Meanwhile, Dems close their eyes to the pair’s blatant anti-Semitism, which is only growing after Israel’s decision. On Friday, for example, the two posted an anti-Israel cartoon by an artist known for drawings that mock Holocaust victims and feature anti-Semitic imagery. Outrage from Dems? Ha.
The pair also upped their “We Hate Israel” campaign. Tlaib teared up before the cameras over how her family members had to pass through “dehumanizing” checkpoints — with nary a word about how those stops are needed to prevent terrorism by Palestinians. Omar called for ending aid to Israel (which lets it buy US military equipment).
Where are the Dems who’ll stand up for the Jewish state against such attacks?
True, Democrats have been moving away from Israel for years now, a shift that makes little strategic — or moral — sense. If they continue to stick with Tlaib and Omar, the split will be complete.
I suggest that the visit would have been a nightmare for Israel, one with possibly far worse implications than might initially had been conceived. The two women are skilled demagogues, and everywhere they would have gone would have been an up close and personal indictment and delegitimization slugfest.
Israel would have been on the defensive, and as it often is, and not very effective or compelling in its responses.
The greater damage would have taken place on their return as the two would have sought to whip up anti-Israel sentiment in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party based on their personal experiences.
They would have pulled the center of gravity of the party toward the left-wing position (as they have been doing on several fronts), which is increasingly hostile to Israel.
While those who are upset with Israel’s decision believe it will weaken bi-partisan support (meaning Democratic support), the aftermath of the Magical Misery Tour would have been intense criticism of an “apartheid, colonialist regime.”
It is hard for many Israelis to understand just how toxic American political discourse has become. Given the Democratic hatred of all things Trump or Trump-related, Israel, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in particular, are walking around with targets on their backs. In the world of intersectionality, with designated victims and designated oppressors, Israel and, increasingly, Jews are being categorized as bad guys.
The visit would have heavily played into this narrative and mindset.
While we can never know the implications of that which did not happen, my strong intuition is that notwithstanding the current criticism, Israel dodged a bullet.
The actors playing the roles of the hilltop youth do a professional job of convincing us that all young settlers are just as crazy as the young Haredi killer. The scenes involving the Israel Police and Security Forces are dramatized in a constantly negative light, as if the Israeli Authorities are conducting a cover-up, not wanting the truth to be discovered, making all of Israeli society seem responsible for the Arab boy’s murder.
All these decisions are deliberate directoral decision.
The director, Yosef Cedar, has allowed the main actor, playing the role of the investigating Shabak agent of the Jewish Division, only one facial expression throughout every scene, a constant sneer which seems to say, “Everything in Israel is corrupt and evil.”
In short, in this unabashedly leftist Israeli masterminded TV mini-series, the Jews are always the villains, and the Arabs always are the victims.
When you add to this the very deliberate use of one-sided dramatization, manipulated dialogue, slick camera angles which make the Jews look constantly guilty and the Arabs persecuted, plus professional editing favoring the Arab side of the story, scary music accompanying the Jews and sympathetic music heightening the injustices against the Arabs, with seasoned actors in tear-jerking performances portraying the victimized Arabs and no actors at all playing the three slaughtered Jewish boys and their families, you end up with a movie that is sure to win top awards in Hamas and Islamic Jihad film festivals and Cannes.
Of course, Israel’s Minister of Culture, Mir Regev, will raise her voice in protest, but no positive and truthful movies about the life of Israel’s brave and idealistic settlers are ever funded and therefore never made, leaving a vacuum for movies like “Our Boys” and their hateful propaganda to thrive.
Here are some parts you may never had heard about:
The Arabs said, sure, we'll stop killing Jews - if you just throw away any possibility of a Jewish homeland. Otherwise, well, what do you expect?
As we know from harsh experience, murderous Arab mobs and their inciters are not likely to look at facts.
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It's Easier To Launch Semantic Tangents Such As 'Arabs Are Semites Too' Than Address Arab Antisemitism
By Rebecca Goldsmith, If Not Now activist
I always counsel my pro-Palestine allies to keep the focus of rhetoric on Islamophobic manifestations and anti-Muslim violence, especially from Israel, but it can be hard to maintain that focus when others bring up Arab enmity toward Jews. That's why my go-to tactic always involves dismissing such points with a wave of the hand and the assertion that since Arabs are also Semites, calling them antisemites makes no sense.
This rhetorical move leaves opponents confused, which gives us the opportunity to seize the initiative once again and return to blasting Israel for its racism and brutality. Better to silence them with historical incoherence than have to confront any justice to Jewish fears of Arab violence.
Now, anyone with even minimal education in the subject already knows that the term "antisemitism" always refers specifically to hatred toward Jews; the term itself was coined in nineteenth-century Germany as a euphemism because "hatred toward Jews" just sounds bad. Including Arabs in the mix only muddles the issue, but that is where we strike: in the muddle. A coherent argument is the worst enemy of a cause that rests primarily on emotionally charged distortions.
Anyone with slightly more than a minimal education also knows that the term "Semitic" refers to languages, not ethnicities; the Semitic group of language, which includes both Hebrew and Arabic, forms part of the larger Afro-Asiatic family of languages, meaning that a speaker of Arabic speaks a Semitic language, but that has no bearing on ancestry or race. As it appears in the term "antisemite," the term replaces the linguistic sense with a racial one. With just a little rhetorical sleight of hand, presto, Arabs are Semites too, and Zionists have no argument!
Good thing we have that tool available, too, because it's less convincing to deny centuries of Arab persecution of Jews than to undermine the way it's framed. The idea is not to concede any legitimacy to the notion of Jewish sovereignty as a necessity, lest the entire conceptual edifice of destroying Israel for the sake of everyone involved suffer irreparable damage. Regardless of our contention that Jews and Arabs lived harmoniously until Zionism, getting involved in a discussion of whether Jews suffered as an underclass at the hands of Arabs distracts from the essential point, so better to dismiss it with sophistry.
And you know I have credibility on this issue because I identify as a Jew and a Jew can't be antisemitic either.
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16 years ago tonight, the 22nd of the Hebrew month of Av, 23 Jews were murdered in a suicide bombing while traveling on a bus in Jerusalem's Beit Yisroel neighborhood. Those murdered included 7 children. There were six terrorists directly involved in the attack, including the suicide bomber, two terrorists killed in an attempt to arrest them and three terrorists who are still in prison.
According to the calculations of Palestinian Media Watch, the Palestinian Authority has paid the imprisoned terrorists and the families of the dead terrorists, as payment for the murderous attack, a cumulative sum of 2,692,500 shekels ($764,482).
One of the more dominant terrorists who planned the attack was Majdi Za'atri who was sentenced to 23 consecutive life sentences and an additional 50 years. He alone, through June 2019, has been paid by the PA 706,800 shekels ($188,996).
Two other terrorist arrested at the same time have been paid the same amount. Accordingly, since the arrest of the three terrorists in August 2003, the PA has paid them, to date, a total of 2,142,300 shekels ($608,263).
The timing of the Palestinian Authority being called to task for antisemitism in its textbooks by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination coincides with the UNRWA mandate coming under debate for renewal every five years, since 1949.
This year, for the first time, there will be no automatic renewal.
What is the connection between the PA textbooks and UNRWA?
I personally interviewed Dr. Na’im Abu Hummus, who was then Palestinian education minister, at his office on August 1, 2000, the very day the first textbooks published by the PA curriculum were provided to UNRWA.
In that interview, Al-Hummus explained that the PA had contracted with UNRWA to function as the exclusive supplier of schoolbooks for all UNRWA schools in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Jerusalem.
That day, the PA provided the Center for Near East Policy Research (CFNEPR) with its first 80 school books, and the center has over the last 19 years received and examined all 365 school books which the PA has supplied to UNRWA.
Conclusions? The CFNEPR has found that PA textbooks used by UNRWA have been indoctrinating virulent antisemitism into the hearts and minds of refugees from the 1948 War of Independence and their descendants.
Significance? UNRWA is responsible for the education of 321,000 students in 370 schools.
The United Nations General Assembly renews UNRWA’s mandate every three years and is expected to rubber-stamp its extension this November. Perhaps the assembly would reconsider if UNRWA’s top donors — the European Union, Germany, Britain, and Saudi Arabia — made clear that their patience is at an end.
Instead, UNRWA donors should call on the UN to treat Palestinian refugees like all other refugees in the world and address their needs through the UNHCR, which is less prone to corruption, though still not immune. The provision of services to Palestinians in need would continue or even improve. The U.S. could incentivize the proposed reform by offering to restore most or all of its $360 million annual funding if the UNHCR takes charge.
Additionally, as President Trump’s special envoy Jason Greenblatt suggested, nearby countries hosting Palestinians should assume many of UNRWA’s responsibilities — with donor support — so that these populations can finally start building lives outside the camps.
Corruption within a self-serving and self-preserving bureaucracy is entirely predictable. UNRWA has become a vestigial organ, no longer serving its purpose of helping actual refugees. Eliminating a bloated, bureaucratic UNRWA and redirecting its work towards more efficient bodies determined to solve the problem will ultimately serve all interested parties. It would cause some pain, but it is better than condemning another generation of Palestinians to grow up in the camps, where they learn to blame Israel for their suffering.
A guest post by Victor Muslin. I have divided it up into parts - EoZ
A toxic anti-Israel climate on college campuses is on the rise. This increase in Zionophobia is a source of anxiety to Jewish students and their parents. Students are wondering what awaits them on campus and how to best navigate the hostile environment of academia. Parents are wondering what can be done to protect their children and combat Jew hatred at their school. With the next school year approaching, there has been no dearth of advice from professional advice-givers of mainstream Jewish organizations and well-meaning intellectuals. But how effective has this avalanche of advice been?
Recently I read a blog in the Times of Israel entitled "Before you head to campus, read this." The author acknowledges that "many campuses have become ground-zero for anti-Israel activism" and advises pro-Israel students "to be knowledgeable enough, open to talking with others in your circle, willing to grapple with complexity, and confidently owning your identity." When it comes to Israel, the advice is to "discuss with nuance and sophistication, not bombast" and to "understand that there is more to every student than where they stand on this issue. Disagreements on Israel shouldn’t be the only thing keeping individuals or student groups from interacting."
In broad daylight on Broadway in front of the main entrance to Columbia University campus. This is the reality of Jewish experience on a toxic anti-Israel campus. As a Jewish student, are you prepared to see this at the main entrance to your campus?
It is solid advice that might work well on campuses where pro-Israel students are confronted by peers who, as the TOI piece states, "may have never met a Jew before and for whom Israel is simply a faraway country." If only such open-minded peers who are genuinely ignorant about Israel were the main problem.
Unfortunately, this is not the reality on many problematic campuses and this sensible advice has a fatal flaw as it presupposes that one's opponents are acting in good faith, i.e., that they are fair people, sincere in their beliefs, open to examining whether these beliefs are based on the truth, and are willing to change their minds if shown contrary facts.
If only it were possible to prevail in arguments by "discuss[ing] [Israel] with nuance and sophistication" as the article recommends. If only it were possible to educate by a calm presentation of facts and reason. If only it were possible to win sympathy by explaining what Israel means to the Jewish people who were exiled by the Romans and persecuted in the Diaspora. If only it were possible to win admiration by extolling the miraculous success of the tiny nation of refugees who, surrounded by enemies, overcame tremendous odds and who, by sheer hard work and intellectual brilliance, created amazing technologies and medical breakthroughs benefiting the entire world. If only it were possible to win empathy by pointing out how Israel has been always the first nation to help in a disaster, even when the disaster strikes its enemies. If only it were possible to win hearts and minds by dispelling lies. If only...
The level of Zionophobia fueled by BDS-inspired Jew hatred is not the same on every campus. Anti-Israel activities are concentrated in a small number of prestigious campuses popular with Jewish students; the larger the Jewish student population the more pervasive is the anti-Israel hostility. The worst anti-Israel schools tend to be prominent, prestigious universities that wield enormous influence and generate the largest amount of publicity. Averaging anti-Israel sentiment of Columbia University which had 108 incidentsrecorded by AMCHA or New York University which had 75 incidents with Appalachian State University which had 4 incidents or Bradley University which had 1 incident distorts the reality. It tempers what it feels like to be an isolated pro-Israel student on a campus with an active pro-BDS movement fueled by aggressive chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), IfNotNow and J Street U, where professors are anti-Israel propagandists, where Hillel eschews involvement beyond anodyne statements and serving Shabbat dinners to avoid antagonizing their liberal donors, and where the administrators—the supposed "adults in the room"—are intimidated by, if not openly complicit with, the students and faculty claiming for themselves the exclusive right to be the arbiters of human rights and social justice.
"Ofir, the 24-year-old daughter of Israel Consul General in New York Dani Dayan, said she is harassed and threatened over her background by the group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and that the school is failing to protect her. 'SJP is violent,' she said. 'I’m worried about my personal safety.' The political science major had her initial run-in about a month into the fall 2017 semester, when she was in the lobby of Knox Hall — home to the Middle East Institute — having a phone conversation in Hebrew. 'A girl heard me and started screaming, "Stop killing Muslim babies! . . . You’re a murderer!" Ofir said. 'Then she screamed, "Zionist, get out!" A nearby public-safety administrator did nothing.'"
It is no surprise that in an environment like this students who express sympathy for Israel are treated as evil supporters of a bloodthirsty regime that has no right to exist and needs to be exterminated together with its supporters. Are these the people to whom the pro-Israel students are supposed to listen and with whom they are expected to engage in nuanced conversations? Part 2 next week.
For more information about Zionophobia in academia and specifically at Columbia University and Barnard College, please visit https://www.cu-monitor.com/
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On August 21, 1969, the Al-Aqsa Mosque was burned, the first of the two Islamic Qibla and the third major mosque that attracts the traveler. The Zionist entity claimed that a young Australian named Dennis Michael Rohan carried it out, but this incident came within the framework of a series of actions carried out by the Zionist occupation since 1948 with the aim of obliterating the Islamic civilization identity of the city of Jerusalem.
Golda Meir, then Prime Minister of the Zionist entity, said after the incident; "I did not sleep all night, I was afraid that the Arabs could enter Israel in big groups from everywhere, but when the sun rose the next day I knew that we can do anything we want!"
These words were the key to Zionist barbarism in the occupied territories.
The Golda Meir quote is, of course, a complete fabrication.
If there is ever to be peace, the Arab side has to learn to distinguish between truth and falsehood. They argue with complete conviction the most absurd lies, but too many in the West believe the conviction and don't bother to check the facts.
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Here's another in a never-ending series showing how Arabs and Muslims are lying when they say how wonderfully they got along with Jews in their countries.
This is from the 1890 book Winters In Algeria, by F.A. Bridgman:
The hatred which exists between Arab and Jew is very marked, and "Youdi" (damned Jew) is a term that he reserves for one of that race, and uses also when he wishes to exhaust, in one ejaculation, his vocabulary of curses against a member of his own persuasion.
There was one other interesting section:
The origin of the Arab's hatred to the Jews was a legend which he told with religious conviction. Mohammed the prophet owned a large park filled with gazelles; the favorite of these animals had horns and hoofs of pure gold, which attracted one day the eyes of a Jew. He gave chase, and running the gazelle down secured the precious metal.
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Five years ago, the concept of even talking about this – even three years ago – of cutting off aid to Israel because of two people that hate Israel and hate Jewish people – I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. … Where has the Democratic Party gone? Where have they gone where they’re defending these two people [Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar] over the State of Israel? … I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat – it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.
The CNN article linked above goes on to quote Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL and several other minor public Jews as saying that Trump is invoking the antisemitic “dual loyalty trope.”
The “dual loyalty trope” is far more than the idea that Jews care about Israel, see American and Israeli interests as aligned, and want US policy to be supportive of Israel. It implies that Jews would be willing to work against American interests in order to help Israel, to stab America in the back – as Hitler accused German Jews of doing to Germany – for their own purposes.
This is a pernicious doctrine, but there is no evidence that this is what he meant. Indeed, if the Jews were more loyal to Israel than the US, they would be more likely to vote against the party of Tlaib and Omar, Israel’s enemies, than for it.
Halie Soifer, executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, went farther:
If this is about Israel, then Trump is repeating a dual loyalty claim, which is a form of anti-Semitism. If this is about Jews being 'loyal' to him, then Trump needs a reality check. We live in a democracy, and Jewish support for the Republican Party has been halved in the past four years.
I think these responses are not just deliberate misunderstandings intended to attack Trump. I think that these people are really unable to understand his rather obvious intention, which is that Jews who support the Democratic Party are disloyal to the Jewish people. Not to America, not to Trump, but to the Jewish people.
So let me correctly translate his statement, with which you can agree or disagree: “the Democratic Party has tolerated, even embraced, the antisemitic and misozionist* Tlaib and Omar, and Jews who still support it are either ill-informed or disloyal to their own people.”
One could argue that this is not true, that the Democratic Party can be saved from going down the road traveled by Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, that there are elements in the party that are strongly opposed to their positions, that most House Democrats opposed Omar’s pro-BDS resolution and indeed passed one condemning BDS by a large margin, and so on. I don’t intend to discuss this here. My point is that an interpretation of Trump’s words as antisemitic is simply nonsensical.
There is a reason for the inability of these people to get the point. It is that at bottom they do not feel a part of a “Jewish people.” And they also don’t understand or don’t care that the conditions that enabled the Jewish people to survive in the diaspora no longer hold. Today, the survival of the Jewish people as a unique people in history depends on the survival of the Jewish state.
To those Jews whose worldview was inspired by the 19th century reformers who believed that they could protect their communities from antisemitism and integrate them with non-Jewish society by insisting that Jews were not a people, but only a group sharing a common religion – Germans or Americans of the Jewish Persuasion so to speak – Trump’s remark was unintelligible.
Interestingly, even the Republican Jewish Coalition seems to have missed the point. It tweeted, “President Trump is right, it shows a great deal of disloyalty to oneself to defend a party that protects/emboldens people that hate you for your religion.” That’s wrong. The disloyalty Trump is referring to is not to “oneself,” but to one’s people. And they don’t hate us for our religion: they hate those of us who support a Jewish sovereign state in a place that they believe belongs only to Muslims. They see the Jewish people as a rival, even an enemy of theirs.
The PLO knows there is a real Jewish people and that it has a deep historical connection to Eretz Yisrael.They deny it because they would like the world to accept their false narrative, but they know that the Jewish people are the aboriginal inhabitants – the oldest extant indigenous people – of Eretz Yisrael, the Jewish ancestral homeland. Many American Jews do not know or care.
Trump himself probably thinks the responses were just attempts to attack him, and maybe that is a part of it. Trump, like Polemarchus in Plato’s Republic, seems to believe that “justice resides in helping one’s friends and hurting one’s enemies,” and doesn’t understand people who invert this idea, like the progressive Jews who subscribe to “Tikkunism.”
Because this post mentions Trump, I will get a lot of angry mail. But before you sit down at your keyboard to type all the adjectives that are so beloved of those who believe that Trump is the Devil, please understand that as usual, this post is not primarily about him. It is about the importance for Jews, even in the diaspora, to understand that they are a unique people, with a homeland that is theirs alone.
Trump is comfortable with nationalism, which American liberals have long since rejected, and it makes sense to him that members of a people would naturally want to stick up for their ancestral homeland, even while preferring to live somewhere else.
It makes sense to me too.
___________ *Misoziony is the extreme and irrational hatred of the Jewish state. It isantisemitism raised up one level of abstraction, although almost all misozionists are antisemites as well.
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Despite the backlash, neither Omar nor Tlaib have shown any willingness to pare back their anti-Semitic agitation. When Israel made the arguably ill-advised decision to invoke the country’s new anti-BDS law to bar the congresswomen from visiting the Jewish state, Jerusalem did so on the unassailable legal grounds that the organization sponsoring their trip was viciously anti-Semitic. That organization, Miftah, accused Jews of consuming “the blood of Christians,” has published neo-Nazi screeds, and has celebrated murderous terrorist attacks targeting children. To protest their treatment by the Israeli government, the two congresswomen shared a cartoon drawn by Carlos Latuff, a draughtsman who placed in Iran’s 2006 International Holocaust Cartoon Contest. The two congresswomen have regularly claimed that Israel’s character as a Jewish state is incompatible with representative democratic governance, likened Israel to Nazi Germany, and compared the Hamas-linked BDS movement to the Boston Tea Party.
Through it all, Omar and Tlaib were described in the press not as outliers but leading indicators of a sea change in the Democratic Party’s outlook toward Israel. They are the vanguard of a generation challenging old Democratic nostrums along the “uncomfortable intersection of race, gender, and religion.” They are “changing the conversation” about America’s relationship with Israel, igniting a hostile response “in particular from Republicans eager to exploit divisions in the Democratic Party.” Such a pronouncement is akin to suggesting that Rep. Steve King is “changing the conversation” around America’s relationship with white nationalism when his racist claims generate only censure and opprobrium from conscientious custodians of American national comity.
The only thing that saves Reps. Omar Tlaib and Rashida Tlaib from the universal reproach they are due is the plausibility of the claim that their displays of anti-Semitism are unconscious. But the preponderance of evidence suggests that they know exactly what they are saying and why. Those who continue to defend them probably do, too.
It thus seems fair to note that while not one Jordanian was killed by a terrorist Palestinian to liberate “Palestine” from the Jordanian government in the 19 years of occupation, 2,143 Israelis have been killed and nearly 10,000 wounded by Palestinians in deliberate attacks. It seems fair also to emphasize the word “deliberate.” Dead Jews were the goal. Fair, too, to remind her that 19 of the dead and 172 of the wounded were victims of a massacre during a Passover Seder; Nava Applebaum and her father David were murdered sitting in a café the night before her wedding; Kobi Mandell and Yosef Ishran, two 13-year-old boys, had their heads smashed against rocks; 3-month-old Hadas, 4-year-old Elad, 11-year-old Yoav, and parents Ruth and Udi Fogel were murdered in their beds. Eighteen people, including Americans Malki Roth and Shoshana Yehudit Greenbaum, were killed in a Sbarro pizza parlor (their killers received an estimated $910,823 in “salary” from the Palestinian Authority).
There are 2,132 others to be named and remembered.
Israelis live not only with checkpoints, but with intrusive security in airports, schools, shopping centers, concert halls, and other places because all have been attacked by people — Palestinians, not Costa Ricans or Laotians or Nepalese — intent on killing them.
And yet, Israel is here, strong, vibrant, growing, democratic, and tolerant of everyone except those openly dedicated to its destruction.
If that further upsets Ms. Tlaib, so be it. (h/t messy57)
In 1867, the journalist Samuel Clemens visited the Land of Israel with a group of American pilgrims; he described what he saw there in The Innocents Abroad, published two years later. The place described as so lush in the Hebrew Bible appeared to him to be barren and dispiriting. The nearer he and his fellow travelers came to Jerusalem, “the more rocky and bare, repulsive and dreary the landscape became.” As Meir Soloveichik notes, the exiled Spanish rabbi Moses Naḥmanides formed a strikingly similar impression when he arrived there 600 years prior. But with a difference:
Naḥmanides describes the barrenness of the land of Israel as ordained by God with the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Jews by the Romans. . . . “From the moment we left” into exile, he writes, the abundance of the land has failed to show itself. Throughout the generations, “all seek to settle it,” yet the land resists cultivation. It mourns just as its people mourn. He, too, notes what Twain had sensed as a paradox: that the earth grows more barren as one approaches Jerusalem. “The general principle,” he wrote to his son, is that “the holier the land is, the more desolate it remains.” After all, the Holy Land yearns for the Jews; the holier a speck of soil may be, the more it refuses to provide its fruits until the Jews return.
Naḥmanides saw in 1267 what Twain in 1867 had failed to see. Clemens could never have imagined that exactly 100 years after he visited the Temple Mount in 1867, Jewish soldiers would stand there to claim it as their capital of a flourishing land. Yet credit for this wondrous event can in some sense be linked to Naḥmanides, whose own arrival in Jerusalem exactly 700 years before the Six-Day War marked the beginning of a seven-century Jewish presence in the sacred city. To this day, there is a synagogue in Jerusalem founded by this exiled rabbi—a man who believed that if Jews would return to Jerusalem, Jerusalem would one day return to the Jews.
Rashida Tlaib made a tearful statement to the press on
Monday, expressing her need to “expose the truth” about Israel, which she calls
“Palestine.”
Much of what she says is inaccurate and lacks context, which
makes it a lie. This for instance:
“As a young girl, visiting
Palestine to see my grandparents and extended family, I watched as my mother
had to go through dehumanizing checkpoints -- even though she was a United
States citizen and proud American. I was there when there when my [grandmother]
was in a terrible car accident and my cousins and I cried so she could have
access to the best hospitals -- which were in Jerusalem.”
For one thing, it is doubtful Tlaib ever saw her family go through checkpoints "as a young girl" as there were no checkpoints when Tlaib was small.
Another lie by Tlaib.
She was a young girl in the 80's / early 90's at best. That was before checkpoints when Israelis & Palestinians easily crossed over into each other's territory, relatively safely. Before Oslo & the installation of Arafat's terror government. https://t.co/ATaKyQYy2u
Liar Tlaib,
By the time they had checkpoints she was a young adult:
Rashida Harbi Tlaib (/təˈliːb/;[1]; born July 24, 1976) Yes. By the 90s she was 14. By 93 she was 17. This is simply fakery. pic.twitter.com/uba68wL1Wu
Then too, it is not only Arabs who must pass through checkpoints. Jews, too, must wait their turn in traffic to go through
checkpoints. I go through checkpoints every time I go from my apartment in Judea to the nearest city, Jerusalem. I went through checkpoints each time I labored to give birth to the final 6 of my 12 children, in order to get to the closest hospital in Jerusalem. We all go through the checkpoints, which make us late for appointments, and waste precious minutes getting us to hospital emergency and delivery rooms.The unfortunate inconvenience of the checkpoints is the trade-off for the many lives they save.
I won't lie: It is true that when the soldiers at the checkpoints see I am Jewish, they wave me through, knowing that I am not going to
Jerusalem to blow up a bus or smuggle arms.
Other people do get stopped and
checked. Some more thoroughly than others. It depends on how much suspicion
these people arouse, and yes, whether or not they are Arabs. Profiling like this saves lives. That is because in
Israel, the people who perpetrate terror
attacks are Arabs.
And even with the checkpoints, with soldiers looking in at the drivers, one by one, as cars pass through, we sometimes fail to catch terrorists, as this tweet from Frimet Roth demonstrates:
Rep Tlaib cried about her mother being "dehumanized" at Israeli checkpoints. My child Malki, a US citizen murdered at 15, would be here today had a checkpoint stopped her murderer and a 10 kg bomb from entering Jerusalem. Remind Tlaib: Checkpoints prevent terrorism - save lives. https://t.co/6KD0l7rdhn
While checkpoints save lives, we do of course understand that everyone should have access to medical care. And there is no doubt that Tlaib’s
family would have wanted her grandmother to have access to the best possible hospitals after a bad car accident. But why, with the world pouring billions of dollars in aid into UNRWA and the PA, have the Arabs not built their own good hospitals, closer to home? Why should Muftia Tlaib be required to travel, at all?
The answer is this: the aid that goes to the PA and Hamas is used to fund terror, not hospitals. And that is a choice. With all
that money, dozens of state-of-the-art hospitals could have been built in
Judea, Samaria, and Gaza for the exclusive use of the Arab people. Better
hospitals than the Jews have in Jerusalem, which would obviate the need for travel, passing "dehumanizing" checkpoints, and ensuring that people like Tlaib's "sity" get help on the spot.
But the Arab people choose not to
build hospitals. They choose instead to use the monies they receive to fund the
murder of Jewish Israelis. Weapons cost money. So do the Pay to Slay salaries
for terrorists and their families.
This Palestinian Authority-sanctioned
policy of supporting and inciting terror over building hospitals makes it necessary to create even more “dehumanizing” checkpoints, even while PA constituents lack adequate
and sometimes even urgent medical care. The Arabs have put the murder of the Jews ahead of the health of
their own people. Murdering Jews is their top priority.
And why, after all, should this money not be spent on the Jew-killing machine? PA and Hamas leaders and their families are well provided for: they have no difficulty obtaining medical care inside the State of Israel. Senior PA leader Jibril Rajoub was treated in an Israeli hospital in May. Hamas terrorist leader Ismail Haniyeh and four of his family members received treatment in Israel. PA President Mahmoud Abbas and three of his family members were treated in Israel. Why would these senior officials earmark funds for the medical care of people like Tlaib's "sity" when it doesn't affect them personally?
Putting terror first, and putting the haves before the have nots, explains the tragic
disparity between available funding and the lack of medical care for the Arab
people of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, people like Tlaib's "sity." There should be no need for these people to
travel to Jerusalem after a bad car accident. There is enough money to build
hospitals and urgent care centers for everyone, very close to home.
This choice: choosing to murder Jews over providing medical care to your own people, is sick and wrong. Especially when corrupt leaders have the access to medical care that their people do not. But to
cast the blame on Israel for these awful priorities, for these choices, and to
then cry crocodile tears at press conferences in your official capacity as a
public servant, as Tlaib has done, is even more wrong. It is an abuse of power. And it does
nothing to help the Arab people.
Israel is not to blame for the choices made by Tlaib’s own people. Israel is, on the contrary, one of the two victims of this
choice, this unquenchable thirst to shed Jewish blood; the other being the Arab
people, who lack adequate medical care as a result of their grim and tragic priorities.
It is true that checkpoint solders waved me through as I labored with my 12 children
on the way to Jerusalem. They might well have waved through Rashida’s “sity” after
her car accident, too, except for the fact that Arabs have historically misused
medical services for nefarious ends, for instance for the smuggling of bombs past the
checkpoint in order to blow up Jewish Israelis in Jerusalem. From the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs (MFA):
Unfortunately, there have been
documented cases of Palestinians abusing the neutrality of ambulances and
medical facilities for terrorist purposes. On March 26 2002, Ahmed Jibril, a
Tanzim operative, was detained at an IDF roadblock near Ramah Bridge, south of
Ramallah. Jibril worked as an ambulance driver for the Palestinian Red Crescent
(PRC). He was arrested while driving an ambulance belonging to the PRC in which
were found an explosives belt and explosives. Jibril admitted that Mahmoud
Titi, a Tanzim leader in Samaria, told him to deliver them to Tanzim operatives
in Ramallah.
In addition to Jibril, a woman and
three children, aged 6 months, three and four years old, were in the ambulance.
The explosives belt held sixteen pipes containing approximately 10 kilograms of
explosive materials. The belt was hidden under the mattress of the stretcher on
which one of the children was lying.
Nidal Abd al Fatah Abdallah Nidal,
an ambulance driver from Qalqilya employed by UNWRA, was arrested in August
2002 by IDF forces. He admitted using the ambulance to transport weapons and
explosives for Hammas. Waffa Idris, a PRC employee, perpetrated the suicide
bombing on Jaffa Street in Jerusalem in January 2002. She was dispatched by a
PRC ambulance driver who is also a Tanzim operative, and she was assisted by
another PRC employee. It is also believed she may have traveled in a PRC
vehicle, and used PRC documents to go through IDF checkpoints.
I have been in Israel for four decades, now. I remember these incidents and others, too. It is a known
thing: Arab terrorists smuggle arms in ambulances, even placing them under the
body of a child. How then can we simply wave Tlaib’s “sity” through a checkpoint after a bad
car accident? We want to help. We are good people. But too many Arabs are not.
The MFA website explains Israel's humanitarian predicament:
These incidents are not
exceptional. There have been others in which Palestinian terror organizations
abused the privileged status of ambulances, as well as many intelligence
warnings of their intentions to do so. There is also abundant evidence that
terrorists operate from within hospitals and health clinics; that terrorist
organizations recruit PRC employees; and that wanted terrorists frequently
travel in Palestinian ambulances to escape capture.
In light of these Palestinian
practices, the IDF is forced to stop and search ambulances, which unavoidably
results in impacting the Palestinian population, despite the IDF's efforts to
minimize the disruption caused.
International law may mandate
safeguarding the neutrality of ambulances, medical transports and personnel. However,
it has also long recognized that when ambulances and medical transport are used
for military purposes, they can no longer keep their protected status.
Should we choose to let ambulances through unchecked, taking a chance on the lives of innocent Jews? Or should we trust the Arab passengers of these vehicles, knowing the history, knowing they have abused this trust in the past--Israel's trust--on several occasions?
Ambulances are something most of us see as sacrosanct: something never to be weaponized. This is the issue that
Tlaib should be tearfully addressing from her platform of power: how to fix her
people so they no longer breech these basic human standards of decency, no longer exploit Israel’s humanitarian impulses, so that
Israelis no longer need fear them--fear for their lives--when an ambulance
carrying wounded Arabs rushes by. Because ambulances just like the one that
carried her “sity” have been used to carry explosives to murder Jewish Israelis,
simply because they were Jews.
This, and not some pretend lack of Israeli humanity is the
reason for the “dehumanizing” checkpoints: Arab terrorists who exploit Israel’s
good nature, who exploit ambulances and other medical services, using them as tools to
murder Jews.
This is the reason for the checkpoints in the first place: the Arab propensity for placing the murder of Jews above all else, even medical care for their own people. That is true crux of the problem. A problem Tlaib will never address.
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Thursday, August 22, 2019
