In May 1965, Israeli premier Levi Eshkol spoke about peace with the Arabs:
Here was the PLO reaction in a letter to the editor several days later:
Notice how in 1965 the Arabs still considered the areas between the partition lines and armistice lines as being stolen land; no one considered the 1949 armistice lines to be borders.
The idea that the Jews are like the Crusaders and will eventually be forced out is mainstream Palestinian thought, taught for generations.
And even then the Palestinians used the word "justice" to mean the destruction of Israel. Nothing has changed there.
Eshkol's offer would generate a little interest today, since it is based on what are now called the 1967 lines, but even then the "right of return" was considered sacred and a deal breaker. Nothing has changed there either.
The rejectionism is the same as today.
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A controversial resolution promoting an academic boycott of Israel was narrowly voted down at a prestigious social science academic association over the weekend, The Algemeiner learned on Monday.
The resolution, which was co-authored by Melissa Weiner, an associate professor of sociology at the College of Holy Cross, and Johnny E. Williams, a professor of sociology at Trinity College, called on the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) to “promote divestment and disinvestment from Israel by academic institutions, and place pressure on your own institution to suspend all ties with Israeli universities, including collaborative projects, study abroad, funding and exchanges.”
However, the resolution failed by a vote of 34 to 37 on Saturday.
“The conversation on the proposed resolution was civil by and large, even though the issue was quite contentious,” William Cabin, vice president of SSSP during the vote, told The Algemeiner. “We are pleased by our membership’s conduct throughout the conversation and vote.”
Ezra Temko, a sociologist at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville who opposed the BDS resolution at the SSSP meeting, wrote that “The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel is an ugly campaign that stands in opposition to social justice.”
The difference between the Democratic and Republican parties on Israel is that while mainstream Democrats support the Jewish state, among Republicans, the whole party does, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.
And the problem with the Democrats, he asserted, is that members such as congresswomen Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) are – with their statements and actions – pulling the party away from Israel.
“I think they are the wave of the Democratic Party,” said McCarthy, currently in the country leading a group of 31 Republicans on a week-long study tour organized by an AIPAC affiliated charity. He cited a current poll saying that the most sought after endorsement for Democratic candidates in the upcoming election is – first of all – any former Democratic president, and “the next in line is AOC.
“This is concerning to me,” he said. “They are not a few freshman anymore. They are the movement within the party.”
McCarthy noted that the Republican-controlled Senate passed an anti-BDS bill known as S.1 – Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act of 2019 – in February by a vote of 77 to 23, with Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer co-sponsoring the bill, and 21 Democrats voting for it.
But it did not move in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. Instead of bringing the bill to the floor, the Democratic leadership was only able to bring to a vote an anti-BDS resolution, which passed by a landslide margin of 398-17. But, McCarthy stressed, there is a world of difference between a bill and a resolution.
A bill, if it passes both the Senate and the House, then goes to the president to be signed into law. A resolution is just a resolution. “A resolution is a statement, a law is binding,” he said.
The only strategy that has a fair chance of success to reduce, but never stop, all mass killings, starts from the opposite end. It is beyond dispute that gunmen utilize the element of surprise. It has long been known that most of the death and destruction of a mass shooting takes place before any police or security team has time to arrive. Killers open the door and they start shooting: no warning, no mercy, no pause. Speed is the essence of any police response. Better that a single officer enter the fray immediately than wait even ten seconds before reinforcements can pitch in.
Yet the police cannot be everywhere, so they need reinforcements before they arrive, not afterward. One way for this to work is to make sure that in every mass gathering there are already present trained, armed individuals who can confront any assailant the instant an attack begins. To achieve that goal, there must be an immediate reversal of current policy and the implementation of something similar to current Israeli practice, which states simply enough: “All off-Duty Combat Soldiers Must Carry Their Weapons.” The United States should adopt a similar policy, which applies to the military, police officers, and others who carry and use weapons as a routine part of their job. It is clear that the risk of a terror attack is lower in the United States than in Israel. Indeed, of the 39,000 gun deaths in 2016, only 451 were from mass killings. But the grisly list of mass killings is bad enough. The trend, moreover, has been upward over the last half-dozen years. The public’s frustration and outrage are palpable.
The immediate response from armed individuals already on the premises could do much to deter crazed individuals from making these attempts. They could engage in return fire that could kill or wound the attacker or induce him to flee. And the benefit of this boots-on-the-ground policy is not limited to mass shootings. To be sure, it will be of little use in cases of suicide or domestic disputes. But it could help deter various forms of stranger assaults that take place on public streets or places, like airports, schools, parks, and shopping malls. There is always the risk that the return fire will be misdirected, but the same is true of the actions of SWAT teams that burst belatedly on the scene.
After all, just what is the alternative? The common proposals today all call for more top-down restrictions intended to keep people from acquiring dangerous weapons in the first place. These proposals tend to ignore the impressive array of federal restrictions already in place. Here is a partial list: the National Firearms Act of 1934, which taxes various gun transfers; the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993, which initiated a five-day waiting period before any individual could acquire a gun; the Child Safety Lock Act of 2005; and the National Instant Criminal Background Check Act of 2007.
Have you ever seen soldiers carry guns like this? Smiling while pointing at each other?
This is the Sebastia National Park in Samaria. Even though it is in Area C, it is surrounded by Arab villages. Because of the danger from those villages, Jews can only go to with prior notice, and under army protection, but it is an important archaeological site/park.
The women are playing paintball or perhaps laser tag around the old Ottoman train station there, which is also in Area C. They have every right to be there.
Notably, the Palestinian Authority has been encroaching on the area of the train station in recent years, essentially doing a land grab by paving roads and doing other heavy equipment tasks around there. Regavim has details.
A typical reaction to this "heavily armed settler incursion" comes from this Facebook guy who thinks that it is normal for religious Jewish women in long skirts to carry machine guns.
Oooh. such cutting sarcasm!
(h/t Tomer Ilan)
UPDATE: Gidon Shaviv is pretty sure it is Laser Tag.
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A few days ago, IDF Arabic spokesman Avichai Adraee posted what appears to the the acoustic introduction of a popular Arabic song, popularized by a Tunisian artist, done by IDF soldiers.
The song is “Ya Lili” by Tunisian artist Mohamed Saleh Balti together with a child. Adraee wrote that this is “The Tunisian song that stole the hearts of the world. Now a performance by IDF soldiers."
There are dozens of articles in Arabic media denouncing the IDF performing a popular Arab song, especially from Tunisia.
This seems to be a series. Yesterday Adraee posted another IDF version of a popular Arab song:
He also asks what other popular Arabic songs IDF's Arab Facebook fans might want to see covered by the IDF.
Some of the comments on Adraee's Facebook page are quite positive.
While this might not seem to be a major story, it shows again the difference between the positions of Israeli Jews and most (but not all) Arabs.
The IDF versions of the songs are not meant to be theft or parody; they are tributes to Arab music. If an Arab army or artist would create a cover of a popular Israeli song as a tribute, Israelis wouldn't be upset - they'd be thrilled.
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Before the UN’s anti-racism committee reviewed the “State of Palestine” for the first time today, UN Watch Legal Adviser Dina Rovner took the floor twice before the committee’s panel of experts to present UN Watch’s 32-page shadow report on Palestinian violations of the anti-racism convention. The first remarks presented below were delivered at a meeting between the panel members and non-governmental organizations. Following those remarks is Rovner’s in-depth speech on the UN Watch submission, parts of which were conveyed in an informal lunchtime briefing with committee members.
Full prepared remarks, delivered at the UN anti-racism committee’s meeting with non-governmental organizations:
We meet today to review the State of Palestine’s compliance with the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Yet one would not know that from reading the Palestinian Authority’s 62-page report to this Committee, which repeatedly blames the “Israeli occupation” for countless alleged violations of Palestinian rights, while seeking to evade responsibility for its own racism and discrimination. We remind all stakeholders that Israel will be reviewed for its actions in November, whereas the proper focus of today’s review is Palestinian compliance with the Convention, or lack thereof.
United Nations Watch submitted a shadow report, which is available at www.unwatch.org/PA-racism. We were disappointed that NGOs like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International which lobbied for the Palestinians to join international treaties saying it would hold them to account did not submit reports for today’s review.
Ironically, the PA report acknowledges that there are almost no minorities in Palestine. According to the statistics provided by the PA, the various minority groups comprise no more than 1% of the population.
The Committee may wish to ask the PA why, by its own admission, it has virtually no minorities. By any objective standard, these figures suggest high levels of racism and discrimination. For example, if 1.9 million Arab citizens live in neighboring Israel, comprising 21% of the population, why is it that there are no Jews at all living under Palestinian jurisdiction?
Today, for the first time since Yasser Arafat & his PLO were brought in to the United Nations in 1974, the Palestinians are being officially reviewed for their policies & practices of racism & discrimination.
UN Watch’s detailed submission reveals that the PA and Hamas routinely violate international commitments to combatting racism, through laws, policies, and statements aimed at denying any Jewish rights in Israel or the Palestinian-controlled territories.
By contrast, in its own report, the PA shirks its obligations as a party to the anti-racism convention by failing to address the problem of racism in Palestinian law and society, and instead seeking repeatedly to blame Israel.
“The PA exploits the reporting process of the anti-racism committee as yet another UN vehicle to attack Israel. This is a waste of the committee’s time and resources, as Israel is subject to its own review later this year,” said Neuer.
Highlighting the deficiencies in the PA’s report, UN Watch urged the anti-racism committee to focus its review on Palestinian laws and policies, detailing the following discriminatory practices for consideration:
1. Racist Palestinian laws criminalize the sale of land to Israeli Jews
Dozens of Palestinians have been arrested for attempting to sell land to Jews — a crime that is considered treason. In December 2018, an American-Palestinian man was sentenced to life in prison with hard labor for violating the Palestinian law prohibiting land sales to Israelis. Palestinian courts have ruled that the death sentence can be applied in such cases as well.
2. Palestinian laws incentivize the murder of Israeli Jews by providing financial rewards to Palestinian terrorists who kill or attempt to kill Israeli Jews
The payment by the PA of salaries and benefits to Palestinian prisoners serving time in Israeli jails for terror-related offenses is mandated in Palestinian law. Each year, the PA allocates approximately 7% of its budget to terrorist payments. This practice directly legitimizes acts of terrorism against Israelis and is aimed at keeping Jews out of areas controlled and claimed by the PA.
President Mahmoud Abbas recently reiterated the PA’s commitment to these payments, stating “even if we have only a penny left, we will give it to the martyrs, the prisoners, and their families.”
3. Regular incitement of antisemitic racial hatred by Palestinian officials, including PA President Mahmoud Abbas
While the PA report referenced Palestinian criminal laws concerning propaganda, it conveniently ignored the problem of rampant antisemitic propaganda that incites Palestinian terrorism. In his speeches and social media posts, Abbas has regularly incited terrorism and spewed classical antisemitic tropes. His comments have praised “martyrs” as the “priority” of Palestinian society, proclaimed that Jews “have no right to defile the Al-Aqsa Mosque with their filthy feet,” and claimed that European Jews were hated for their connection to usury and the banks rather than for their religion.
Several other PA and Hamas leaders have publicly called Jews “apes and pigs” and promoted other antisemitic libels.
Forty-one times over past 13 years, Ken Roth sent his HRW reps to criticize Israel, at every session when it was subjected to stand-alone scrutiny at the UNHRC.
Yet now that the Palestinians are being reviewed for first time ever by the UN racism committee, he submits nothing. pic.twitter.com/ZDznwsQ47C
While we were working on our 32-page submission to the UN racism committee documenting Palestinian Authority discrimination against Christians, Samaritans & Jews, Ken Roth & his HRW team were sitting & smiling with the perpetrator, whitewashing his crimes. https://t.co/js07ddaLcFpic.twitter.com/j0yeKIh0fa
TruNews is a fundamentalist Christian streaming news and opinion platform that has increasingly featured anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist content, and also has a long record of disseminating radical Islamophobic and anti-LGBTQ messages. Founded in 1999 by Rick Wiles and affiliated with Flowing Streams Church in Vero Beach, FL, where Wiles is senior pastor, TruNews was previously known as America’s Hope, American Freedom News, and briefly as Christian News Channel.
TruNews programming generally consists of Rick Wiles and one or more cohosts or guests praying, reading biblical passages, discussing current events, talking breathlessly about the “End Times” and asking for money. Wiles and his guests frequently espouse extreme conspiracy theories, including alleging that the U.S. government planned to spread the Ebola virus on U.S. soil, that the U.S. and Israel created ISIS and that “western intelligence agencies” were training ISIS soldiers, and that mass shootings are false flag operations carried out by “super-secret covert killing teams” as a way of rallying public support for eliminating the Second Amendment and for “capitulat[ing] to a globalist agenda.”
In the first few months of 2019, Rick Wiles and his cohosts have taken an increasingly extreme anti-Semitic and conspiratorial anti-Zionist position. They have obliterated the distinction between Israelis, Zionists and Jews, using terms like “Jewish lobby” and “Israel lobby” interchangeably. They have railed against “old evil wicked kabbalah wizard rabbis,” claimed that Jews crucified Jesus 2000 years ago in order to build a “Zionist empire” and that Jews are going to kill and persecute Christians in the near future. They also alleged that Jews and Zionists control and promote abortion and pornography and have “attacked Christian culture.”
I listened to TruNews' latest podcast and, yes, Wiles and his team are insane. The antisemitism is off the charts. But it is not at all like what leftists claim white nationalism is like.
Yes, they hate leftists. They emphasize that the Dayton killer likes Bernie Sanders, whom they describe as a "socialist Jew," to associate him with Jews.
The show then talked about how the Anglican Church in Canada took out a text calling to convert the Jews, and they were very upset. They went on a supercessionist rant saying that the Church replaced the Jews, and therefore the Jews have nothing to do with Israel:
God replaced the citizens of Israel. Let you chew on that one. What Jesus did for us, he said I will give it to the Gentiles to make them jealous, yes, well this is what jealousy looks like... Israel and the church are one and the same. God replaced the citizens of Israel, yes the rebellious Jews who crucified Christ and rejected Christ as Messiah were kicked out of Israel. The Jews who believed on the name of Jesus remained in Israel. Israel and the church are the same. Then God opened up the doors to the Gentiles to everybody and said you're all welcome come on in join Israel. That's right, the rebellious Jews were outside of Israel. Right now they they can get back in any day that they want to but their old passports have been expired. They need new passports stamped with the blood of Jesus. And unless a Jew is willing to get a new passport for citizenship and Israel stamped with the blood of Jesus he or she is forever outside the kingdom of God; you're lost.
That wasn't the end of the Jewish topics. They spoke about the controversial movie "The Hunt" which they associated with Jews owning Hollywood. And then they claimed that "Talmudic Jews" are attempting to censor the New Testament and the Quran, to put "trigger warnings" on the texts because of their antisemitism.
A nugget from Wiles: "The Talmud is the oral interpretation of those demon-possessed filthy old rabbis that practice witchcraft Kabbalah-ism."
Every topic on the show they associate with Jew-hate.
They are against Zionists, they are against leftist Jews, they are against "Talmudic" and "Kabbalah" Jews, they claim that Hollywood is a Jewish plot to destroy the youth.
Oh, and they love talking about the "synagogue of Satan," putting them in the same camp as Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan.
The antisemitism of this white Christian nationalist radio show is surprisingly close to that which one sees on Muslim websites, especially the obsession with Talmud, hate of Zionism, claim that Israel was behind ISIS, and the hate of religious Jews.
Leftists claim that white nationalists have much in common with Zionists. It is not even close to true, but listening to Rick Wiles, one can see that at least their flavor of white nationalism sounds a great deal like Muslim antisemitism.
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Since January 1, Amnesty International has tweeted about TripAdvisor's listing of Jewish tourist spots in Judea and Samaria 13 times. Here's the latest:
Let's compare and see which are the most important human rights issues for Amnesty this year:
Based on its tweets, TripAdvisor is one of the worst human rights abusers in the world - more worthy of attention than China (which mentioned Uyghur Muslims 3 times), more that Syria, more than Russia.
Human rights groups are not transparent as to how they allocate their resources. They accuse nations of acting with "impunity" but they are just as guilty of that charge given that there is no oversight on how they raise and spend their money. Their politics trumps actual human rights. There is no other way to explain why Amnesty acts like TripAdvisor listings are considered worse human rights abuses than the entire countries of China or Syria, and places with terrible human rights records like Turkey are practically ignored. These aren't "human rights" organizations, they are political organizations using "human rights" selectively to promote their agendas.
Human rights groups demand accountability from their targets. The world must demand no less from human rights groups themselves.
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The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has a webpage that appears to be a copy and paste of guidelines and philosophy from the BDS movement.
Bizarrely, it criticizes the government it is a part of:
The security aspect: The [Zionist] entity is linked to shameful security agreements with the PNA [Palestinian National Authority] and the surrounding Arab countries.
There is no way that the PA would write such a statement slamming its own positions and those of its Arab neighbors.
The entire Foreign Ministry website is amateurish and seemingly only a skeleton of a site; it doesn't have any news since 2016 and the entire page describing its vision states:
The overall vision of the ministry is to make the Palestinian issue an influential and determined element in international diplomacy.
This is probably because the PLO handles all foreign affairs, not the PA which is domestic.
The BDS page states its objectives. Based on the numbers given, it appears to have been written in 2015 or so. It seems laughable now:
The boycott will create economic, social and academic isolation, and this will have serious repercussions on [Israel] and will help undermine it.
The boycott in its advanced stages will result in hundreds of thousands of Zionists losing their jobs and will be forced to reverse migration from within the entity to the outside, in search of the welfare they have lost.
Economic Goals: The per capita income in the Zionist entity (population of 8 million people) is approximately 35 thousand dollars and is ranked 41 in the world, and if the Zionist economy is affected negatively, per capita income will decline.
Boycotting the Zionist entity will cause it to lose tens of billions of dollars annually from investment, as well as from annual income, and will lead to a significant reduction in the tax revenues earned by the entity.
Academic Objectives: Depriving the Zionist occupation of benefiting from the scientific expertise, grants and privileges offered by prestigious universities, and communicating with scholars and academic professors, in order to pressure the occupation to stop its arbitrary practices against educational institutions and Palestinian students.
Since this was written, Israel's GDP has increased to $41,000 per capita and it has risen from a rank of 41 to 22 in the world.
Even though I believe that BDS' goals are not economic but propaganda, the failure of its economic program has been stunning when looked upon from this perspective.
Note also that this document's primary wish for this BDS plan was to force Jews to move out of Israel.
The website itself is testimony to how little the PA has bothered in building its own institutions. The site exists to make it appear like there is a government doing normal governmental jobs, but like so many other PA government sites we have looked at, it is just smoke and mirrors.
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Public research materials viewed by the Free Beacon reveal that several committee members behind California Department of Education's Draft Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum are outspoken critics of Israel.
One member, Samia Shoman, is a Palestinian-American who teaches in the San Mateo Union High District. Her lesson plans on Palestinian history have been featured as a teaching tool by the Qatar Foundation International, a group tied to the nation and its efforts to proliferate boycotts of Israel. Shoman is also a pro-Palestinian activist on Twitter.
Another committee member, Gaye Theresa Johnson, an associate professor at UCLA college of social sciences, also has supported pro-Palestinian causes on Twitter, including retweets from pro-Iran individuals who have deemed Tehran as the victim in the ongoing nuclear standoff with the United States.
A third committee member, Theresa Montaño, a professor at California State University, Northridge, has publicly supported the BDS movement and advocates for Israeli scholars to be boycotted in the United States. Montaño also signed a 2009 letter to then-president Barack Obama that was organized by one of the globe's most prominent BDS organizations.
Masha Merkulova, founder and executive director of Club Z, a Bay Area organization that fosters commitment to Israel, told the Free Beacon that the effort to promote this one-sided curriculum should worry all Americans.
"If we allow this to happen, California's children are going to be indoctrinated in intolerance and hate," Merkulova said. "This is our flashpoint … this ethnic studies curriculum is infused with Jew hatred. Let's call it for what it is, anti-Semitism. Our Department of Education has put bigoted people in charge of writing a curriculum that is supposed to promote inclusivity and tolerance."
"This is an attempt to make anti-Semitism institutional," she said. "This is what the kids are going to learn as part of normal things they learn."
There are no "roads or neighbourhoods that only Israeli settlers are allowed to enter" in the West Bank, @hannahluci and @thetimes
There are areas that Israeli *citizens* can enter. Not just settlers. BTW, Palestinian citizens of Israel are as free to visit as any other Israeli. pic.twitter.com/au4u9XJYMt
According to Army Radio, Netanyahu said in response that he was in favor of allowing access to Jews, but left the decision in the hands of the Israel Police. His office indicated that Netanyahu had issued no closure.
Police responded to the violence by utilizing riot-control measures to end the protests. Reports indicate that the head of the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf was injured during the incident, as well as an estimated 14 Muslim worshippers and four police officers.
At 10:30 am, police authorized Jews to enter the Temple Mount in small groups. The worshippers were under close police escort and limited to a very small area, but some reported that police appeared to be more accommodating than usual, allowing them to pray openly and performing security checks less stringently.
Despite the limited Jewish access, Arabs at the site began chanting “Allahu Akbar!” and throwing chairs and other objects at them for the hour, during which police held the site open to Jews. A video Sunday showed Waqf director Azzam al-Khatib and Mufti of Jerusalem Muhammad Hussein encouraging the angry crowd, telling them: “In spirit and blood we will redeem you!”
At approximately 11:30 am, the site was closed to Jews, but reopened again in the afternoon for one more hour.
Regular visitors to the site noted that the closure time is usually 11 a, but said police held the site open an extra half hour due to the Waqf incitement.
Last year, some 1,400 Jews ascended to the Temple Mount for Tisha B’Av, a record number. However, this year, despite the violence and concerns that Jews would not be given access, more than 1,700 Jews ultimately paid their respects at the holiest site to the Jewish people.
Tisha B’Av — the ninth of Av — is the saddest day on the Jewish calendar. Traditionally, observant Jews fast and deprive themselves while they pray and remember various major catastrophes in Jewish history. Over time, other calamities have been mourned, including the Nazi Party’s formal approval of “The Final Solution” on Av 9, AM 5701, and the start of the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka one year later. For many, Tisha B’Av is a time of mourning for the Holocaust as a whole.
On Tisha B’Av of all days, thousands of leftist American Jews staged protests across the country against ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
For some time, the Holocaust has been used as a comparative metric in order to condemn the implementation of existing immigration laws. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) famously likened detention facilities to concentration camps and referenced the phrase “Never Again” — synonymous with Holocaust remembrance. The same phrase adorned T-shirts and signs at the protests on Sunday, with the hashtag #JewsAgainstICE going viral.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s weaponization of Jewish tragedy is an example of the uninformed and offensive rhetoric that we have come to expect from the New York congresswoman. However, when the incomparable catastrophe that was the Holocaust is weaponized by leftist Jews in a bid to peddle Democratic talking points, we have moved beyond casual political ignorance and into the realm of deliberate historical destruction.
Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas said Saturday that outsiders will be deported from the Palestinian land to the "dustbin of history" because this land is for the Canaanites.
“We are the Canaanites,” he stressed.
Addressing the crown in Jalazone refugee camp in Ramallah, Abbas said the Palestinians will remain “steadfast, patient and resilient.”
“We will remain in our homeland, and the outsiders on this land has no right in this country. The land is for its inhabitants, this land is for the Canaanites who were here 5,000 years ago, and we are the Canaanites.”
It doesn't sound like he recognizes Israel, does it?
Mahmoud Abbas' family name almost certainly comes from the Abbasid dynasty, whose founder came from Mecca. Very few Palestinian families can trace their ancestry in the land more than 1200 years (Christians being the exception, at least the few who are left.) Most of them have family genealogy pages on Facebook and elsewhere that proudly trace their heritage to Arabia.
Abbas also laid a wreath on the grave of terrorists from the Jalazone camp.
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The most prominent BDS-related story of the last month is
Congresses 398-17 vote to condemn the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions “movement,”
an overwhelming (and bi-partisan) tally reaffirming a long-standing trend
within the most representative body of American politics (Congress) to support
the Jewish state against efforts to attack it militarily and economically.
In an age of partisan fervor where We vs. They defines most
political commentary, it was natural that this vote be characterized along the
Left-Right axis that colors all our conversations. This included a focus on the most vociferous
voices against the measure (represented by “The Squad” of Democrats who have
generated considerable controversy related to Jewish issues over the last six
months).
While not ignoring the filters that color so many political
conversations, it is important to keep in mind some practical matters regarding
Congress taking such a strong stand against efforts to harm Israel
economically.
First, this vote was one of a series that shores up measures
taken by more than half the US states which impose penalties on companies
participating in anti-Israel boycotts in the form of refusing to do state
business with such companies. While
claims that these anti-BDS state laws were an infringement on free speech
proved impossible to support (unless one is ready to throw out the entire
anti-discrimination legal apparatus), there was a genuine issue regarding
whether states should be allowed to pass measures that imply a role for the
states in America’s foreign policy, given that, constitutionally, foreign
policy is the responsibility of the federal government.
But that same federal government is allowed to specify what
political activity performed by other parts of government are allowed and not
allowed, including ones that relate to interaction with foreign nations. So, with regard to recent Congressional BDS
actions, these votes were meant to declare that state are allowed to apply
anti-discrimination law to those who participate in discrimination against the
Jewish state.
Keep in mind that the federal government has had rules in
place for decades that make it a crime for American companies to participate in
the century-long Arab boycott of Israel.
What made new rules necessary, at both the state and federal level, was
the migration of anti-Israel boycott activity from the Arab states to
non-governmental organizations (notably the UN) over the last several
decades. With the UN and allied
organizations preparing blacklists of Israeli companies that member states
would be asked to comply with, it was only natural that US anti-boycott rules
needed to change to take this changed world into account.
In other words, those who have been advocating for boycott
measures up and down the NGO landscape have only themselves to blame for
America’s natural reaction to their activity.
And by “America” I mean every state and federal representative
body that has voted to condemn BDS as a form of bigotry and punish those who
participate in this discriminatory “movement.”
Several commenters on recent BDS-related votes have described them as
“largely symbolic.” Putting aside the
practical impact of these measures described above, their symbolic value cannot
be ignored – especially in the context of the propaganda wars that BDS is part
of.
To understand what I mean, consider how the BDSers
themselves have treated any attempt to get a representative body to pass one of
their boycott or divestment measures.
The tiniest of successes (like a small district in Scotland
banning Israeli books) or temporary or failed measures to get local governments
to pass divestment measures (as in Somerville)
are treated as staggering triumphs, paving the way to ultimate victory for the
forces of BDS. Given such behavior, one
can only imagine the celebrations that would be exploding across the globe if a
single US state passed anything that could be construed as mildly supporting
this or that BDS talking point.
Yet here we have more than half of the states in the
country, backed up by a Congress representing the country as a whole, joining
in one voice to declare BDS a form of bigotry that must be fought and
sanctioned. If we had the same mindset
as our political enemies, we would spend the next twenty years shoving these
votes into the boycotters’ faces and declaring they represent the opinion of
the nation against their squalid little movement and insisting they recognize
it as such.
For better or for worse, we are not our enemies which means
we are more likely to focus on the 17 representatives who voted against the
recent anti-BDS vote, or engage in arguments on our enemy’s terrain (such as
those involving free speech), rather than demand the boycotters live by their
own rules and recognize their project as a form of bigotry, and a failure.
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It is estimated that approximately 4,000 Israelis have been killed in terrorist attacks since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. This is the equivalent of 200,000 Americans.
Despite this notorious history of Palestinian violence, there are those in America and Europe who, for their own reasons, continue to enable and normalize Palestinian terrorism by their support for the Palestinian “narrative.” In response to the brutal murder of Dvir Sorek, The Forward published an opinion piece that urged its audience not to “politicize” Sorek’s death, but to remember the message of peace he was carrying when he was slaughtered (books by a peace activist).
At the end of the day, the terrorists who murdered Sorek, and their families, will likely get a sweeter deal than treats in the street. The Palestinian government has created a “Martyrs Fund” to pay a monthly stipend to the families of Palestinians killed, injured, or imprisoned for involvement in attacking Israelis.
It is a system called “pay for slay,” and it was reported that the fund paid out over $300 million in 2017, in amounts often exceeding $3,000 a month, at a time when the Palestinian government was struggling to pay its own civil servants. Sorek’s killers and their families are set for life, further incentivizing the murder of Jews.
Israel’s Shin Bet security service announced Saturday that it had arrested two Palestinian cousins suspected of Sorek’s murder. The suspects hail from the Palestinian village of Beit Kahil near Migdal Oz, and at least one is a member of Hamas. The Israel army said that more than 100 residents of Beit Kahil began hurling stones at troops while they were carrying out the arrest raid.
In his strongly worded essay for Mosaic, Avi Weiss meticulously documents the painful history of the cover-up of the devastating July 1994 bombing of the AMIA building in Buenos Aires—“the largest single attack,” as he puts it, “against a Jewish community in the Diaspora since the Holocaust,” leaving 85 dead and hundreds wounded.
The cover-up was not entirely successful. Despite the dysfunction of the early Argentinean investigation into the bombing, the eventual removal of corrupt politicians and judges did allow a new team of prosecutors to produce, against all odds, a definitive accounting of the plot and its perpetrators. Its conclusion was crystal-clear:
The decision to carry out the AMIA attack was made, and the attack was orchestrated, by the highest officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran at the time, and . . . these officials instructed Lebanese Hizballah—a group that has historically been subordinated to the economic and political interests of the Tehran regime—to carry out the attack.
But that still leaves much undone. Despite the publication of three detailed reports on the AMIA bombing itself, on the role of Hizballah, and on Iranian agents in Argentina, not one of the key suspects has been apprehended, let alone tried or convicted. To the contrary: the failure to hold Iran or Hizballah accountable for the bombing has had adverse real-life repercussions for Argentinean politics and society—not to mention the country’s Jewish community. At the same time, it has positively reinforced and emboldened the leaders of Iran and Hizballah.
Indeed, several individuals who were personally involved in the AMIA bombing have since been promoted through the ranks to senior positions within the Iranian government or Hizballah. This includes not only senior Iranian officials but also less known but more operationally significant Iranian and Hizballah agents.
In sum, those who executed the AMIA bombing 25 years ago continue to oversee international terrorist operations today. In what follows, I’ll cite chapter and verse, beginning with the senior Iranian officials indicted by Argentina, several of whom are also subjects of Interpol Red Notice warrants and whose cases are relatively well known.
In a July 30, 2019 article in Al-Sabil, the mouthpiece of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in Jordan, writer Kathem 'Ayesh published an "Open Letter to the Leaders of the West," in which he blamed these leaders for the problems of the Arab and Muslim world. 'Ayesh is a former chairman of the of the UNRWA teachers union, and in his student days at the University of Jordan he studied under 'Abdallah 'Azzam, one of the founders of Al-Qaeda.[1] In his letter, Ayesh accused the Western leaders of deliberately imposing oppressive and corrupt regimes upon the Arab and Muslim countries with the aim of keeping them weak, backward and dependent on the West, because this serves the Wests' interests. He claimed further that the West does not wish the Muslims to return to their religious roots, which were the source of their past might and cultural dominance, and is therefore waging a "malicious war" on Islam and its values in the name of the war on terror. It is also acting to distort Islam by planting in the Muslim countries preachers who spread extremism and terror, in order to prove to the world that Islam is a source of danger. Even Israel, he added, was placed in the region by the West as a policeman to safeguard its interests. 'Ayesh ended his article with a series of Quranic verses stating that all the efforts to harm Islam will fail because Allah will stand by the Muslims.
The following are excerpts from his article:[2]
"Open letter to the leaders of the West:
"This is a message from an Arab Muslim citizen who follows events and examines them closely, and who expresses the feelings and positions of the absolute majority of people like him, who are very numerous. [We are] the silent majority that is deliberately excluded in our so-called Arab and Muslim world, which you [Western leaders] use as an arena for performing every kind of forbidden experiment, and where you permit every kind of abomination and violate every human norm of justice, decency and objectivity, while disregarding human rights without batting an eyelid.
"We know very well that the democracy you purport to advocate is intended solely for yourselves and your peoples, not for us, because according to your view we are backward, barbaric and dependent peoples who are not worthy of this enormous privilege. That is why you imposed upon us failing governments and 'deep states' steeped in corruption, oppression and injustice, in order to prove to your peoples that we truly do not deserve to live in dignity or enjoy any rights, for we accept all this backwardness that plagues our countries without lifting a finger [against it]. Even when we decide to act and change the situation, you oppose us and support the evil tumor you planted in our midst [i.e., the Arab regimes], hurling vicious accusations at us and drowning us in chaos and bloodshed, in order to convince the gullible that we do not deserve change or freedom...
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Wednesday, August 14, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
