As of this writing, the site seems to be down, but the UN has a style guide that includes a dictionary of commonly-used words whose spelling needs to be standardized. Even though the guide says it uses the Concise Oxford English Dictionary as its default authority on spelling, some words are used so often that the style guide can be used to save time from looking them up in the dictionary.
One such word is "Judaize."
The UN websites use that word over a thousand times. As far as I can tell, it is always in the context of Israel wanting to "Judaize" Jerusalem (or, as many UN documents call it, Al Quds.)
"Judaizing" Jerusalem is like wetting water. But thanks to efforts of those antisemites who want to cut all ties of Judaism to Jerusalem, like the UN, the word has become a pejorative.
Needless to say, "Islamicize" and "Christianize" are not words that are needed in the UN spelling style guide.
(h/t Irene)
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Ma'an reports that the Hamas-linked committee in charge of the weekly riots at the Gaza border has announced that Iran plans to pay the families of anyone killed in the riots.
In addition, Iran says it will pay those injured, and also provide medical attention for them.
"Iran's adoption of the martyrs of the return and wounded marchers is an important step in supporting the steadfastness of the people and supporting the resistance in this way and in other ways," said Hussein Mansour, a member of the Coordinating Committee for the March of Return and Breaking the Siege.
Mansour called on the Arab world to follow Iran's lead in "supporting the Palestinian people, supporting their steadfastness and supporting the continuation of the resistance."
Generally, Iran's financial support for Gaza has been through Islamic Jihad "charities." It has had an on-again, off-again relationship with Hamas which doesn't want to upset other Arabs by openly associating with Iran. By using this committee as a front, Hamas can enjoy the benefits of Iranian assistance without accepting funding directly.
Mansour said that the payments would be made without regard to political parties and organizations that the recipients belong to.
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Words matter, and when lies get embedded into everyday descriptions of the Middle East as fact it is enormously difficult to set the record straight.
National Geographic has a nice article (not yet online) about the race to find and preserve Biblical archaeological texts, many of which can be found in Israel and areas controlled by Israel. But one parenthetical statement makes one wonder who does fact checking for the esteemed magazine.
"In 1993, after signing the Oslo Accords - which provided a framework for returning disputed territories to Palestinian control - the Israeli government launched Operation Scroll, an urgent survey of all the archaeological sites the country potentially stood to lose."
It is nice that the author didn't lazily say "occupied territories" instead of "disputed territories," but it is quite untrue that Oslo was about "returning disputed territories to Palestinian control."
Because they were never under control of anyone known as Palestinians, nor were they ever under control of any independent political entity since the Romans defeated the Jews in 70 CE.
They were under control of Jordanians, British, Ottomans, Crusaders, Fatimids, Umayyads, Byzantines and others - but never the Arabs who moved into the area many centuries after the Jewish kingdoms fell.
Too many people think it is axiomatic that a people called the Palestinians have been indigenous to the region and deserve to control "their" land. However, the Palestinian Arab people are an invention of the 20th century. There were Arabs in the land called Palestine but they were not a people by any definition of the term; no one identified them as such and they didn't identify themselves as such.
Many get very upset when this is pointed out but mollifying those who implicitly threaten violence when they don't get their way does no service to the truth.
If the land is being "returned" to any indigenous people, it is the Jewish people who deserve it. Whether the current Israeli government decides it is in the interests of its people to give the land away to others is a separate issue. If any people can claim the right to the land, from a historical, moral or legal perspective, it is the Jewish people.
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Everyone except anti-Semites understands that Israeli actions don’t justify attacks on Jewish citizens of other countries, but rampant anti-Israel sentiment often makes anti-Semites believe that society will tolerate such attacks as long as they can be portrayed as “anti-Israel.” And this belief is hardly unfounded. To take just one example, consider the notorious case of a German synagogue firebombed in 2014. Both the trial court and the appeals court ruled that this wasn’t an anti-Semitic crime, but merely an overly zealous form of political opposition to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Consequently, the perpetrators received mere suspended sentences.
In short, hostility toward Israel in the surrounding society encourages anti-Semitic acts among people who already hold anti-Semitic beliefs. And since hostility toward Israel emanates primarily from the left these days, it’s no surprise that such hostility is higher in liberal Western Europe than conservative Eastern Europe. Thus, both of the main contributors to anti-Semitism in Europe today—Islamic anti-Semitism and left-wing hostility toward Israel—are more prevalent in the liberal West than in the allegedly “fascist, anti-Semitic” countries of Eastern Europe.
None of the above implies that right-wing anti-Semitism isn’t a real problem; it obviously is. Nor does it imply that Eastern Europe’s right-wing governments have a clean bill of health on anti-Semitism; they have been responsible for some undeniably problematic acts and statements. It certainly doesn’t guarantee that nationalist parties won’t turn against the Jews tomorrow, as a prominent European rabbi warned last week. The British Labour Party’s swift transformation into an anti-Semitic cesspool shows just how quickly Jew-friendly attitudes can disappear. And it doesn’t mean America’s situation is necessarily analogous; the U.S. is too different from Europe for easy parallels to be drawn.
Yet to pretend, as many American Jews do, that right-wing anti-Semitism is the only kind we need to worry about flies in the face of reality, at least as it has played out in Europe. The European reality similarly belies the claim that rightist governments are, by definition, bad for the Jews. And given that reality, Netanyahu’s close relations with conservative European governments could actually help combat anti-Semitism in those countries by bolstering their positive attitudes toward Israel.
The world is a great deal more complex than the simple “left-wing good, right-wing bad” equation so prevalent among American Jews today. And recognizing that complexity might help liberal Jews be more understanding of their conservative brethren, both at home and in Israel.
Consider Peter Beinart, the one-time New Republic editor. “No, BDS Is Not Anti-Semitic, And Neither Is Ilhan Omar” was the headline for a piece he wrote in the Jewish Daily Forward recently.
BDS, of course, is short for boycott, divest, sanction—a movement that singles out the Jewish state for such punishment. This, despite the horrors that are routine around the world, from China to Venezuela.
Beinart writes that the “BDS movement doesn’t officially oppose the existence of a Jewish state, but some of its most prominent advocates do.” So leaders of the movement want to destroy Israel, but the movement isn’t tainted by them? Where else would this be an acceptable line of argument? If white nationalists marched for gay rights, which liberal would disregard their outsize hate and focus on the one point of agreement? It’s laughable.
As for Ilhan Omar, she’s the newly elected Minnesota congresswoman who in January will take Ellison’s seat in the House of Representatives. In 2012, she tweeted: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”
The notion that Jews have the world under a spell is as classic an anti-Semitic trope as one can find, yet somehow Omar finds a Jewish defender in a Jewish publication.
Then there’s Linda Sarsour. Last week the Women’s March leader called out “folks who masquerade as progressives but always choose their allegiance to Israel over their commitment to democracy.” This was another old Jew-hating trope: namely, that Jews secretly harbor dual loyalty to Israel. And this is just the latest in a long litany of anti-Semitic comments she’s made.
What’s even more odious is that the Sarsours of the country are called on to help heal the hatred they sow. Last year, Sarsour sat on a panel at the New School about fighting anti-Semitism. And just last week Al Sharpton, who has a history of saying heinous things about Jews in the 1990s, was on MSNBC to discuss — you guessed it — fighting anti-Semitism.
It’s like a bad joke. The guy who has referred to Jews as “interlopers” and “diamond merchants” is now the one claiming to fight Jew-hatred. Has he ever apologized? Jews forgive public figures like Ellison, Omar, Sarsour and Sharpton. But they would never encourage other targeted groups to do the same.
Fighting the normalization of anti-Semitism has to begin with Jews themselves speaking out. Now would be a good time to start.
A reporter for the Israeli public broadcaster KAN was attacked in Berlin on Sunday evening while filming a report on the street.
Antonia Yamin, the Europe correspondent for KAN, was speaking to the camera in Hebrew in the Neukölln neighborhood of Berlin when a rowdy group of four teenagers passed by. At first they attempted to disrupt her broadcast, shouting and blocking the camera. Yamin paused and asked the group to move along. The video then shows her running after one of the men who threw a firecracker at her and her cameraman. The firecracker is then seen burning on the sidewalk.
“The truth is I had a very nice day at work today,” Yamin tweeted on Sunday evening with a video of the incident. “But between one interview and another I had to stop to report about the Brexit deal. As you can see on the video you can’t report in Hebrew in Neukölln, Berlin without being disturbed and without people throwing firecrackers at you.”
The Neukölln neighborhood is known for having a high concentration of immigrants.
Yamin told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that she didn’t report the incident to the police.
“I had an interview afterwards and I am filming the whole week,” she wrote via a direct message. “I also don’t think that it will bring me anywhere to sit for a few hours at the police station.”
Yamin said she won’t let the incident change anything about how she will report in the future.
“Fifteen minutes after the incident I was already filming my next story,” she said, “about an Israeli drag queen who performs together with a Syrian belly dancer (a wonderful story about friendship).”
האמת שבסך הכל עבר עלי יום נחמד בעבודה. היו לי כמה מרואיינים מדהימים שאני כבר ממש משתוקקת שתראו בסדרת כתבות שתעלה בקרוב. בין מרואיין אחד לשני הייתי צריכה לעצור לרגע כדי לדווח על הסכם הברקזיט המתגבש. אבל מתברר שבשכונת נויקלן בברלין אי אפשר לדווח בעברית מבלי שיפריעו ויזרקו עליך נפץ pic.twitter.com/1TKJqora5b
Haaretz reported "From Qatar to Iran, none of the countries participating in the MED2018 conference seemed really interested in the Palestinians. Normalization with Israel, on the other hand, was all the rage: ‘It’s a total change in paradigm’"
This cartoon caption from Felesteen is complaining about security cooperation between Israel and some Arab countries.
Palestinians are confused and adrift without the reflexive support of their Arab "brethren."
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By now, many of you have probably seen this
video of a “prominent” human-right BDS activist Simone
O’Broin going nuts on an Air India flight when the flight attendants refused to
give her more alcohol than the huge amount she had already clearly consumed.
Her tirade, including expletives and racial slurs directed
at those denying her booze, was also wrapped in a drunken version of the sort
of self-righteous outrage O’Broin and her ilk tend to serve up to anyone who
challenges their demand to be given the moral high ground immediately and
unconditionally.
This is just the latest example of boycotter misbehavior we
have seen in recent years. Just a couple
of years ago, for example, Husam El-Qoulaq (who played a central role in
organizing student government divestment votes as an undergraduate) won
Internet fame as the Harvard Law School student who told Israeli political
leader Tzipi Livnithat she
smelled. Despite best efforts
by El-Qoulaq and the school to erase this misbehavior from personal and public
records, and best efforts by apologists to put his infantile comments “into
context,” El-Qoulaq now stands alongside O’Broin as exemplars of what is really
going on in the mind of the BDSer.
Keep that in mind the next time they try to feign
reasonableness before an audience they are trying to sucker.
AirBnB
Speaking of suckers, the decision by the online travel firm
AirBnB to delist properties in the disputed territories (but only the ones
owned by Jews) can be seen as the latest attempt by political activists to go
around the political process by targeting the Internet firms that control
access to goods, services, news and interpersonal communication.
Given how much time I and others have spent debunking BDS
hoaxes, it is in our interest to admin when the BDSers score a rare win, if
only as a point of contrast. But it
should also be acknowledged that this win, which came at the end of a two-year
bullying campaign supported by wealthy and high-profile organizations like the
increasingly contaminated Human Rights Watch, ended not with the crippling of
the Jewish state’s economy but rather with a few dozen houses no longer being
included in one of many online travel sites.
This story can also be seen in light of the traditional BDS
tactic of demanding someone else take action with no concern for the
consequences that someone else will have to bear. Already, AirBnB has faced stiff criticism for
their hypocrisy, given how many human rights abusers – including genuine
occupiers of other people’s territory – they continue to include in their
listings. The inevitable lawsuits are
beginning to kick in, and it’s just a matter of time before the company is
asked to explain why their decision should not trigger action by the many, many
US states that have anti-boycott legislation on the books.
As those consequences gel, I suspect that the many
compliments AirBnB received for caving to BDS pressure will not translate to a
scintilla of support for a company that must now bear the brunt of a choice
forced on them by others. Freiers.
University of Leeds
Having just mentioned a BDS win, it’s worth noting that the boycotters
are still trying to pull fast ones on the public when they announce their
latest “victory” on a BDS web sites or in some breathless press releases.
Most recently, we’ve seen the Hampshire Strategy
play out in the UK where the decision by the University of
Leeds to change its investment strategy based on issues related to
climate change was transformed into their joining the BDS “movement.”
How did this come about?
Well, as at Hampshire, Leeds has been targeted for years by anti-Israel
activists demanding investments in several large and prominent companies pulled
from the school’s portfolio. And, like
every other similarly targeted university on the planet, they have refused to
do so. But given the scale and diversity
activity of their portfolio, it was just a matter of time before some of those
investments got moved in and out, either for purely financial reasons (like the
stock not doing well) or for political reasons having nothing to do with the
Middle East.
As I’ve noted before, divestment is a political act which
means taking a financial step without announcing publicly that you are doing so
for a clearly stated reason means political divestment has not occurred. In the
case of Leeds, as at Hampshire, the school has actually stated explicitly that
they did not do what the BDSers say they did, making it even more clear that
divestment has not occurred.
Given that Hampshire is still trotted out as a BDS “win”
nearly ten years after this ur-BDS hoax was exposed, don’t expect Leeds to get
dropped from Omar Barghouti’s slide deck anytime soon.
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The tech company will operate anywhere and serve anyone—except Jews in the West Bank.
Two very different organizations took action last week against Jews owning property in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority sentenced two Palestinians to 15 years hard labor for selling land to Jews. And Airbnb, the tech behemoth and online marketplace for lodging, announced it would no longer serve Jewish communities in the West Bank. The two actions differ in brutality but are based on the same idea: Jews should have no home in the West Bank.
Under Airbnb’s policy, an American Jew with a rental property in the West Bank is barred from listing it for rent on the website. But an American Arab is welcome to list his home a few hundred meters away, even though the Palestinian law forbidding real-estate deals with Jews carries a maximum penalty of death. That openly racist policy doesn’t trigger Airbnb’s delisting policy.
Airbnb admits the West Bank is the site of complicated “historical disputes.” Until 1948, the West Bank was part of the League of Nations’ 1922 British Mandate for Palestine, created to become a “national home” for the Jewish people. In 1947, the U.N. General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution suggesting the territory be divided into Arab and Jewish states, an idea the Arabs immediately shot down. Indeed, when the mandate ended and Israel declared independence in 1948, all its Arab neighbors invaded immediately. Jordan occupied the West Bank and massacred or expelled every Jew in the area, took their homes and destroyed their synagogues. Israel only regained the West Bank after Jordan foolishly attacked again in 1967. Many Jews then returned, including to lands Jews had purchased before Israeli independence.
Since then, the dispute has narrowed. Israel signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestinian leadership in 1993, leaving all settlements—the new and returning Jewish communities—under complete Israeli control. Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty in 1994. To be sure, the Palestinians still demand the removal of Jews from the entire West Bank. But Airbnb’s policy applies only to the Israeli—primarily Jewish—communities in the disputed territories.
Israeli cities in the West Bank are open to any lawful resident of Israel, including Arabs. By contrast, any Jew who enters the West Bank’s Palestinian towns risks his life.
An NGO published a report on Monday charging hypocrisy against boycotts of Israel in the aftermath of Airbnb’s boycott of Jewish West Bank settlements and with the UN Human Rights Council close to publishing a blacklist of companies that still do business there.
The report by Professor Eugene Kontorovich of the Kohelet Policy Forum said that “major American and European companies like Airbnb, Coca Cola, Ford and Caterpillar continue to legally do business in occupied territories worldwide without hinderance. That is because - except when `Israel is involved - no one believes such business is actually illegal.”
Regarding Airbnb, Kontorovich said that the company was now trying to get itself off of the UNHRC blacklist by boycotting Jewish West Bank settlements and there was a danger that other companies could follow suit. He added that it was unclear whether Airbnb would even succeed in getting itself taken off the list since it was not boycotting disputed areas of Jerusalem.
Deputy Minister of Diplomacy in the Prime Minister's Office, Michael Oren commended the “Who Else Profits II” report, stating, "This treatment isn't being handed out to any other country in the world, which means its inherently anti-semitic."
A past similar report by Kontorovich in summer 2017 alleged that the UN Human Rights Council was turning a blind eye to more than 40 European companies that operate in four other areas deemed occupied territory by the UN.
The other occupied areas listed by the reports are: Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus, Armenian-occupied Nagorno-Karabakh and Russian-occupied portions of Ukraine.
The extremist American Jewish non-profit organization, The New Israel Fund (NIF) is yet again part and parcel of boycott efforts against the State of Israel. Along with its stated policy of endorsing a boycott against Israel, non-profit organizations financed by the NIF were integral to influencing Airbnb’s decision to remove listings for homes in “Israeli settlements in the Occupied West Bank.”
As a report by NGO Watch noted, “This change in policy was a clear result of a coordinated and well-financed campaign targeting the company by NGOs involved in BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) campaigns against Israel, led by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), in concert with the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), at least three Israeli groups, and the Palestinian Authority. The funders responsible for this campaign include a number of European governments as well as the US-based Rockefeller Brothers Fund.”
Who are these Israeli non-profits?
Kerem Navot co-authored a November 2018 report with Human Rights Watch, entitled “Bed and Breakfast on Stolen Land:
Tourist Rental Listings in West Bank Settlements” which alleges that that Airbnb (and Booking.com) “facilitat[e] Israel’s unlawful transfer of its citizens to the settlements.” Kerem Navot is funded by NIF, and the organizations leaders come from NIF backed organizations.
Who Profits posted a profile of Airbnb, listing its owners, investors, contact information, and details on “listings on Airbnb’s website …in … illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian and Syrian territories.”
Airbnb was also featured in the NGO’s October 2017 report and accompanying political campaign, “Touring Israeli Settlements Business and Pleasure for the Economy of Occupation.”
A media outlet financed by NIF, +972 published an article “Airbnb lets you vacation in illegal West Bank Settlements,” which claimed discrimination alleging “thinly veiled discrimination along ethnic or national lines.”
Airbnb was wrong and its decision is racist and Anti-semitic.
Accession by Jordan does not compel it to conclude with Israel any of the arrangements mentioned in the Protocol. Jordan commits itself to the respect of the obligations contained in the Protocol towards States which do likewise. Jordan undertakes no commitment toward States whose regular or irregular armed forces do not observe the provisions of the Protocol.
It sure sounds like Jordan was saying two things:
1) The Protocol is only between High Contracting Parties, and since it did not recognize Israel as one of them, it was not obligated to refrain from using poison gas or biological weapons against Israel.
2) If it accuses Israel of using such weapons, for example by claiming as Mahmoud Abbas once did that Israel might poison the water supply of Palestinians, then that is an additional reason why Jordan would claim to be justified in using poison gas against Israel.
A further question can be asked: since Jordan's peace treaty with Israel, does this reservation on the prohibition of poison gas still apply, or does Jordan have to explicitly remove it from the record? As of this time, Jordan's reservation is still documented by the ICRC without any further comment. And Jordan's reservation saying that it doesn't apply to Israel is not conditional.
So Jordan may believe it has the legal right to use chemical WMDs against Israel - today.
(h/t Irene)
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This morning there was a car ramming attack where a Palestinian ran his car into IDF soldiers, injuring three.
The driver was killed.
Al Resalah reports that the terrorist, Ramzi Adnan Abu Yabes, 32, was the head of the nursing department at the Arab Rehabilitation Society in Bethlehem.
This is not the first doctor or other medical professional involved in attacks against Israelis.
Medical professionals are taught the basic concept of "First, do no harm." Apparently there is a Palestinian exception to that rule.
UPDATE:
(h/t Renato)
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The United States Agency for International Development announced that half of its employees in the West Bank and Gaza will be let go in the coming weeks and by early 2019, the operations will be completely shut down.
The humanitarian agency is one of the largest and most important in the region.
The U.S. State Department informed USAID last week that by next month the agency would have to present a list of 60 percent of its employees to be dismissed as the first step in the shutdown that will be finalized by 2019.
The USAID chapter in the West Bank and Gaza began operating in 1994, focusing mainly on economic issues including water, infrastructure, education and health. USAID has invested about $5.5 billion in the West Bank and Gaza in the construction of roads, schools, clinics and community centers.
USAID also buys medical equipment, provides humanitarian assistance to those in need of medical care and teaches lifesaving techniques to doctors from Gaza and the West Bank via Israel and other countries. In recent years USAID has conducted in-service education for teachers, built schools and worked on projects to keep young Palestinians in the education system.
USAID has been fairly concerned in making sure that it does not fund any people or groups associated with terrorism. At the same time, it has not been effective in training ordinary Palestinians to abhor terror and to accept Israel. Palestinian thinkers have warned that USAID promotes "normalization" but the PA has pushed back heavily against any such initiatives.
The purpose of foreign aid should be ending the need for its existence, and we provide development assistance to help partner countries on their own development journey to self-reliance – looking at ways to help lift lives, build communities, and establish self-sufficiency.
Our efforts are both from and for the American people.
USAID demonstrates America’s good will around the world; increases global stability by addressing the root causes of violence; opens new markets and generates opportunity for trade; creates innovative solutions for once unsolvable development challenges; saves lives; and advances democracy, governance, and peace.
By those standards, has USAID been successful in the territories?
Are Palestinians more pro-American? Clearly not.
Did USAID address root causes of anti-Israel violence? Clearly not.
Did it open new markets in the territories? If it did, those markets are minuscule.
Did it advance democracy? Certainly not.
Did it advance governance? It seems that on the contrary, the Palestinian leaders are now dependent on foreigners to build their governance structure, and after over 20 years, one would think they would be more self sufficient if these foreign teams from the US and EU really were teaching them how to be self-sufficient.
Did it advance peace? No, although it possibly kept the status quo.
The head of USAID once said “I believe the purpose of foreign assistance is to end the need for its existence.” By that measure, USAID has failed Palestinians, and withdrawing it should be to their benefit - they have the tools, they just choose not to use them.
There is a danger to Israel by the removal of USAID. Infrastructure projects are needed no matter who funds them and if there is no safe water, for example, Israel will end up being more involved in Palestinian affairs rather than disengaging from them.
Chances are pretty good that for the medium term, the EU will happily make up the shortfall from the absence of USAID. But that pushes the main problem off - if the purpose of this aid is to build self sufficiency, then the programs must have that goal in mind from the start, instead of creating a welfare society where Palestinians expect the West to do everything for them, as exists today.
It is absurd that so many years after Oslo the Palestinians have not learned to build their own institutions. Zionists in the 1920s and 1930s essentially built their state institutions without foreign assistance and they were ready in 1948 to govern themselves.
The world needs to look at exactly why "Palestine" has not progressed significantly in self-sufficiency since 1994.
it won't like the answer - that the "State of Palestine" is not meant to be a place for Palestinians to live safely and with dignity, and instead it has always meant to be a springboard to destroy Israel. Any aid they get towards that goal is welcome, and any aid they get that frustrates that goal is rejected.
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“Suppose the Exodus from Egypt had never occurred. Suppose the Romans never exiled the Jews. Suppose also that there had been no Jews in antiquity. Even then, the justification for establishing their nationhood in Israel would be valid along the lines I tried to explain in my article “From rabid Zionism to egalitarian Zionism” (November 9, 2018).
Shlomo Sand’s response to my arguments (“The twisted logic of the Jewish historic right to Israel,” November 16, 2018), misses that central point. In this sense he’s like Naftali Bennett. The education minister carries an ancient coin in his pocket in order to prove Jewish ownership of the land since antiquity. Sand’s understandable revulsion at the Jewish-national implications of Bennett’s version of nationalism, based on that coin, leads him to reject Zionism in its entirety.
The justification I tried to provide for this ideology frees us both from Bennett’s coin and from Sand’s contentions against it. It’s anchored not in the history of the Jews in antiquity, but rather in two pivotal facts regarding their history in modernity.
Fact 1: A major component of the Jews’ social profile in modernity, in their own eyes, and in the eyes of their surroundings, is that of group originating in Palestine in antiquity. It doesn’t take a historian to recognize this fact. Suffice it to read the Passover Haggadah, be a tourist in Florence or listen to the “Passions,” preferably Bach’s.” (h/t dov)
For the full article click via twitter:
Israel is important as an embodiment of Jewish self-rule not only for its own Jews, but for world Jewry as a whole | Opinionhttps://t.co/6deq5zCZad
Monday is the tenth anniversary of the Mumbai terror attacks, and the event is being marked with a renaming ceremony at the Chabad center that was one of the targets.
On November 26, 2008, ten terrorists from the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) group entered Mumbai by sea and launched a coordinated gun-and-bomb assault on multiple sites in India’s most populous metropolis, killing 166 people — including six Jews at the Nariman House.
A decade after the carnage, the Chabad center is being renovated, and the fifth floor — where the murdered Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg lived with their two-year-old son Moshe (who survived the attack, thanks to the heroism of his nanny, Sandra Samuel) — is to be named the “Nariman Lighthouse” and serve as a memorial to the victims of the Mumbai attacks.
“We hope that viewing this will teach visitors the power of adding light,” Rabbi Israel Kozlovsky — the current head of the Nariman House — told Lubavitch.com. “We want to create waves of good that will spread until the whole world is filled with it.”
Former intelligence officer slams France’s “short-termist” policy to help militant groups for immediate securi
France worked closely with Palestinian Authority during the late 1990's and 2000's, including during the Second Intifada ("uprising") against Israel, providing training and delivering "sensitive intelligence" to the PA's security services, a former officer in the French secret service told i24NEWS on Wednesday.
Speaking with i24NEWS defense correspondent Mattias Inbar on his French-language weekly Defense program, Pierre Martinet said that “France, via its secret service, trained Palestinian agents in France” and that the French government delivered “sensitive materials to the Palestinian administration via the diplomatic bag”.
The diplomatic bag is an expression to describe a physical package that is used by a diplomatic mission to exchange correspondences with its home country. It cannot be officially scrutinized by another country’s border protection agencies and benefits from the same kind of diplomatic immunity as its owners.
The ‘bag’ can be anything, but is most often an actual suitcase.
"Unofficially we have collaborated with different [foreign] services, more notably with Palestine at different times. We worked with them on training and delivery of certain materials....through back-channel diplomacy," Martinet said.
Check out this abstract of a paper published at the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication by Atef Alshaer, who lectures at the University of Westminster and who wrote this while at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London:
This article sheds light on poetry written by two of the most prominent leaders of Hamas, assassinated by Israel in 2003 and 2004, respectively: Ibrahim al-Maqadmah and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi. Both leaders took part in the creation of Hamas and propagated its ideology in political, cultural and other fields. Poetry, being the premier form of artistic expression in the Arab world, is used by the leaders of Hamas to present their experiences in Israeli prisons, and their vision and involvement in the Palestinian struggle. The sentiments that their poetry expresses, reveal deep and nuanced cultural, political and philosophical dimensions. The poetry of Hamas can be characterized as one of commitment, suffering, pain, longing, defiance, and certainty.
The paper is even worse, as Alshaer refers to the murderous leaders of Hamas as "intellectuals" who suffered a "cruel fate":
Al-Rantisi became the movement’s leader following the assassination of founder Ahmad Yasin by Israel in 2004, and was himself assassinated by Israel later that year. Ibrahim al-Maqadmah was also assassinated by Israel in 2003. Both had similar life experiences, and ultimately shared the same cruel fate, like many other Palestinian intellectuals.
See? Israel doesn't target Hamas terrorists who blow up buses and pizza shops with women and children - it targets Palestinian intellectuals!
The entire paper is filled with love of Hamas and denial of its violent nature. In this section, Alshaer claims that Rantisi only wants peace, a desire frustrated by Israel:
In these lines, al-Rantisi shows an existential paradox, wherein Palestinian lives have been disrupted and deprived of normality: on the one hand, there is the desire to live in peace and to see fulfillment of one’s needs and desires, and on the other, there are the forces which have rendered impossible the fulfillment of these needs and desires. Confronted by this dilemma, al-Rantisi chooses to resist injustice.
"Justice," of course, is the destruction of Israel.
Rantisi's poem urging his son to take up violence is interpreted romantically by Alshaer:
Better to die than to live as a coward… here you are rotting in a prison with no
price/ tomorrow you die, and you will be buried/ O, pity on me, to whom you
would leave your sons/ and the wife you will leave behind to wolves…I fear that
you would be exiled tomorrow/ you would leave your house derelict; complain
over the ruins/ you search for a trusted friend/ to cry for you or share the suffering
with you…I forewarn you my son not to bow to an idol, not to return the sword
to the sheath/ go in life as you like; I would not be satisfied with such a life
without struggle.
This is a moving poem, clouded by paradoxes and occasional mysteries,
such as when he fears that his wife would be left to wolves if he dies. Wolves
are depicted as representing the ultimate danger; he understandably is racked
with worry over the state of his wife and his sons if he is not to be with them.
Here, the poet depicts himself as ‘the man, guardian, of the house’ who ensures
the safety and security of his family. But finally, Al-Rantisi beckons his son
not to give up: what is at stake deserves sacrifices; not doing so would be tantamount
to surrendering to the forces that deny Palestinians a life of dignity
and peace.
The keywords that Alshaer uses to describe this paper shows his romanticizing of the terror group:
Alshaer, who clearly shares Hamas' philosophy, does admit that Hamas' poetry proves that Hamas is not interested in peace with Israel but in creating an Islamic state:
[W]ithin the grand scheme of Hamas’ ideology, an independent
Palestinian state is only a stepping stone towards the realization of a larger
Islamic polity that would encapsulate territories larger than Palestine, and ultimately
culminates in an Islamic caliphate.
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Cease Firing
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[image: Dry Bones cartoon, Peace, Oct 7, Jews, War, Cease Fire, Jewish,
Israel, Palestine, Gaza,]
It really is that simple
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Tuesday, November 27, 2018
Elder of Ziyon
