Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, October 22, 2017

Syria says Israel worked with terror groups to shoot rockets at - Israel

Israeli artillery shelled three Syrian regime positions in the Golan Heights amid threats that Tel Aviv would escalate its response to rocket fire from the Syrian side of the Golan.

The Israeli shelling came in retaliation to five rockets being fired from Golan territories that are held by gunmen in Syria. The rockets had veered off their course and landed in the Israeli-occupied section of the region.

Actually, the rockets came from territory controlled by the Syrian army.

For its part, the regime acknowledged the Israeli attack against one of its positions,.

“The general command of the military and armed forces renews its warning of the dangerous repercussions of such hostile activities and holds Israel completely responsible for their consequences,” regime forces said in a statement.

“The attack is part of Israeli coordination with the terrorist groups that it supports in the region,” they added.

It said that the initial rocket fire that prompted the Israeli retaliation was originally coordinated with Tel Aviv “in order to give the Zionist enemy an excuse to carry out its aggression.”

This has Iran's fingerprints all over it:

Concluding a visit to Syria on Saturday, the commander of Iran’s armed forces signed a memorandum of understanding with Syrian officials in which the two allies announced plans for tighter military cooperation and coordination — notably against Israel. The sides agreed to expand cooperation on intelligence, training, technology and against what they called “Zionist-American schemes,” the Ynet news website reported.

Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, Iran’s chief of staff, has spent several days in Syria, touring war zones and meeting with high-level officials, including President Bashar Assad.

In what was seen as part of a determined effort to put an end to Israel’s hitherto unimpeded air superiority over Syria and Lebanon, Bagheri on Wednesday said Tehran would not tolerate violations of Syrian sovereignty by Israel and vowed that the two countries would jointly fight against Syria’s enemies. “We cannot accept a situation where the Zionist entity attacks Syria from the ground and the air,” he said.

It is notable that even "moderate" Arab media like London-based Asharq al-Awsat - which is pro-Saudi Arabia - simply believes Syria's version of events over Israel.

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This looks like a great movie on Israel's 1977 Maccabi Tel Aviv European Cup championship

On the Map is a documentary that is now making the rounds of Jewish and Israeli film festivals.

It looks really good.

(h/t Yoel)

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10/21 Links: Deliberate rocket fire from Syria; UN appoints Mugabe a ‘goodwill ambassador’

From Ian:

Israel believes rocket fire from Syria may have been deliberate

Israel believes five rockets fired across the border from Syria early Saturday morning may have been deliberately launched at Israel, rather than constituting errant spillover from clashes in Syria, military sources said late Saturday.

Israel fired back into Syria, hitting three rocket launchers, in response to the rocket fire, and warned that further fire would prompt a more intensive response.

Syria, in turn, claimed that Israel had “coordinated” with terror groups, inviting them to fire into Israel as a pretext for the IDF response, and it sent letters of complaint to the United Nations.

The Israeli army said five projectiles were fired at around 5 am, and that four of them fell relatively deep inside Israeli territory. The rockets set off alarms in several locations. They landed in open ground, and caused no injury or damage. One of them landed close to an Israeli residential area.
UN soldiers patrol near the border with Syria in the Golan Heights after projectiles land on the Israeli side of the border, October 21, 2017. (Basel Awidat/Flash90)

Channel 2 news reported that although the IDF officially referred to “spillover” fire in its statements Saturday, there was “a growing sense” in the army that the Syrian fire was deliberate.

There was no fighting going on in Syria at the time of the fire, the TV report said. It added that the area from which the rockets were fired is under the control of the Syrian army. And it noted that the projectiles fell deep inside Israeli territory on the Golan Heights, one after the other, rather than close to the border.

In letter to UN, Syria blames Israel for faking attack to 'justify own aggression'

The Syrian Foreign Affairs Ministry sent two letters to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Saturday accusing Israel of faking an attack on its own territory following the IDF's aerial attack on Syrian military positions in Quneitra on Saturday morning.

The Israeli military struck the Syrian targets in retaliation after five projectiles were launched at Israel from Syria, with three landing in an open area on the Golan Heights.

"Israel asked terrorists to launch projectiles at its own territory, so it could justify its own attack," the letters to Guterres reportedly charged.

"This new Israeli aggression against the outskirts of Quneitra is a new chapter in the connection between the Israeli occupation and the armed terrorist organizations, and a desperate attempt to support those organizations," the letter read in a blatant accusation but did not specify which terror groups Israel is allegedly collaborating with.

The letter continued to allege that "Syria repeatedly warns of the grave repercussions to the repeated aggressive actions that cannot be explained as anything but support of terror and criminal terror organizations, against Security Council resolutions."

The Syrian Foreign Ministry urged the UN to step up its involvement and to actively condemn Israel for its so-called 'manipulations,' writing to Guterres that "Syria is surprised by the lack of reaction from the Security Council [that isn't calling on Israel] to stop its aggression and isn't condemning it, seeing as it hurts basic UN principles as well as international law."

Corbyn says no to Balfour dinner

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has declined an invitation to attend a dinner to commemorate the centenary of the Balfour Declaration in London next month.

Jonathan Goldstein, chairman of the Jewish Leadership Council, said today it was “deeply unfortunate” Mr Corbyn was not going to the event.

“I do think it will not have been amiss for Mr Corbyn to understand that the Jewish community will have taken great heart and great comfort for seeing him attend such an event because it recognises the right of Israel to exist,” Mr Goldstein said.

He noted Mr Corbyn had also not attended a reception for Labour Friends of Israel during the party conference last month.

But Mr Goldstein said he hoped there would be representation from among the Shadow Cabinet at the dinner.
RELATED: Andrew Neil's Holocaust Educational Trust speech

The Labour Party has been asked to comment.

Earlier this month in an article in the Sunday Times, Mr Goldstein hit out at the Labour party's "utter failure to denounce the pernicious antisemitism that continues to pervade Labour".

10/20 Links Pt2: Liberal Jews and that inconvenient Israeli consensus; NFL Hall of Famers’ visit to Israel

From Ian:

Jonathan S. Tobin: Liberal Jews and that inconvenient Israeli consensus

Jewish institutions are under siege these days, and their principal critics aren’t neo-Nazis. Despite the clear leftward tilt of most organized Jewish life, liberal critics are constantly telling us that mainstream groups like AIPAC and federations are toadies of an Israeli government that is pursuing policies that American Jews abhor. The ferment on the left runs from tame—and largely irrelevant—liberal Zionist groups like J Street to more extreme opponents like IfNotNow and the virulently anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, which also dabbles in anti-Semitic libels as well as support for boycotts of Israel.

The critics and the naysayers have the ear of many Jews. The reason for this has more to do with the demographic collapse and decline of a sense of Jewish peoplehood among the non-Orthodox denominations that make up about 90 percent of American Jews, than it does with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s shortcomings. But it’s also true that the majority of the non-Orthodox Jewish community has little sympathy with the Israeli government’s positions on the peace process.

The notion promoted by President Barack Obama that Israel needs to be saved from itself still resonates among the majority of Jews who voted for him. This view holds that Israel’s continued presence in the West Bank is the prime obstacle to peace as well as the future of the Jewish state. But while this liberal consensus deems Netanyahu a problem, its proponents rarely stop to ask why he was elected prime minister four times, including winning the last three elections in a row.

The answer is simple. There exists a broad consensus within Israeli society that contradicts the assumptions held by most American Jews. The majority of Netanyahu’s compatriots see his policies as the only possible response to a Palestinian political culture that still refuses to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders might be drawn. Moreover, that Israeli consensus isn’t merely upheld by Netanyahu and his allies; his rivals on the center and the left also embrace it.

The most complicated city in the world: Talking to Mayor Nir Barkat about running Jerusalem

On 12 September Fathom hosted a briefing with Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat. Below is an edited transcript of the event. Barkat spoke candidly about running a city that is under the microscope like no other and contested like no other. He also discussed his vision for Jerusalem to be a model for peace and coexistence around the world and his policies to close the gaps between its different communities.

Nir Barkat: I think with this expert audience I’m excused from explaining how complicated the job is. What I’d like to do is share with you the vision that I have for my city. If you understand that vision, you will better understand the decisions I take.

Let me take you back 3,000 years.

When the people of Israel came back from Egypt after hundreds of years of slavery, the land was divided between 12 tribes. Each tribe had its own bit of land, except for Jerusalem, which for a thousand years made everyone welcome at the gates of the Holy City. Hence the phrase in the Bible, “Jerusalem makes all people friends” – a place where all tribes, Jews and non-Jews alike, could worship.

There is another famous phase in Hebrew, “from Zion, new leadership comes out of Jerusalem”. Returning pilgrims would be asked, “what’s new in Jerusalem?” The idea was, if it works in Jerusalem, it might work here. And that need not apply only to the past of Jerusalem; it could apply to its future too. My experience as a mayor is that Jerusalem is a thought-leader. When we get things to work here – between the secular and the religious, between Muslims, Jews and Christians – we offer a model to others.

Arab Muslim Israeli: Anyone Who Slanders Jewish State As ‘Apartheid’ Regime Should Be Ashamed

An Arab Muslim citizen of Israel blasted the anti-Semitic charge that the Jewish state is an “apartheid” regime, saying people should be “ashamed” of using that term to describe the only country in the Middle East that provides “freedom of belief, the right to educate, to elect and be elected” to all minorities.

In a video that went viral this week on Facebook, Dema Taya, who lives in the central Israeli city of Qalansawe, said on an Arabic-language news channel, “Israel is not an apartheid state and anyone who believes this should be ashamed of himself.”

“You live in this country and enjoy the full benefits of its citizenship. You are free to work, study, express yourselves and whatever you desire,” she told the host. “You lead and educate the next generations in a state that respects you. Look at Syria, Iraq, Egypt and the rest of the Arab countries. What have they done for the good of their people?”

Taya is currently in the U.S. on a speaking tour as part of a delegation organized by Reservists on Duty to fight the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) and tell of their personal experiences growing up as members of Israel’s minority communities.

“I’m proud to stand up and speak for Israel and that I’m an integrated part of it,” Taya said in the interview.

“I hope that all Arab countries will adopt the Israeli democratic regime – and for your information, 90% of Gaza Strip citizens and the West Bank wish they were under such a regime,” she concluded.

10/20 Links Pt1: Palestinian mission in Colombia calls for Israel’s destruction; Glick: Iran’s very good week

From Ian:

Quoting Arafat, Palestinian mission in Colombia calls for Israel’s destruction

The official Palestinian mission to Colombia on Thursday night tweeted a quote from former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat calling for the destruction of the State of Israel.

The tweet read, “Our goal is the end of Israel, and there can be no compromises or mediations…. We don’t want peace. We want WAR and victory — Yasser Arafat,” according to a spokesperson for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Following a report on Israel’s Channel 1 television, the Spanish-language tweet was removed. No explanation or apology was offered.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry responded to the tweet by condemning Arafat for his “legacy of hostility” and death.

“A quote from one of Arafat’s statements clearly illustrates to us the hatred that was always his lot and the legacy of hostility he left behind,” the ministry told the TV station. “In his life and death, his entire legacy is death, hatred and disgust.”
Israel’s ambassador to Colombia said the matter had been raised with the local authorities.

“We brought the matter of the Palestinian mission’s tweet to the attention of the government in Bogata,” Marco Sermoneta told Channel 1. “Anyone who believes everything the Palestinians say must also believe them when they say this.” (h/t Yenta Press)

Senior UK Jewish Leader Criticizes British UN Diplomat Over Balfour Declaration Comments to UN Security Council

The top organization representing British Jews has lodged a complaint with the British government over remarks by the UK’s Deputy Ambassador to the UN suggesting that the absence of a Palestinian state represents the “unfinished business” arising from the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

In a speech to a UN Security Council debate on the Middle East on Tuesday, Deputy Ambassador Jonathan Allen underlined that the “UK is proud to have played a role in helping to make a Jewish homeland a reality” when it issued the declaration in November 1917. But Allen drew the ire of British Jewish leaders when he added, “let us remember, there are two halves of Balfour, the second half of which has not been fulfilled.”

“There is therefore unfinished business,” Allen said, a remark he repeated in a later tweet.

In a letter to Britain’s senior diplomat at the UN, Ambassador Matthew Rycroft, Jonathan Arkush – president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews – invoked Prime Minister Theresa May when he asserted that it is “completely inconsistent with the United Kingdom’s declared policy to mark, commemorate and celebrate the Balfour Declaration (all terms used by the Prime Minister and other ministers in recent weeks).”

“In just a fortnight’s time a commemorative dinner is to take place to be attended by the Prime Minister and Prime Minister Netanyahu,” Arkush said. “It is deeply unattractive for the UK’s Mission to the UN to strike a critical note and exposes the UK Government to a charge of hypocrisy.”

Yisrael Medad: Tweeting to UK UN Depty Ambassador Allen

It really is, my man, quite at matter of simple historical facts.

You are reading into the text things that are not in it, or intended to be. The Arabs of the area were to gain at least three national states, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, and the area known as Palestine was to be the Jewish state. The one Jewish state.

And in any case, as Jonathan Hoffman tweeted,
Oh rubbish. The 'civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in [former] Palestine' are completely protected.

If the PA isn't bound by the Oslo accords, then it should self-destruct, right?

MEMRI recently published this clip:

Fatah Revolutionary Council member Salwa Hudaib said that the Oslo Accords had destroyed Jerusalem. "I say, on my own behalf and on behalf of the Fatah movement, that we are not bound by the Oslo Accords, because these accords no longer exist on the ground," she declared, speaking on the Palestinian Authority's Alfalstiniah TV channel on September 16. "Our leaders were tricked into signing some of the articles," she said, adding that Israel "is known for its deception, its treachery" and "regularly avoids implementing agreements."

Interviewer: "Has the Palestinian leadership ever officially declared that it is no longer bound by the Oslo Accords?"

Salwa Hudaib: "The Vienna Convention stipulates that if any party breaches an agreement, that agreement becomes null and void. Israel did not implement the agreement within five years, and it continued its activities of settlement, of Judaization, of deportation, killings, and oppression, and only intensified its occupation and settlements, and therefore, we are not bound by the Oslo Accords. President Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] has not declared this officially, except for when he said, during the [2017] Al-Aqsa Uprising, that we were halting the [security] coordination and all bilateral relations with the Israelis. This started on July 14th, 2017, and it continues to this day. In addition, the popular resistance has intensified. So we are not bound by the Oslo Accords. I say, on my own behalf and on behalf of the Fatah movement, that we are not bound by the Oslo Accords, because these accords no longer exist on the ground."

The Oslo Accords created the Palestinian Authority. it is what gave the Palestinians self-rule over Areas A and B.

So if they say it is abrogated, then Israel has every legal right to take over the entire West Bank again, and control it legally under international law, since there is no Palestinian legal entity.

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Jasbir K. Puar of Rutgers University is publishing a book called The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability.

The blurb:

In The Right to Maim Jasbir K. Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability. Drawing on a stunning array of theoretical and methodological frameworks, Puar uses the concept of “debility”—bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors—to disrupt the category of disability. She shows how debility, disability, and capacity together constitute an assemblage that states use to control populations. Puar's analysis culminates in an interrogation of Israel's policies toward Palestine, in which she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury. Supplementing its right to kill with what Puar calls the right to maim, the Israeli state relies on liberal frameworks of disability to obscure and enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies. Tracing disability's interaction with debility and capacity, Puar offers a brilliant rethinking of Foucauldian biopolitics while showing how disability functions at the intersection of imperialism and racialized capital.

It is, as always, an amazing coincidence that such a high percentage of so-called "academics" somehow manage to find Israel to be the paradigm of whatever evil they identify - "settler-colonialism" is a classic example, but even campus rape and racism have been linked to Israel through the magic of the new intersectionality where any two concepts can be linked as long as the author hates both of them - and one of them is Israel.

We looked at the hate that animated a speech of Puar's last year, when she attempted to link Israel to pretty much everything evil at a conference on gender and ecological issues:

In centering in human entities and temporalities how Palestine matters resituates the geopolitical that has been oddly alighted in the resurrection of the ecological and the geographical and emergent fields of new materialisms and Anthropocene studies. Many scholars have rapidly noted that much of the Anthropocene talk has been enabled through a rather bald-faced appropriation of long-standing native and indigenous cosmologies. So the book attempts to offer a counter genealogy to the surge of theories of object-oriented ontology and theories of post-humanism by putting them into direct relation to the fields of post-colonial theory, questions of imperial occupation and settler colonialism and disability studies.

This is the germ of her idea for this new book.

But first, let's look at the first paragraph of Puar's new book's preface, before she completely descends into pseudo-academic gobbledygook:

The intensification of the writing of this book, and the formulation of “the right to maim,” its most urgent political theoretical contribution, began the summer of 2014. This was the summer police shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the summer of Operation Protective Edge, the fifty one-day Israeli siege of Gaza. Organizers protesting these seemingly disparate events began drawing connections, tracing the material relationships between the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the militarization of police in Ferguson, from the training of U.S. law enforcement by the Israeli state to the tweeting of advice from Palestinians on how to alleviate tear gas exposure. Descriptions of the militarized containment of civilians in Ferguson
echoed those of the settler colonial occupation of Palestine. It was not long before the “Ferguson to Gaza” frame starting taking hold as an organizing rubric. Ferguson-to-Gaza forums sought to correlate the production of settler space, the vulnerability and degradation of black and brown bodies, the demands for justice through transnational solidarities, and the entangled workings of settler colonialism in the United States and Israel. The comparisons, linkages, and affective resonances between Ferguson and Gaza were not perfectly aligned, and they did not always yield immediate alliances. But these efforts were convivial in their mutual resistance to the violent control of populations via targeted bodily assaults, and reflected desires for reciprocating, intersectional, and co-constituted assemblages of solidarity.

Puar accidentally highlights the sequence of events that contradicts her entire academic career. Israel-hating activists (like Puar herself) decided to tenuously attempt to link protests against US police practices to Israel which even Puar admits is "disparate" and that the connections between the two are not obvious. The desire to link the two completely disconnected issues precedes the actual supposed linkage. Puar the quasi-academic is willing to embrace and fabricate these linkages not because there is any truth to them but because they fit her politics. Facts are merely props for foregone conclusions where context is the enemy.

As a thought experiment, decide: Which is closer linked to each other, Israeli practices with US police brutality, or Palestinianism and Nazism? The links between Palestinianism and Nazism are direct: the founder of the Palestinian national movement was an open antisemite who proudly supported the Nazi aims of genocide against Jews; Palestinianism aims to remove Jews from positions of political power as the Nazis did in the 1930s, Palestinian media today continues to publish articles that are antisemitic and which include the blood libel and Holocaust denial just as Nazi media did, the Palestinian leadership violently suppresses any dissent within their own areas of power. Yet can one even imagine an academic paper pointing out these links ever getting published, let alone an entire book by an academic press?

The linkages that Puar and her ilk claim where Israel is the personification of whatever is fashionably evil at the moment are not only tenuous - they are fictional. One can literally choose any topic and any nation and find linkages that are at least as believable. All one needs is the desire and the links come by themselves. It isn't research - it is dumpster diving.

In fact, the next two paragraphs of Puar's preface highlight exactly that. She claims that US police (as if all the police departments in the US are magically linked to each other in what she calls the "US security state") have a seeming default "shoot to kill" policy against blacks, but Israel's policy not to kill Palestinians is framed instead as a "shoot to maim" policy: They are, obviously, opposite.

One striking aspect of the connective tissue between Ferguson and Gaza involved security practices mining the relationship between disability and death. Police brutality in the United States toward black men and women in particular showed a definitive tendency to aim for death, often shooting numerous bullets into an unarmed, subjugated, and yet supposedly threatening body—overkill, some might call it. Why were there seemingly so few attempts to minimize the loss of life? The U.S. security state enacted powerful sovereign entitlements even as it simultaneously claimed tremendous vulnerability. ....

The might of Israel’s military—one of the most powerful in the world—is built upon the claim of an unchanging ontological vulnerability and precarity, driven by history, geopolitics, and geography. Alongside the “right to kill,” I noted a complementary logic long present in Israeli tactical calculations of settler colonial rule—that of creating injury and maintaining Palestinian populations as perpetually debilitated, and yet alive, in order to control them. The Israeli Defense Forces (idf) have shown a demonstrable pattern over decades of sparing life, of shooting to maim rather than to kill.This is ostensibly a humanitarian practice...

The ostensible "US security state" policy of shooting to kill is linked to the IDF policy of trying to avoid death.

Yet, sure enough, Puar finds a linkage between the two in the next paragraph - because anyone can find any linkage to anything when they look hard enough.

Indeed, immediately after that she describes the egotism that caused her to try to link the movement for the rights of the disabled with Black Lives Matter and therefore Israel:

On this particular day [July 10, 2016] the main Black Lives Matter protest in New York City was happening in Times Square. Not far from this location, the Second Annual Disability Pride parade, marketed as a festival and celebration, was marching on Broadway from Union Square to Madison Square Park. International in scope, the parade included veterans and actors involved in the development of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. I was in a part of Manhattan equidistant from both activities, one being an action and the other being an event. The relationship between the two confounded me.

Why does there have to be a relationship between two completely different marches in Manhattan on a single day? Because Puar wants there to be one. After all, she was equidistant from both - that must have some sort of divine (sorry, intersectional) meaning, right?

And, of course, Puar succeeds in finding that link, which is the basis for this entire book!

This isn't research. This isn't innovation. This is simply hate dressed up in academic clothing, and the hate that Puar has is just as toxic and noxious as the racism she pretends to oppose.

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Arabs consider the Holocaust a myth - until it becomes convenient for them to say Jews are worse than Nazis

A few years ago, Jordan's Al Rai newspaper wrote an article that says that there was nothing special about the Holocaust, saying that Nazis killed lots of people besides Jews, and that the Holocaust itself is "surrounded by doubts an ambiguity" and raises many questions, and that there were many other "holocausts".

Also that Palestinians suffered from multiple "holocausts" at Deir Yassin and Sabra/Shatila and Gaza.

The Holocaust denial and soft-pedaling is sadly typical in Arab media.

But when one can make a political point, then Holocaust events become much more believable.

Two weeks ago, according to Haaretz, a large group of Jewish teens rioted in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem.

According to Palestinian eyewitnesses, approximately 400 youths marched through the Old City from the Western Wall towards the Muslim Quarter's Damascus Gate, allegedly shouting, beating the doors of houses and shops, throwing rocks and smashing car windows.

As they approached Damascus Gate, the youths stormed an open shop and attacked the shop's Palestinian owner. The owner was taken to Hadassah University Hospital to be treated for his wounds and was released in the morning, his injuries described as "light."

A police force of about 20 officers later arrived at the scene and escorted the rioters out of the Old City however no arrests were made. Police issued a statement on Thursday morning saying that there had been a fight between two groups of youths.

"During the night, a confrontation broke out between young people on Hagai Street in the Old City, during which stones were thrown," the police said.

Police say that it was a fight between two groups, not a group of Jews rioting -and Ma'an says "dozens" of Jews, not 400, were involved - but Haaretz' headline still lies and says "Hundreds of Jewish Teens Run Riot in Muslim Part of Jerusalem's Old City."

One Palestinian shopkeeper was lightly injured, according to the report.

I'm not defending anyone rioting or causing damage. But following Haaretz's lead, the same Al Rai newspaper that said that the Holocaust is questionable now says that what happened in Jerusalem was - yes, you guessed it - Kristallnacht.

In the two days of Kristallnacht, over 250 synagogues were burned, over 7,000 Jewish businesses were trashed and looted, 91 Jews were killed, and Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools, and homes were looted while police and fire brigades stood by.

Comparing the disturbances in Jerusalem two weeks ago with Kristallnacht is as obscene as comparing Israel responding to rockets to the Holocaust.

But for Israel haters, the Holocaust only exists as a prop to say that the Jews are worse than Nazis.

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10/19 Links Pt2: UN Promoting Anti-Semitic Hate Groups, Terrorism; Outside the UN, BDS Is Losing Badly

From Ian:

Report: UN Promoting Anti-Semitic Hate Groups, Terrorism

The United Nations has formally endorsed and approved scores of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hate groups that promote terrorism against Jews from within the halls of Turtle Bay and elsewhere, according to a new report that exposes how these organizations have been granted privileged status by the U.N., potentially in violation of the international body's own bylaws.

The U.N. has formally accredited scores of non-profit organizations that use their legitimacy to spread anti-Semitic propaganda promoting terrorism against Israel and Jews, according to an in-depth new expose by Human Rights Voices, a watchdog organization.

The report, which provides pictorial evidence of this behavior, exposes how these organizations use their U.N.-accredited stature to slander the Jewish state and promote terror groups such as Hamas.

The report is likely to galvanize the Trump administration and pro-Israel supporters in Congress to further scrutinize the U.N.'s systematic promotion of anti-Israel propaganda, according to those familiar with the matter.

The Trump administration has already removed the United States from a U.N. cultural organization known as UNESCO due to its repeated efforts to pass anti-Israel resolutions that claim Jewish historical sites do not belong to the state of Israel.

Evelyn Gordon: Outside the UN, BDS Is Losing Badly

Until now, because most boycott initiatives have been small-scale, it’s been possible for people who advocate “just boycotting the settlements” to ignore what that actually means. The irony is large-scale initiatives like the UNHRC blacklist, by publicly spelling out exactly what it entails, make it much harder for people to keep ignoring the truth: that “boycotting the settlements” actually means boycotting Israel.

Nevertheless, this realization isn’t going to sink in without a lot of work on the part of both the Israeli government and Jewish and pro-Israel activists worldwide. Indeed, that’s one of the main lessons of the victories to date.

When the BDS movement first emerged, many well-meaning people advocated ignoring it rather than fighting it on the grounds that fighting it would simply inflate the importance of an otherwise insignificant movement. But victories like those of the past few weeks show why that strategy was wrong. The growing understanding that BDS is anti-Semitic didn’t happen because Israel and overseas activists ignored the movement; it happened because both the Israeli government and overseas activists relentlessly explained the connection between boycotting Israel and anti-Semitism. And a similar effort will be needed to explain that “boycotting the settlements” is just a euphemism for boycotting Israel.

Even though large swaths of polite society are now perfectly comfortable with anti-Semitism as long as they can tell themselves it’s just “anti-Zionism” or “fighting the occupation,” open avowals of anti-Semitism are still taboo. Once stripped of the comforting pretense that it’s not anti-Semitic, BDS will be finished. And groups like the Austrian student union and the Bavarian Green Party are now tearing that pretense to shreds.

Why Europe's New Nationalists Love Israel

There is another path, taken by the United States, which allows that every nation can be "almost chosen," in Lincoln's memorable phrase. It can emulate Israel without seeking to supercede it. What distinguishes American culture is the radical Protestant belief that the City of God cannot be realized in the City of Man, that life is a pilgrimage whose goal is ever beyond the horizon. This concept defines and shapes American literary as well as popular culture, as I tried to show in this essay.

The existence and success of the State of Israel changes everything. It is not merely a promise, spiritualized by Christianity into a vision of another life beyond this one, but a living, breathing people that punches above its weight in every field of human endeavor. Perhaps the people of Israel will help fulfill their mission to be a light unto the nations by example. Europe's new nationalists may attempt to emulate Israel not but superceding it or by asserting their claims for election against each other, but by seeking to identify its virtues.

Post-nationalist Europe bears an irrational hatred of Israel, I wrote in this space in 2014.
The flowering of Jewish national life in Israel makes the Europeans crazy. It is not simply envy: it is a terrible reminder of the vanity of European national aspirations over the centuries, of the continent's ultimate failure as a civilization. Just as the Europeans (most emphatically the Scandinavians) would prefer to dissolve into the post-national stew of European identity, they demand that Israel do the same. Never mind that Israel lacks the option to do so, and would be destroyed were it to try, for reasons that should be obvious to any casual consumer of news media.

It is too early to judge the direction of the new European nationalism, which has some elements that make me cringe, and some that make me release the safety-catch on my Browning. But it also has men and women who do not want to disappear into the dustbin of history and look to Israel for inspiration. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

The Palestine Children's Relief Fund styles itself as a "non-political" organization that only cares about Palestinian children's lives.

Here is a snippet of a speech by Hanan ashrawi at their annual dinner in Atlanta this past weekend, where she accuses Israel of having no interest in peace.

Non-political?

Ashrawi gave a speech at another PCRF gathering in 2015 where she accused Israel of attempting to destroy Palestinians not only physically (11:27 -"Israel is a settler colonial project is attempting to complete the Nakba that started in 1947-48") but culturally (" a people [Jews] are attempting to eradicate the very
presence, the very history, the very culture, the very identity of another nation and to take over not just that land but that narrative.") She claimed that Israel created towns where they stole Arabic names and Hebraized them, which is the exact thing Arabs have done to Biblical-era sites.

Ashrawi mentioned Israel 85 times in this speech, which seems curious for a "non-political" organization that is only concerned with treating Palestinian children (and most of their actual work does seem to be to treat them, especially Syrian Palestinian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon.)

Hundreds of well-heeled Arabs pay to attend fancy dinners where they tell themselves they care about Palestinian children but the star of the show is spewing anti-Israel lies (and barely talking about Palestinian children, except to say that they are being blown up by Israeli missiles.)

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

The Jerusalem Post reports,

Israel's representatives to the judo Grand Slam event in Abu Dhabi have been told that they will once more not be allowed to compete under their country's flag.

The blue-and-white delegation to the final Grand Slam competition of the year is set to include 12 athletes, but Israel Judo Association chairman Moshe Ponte was informed by the organizers that they won't be able to have the Israel flag on their judo uniform, as they do in every other event across the world. Instead of having ISR (Israel) by their names on the scoreboard and on their backs, they will have to take part in the contest as representatives of the IJF (International Judo Federation). The national anthem will also not be played, should an Israeli win a gold medal.

This is something Israelis and supporters of Israel have grown used to.

We are not, in the minds of the Emiratis, a country. And if asked, they would doubtless agree with the spokespeople of the Palestinian Arabs that the Jews are not a people. Maybe even that Jews are not people at all, although this isn’t something they would admit in public.

Miri Regev, our combative Minister of Culture and Sport, wrote a harsh letter. Maybe Abu Dhabi will drop its insulting demand, maybe we will not send our athletes to compete, or maybe we will do what most of the non-Muslim world does over and over (including the government of Israel) in the face of lunatic Muslim demands for submission, and submit.

I’m sick of it.

Here’s a personal story. I’m an amateur radio operator (a “ham”). Many of us engage in competition to contact as many different “entities” as possible. There is a list of 340 entities, defined by political and geographic criteria. Some are normally uninhabited and inhospitable to human presence, and some have few amateurs. They may only be available for short periods of time, as when someone organizes an expensive expedition to a place like Bouvet Island, in the South Atlantic near Antarctica. Contacting a large number of them is quite difficult, and requires patience and time. Amateur radio is in a sense a sport, although perhaps a sedentary one; but like other sports it strives to stay above politics.

The location of a station is identifiable by its call letters, and there are currently 7 or 8 countries (Iran, Yemen, Libya, etc.) who do not permit operators within their jurisdictions to contact stations in Israel. So we are automatically at a disadvantage in competition. But rarely does anyone complain. It is expected. Israel is special.

This is probably less important than Judo, which in turn is less important than the UN Human Rights commission, which has passed about 70 resolutions condemning Israel since 2006, more than all other countries put together; or UNESCO, from which the US and Israel have removed themselves because of its ludicrous bias. Or the UN General Assembly.

But all of these “little” insults add up. Like an abusive relationship in a marriage or between a parent and a child, in which every interaction provides an opportunity for the abuser to belittle and insult the victim, there is a cumulative effect on both the target of the abuse and bystanders. No matter how secure she is, there is a feeling that if she weren’t doing something wrong, she wouldn’t be a target of abuse. And if there is more than one abuser, the effect is even greater.

What begins as verbal abuse between partners becomes physical; and minor physical abuse can become major and even lead to murder. In the international realm, a sustained campaign of delegitimization can be a precursor to war or genocide. It’s happened more than once.

When the state of Israel was founded despite the violent opposition of the Arab world, the conflict surrounding her was mostly contained in the region. The Arabs attempted to enforce an economic boycott, which was only spottily effective. But with the artificial creation of the Palestinian movement in 1967, and even more so with the Durban Conference in 2001 and the program of associating Israel with the modern-day deadly sins of racism, apartheid and colonialism, bullying Israel became a worldwide endeavor. Europeans jumped on the bandwagon with glee, picking up what Richard Landes called a “get out of Holocaust shame free card” by accusing Israel of being worse than the Nazis. And in North America, liberal Jews who wanted to belong to the fellowship of the intersectional Left were easy prey.

Even many Israelis (some of whom work for important media outlets) wilted under the onslaught and began to believe that their country actually was a racist, colonialist enterprise and even an apartheid state.

Another personal story: when I was 8 or 9 years old I had a friend who liked to tell me how dumb I was. One day, after he’d called me stupid four or five times, I picked up a large two-by-four (for non-Americans, a wooden beam about 5 cm by 10 cm thick) and swung it at him. Luckily for both of us, it struck his shoulder instead of his head. My parents explained that I might have killed him, and didn’t I know that I wasn’t dumb? “I know, but I’m tired of hearing it,” I said.

Israel needs to express that she, too, is tired of abuse. Getting a divorce from UNESCO was a good start, although I’m embarrassed that we had to wait for the US to do it first. We should tell the hosts of the Judo competition in Abu Dhabi that their singling out Israel is unacceptable; either they drop their special rules or we will not participate. And we should demand that the International Judo Federation does not accept the results of any contest that does not treat all competitors with respect.

Now I think I’ll try some similar judo on the committee that governs amateur radio competition.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

10/19 Links Pt1: Mass murderers honored at PA Uni; The Big New Palestinian Lie

From Ian:

Alan M. Dershowitz: Why Are So Many Claiming That Iran Is Complying with the Deal, When Evidence Shows They Aren't?

Yet, even if Iran were to comply with the letter of the nuclear agreement, it would still be able to build up a vast nuclear arsenal within a relatively short timeframe. The approach adopted by the Trump administration – articulated in a statement delivered by the president several days ago – is justified by the realities on the ground. By announcing that he is decertifying Iran's compliance with the nuclear agreement, President Trump is giving Congress 60-days to act. Not only is President Trump giving the United States back some of its leverage, but he is also sending a powerful message to the rogue leaders in Iran and North Korea – who are believed to have cooperated on missile technology – that the era of containment and deterrence policies is over. The United States is returning to its original mission of prevention.

Interestingly, in the aftermath of President Trump's address, the Saudi Press Agency reported that King Salman called the U.S. President to offer his support for America's more "firm strategy" on Iran and commitment to fighting "Iranian aggression." Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, offered similar praise for the new U.S. posture, saying in a statement that President Trump "has created an opportunity to fix this bad deal, to roll back Iran's aggression and to confront its criminal support of terrorism." It is no secret that these two previously discordant states are now cooperating in unprecedented ways as they try to counter the threat posed by a nuclear Iran. When Israel and the Gulf States are on the same page, the world should listen.

There are those that argue that by decertifying, President Trump has undercut American credibility and sent a message to the world that it can't count on one American president following through on deals made by his predecessor. But the fault for that lies squarely with President Obama who refused not only to make his deal a binding treaty, but also to seek any congressional approval – both of which would have assured greater continuity. He knew when he signed the deal that it could be undone by any future president.

The goal, of course, is not to undo the deal but rather to undo its sunset provision and to make Iran keep the commitment it made in the prologue: never to obtain "any nuclear weapons."

The available evidence now strongly supports the conclusion that Iran is not keeping that commitment: that it is determined to develop a nuclear arsenal capable of being mounted on intercontinental ballistics missiles. If the current deal is not changed, it is likely that Iran will become the new North Korea – or worse – before very long.

The Big New Palestinian Lie

It is precisely the inflammatory speech of Abbas and his senior officials, expressed at every possible podium, which has been trying to turn the conflict into a religious one.

If any side has turned the conflict into a religious one, it is the Palestinian side, which has long depicted Jews as sons of monkeys and pigs, enemies of Allah, and killers of prophets. When Abbas and other Palestinians accuse Jews on a daily basis of "storming" and "desecrating" the Al-Aqsa Mosque, they are firing the first shots in their religious war against Israel and the Jews.

By turning the conflict into a religious one, the Palestinians are hoping to avoid any discussion about important issues such as security, borders, the status of Jerusalem, anti-Israel incitement and assaults on public freedoms under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Palestinian leaders do not feel comfortable discussing any of these issues; that is why they prefer to make the debate appear as if it is about religious issues.

PMW: Mass murderers honored at Palestinian University

Students at the Palestinian Al-Quds Open University (Dura branch) were welcomed this week at a reception for new students by a large banner teaching them who Palestinian "heroes" are. Students looked up to see a huge banner on stage with pictures of founders and heads of terror organizations who are responsible for the deaths of many hundreds of Israelis:
Abu Ali Mustafa, head of PLFP
Fathi Shaqaqi, founder of Islamic Jihad
Ahmad Yassin, founder of Hamas
Yasser Arafat, former PLO and PA Chairman
Salah Khalaf, head of Black September
Abu Jihad, head of the PLO terror organization's military wing

Ahmad Yassin was the founder and leader of Hamas and was responsible for dozens of suicide bombings on buses, on streets and in cafés in which hundreds of Israelis were murdered.

Abu Jihad (Khalil Al-Wazir) headed the PLO terror organization's military wing and planned many deadly Fatah terror attacks in the 1960's - 1980's. These attacks, which murdered a total of 125 Israelis, included the most lethal in Israeli history - the hijacking of a bus and murder of 37 civilians, 12 of them children.

Salah Khalaf headed the terror organization Black September, a secret branch of Fatah established by Yasser Arafat. Attacks he planned included the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics (Sept. 5, 1972) and the murder of two American diplomats in Sudan (March 1, 1973).

The banner at Al-Quds Open University included the logo of the university's branch of Fatah's student movement Shabiba that includes the slogan: "From the sea of blood of the Martyrs (Shahids) we will create a state," as well as the PA map of "Palestine" that presents all of Israel as "Palestine" together with the PA areas in the colors of the Palestinian flag. The logo of Al-Quds Open University also appeared on the banner, next to an additional PA map of "Palestine" in the colors of the Palestinian flag.