."

I could picture this man at his computer. Scholarly, earnest, someone who loved his people and his nation. And now I was proud of him, too. Why not? He was one of my people, doing this amazing thing, expecting no praise, wanting none, doing it all anonymously from a pure heart. One of the best!

I never got to meet Y. Ben-David and now I never will. At least not in this life. He died suddenly on Monday morning, without fanfare. It was the same unassuming way he'd lived his life, as a mild-mannered engineer by day, but a fearsome warrior for Israel at night, in the privacy of his study. His ultimate struggle had occurred in private, too.

I paid a shiva call to my friend today, and she reminded me that her son had done this amazing work, and how no one knew about it, how everyone thought he was just this quiet guy who kept to himself. As I was leaving, my friend clasped my hands hard, tears in her eyes, and said, "If there is any way you can commemorate him, the work he did, we would be so grateful."

There would be no photo of him to accompany my piece. No airing of his real name. And in fact, my friend let on that Y. Ben-David had more than one alias. His influence was wider than anyone could have imagined.

No one knew it was him, but he was out there fighting the Richard Silversteins, Brant Rosens, and +972 Magazines of the world, every single night. Google Y. Ben-David and you'll see he was everywhere. Fighting the bad guys, and doing it right, with provable facts and intelligent analysis.

Y. Ben-David was a warrior for his people and his nation, which he saw as indivisible.

The loss is keen.

May his memory be a blessing and may his family be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

[EoZ] Y. Ben-David's actual email address was named after Bar-Kochba, meaning that Varda's characterization of him as a "warrior" is more on-target than she perhaps realized. He commented here hundreds of times since 2011. Baruch Dayan Emet.

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.

Theorists Struggle To Posit Israeli Move Not Deemed Blow To Peace Process (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Stanford, November 1 - Scientists testing the principles of theoretical physics have so far been unable to create hypothetical situations in which an action by Israel will not be construed as a threat to the peace process with the Palestinians, a news brief in the journal Physics reports.

Writing to report on the latest developments - or lack thereof - in the Israeli-Palestinian niche of the field, a group of scientists indicated that through sixteen months of calculations, diagrams, experimentation, and analysis, they have yet to posit a move by Israel that would not immediately be characterized as undermining the peace process or the Two-State Solution.

"We will continue our work," one scientist was quoted as saying. "But so far the results have proved disappointing."

In an interview, research team leader Professor Palli Wood described the various ways in which each hypothetical Israeli move would meet its ignominious fate. "So far, and this might serve as the basis of an interesting model to explain the dynamic, the possible imprecations involving such moves fall into three categories," she explained. "The most common reaction to an Israeli action involves painting it as directly opposite to peace, or to a desire for peace. That's the simplest and easiest to predict."

"The second type of negative reaction takes an Israeli move that, if performed by some other party, might be ignored or considered unremarkable," she continued. "But because Israel is the party performing the action, the very neutrality or irrelevance of the action becomes a demonstration of Israel's lack of commitment to the peace process or the Two-State Solution. If Israel were serious about peace, the argument goes, it would not waste its time on moves that, while they do nothing to hinder the peace process, do nothing to advance it, either, and therefore call into question whether Israel really wants peace."

Professor Wood finds the third type of response most worthy of study, however. "Finally, when Israel does do something positive, something constructive, or manifestly in keeping with the letter and spirit of the agreements that govern the peace process, there's still a way it's turned into a blow to that very process," she remarked. "Instead of demonstrating willingness to pursue peace, instead these moves become proof that Israel is merely engaging in deceit, 'peacewashing,' if you will, attempting to pull the wool over the eyes of the international community. It could not possibly be that Israel is interested in peace, an axiom that leads to the inevitable conclusion that any Israeli moves in the direction of peace as envisioned by the stewards of the process must perforce be insincere, diversionary, or otherwise a threat to peace."

The scientists noted the opposite dynamic with regard to Palestinian behavior, concerning which the theorists have yet to posit an action or set of actions so heinous that international consensus might question Palestinian willingness to make 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.

11/01 Links Pt1: Ahead of Balfour 100, UK enshrines Churchill’s headstrong case for Israel; The Terror Tunnels of Gaza

From Ian:

Bibi: " Do Not Test the Will of the State of Israel or the Army of Israel."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara attended a memorial ceremony to honor the Australian and New Zealand soldiers who fell during World War One. The ceremony is part of the events marking 100 years since the battle for Be'er Sheba. Also attending the ceremony were Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his wife and New Zealand Governor General Patsy Reddy and her husband.

Transcript of Bibi's speech:
"Thank you, ANZAC soldiers and the families of the brave Aussies and Kiwis who fought here and died here.

Nearly 4,000 years ago, Abraham came to Be'er Sheba, the City of Seven Wells. Exactly 100 years ago, brave ANZAC soldiers liberated Beer Sheba for the sons and daughters of Abraham and opened the gateway for the Jewish people to reenter the stage of history. The heroism of your fallen men will never be forgotten. The brave soldiers who are buried here played a crucial role in defeating the Ottoman Empire, liberating the Holy Land, ending 400 years of Ottoman rule in one great dash.

This momentous occasion was a historic milestone in the natural kinship between our peoples. When I say natural, I don’t just mean the way we address life and each other, that easy informality, that warmth. That was evident from the moment our people met your people. I mean something deeper, because there’s a historical significance of what happened here. ANZAC soldiers went on to capture Jerusalem, Tiberius, Megiddo, then continued northward. They were actually retracing the footsteps of the heroes of the Bible. They were stepping on the verses of the Bible, and they knew it, and their clergy who spoke of this so movingly a moment ago, they knew it too.

This partnership began two years earlier, in 1915, with a great defeat. In the defeat at Gallipoli, two things were forged. One, the absolute resolve of the ANZAC forces to redeem their fallen brethren and establish this glorious victory here. And the second thing that was forged was the first meeting between ANZAC fighters and Jewish fighters, the first Jewish fighters who stood shoulder to shoulder with them in Gallipoli, the first Jewish fighting force in 2,000 years. And that continued here with the Jewish Legion that helped liberate Palestine here, in this campaign that we mark today. This was a point, a partnership that has historic significance today.That’s the spirit of the army of Israel. It stands today. We set out a simple policy: We seek peace with all our neighbors, but we will not tolerate any attacks on our sovereignty, on our people, on our land, whether from the air, from the sea, from the ground or below the ground. We attack those who seek to attack us. And those who contemplate that, I strongly advise you: Do not test the will of the State of Israel or the army of Israel.

PM Netanyahu & Australian PM Turnbull at Battle of Be'er Sheba Centenary Service

PMW: PA accuses Israel of using "poisonous gas" while exploding terror tunnel

Yesterday, Israel carried out a controlled explosion to destroy an attack tunnel dug by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terror group that started in the Gazan city of Khan Younis and crossed into Israeli territory.

A member of Islamic Jihad, Khaled Al-Batsh, explained [in Al-Dustour (Jordanian newspaper), Oct. 31, 2017] that the tunnel that Israel attacked "was intended for freeing prisoners from the Israeli occupation prisons." Al-Batsh was implying that the purpose of the tunnel was to facilitate the entry of Islamic Jihad terrorists into Israel, to kidnap Israelis who would then be used as hostages to force Israel to release prisoners.

At least seven members of the Islamic Jihad and Hamas terror organizations, including senior terrorist commanders, were killed in the explosion of the tunnel.

Instead of condemning the digging of the terror tunnel, Mahmoud Abbas's PA and Fatah chose to accuse Israel of using "poisonous gas" in breach of International law.

JCPA: The Terror Tunnels of Gaza

Since the end of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014, the terror organizations in the Gaza Strip – headed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which are close to Iran – have been engaged in an unprecedented military buildup. The aim is to rehabilitate their military capabilities which were damaged in the war against the IDF. According to Israeli security sources, the Palestinian organizations have managed to bring their capabilities to a point well beyond what they had in 2014.

That has included manufacturing a large number of rockets, developing new weapons such as drones, building up elite units such as naval commandos, and digging new attack tunnels into Israel, which Hamas and Islamic Jihad view as a “strategic weapon.”

The tunnel-digging is a large-scale project that employs thousands of people and costs tens of millions of dollars. Hamas and Islamic Jihad receive financial and technological assistance from Iran for the project. A large portion of the financial resources also comes from tax revenues that are supposed to alleviate Gaza’s electricity, water, and employment shortages but are diverted to the tunnel project.

On October 24, 2017, Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza who is also commander of its Izzadin al-Qassam military wing, boasted that the military wing can now fire in 51 minutes the same number of rockets it fired at Israel during the 51 days of Operation Protective Edge.

Sinwar also revealed that Hamas has managed to smuggle large quantities of weapons into Gaza. “The quantity of weapons we brought into the Strip in 2015-2016 is much larger than the entire quantity we brought into the Strip during the past 10 years,” he said.

As noted, Hamas and Islamic Jihad see the tunnels into Israeli territory as a “strategic weapon” that deters Israel.

The Western media never grasps the sheer amount of time and money that Iran spends on demonizing Israel (and America.) It is a truly psychopathic obsession.

From Mehr News:

The second meeting of International Union of Resistance Scholars has kicked off Wed. with presence of over 700 prominent Shia and Sunni scholars from 80 countries in Beirut, Lebanon.

Participating at the event are the head of the Resistance Scholars Union, Sheikh Maher Hammoud; Lebanon's Hezbollah leader Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah; and Secretary General of the World Forum for proximity of the Islamic Schools of Thought Ayatollah Mohsen Araki, giving their speech over the critical situation of Palestine and its leading role in boosting unity and solidarity among Muslims.

That tells the entire story. Iran wants to be the leader of the Muslim world, and there is only one thing that has historically unified that world: hatred of Israel.

But that solidarity is cracking, as the Arab world grows more sick of the Palestine issue. Iran must stoke the flames any way it can because without that there is nothing left but the Shiite/Sunni schism which has always been much more pronounced - and deadly.

Opening the conference, the head of the Resistance Scholars Union, Sheikh Maher Hammoud stressed that “the Israelis believe in the certainty of their collapse more than the Muslims.”

Well, there's some wishful thinking there.

Ayatollah Khamenei also gave a message about how everyone needs to unite to destroy Israel.

The group was created in 2014 and held its first conference in 2015. which sounded a great deal like this one.

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.

Jews praying at the tomb of Yaakov Abuhatzeira before the ban by Egypt

From Egypt Today:

Israeli Ambassador to Egypt David Govrin visited the tomb of Yaakov Abuhatzeira in the Beheira governorate’s city of Damanhour, a security source in Beheira said on Tuesday.

The Israeli ambassador’s visit came amid tight security, and then he left the tomb after 30 minutes, heading to the embassy’s premises.

In December 2014, the Administrative Court of Alexandria banned the annual festivities, previously attended by hundreds of Jews at Abuhatzeira’s gravesite in the Nile Delta city of Damanhur, where the rabbi was buried in 1879 en route to Israel.

Times of Israel reported in 2015 about Egypt's ban on the celebrations of Rabbi Abuhatzeira's birthday:

In December 2010, the last time a large group of 550 Israelis traveled to Egypt, they were met with signs reading “death to the Jews.”

Egypt’s Nasserist party launched a campaign titled “You shall not pass on my land,” calling on the government to disallow any “Zionist” presence in Egypt.

Reports at the time about the Egyptian court case to ban the celebrations noted that the decision mentioned "outraged local sensibilities over the annual festival, saying villagers objected to the mingling of men and women and celebrants' drinking of alcohol."

Egypt's Al Masry al-Youm notes with sadness that the Egyptian court only banned the marking the anniversary of Rabbi Abuhatzeira's birth (which usually falls in January), so they legally couldn't do anything to prevent Govrin's visit.

However, the Al Masry al-Youm article adds some details about the Alexandria court decision that had never been reported in English before:

Among its considerations in the verdict, the court mentioned that the Jews had no influence that is worth mentioning on Egyptian civilization/culture, and they have not contributed at all to human knowledge of the history of civilization/culture.

This isn't a judicial determination of facts. This is raw antisemitism in an official Egyptian court ruling.

Moreover, the court ruling overturned a 2001 Egyptian decision to consider the site a protected Egyptian antiquity and instructed the state to inform UNESCO not to consider the site to be special any more.

In addition, it said that it is forbidden to move the rabbi's remains to Israel.

At the time of the decision in 2014, human rights groups in Egypt were notably silent about the obvious antisemitism around the verdict.

A number of heads of Egyptian human rights organizations and others concerned with religious freedoms refused to comment on the verdict, requesting time to consider it and examine the extent of its contradiction in regard to the religious freedoms of the Jewish comunity in Egypt. Article 64 of the 2014 Egyptian Constitution covers the freedom to hold religious rites.
Some human rights groups have remained silent about the verdict because of social and cultural pressures. Their silence is to prevent the new government from possibly being accused of favoring Israel or allowing the entry of Israeli tourists into Egypt under the pretext of celebrating Abu Hasira's birth should their objection to the court decision force the executive to overturn the ruling.
Ali el-Samman, president of the International Union for Intercultural and Interfaith Dialogue and Peace Education (ADIC), told Al-Monitor, “Everyone is required to respect the judicial verdict and not to comment on it.”

It isn't that human rights organizations don't believe that Jews have human rights. It's just that, by sheer coincidence, in any case where they might be asserted, any Jewish human rights must always take a back seat to some other more important considerations - like the Jew-hating attitudes of the locals and the political situation that makes the topic of Jews touchy.

(h/t Ibn Boutros and Abdallah Mashaallah)

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.

Haaretz, apparently thinking it cannot find enough Israel haters on its staff, has a guest op-ed from Donald Macintyre who used to cover Gaza for The Independent:

Mahmoud al-Bahtiti, who has been fixing car and truck engines in Gaza City for the past 50 years didn’t vote in the 2006 Palestinian elections because he trusted neither Fatah nor Hamas.

But on Britain, he has definite opinions – or at least, about Britain circa 1917. He doesn't need a centenary commemoration to bring up the Balfour Declaration with a British visitor.

Last year, his business struggling for lack of customers, he asked me a question. Given that "We [Palestinians] are still suffering as a result" of the Declaration, wouldn’t an apology from the British government be in order?

Mahmoud wasn’t trying to get back what is now Israel. In his words: “The Jewish people took their rights after Hitler committed massacres against them. But who will give us our rights? Britain gave our lands to the Israelis and they never cared to give us our rights."

Obviously, Macintyre thinks that Mahmoud is speaking some deep truth here.

But guess what? The Palestinians could have had a state in 1937. And 1947. And 2000. And 2001. And 2008. And even under the Netanyahu government in 2014!

They have rejected every single peace plan. But hateful pseudo-experts like Macintyre know that the Palestinians are without any blame. Let's blame Great Britain for their plight. (News flash, Donald: If there was no Balfour Declaration and the Zionists weren't successful, there would still not be a "Palestinian state." It would have been gobbled up by Jordan, Egypt and Syria. You know this is true because in 1917 there were essentially no such thing as Palestinian nationalism.)

Macintyre isn't done with his idiocy and hate, though:

If the British government wanted, 100 years after Balfour, to rethink its historic role in the conflict, it could begin by persuading its EU partners (while, pre-Brexit, it still has any) to reinforce the one initiative currently in play: The attempt at Hamas-Fatah reconciliation. To commemorate a point in history when the conflict deepened with support for a process of unification, at least on the one, weaker side.

He writes this a day after Hamas was discovered to be building a tunnel into Israel to perform war crimes. War crimes which Fatah condoned. So, Macintyre is saying the best chance for peace is to allow two terrorist groups to unite - and for Britain to encourage it.

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.

Iraqi Parliament criminalizes display of Israeli flag

From Voice of America:

Following the display of the Israeli flag in pro-independence Kurdish rallies, the Iraqi parliament, known as the Council of Representatives, voted Tuesday to ban the Israeli flag, describing it as a Zionist symbol.

"A dangerous phenomenon, representing the hoisting of the Zionist entity flag during public rallies in front of the media, has recently appeared that breaks the basic constitutional principles of Iraq," Salim al-Jabouri, Speaker of the Iraqi parliament, said while announcing the law that vows criminal prosecution against those who raise the Israeli flag in the country.

"This is an exercise that damages the reputation of Iraq and its nation and the law punishes it by the maximum penalties," the speaker added.

The law was introduced by the parliamentary bloc of the Shiite Supreme Islamic Council and was unanimously approved by other members of the Iraqi parliament. It ordered law enforcement to pursue criminal charges against "those who promote Zionist symbols in public rallies in any form, including the hoisting of the Zionist flag."

Is there anyone more insecure than these people? The idea that Kurds might be Zionist is such a threat to Iraq (whose parliament Shiite bloc are puppets of Iran) that they have to criminalize the Israeli flag?

They sound like 7 year olds who are afraid of "cooties."

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.

10/31 Links Pt2: Calling Out the Tellers of Anti-Israel Lies; When old and new anti-Semitism come together

From Ian:

Calling Out the Tellers of Anti-Israel Lies

Media coverage of, and academic writings about, Israel routinely betray the intellectual integrity that should govern both. Israel has paid a steep price; the Palestinians perhaps even more so.

It would be difficult to quantify precisely the damage inflicted by the omissions, distortions, and accusations that routinely disfigure portrayals of Israel. Still, the steady flow of malicious propaganda posing as news and scholarship poisons the debate about a complex and tragic clash between two peoples. The frequent characterizations of Israel as a moral and political monster — a state supposedly guilty of colonialism, apartheid, and all manner of war crimes and crimes against humanity including forced population transfer, ethnic cleansing, and genocide — reinforce Palestinian expectations that their demands be met immediately and in full while bolstering Israeli suspicions that they can’t get a fair hearing in the court of public opinion and can’t secure a just deal under the international community’s auspices. Gross untruths about Israel drive the parties further apart, not only defaming Israel but also setting back the legitimate interests of the Palestinians, whose cause they are contrived to advance.

Emphasizing your side’s merits and the other side’s defects is only human, and partisan reporting is an old story. The new story is that in service, for the most part, to progressive political goals, Western journalists and professors have flouted their professional obligations in order to erect an edifice of falsehoods about Israel.

To catalogue the falsehoods, expose their authors, and set the record straight requires prodigious research and painstaking documentation, a grasp of contemporary political realities, and a synoptic, historically informed understanding of the larger Israeli-Arab conflict. With the 2014 publication in Hebrew of “Tasiyat Hashkarim,” which became a bestseller in Israel, journalist Ben-Dror Yemini established that he was the man for the task. His “Industry of Lies: Media, Academia, and the Israeli-Arab Conflict,” just appearing in English translation from Hebrew, will prove indispensable to those politicians and policy makers, journalists and professors, and members of the general public who believe that getting the story right in the Middle East is inseparable from advancing the cause of peace.

Ben-Dror Yemini: When old and new anti-Semitism come together

The Jews in the United States, we are told again and again, are in a wonderful state. Indeed, in most Jewish communities, especially in New York, the number of anti-Semitic incidents is infinitesimal. The Jews are living a good life.

But something is simmering below the surface. During Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and over the past year as well, the radical right wing has been the main star of incidents anti-Semitic in nature. This Right should not be discounted. It was dangerous in the past, and it could be dangerous again.

Something else is happening, however, and not just below the surface. Within several days, three things happened in the United States that were completely unrelated, apart from the fact they likely won’t be recorded as anti-Semitic incidents, although I doubt anyone thinks otherwise.

Let’s start with Alan Dershowitz, a well-known figure, who has been visiting campuses. It’s worth noting he isn’t right-wing. His worldview, in Israeli terms, would classify him somewhere around the Zionist Union. He is affiliated with the Democratic Party, and he is perhaps the finest speaker against the campaign to demonize Israel.

About two weeks ago, he gave a lecture at Berkeley. A week later, the local student-run newspaper, The Daily Californian, published a cartoon showing Dershowitz addressing an audience as a liberal presenting his case for Israel, but all the audience can only see is his face. In the hidden part, Dershowitz has an IDF soldier on his palm shooting a Palestinian boy, and another Palestinian boy is being crushed under his foot.

One can cry out “freedom of speech” of course, but it’s kind of difficult to hide the image of child-murdering Jews. Old anti-Semitism and new anti-Semitism in a joint performance. And it’s happening in the stronghold of progress, Berkeley.

Iraq bans Israeli flags after Kurds wave them at independence rallies

The Iraqi parliament voted on Tuesday to criminalize the flying of Israeli flags after the banners were held aloft at a number of Kurdish independence rallies ahead of a referendum in September.

The vote to ban the flags from public spaces came at the request of Ammar al-Hakim, the Shiite leader of the Citizen Bloc, the Iraqi news agency AlSumaria reported.

Israel has been among the only countries to openly support an independent Kurdish state, and many Kurds have welcomed the support, drawing accusations from Arab leaders that the referendum was a Zionist plot.

Turkey fiercely opposed the referendum and has threatened sanctions against the region, reflecting its worries about its own sizable Kurdish minority.

Iran and Iraq’s central government in Baghdad also expressed alarm over the referendum and have refused to recognize its validity.

Say that "peace" means "destroy Israel" enough times, soon people will believe it

An apparel company called "Wear the Peace" just came out with their newest collection: a line of clothing with a map of "Palestine" as a folded keffiyeh - and no Israel.

But they want peace! They say it right in their very name! Why should anyone think that a peace organization that calls for ethnically cleansing Jews from Israel is anything but peaceful?

(h/t Mitchell)

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.

1915 encyclopedia describes the characteristics of Jews

From the New International Encyclopedia, 1915 edition, published by Dodd, Mead, Volume 12, under "Jews:"

Besides the obvious antisemitic stereotypes - all the more striking because this was written to be the 1915 equivalent of "politically correct" - there is one other striking part of this description.

In may ways, it describes the exact opposite of the Zionists who were starting to rebuild Israel.

They reveled in physical labor to build their homeland. They were soldiers and pioneers rather than martyrs. They didn't care about social position. (And the Zionists of the time were not religious.)

No one in 1915 could have imagined the Jews, of all people, would build a vibrant nation only 33 years later.

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.

10/31 Links Pt1: Israeli deterrence in a new Middle East; Year Zero: The Palestinians and the Balfour Declaration

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Our crazy world this week

Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Video Network the Democrats’ Russian boomerang (which of course has been generally ignored or scorned), VP Mike Pence’s initiative to support the persecuted Christians of the Middle East, and the Catalan crisis that has erupted in Spain.

Year Zero: The Palestinians and the Balfour Declaration

For the Palestinians, the year zero is not 1948, when the State of Israel came into being, but 1917, when Great Britain issued, in the November of that year, the Balfour Declaration — expressing support for the establishment of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine.

So central is the Balfour Declaration to Palestinian political identity that the “Zionist invasion” is officially deemed to have begun in 1917 — not in 1882, when the first trickle of Jewish pioneers from Russia began arriving, nor in 1897, when the Zionist movement held its first congress in Basel, nor in the late 1920s, when thousands of German Jews fleeing the rise of Nazism chose to go to Palestine.

The year 1917 is the critical date because that is when, as an anti-Zionist might say, the Zionist hand slipped effortlessly into the British imperial glove. It is a neat, simple historical proposition upon which the entire Palestinian version of events rests: an empire came to our land and gave it to foreigners, we were dispossessed, and for five generations now, we have continued to resist.

Moreover, it is given official sanction in the Palestine National Covenant of 1968, in which article 6 defines Jews who “were living permanently in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion” as “Palestinians” — an invasion that is dated as 1917 in the covenants’ notes.

As the Balfour Declaration’s centenary approaches on November 2, tes theme is much in evidence. There is now a dedicated Balfour Apology Campaign in the UK, seeking both British government contrition and British taxpayer-funded reparations for the supposed handing of Palestine, in the words of one British Mandate-era Arab organization, into “the claws of the Jews.”

'The criminal Balfour Declaration'

The Palestinians - an invented people - have not only tried to deny the rights of Jews to the land they were promised, they have also tried to trace their roots to the Canaanites; they claim Jesus was Palestinian; the Jewish Temple was built in Sinai, not in Jerusalem; the ancient Israelite kings were actually Muslims, and the Jews are just a melee of people that will forever endure God's wrath; they are actually of Khazar origin, they are not entitled to a homeland, but perhaps they can live as second-class citizens under Islam.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has stood fast in the face of the annoying Palestinian efforts to extract an apology. Instead, she has voiced pride in the declaration and said there were no grounds to walk it back.

The Balfour Declaration is not the basis for Israel. The state was founded based on the historical and religious rights of the people of Israel on this holy soil.

Because the promise of a Jewish national home is anchored in the three monotheistic religions, the Palestinians who are fighting the facts must also sue the biblical prophets, Jesus, and especially Allah and the Prophet Muhammad, who promised this land to the people of Israel and never mentioned the Palestinians.