Two foolish youths and a Jewish Palestinian - by Vic Rosenthal

...Everything in this story is surreal. Imagine: Hillel Garmi believes that Hamas is nonviolent, and Luhar Altman thinks that Israel should not have an army. And a Jewish Palestinian wishes for “many more like them.” 

A "Jewish Palestinian"

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
09 August '18..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2018/08/two-foolish-youths-and-a-jewish-palestinian/

Young people are naïve. They pop out of their mothers’ wombs as little fresh-faced tabulae rasae with a huge amount of energy. By the time they approach draft age, Israeli culture treats them as adults. They look like adults, and they are given adult responsibilities; but because they have until then lived in a bubble of people that care about them, some of them have not learned about the reality outside it. They are unable to internalize that there are people out there who do not care about them, indeed who would rip their throats out to steal their bicycles. Or for nothing at all except their Jewish identity.

The bubbles that protected the young Luhar Altman and Hillel Garmi, who feature in this Ha’aretz story by Jewish Palestinian Amira Hass, must have been warm and soft beyond compare, because the degree of naïveté that they still display at age 19 is mind-boggling. Luhar and Hillel have decided that they would prefer not to serve in the IDF. Instead of taking the usual paths to avoid service that are available to a young Israeli – what to say to an army psychologist to mark you as undesirable is common knowledge – these two have chosen to refuse to serve on political grounds and will go to prison, to the great admiration of Jewish Palestinian Hass.

They are doing this to inspire other young Israelis to also avoid service. This is their way of fighting “the regime’s immorality.” I can’t imagine what they think the success of their campaign would look like, although we don’t have to look very far to see examples of how the folks that the IDF defends us against treat the people under their control.

So far they have merely shown that they are part of the anti-Zionist Left. But what is remarkable is the utter counterfactual idiocy of their reasons, the degree of blindness to reality they display. I wish they had said simply that they hated the Jewish state and wanted it replaced with an Arab state, the way Jewish Palestinian Hass does. At least then their position would make sense. But no. Let me quote Hass quoting them:

[Garmi’s] declaration opens: “This year, during the wave of unarmed demonstrations which took place near the Gaza Strip fence, I read what Ahmed Abu Artema, who organized the demonstrations, wrote, and I was impressed to discover people who take on the situation between the sea and the Jordan without using a gun. Like them, I too believe in civil disobedience – a tactic aimed at using unarmed force to underscore the regime’s immorality.”

Like them? I mean, seriously, Hillel Garmi, do you think that the riots and attempted incursions at the fence are about nonviolence and civil disobedience? Suppose the IDF left their posts at the fence and went to the beach in Tel Aviv. What do you think would happen? You do know that when Hamas operatives are not “using a gun” they are using a knife, or a car, as a weapon? You do know that they want to kill you, personally, because you are a Jew and the Quran tells them to?

Israel Recycles Water, and Amira Hass, of Course, Recycles False Water Charges

Amira Hass must really like false charges that Israel is stealing Palestinian water, since she keeps on repeating those false charges, requiring us to repeat their refutation.

Alex Safian, PhD..
CAMERA Media Analyses..
23 June '16..

Amira Hass must really like false Palestinian charges that Israel is stealing their water, since she keeps on repeating those false Palestinian charges, requiring us to repeat the refutation.

Whereas previously Hass charged that profligate Israelis "use three times more water a day in their households as West Bank Palestinians do," in her latest effort she charges that:

On average, the Palestinians consume 73 liters per person per day. Below the recommended minimum. Israelis consume a daily 180 liters on average, and there are those who say even more.

She also charges that "Israel sells the Palestinians water that it first stole from them," and:

With the Oslo Accords, Israel imposed an outrageous, racist, arrogant and brutal division of water sources in the West Bank: 80 percent for Israelis (on both sides of the Green Line), and 20 percent for the Palestinians ...

Hass is dead wrong about the relative usage of water by Israelis and Palestinians, and about her other charges too, but before getting into details and numbers, it's important to illustrate a deeper distortion in her claims.

(Continue Reading)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Surprise? Haaretz's Hass Sweeps Away the Facts - by Tal Raphael

...What facts did Hass omit in this apparently dramatic and heart-wrenching story? In fact, the real story is neither dramatic nor heart-wrenching.

Tal Raphael..
CAMERA Media Analyses..
19 June '16..

Haaretz's Amira Hass last week claimed that Israel "sweep[s] away" the Palestinian population ("Israel's Right to Sweep Away Palestinians," June 8).

With evocative phrases, Hass introduced various examples of Israel allegedly "sweeping away" Palestinians. Under the heading "The right to dismantle a kindergarten," for example, Hass recounted the alleged fate of the Hamadin Bedouin community of Sateh al-Bahr. According to Hass, on June 5, Israel’s Civil Administration in the West Bank dismantled "six prefab houses and one prefab [caravan] that served as a kindergarten for 12 children." As a result, she wrote, "Twenty-six people, including 13 children, lost their homes."

What facts did Hass omit in this apparently dramatic and heart-wrenching story? In fact, the real story is neither dramatic nor heart-wrenching.

(Continue to Full Post. Please Share)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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On the search for terror at Haaretz - by Arnold Roth

...There's something depressingly fitting in Hass, recipient of the World Press Freedom Hero award 16 years ago by her peers in the news industry, delivering a bogus slapdown of Israeli "terror" that focuses on a hamlet populated by straw men.

Route 443 [Image Source]

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
17 February '16..

Over at Haaretz, they have another example of Amira Hass agit-prop disguised as a "news report" today ["Army terror against the Palestinians that journalists only yawn at", Haaretz, February 17, 2016]

It runs through a list of non-lethal actions taken by the IDF and security forces and ends with these words:

[I]n the dictionary of the residents (and mine), destruction of cisterns, theft of land and livelihood, and invasions of homes are acts of terror.

That Hass "dictionary of terror" is a strange and malevolent thing.

Military actions designed to defensively safeguard the second-busiest artery serving the nation's capital qualify for a prominent appearance in it.

But it fails to even hint at the numerous attacks, including murders, done in recent weeks by Arabs living nearby. [Google Search]. The very recent killing for instance [about which we wrote: "26-Jan-16: Two attackers stab women at neighborhood grocery store; instantly become figures of emulation"] of a lovely young woman, Shlomit Krigman, 24, stabbed to death on January 26 [her editors at Haaretz reported it, even as she ignores it] on a street in Beit Horon.

That's a community located an easy stroll away from Beit Ur Al Tahta (the subject of the Amira Hass story) and the adjoining Beit Ur Al Fuqah.

(Read Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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Amira Hass, BDS and the rebirth of the ‘Elders of Zion’ at the University of Kent

...The enemy of BDS is the entire state of Israel. But to state this out loud is to invite criticism, to expose the antisemitic underbelly of the entire boycott movement, so it is best to try to hide this goal. Here was Amira Hass in public admitting she is actively promoting BDS, actively petitioning foreign governments and winking and nodding at other activists, showing them the way to avoid the antisemitic label.

David Collier..
Beyond the Great Divide..
29 January '16..

Yesterday, 28/01/2016, I was at the University of Kent to hear a talk by Amira Hass titled ‘Israel and the Palestinians: Colonialism and Prospects for Justice. The event itself was a collaboration between The Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at Kent University and the Palestine Centre at SOAS, University of London. One of these universities, SOAS, is already a notorious hotbed for extremism, the other, Kent, seems to be desperately trying to catch-up.

Dr Bashir Abu-Manneh is the head of the centre for Postcolonial studies at Kent, like other academics of his type, it can be seen from his own activity that he has long lost sight of what academia and critical thinking is about. This event, following one just the evening before attempting to create BDS activists on campus, is simply a sign of a deteriorating environment.

Amira Hass is an Israeli columnist at the Haaretz newspaper. For the last 20 years she has lived in the Palestinian areas, originally in Gaza, but more recently moving to Ramallah in the West Bank. Amira is an example of one of those Israelis nobody should have heard of. Standing for politics that receive no support in Israel, Amira’s opinions reflect none but a handful of oddballs. Every nation has people like Hass hidden in the shadows. What makes her ‘special’, what makes her a marketable commodity, are hundreds of millions of people outside of Israel that simply want Israel gone. The audience of Amira Hass are not peacemakers, but warmongers.

There were around 200 people in the hall to hear her talk. Perhaps 60 of them students from the university. The rest, activists from the local Palestinian support groups. The talk itself was relatively predictable and in 45 minutes, she did not mention Arab violence once. The intifada’s, both of which apparently were ‘benign’, were mentioned in name twice but never detailed. Rather, the violence, all of it, was Jewish.

In usual fashion, events in Israel were taken out of context, exaggerated, misrepresented, and as one would expect from an activist who long ago forgot how to actually ‘report’ a news item, important details were either deliberately sidestepped or completely forgotten. Sleight of hand in her description of events with the Bedouin of the Negev, allowed Hass to suggest that it didn’t matter which side of the 1967 border was being discussed, the end result for an Arab is always the same. Gross distortion of a deliberately sinister kind, and an unforgiveable misrepresentation of the simple fact that Arab Israelis are *factually* living as equal citizens in a liberal democracy.

At events like this I always feel sorry for the uniformed in the audience. They are vulnerable to a propaganda exercise that is designed to spread lies and hatred. Although that, I suppose, is the sole purpose of the talk in the first place. I also resent the idea that a university in the UK can give a platform to such distortion without feeling the need to provide an alternative voice.

Wow! Even Amira Hass Is too ‘Zionist’

...Judging by her column, Hass learned nothing from the fact that even she was ostracized as too “Zionist” by these activists. But other well-meaning liberals ought to do so. “Pro-Palestinian activists” who have no place even for Amira Hass in their world have no place for anyone who seeks anything other than Israel’s violent demise. Thus by cooperating with such activists, liberals are not promoting a peaceful two-state solution; they’re promoting the activists’ goal of a world without Israel.

Image by © Wissam Nassar/Xinhua Press/Corbis

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary Magazine..
23 December '15..

Many well-meaning people still believe that “pro-Palestinian activists” are exactly what the term sounds like – people anxious to better the Palestinians’ lot by ending “the occupation” and creating a Palestinian state. But Haaretz journalist Amira Hass provided a window onto these activists’ true nature in a column this week: They are people for whom even Hass – a self-described non-Zionist who deems Jewish immigration to Israel a “crime” and Palestinian violence against Israel a “right” – is a “Zionist,” and therefore beyond the pale. In short, they are people whose world has no place for any Israeli Jew of any political persuasion, and for whom the only “pro-Palestinian” future worth contemplating is one where Israel ceases to exist.

To understand just how extreme a worldview is required to label Hass too “pro-Israel,” some background is in order. Hass is Haaretz’s longtime Palestinian affairs analyst, but she’s unique among the Israeli journalists covering this beat in that she doesn’t live in Israel; she has lived for over two decades among the Palestinians, first in Gaza and then in Ramallah. This isn’t merely out of journalistic dedication; it’s where her avowed sympathies lie.

She states explicitly that she isn’t a Zionist. As she put it in the above mentioned column, during a panel she moderated at last week’s Haaretz conference in New York, “The newspaper’s representatives made it clear that Haaretz is a Zionist publication, that its opposition to the occupation stems from Zionist principles. I found it appropriate to distinguish myself from this stance.”

In this same column, she wrote that overseas Jews who move to Israel “would be choosing to participate in another crime,” a message she said she has delivered at forums ranging from the Haaretz conference to meetings with South African Jews. As she correctly noted, this is the antithesis of Zionism, which “preaches in favor of the immigration of Diaspora Jews to Israel.” In contrast, she appears to favor letting Palestinians immigrate to Israel; at any rate, she devoted several paragraphs to decrying Israel’s refusal to let them to do so.

Moreover, she believes Palestinians have a “right” to kill Israelis; in a now-infamous column in 2013, she wrote, “Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule.” That those stones are lethal weapons whose victims are primarily innocent civilians – the list of Israelis killed by Palestinian stone-throwers ranges from infants through toddlers to senior citizens – evidently doesn’t cause her any moral qualms.

So what could Hass possibly have done to enrage those “pro-Palestinian activists” to the point of accusing her of the worst crime in their book – Zionism? In her own words, “The thing that apparently angered them most was that I dared claim that the use of weapons does not advance the Palestinians’ cause today.”

The Real Lessons from Birzeit’s Expulsion of Haaretz’s Amira Hass

...Palestinian universities’ unwillingness to confront students with any perspective that might challenge their preexisting views has also hindered Palestinian economic development, because students aren’t developing the critical thinking skills necessary for success in today’s high-tech economy. But that’s the Palestinians’ problem. Birzeit’s education to hatred and prejudice, in contrast, ought to be the problem of anyone who claims to care about Israeli-Palestinian peace. Unfortunately, most of the world would rather look the other way.

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary Magazine..
01 October '14..

If the world hasn’t yet grasped that Palestinians aren’t interested in peace, it’s certainly not because Palestinians haven’t been working hard to make it clear. Mahmoud Abbas’s “genocide” speech at the UN last week did get momentary attention, being too public to ignore completely. But an even more telling incident has been almost completely overlooked: the expulsion of Haaretz reporter Amira Hass–a woman who has spent decades promoting the Palestinian cause–from a conference at Birzeit University near Ramallah, solely because she is an Israeli Jew.

Nobody, in Israel or outside it, is more pro-Palestinian than Hass. To the best of my knowledge, she’s the only Israeli reporter so dedicated to the Palestinians that she has made her home among them for decades, first in Gaza and then in Ramallah. She reports relentlessly on Palestinian suffering under the “occupation regime” and is a tireless apologist for unattractive Palestinian habits such as stone-throwing. Her latest op-ed, for instance, was an apologia for Abbas’s genocide speech, and her report on her expulsion from Birzeit was similarly forgiving of the bigoted policy that bans all Israeli Jews–though not Israeli Arabs–from the campus simply because they are Israeli Jews. So if students and faculty at Birzeit, the Palestinians’ flagship university, can’t even tolerate having Hass on their campus, what does that say about Palestinian readiness to make peace with the Israeli majority, which doesn’t share her belief that their own country is evil and all justice is on the Palestinians’ side?

After all, universities are where the next generation of leaders is nurtured; this makes Birzeit’s position far more important than that of the 79-year-old Abbas, now in the tenth year of his four-year term. Abbas will soon be gone. But Birzeit’s students and graduates will be an influential force in Palestinian society for decades to come.

Can You Imagine? Amira Hass, Ha'aretz Publish False Water Charges

...The bottom line is that virtually every charge leveled by Amira Hass is either flat out wrong or blatantly deceptive and Ha'aretz should immediately run a forthright correction.

Alex Safian, PhD..
CAMERA Media Analyses..
15 February '14..

In a front page article in Ha’aretz (Feb. 13, 2014; click here for the cached version), Amira Hass claims that “Israelis – including those in the settlements – use three times more water a day in their households as West Bank Palestinians do,” and goes on to charge, among other things, that this is:

just one aspect of the large discrepancy between Israelis and Palestinians in access, development and use of water resources ...

Hass is dead wrong about the relative usage of water by Israelis and Palestinians, but before getting into details and numbers, it’s important to illustrate a deeper distortion in her claims.

What if, for example, one society uses most of its water for agriculture, in a very wasteful old-fashioned way, like flood irrigation of water-intensive crops, and therefore has only limited water left for residential use in households?

And what if, in contrast, a neighboring society saves water in every way possible, starting with low flow toilets and low flow shower heads, and it also invents and uses extremely efficient agricultural techniques like drip irrigation? And what if that society also recycles its sewage – say eventually it treats 78% of its sewage – devoting most of that reclaimed water to agriculture, thereby saving an equivalent amount of fresh water? And what if that society also builds some of the largest desalination plants in the world, turning sea water into fresh drinking water?

And if as a result of all these efforts the second society has much more clean water available for its people to drink, does that mean it is discriminating against the first society?

Obviously the answer is no, any claim of discrimination here would be nonsense.

But if the first society is the West Bank Palestinians, and the second is Israel, then Amira Hass’s conclusion would evidently be that yes indeed, this is proof of Israeli discrimination against Palestinians.

In other words, just looking at basic realities, and without even examining detailed numbers, Hass’s discrimination claims are nonsense.

Romanticizing Child's Attacker - Back to the Bad Old Days at NPR?

Andrea Levin..
CAMERA Media Analyses..
03 June '13..

Is it back to the bad old days at NPR?

National Public Radio’s May 30, 2013 Morning Edition segment reported by Emily Harris displays all the hallmarks of anti-Israel bias that once characterized daily coverage on the network. Heavily skewed toward the Palestinian perspective, the piece romanticizes perpetrators of violence and violates the most basic ethics of fairplay in reporting on a contentious issue – giving more than twice as much air-time to Palestinian perspectives and including three Palestinian speakers to just one Israeli.

Indicative of the sharp bias is the story’s focus. On the occasion of the release from intensive care of a Jewish child severely injured in a stone-throwing attack by Palestinians, NPR turns not to the dangers faced by Jews under threat from such lethal violence but to extensive, sympathetic treatment of the grievances of the Palestinian perpetrator, Tareq Hammed, and his mother. A brief introductory reference to the child, Adele Bitton, is followed by lengthy commentary devoted to the complaints of the Palestinians, to such things as Hammed being arrested late at night, soldiers shouting at, handcuffing and blindfolding him – and his not having time to change clothes. Hammed’s mother is given a platform to lament that she’d also been witness to her husband’s arrest by Israeli soldiers, the implication being not that father and son were two of a kind, assaulting the innocent, but that they were a family of courageous resistance fighters.

When Adele’s mother describes the rock-throwing attack and says the intent of the attackers is to kill, Harris interjects that: “An Israeli journalist caused an outcry among Israeli settlers when she recently wrote that throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule.” NPR failed to identify the “Israeli journalist” as far-left Ha’aretz commentator, Amira Hass, and deceptively implied she was denounced only by “Israeli settlers.” In fact, Israelis across the political spectrum, including left-leaning Yossi Beilin, deplored her statement. Beilin’s column, entitled “Violence Is Never Legitimate,” appeared in Israel Hayom and included the following:

Hass was wrong to claim that those who are under occupation have a "birthright and a duty" to engage in rock-throwing attacks. Throwing stones is a violent act that may kill or maim....

A moral person cannot come out with such statements...

Amira Hass, daughter of Rosa

...The anti-Israel and pro-Arab line that Hass promotes appeals equally to anti-Israel forces on the international arena’s left and to rightist neo-Nazi outfits abroad. The rhetoric to which both supposed opposites resort when demonizing Israel is eerily similar. Hass delights them both.

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
19 April '13..

Communist icon Rosa Luxemburg was rifle-butted to death by German nationalists nearly a century ago. Nonetheless, though her legacy has been largely forgotten elsewhere, her spirit is alive and well in 21st century Israel. It thrives among her assorted homegrown doctrinal descendants. Ideologically, Ha’aretz’s Amira Hass is Rosa’s daughter and drinks from her wellspring.

In a recent op-ed, Hass justified – indeed glorified – the targeting of Jews by Arabs who hurl rocks at passing Israeli vehicles. There’s no doubt where her loyalties and sympathies reside. “Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule. Throwing stones is an action as well as a metaphor of resistance,” she wrote. Nowhere did Hass mention the historical progression and context that produced what she habitually disparages as Israeli “occupation.”

This is no surprise. Hass, reared in an orthodox communist home, had long ago crossed the lines not only in abstract terms. She resides in Ramallah, having previously made her home in Gaza (but that became uncomfortable and unsafe, given the illiberal nature of Gaza’s Hamas warlords).

For the most part, the usual hodgepodge of Israel-bashers overseas avidly amplifies Hass’s every word. Her diatribes, however, barely resonate inside Israel except among small cliques of local ultra-radicals. But her stirring defense of rock-hurlers did succeed in setting off an uncommon hullabaloo.

For one thing, her piece appeared the day after Waal al-Arjeh, the stone-thrower who hit Asher Palmer’s car in 2011, was convicted of murdering the young father and his one-year-old son, Yonathan. The judges determined that, contrary to forgiving attitudes by predisposed news-slanters, rocks can be lethal weapons. Palmer lost control of his car and was killed in the resultant crash as was the baby – a mere 17 days past his first birthday.

Another toddler, Adelle Biton, is now comatose and in critical condition after a rock struck the car in which she, her two sisters and mother were riding last month. Adelle’s mother, Adva, invited Hass to “come to the Intensive Care Unit, see my Adelle, a three-year-old child, connected to tubes. Come experience with me what I am dealing with. Amira, a rock does not distinguish between different people’s blood, and not between an adult and a three-year-old. A rock kills. A rock is a murder weapon for all intents and purposes.”

But Hass is a seasoned political warrior and in all likelihood impervious to any pain that doesn’t serve the causes she propagandizes. In her universe, the fault for the tragedies of tiny Yonathan and Adelle – and too many others – rests with their parents and official Israel. The tots just shouldn’t have been where they were, Hass would surely aver.

Toddler Victim of Stone-Throwers Struggles for Life - Where's the Coverage?

SC..
CAMERA Snapshots..
11 April '13..

Last week, journalist Amira Hass authored an opinion piece in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz condoning and even encouraging violent Palestinian stone-throwing. In the editorial, Hass wrote that “throwing stones is the birthright and duty” of Palestinians and that it “is an action as well as a metaphor of resistance.” Hass received quite a bit of criticism in Israel, and that criticism was covered by British newspaper, The Guardian:

A prominent Israeli journalist, Amira Hass, has been subjected to a wave of hate mail and calls for prosecution for incitement to violence since writing an article defending the throwing of stones by Palestinian youths at Israeli soldiers.

In paragraph six of the story, The Guardian finally got around to mentioning Adele Bitton, a toddler who remains in intensive care in Israel after the car in which she was riding was involved in an accident caused by a non-metaphorical stone.

Adele’s mother, Adva Bitton, responded to Hass’ article with an open letter published on the Hebrew Web site, NRG, translated here:

Amira, come to the intensive care unit, and see my Adele, a 3-year-old girl, attached to tubes. Experience with me the difficult trial with which I am coping. Amira, a rock does not distinguish between blood and blood, or between an adult and a 3-year-old girl. A rock kills. A rock is a deadly weapon in every way. Three weeks ago, I experienced on my own flesh how a single rock has caused the life of an entire family to be turned upside down.

Or simply one who condones the murder of innocent Jews?

Sherri Mandell..
Times of Israel..
08 April '13..

I delayed reading Amira Hass’s article in Haaretz, The inner syntax of Palestinian stone-throwing, because I knew that it would put me in pain.

Amira Hass tells us that throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule. She writes that for the Palestinians, “throwing stones is an action as well as a metaphor of resistance.”

A trope describing my son’s murder.

According to Hass, my son Koby’s murder by stones is not only an act but a metaphor. Koby’s teenage body was bludgeoned to death. Was that a simile or a metaphor? Was a beating with stones like cruelty? Or was it cruelty? Are you, Amira, condoning his murder? Or is it like you are condoning his murder?

Perhaps Asher Palmer and his son Jonathan were killed because of a synechdoche, the rock as a symbol of a whole people’s arm, Palestinian rage?

And the child who is still in the hospital because his mother’s car was in an accident because Arabs threw stones – an act of resistance?

My son and his friend Yosef, a 13 and 14 year old boy stoned to death. Resistance to their school books, their salami sandwiches, their math homework.

The "birthright and duty" to hurt Jews

Dror Eydar..
Israel Hayom..
04 April '13..

Using Haaretz as her platform, columnist Amira Hass wrote on Wednesday that "throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule." This while 2-year-old Adele Biton has been fighting for her life for the past several weeks, after her parents' car was hit by rocks and crashed into another vehicle.

Not only is stone throwing a right, Hass calls it "a duty"! That is how you rise up against the "regime" and the "occupation." Do you hear us, dear terrorists? You are duty bound to throw rocks and murder Jews; if you don't do that you are not really fighting the "foreign regime." Tell that to the late Asher Palmer and his 1-year-old son Yonatan, who were killed after rocks were thrown at their car.

The Palmers' killer was convicted on Tuesday. The court ruled that a rock thrown at a moving car was more dangerous than a bullet fired from a car in a drive-by shooting. Is there any difference between the stone-thrower who was found guilty of killing someone, and Amira Hass, who justified — and effectively encouraged — such action in her despicable column this week? Yes. There is a huge difference. In the world we live in, self-hating Jews and other "random" Jews, are considered to be one and the same. Thus, if Hass condones rock-throwing terrorism, the thinking goes, she could teach us something.

"Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all," says the Bible (Proverbs 31:29). In the case of Hass ("hatred" in German), many self-hating Jews do their job well, but she has surpassed them all.

Hass does the explaining for the killers: "In the inner syntax of the relationship between the occupier and the occupied, stone-throwing is the adjective attached to the subject of 'We’ve had enough of you, occupiers.'"

But this only refers to the inner syntax of self-hating Jews like Hass or the editorial board of Haaretz, which appears to have renamed the paper "Haaretz [the land] is not ours." But the real syntax has been out in the open for over a century: stone-throwing is another means for killing Jews.

Will Amira Hass and Haaretz Claim "Freedom of Expression"?

Yisrael Medad..
My Right Word..
04 April '13..




As blogger Daled Amos has noted to me:

Actually, throwing stones at Jews is traditionally considered the birthright of Arabs in ruling over Jews as recorded in "In Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts Through the Ages" where S. D. Goitein wrote in 1955:

In former times--and in remote places even today--it was common for Muslim schoolboys to stone Jews. When the Turks conquered Yemen in 1872, an envoy was sent from the Chief Rabbi of Istanbul to inquire what grievance the Yemenite Jews had against their neighbors. It is indicative that the first thing of which they complained was this molestation by the schoolboys. But when the Turkish Governor asked an assembly of notables to stop this nuisance,there arose an old doctor of Muslim law and explained that this stone-throwing at Jews was an age-old custom (in Arabic 'Ada) and therefore it was unlawful to forbid it. [p. 76]

And that was in reaction to the op-ed by Amira Hass yesterday:

The inner syntax of Palestinian stone-throwing

where she wrote, and Haaretz published:

"Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule. Throwing stones is an action as well as a metaphor of resistance.

...this is true not only in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza, but also within Israel’s recognized borders, although the violence and the resistance to it are expressed differently...

...Even if it is a right and duty, various forms of steadfastness and resisting the foreign regime, as well as its rules and limitations, should be taught and developed. Limitations could include the distinction between civilians and those who carry arms, between children and those in uniform, as well as the failures and narrowness of using weapons...

A Lesson For the Geographically-Challenged Amira Hass

Kibbutz Naot Mordechai

 

 

TS..
CAMERA/Snapshots..
18 July '12..






Amira Hass should enroll in a geography course. In her article yesterday ("Disney Family Member Renounces Her Investments in Israel's Ahava Cosmetics,") she writes that Shamrock Holdings, the Disney family firm,

also has a stake in the Teva Naot footwear company, which is located in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc south of Jerusalem. . .

But there is just one small problem. Teva Naot's factory is not located in Gush Etzion, but in Kibbutz Naot Mordechai, in the upper Galilee. Despite the fact that Israeli reporter Amira Hass lives in the West Bank city of Ramallah, she apparently relied on erroneous and misleading reports from foreign BDS advocates regarding Teva Naot. Last year, BDS activists promoted a boycott of the Montreal Naot store on the false allegation that "Naot's soles come from the industrial zone of Gush Etzion, which is an illegal settlement located in the heart of the West Bank on occupied territory." In fact, the shoes' soles are made in Germany and Spain.

CAMERA - Amira Hass and the Activists of Nabi Saleh

Ricki Hollander..
CAMERA Media Analysis..
01 May '12..


Ha'aretz's longtime columnist Amira Hass has an unseemly journalistic history of perverting the facts in order to support her anti-Israel agenda. Both in columns and interviews, Hass routinely distorts the truth about what is happening in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. (See, for example, "Amira Hass Spouts Vitriol on the CBC".) In fact, at one point, she was found guilty in court of libeling Israeli Jews with demonstrably false accounts of their abuse of Arabs.

Now again, Hass is trotting out her tired theme of Israeli abuse of Palestinians. In "For Palestinian women, a picnic with a purpose," she allows a Palestinian activist in Nabi Saleh to use the Ha'aretz column as a platform to promote propagandistic claims about Israeli authorities preventing villagers from visiting a spring that was allegedly stolen from them.

The problem is that the same activist (possibly unwittingly) contradicted what she said in Hass' column and exposed the villagers' real goals in an article that appeared last year in a Palestinian publication, the Palestine Monitor.

Navon - Tom, Gideon, Yossi and Amira

Emmanuel Navon
For the Sake of Zion
21 December '11

http://navonsblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/tom-gideon-yossi-and-amira.html


Tom Friedman’s recent column “Newt, Mitt, Bibi and Vladimir” (New York Times, 13 December) makes two points: a. Alleged friends of Israel such as Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney are blind to the fact that Israel is sinking into the Dark Ages because of the mad-cap policies of Netanyahu and Lieberman; b. The critical voices of Tom Friedman and Gideon Levy are unfairly rebuked as “anti-Israel” when, in truth, those voices are the only ones today that are trying to save Israel from itself, out of foresight and true love. There is also a subliminal message in the title of Friedman’s article: The world’s Axis of Evil is composed of the two Republican frontrunners, of Israel’s Prime Minister, and of Russia’s President-for-Life.

What ignited Friedman’s op-ed was Newt Gingrich’s claim that the Palestinians are an “invented” people. Friedman calls Gingrich’s claim “a new low.” So for Friedman stating the truth constitutes a “low” (for Hillary Clinton it’s simply “unhelpful”). What, exactly, did Gingrich say? That there never was a sovereign country called “Palestine,” and that the Arabs who lived in the South-East of the Ottoman Empire were known as Arabs and not as “Palestinians.” These two facts are undisputable. Now, were the Palestinians “invented”? Yes, they were.

During the Ottoman rule in the Middle East (from 1516 to 1918), there was no “Palestine” but “sanjaks” (i.e. administrative divisions): The Sanjak of Acre, the Sanjak of Nablus, and the Sanjak of Jerusalem. Arabs who lived in those “sanjaks” were a disconnected bunch of tribes who had little in common. There was not “Palestinian” culture, language, religion or national identity separate from that of the wider Arab nation.

The name “Palestine” appeared in the 20th century when Britain established its rule on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire (the British revived the Latin word “Palestina” coined by the Romans to replace the name “Judea” with one remindful of the Philistines –the Jews’ historical foes). All people living in the British Mandate were “Palestinians,” including the Jews. The Jerusalem Post used to be called The Palestine Post, and it is only after Israel’s independence that the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra became the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

Why Amira Hass Is Against the Firing of Qassams

TS
CAMERA/Snapshots
24 March '11

http://blog.camera.org/archives/2011/03/why_amira_hass_is_against_the.html

Amira Hass's Op-Ed yesterday, "The sanctity of the soaring Qassam," provides a fascinating look into the depths of her psyche.

In a display of verbal gymnastics, Ha'aretz's Hass attempts to explain to Hamas why the group should not fire Qassams at Israel. Why gymnastics? Because instead of simply saying, "Don't fire Qassams in populated areas because it is a crime against humanity and wrong," she speaks in terms of tactical interests.

Hass explains that Qassam attaks enables the Israeli military "to put on an act of being an army, one that targets civilians, and thus provide Israel with more ammunition for its victim show."

Hass gives additional reasons why Hamas should not fire rockets:

It's wrong to provide [Israel] with pretexts that would enable it to once again put Gaza's children and old people through an ordeal like Cast Lead, or even one half as bad.

And

The Qassams merely feed Israel's madness. The Qassams merely feed Israel's madness. It is not the Qassams that will ensure the Palestinians, both in and out of Gaza, a life of dignity. It is not the Qassams that will topple the Israeli walls around the world's largest prison camp.

Despite several attempts to explain why Hamas should not fire Qassam rockets, she never once mentions the significance of firing on civilians. Hass is simply not capable of just once simply saying: shooting rockets at civilians is a wrong and unjustified act. Period.

Her total lack of feeling for the lives of Israelis is on display when she states:

Who cares that the "appropriate Zionist response" to 50 mortar shells, which sowed fear but did not kill, was the killing of two 16-year-olds?

It is pure luck that the Qassams only "sowed fear but did not kill." Is Hass waiting for someone to (once again) be killed by Qassam fire before she will acknowledge that indiscriminate firing on civilians is wrong?

Beyond the fact that it has been a matter of luck that the mortars did not kill anyone in this round, Hass is completely unconcerned about the emotional trauma suffered by those who lived through 50 mortar attacks (as well as thousands of rockets over the last decade). Will Hass so easily dismiss Israeli strikes in Gaza that result in damage but not death?

-- By Yishai Goldflam. To see the Hebrew version of this blog post, visit Presspectiva, CAMERA's Israeli site.

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Israel’s Gaza Policy Boosts Hamas’s Popularity? Doesn’t Look Like It

Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
17 August '10

Radical leftists worldwide enthusiastically support Hamas, which has the cardinal virtue of being virulently anti-Israel. It’s a pity they never asked Gaza Strip residents, who actually have to live under Hamas rule. But one of Israel’s leading pro-Palestinian journalists, Amira Hass of Haaretz, gave these residents a voice this week:

“I wish these pictures reached leftists abroad,” my friend said to herself Tuesday as she watched Hamas police use rifle butts and clubs to beat her friends — activists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Although my friend has never been a fan of the Fatah government in the West Bank, she is outraged by the romanticization of Hamas rule by foreign activists.

Ironically, the PFLP agrees with Hamas about most key issues: “opposition to the Oslo Accords, glorification of the armed struggle and opposition to direct negotiations with Israel.” The protest wasn’t over anything political, but over the chronic power outages — more than eight hours a day, every day, for months — caused by the Hamas and Fatah governments’ ongoing spat over who should pay for Gaza’s power plant’s fuel after the European Union stopped footing the bill last November. Since both sides refuse to pay, the amount of fuel entering the Strip has steadily declined; in the first week of August, it amounted to only 23 percent of what is needed to run the plant at full capacity.

Hamas initially tried to prevent the protest — though under Palestinian law, demonstrations don’t need a license. When that failed, “hundreds of police with clubs and rifles” dispersed the demonstrators “very violently.” Many demonstrators were wounded and needed medical attention; others “were detained for some time.”

Most likely, overseas leftists won’t see these pictures, since Hamas kept photojournalists from taking any. But Hass’s word pictures are vivid enough.

(Read full post)

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Amira Hass Sees Vile, Racist, and Brutal Israelis

Michael Lumish
newsrealblog.com
25 June '10
Posted before Shabbat

One of the most common (and facile) accusations against Israel is that it is a racist country. Another equally facile accusation is that Israel is a brutal country. In a recent Ha’aretz article, columnist Amira Hass gives us two for the price of one. Israel is racist and brutal, both!

Here’s how the propaganda works. You find an obscure news story in which one, or more, Israelis behave badly and then use that story to suggest that it says something terribly negative about Israeli society as a whole. The hostile glare of the world spotlight on Israel is so intense that I sometimes expect to find a headline somewhere in the international press that reads, “Israeli Woman Spanks Unruly Child in Parking Lot, World Condemns the Jewish State.”

The story in this case, unfortunately, is not nearly so benign as a spanking in public. On Friday, June 11, a Palestinian Israeli ran down a couple of cops in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi Joz. The police gave chase to the suspect, Ziad Jilani, and allegedly shot him dead in an alley. Hass, therefore, contends that this was a case of Israeli cops acting as judges, juries, and executioners due to a supposedly common Israeli racial hatred of Palestinians. Furthermore, Hass goes on to inform us, it is precisely because of such racial hatred that many Palestinian Jerusalemites live in poverty.

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