Keeping the Flag Flying in the Face of Hate - by Dexter Van Zile

...A few weeks ago, I got a call from a woman living in upstate New York who displayed an Israeli flag on her front porch on May 14 in celebration of the 70th anniversary of Israel’s founding. On May 17, the mailman brought a letter to her house and as soon as she saw it, she had a sense of foreboding. Whoever sent the letter was not her friend.

Dexter Van Zile..
Algemeiner.com..
31 July '18..

The process goes like clockwork. Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip attack Israel with rockets, kites, or huge crowds of people intent on crossing into Israel. The fact that these attacks are organized and led by Hamas — an organization dedicated to Israel’s destruction — is largely ignored or downplayed.

The outrage machine gets started when Israel fights back to protect the safety of its citizens and the integrity of its border with Gaza. When Palestinians who have put themselves in harm’s way get killed, many of the people in the media who had previously been quiet suddenly sit up and take notice to declare that Israel is using “disproportionate” force to defend itself against “unarmed civilians” or “peaceful protesters.” They also ignore the fact that Hamas has incited many of these “protesters” and many of the dead are known Hamas members.

After this all takes place, some people in the US — a minority to be sure — start viewing the Jews in their orbit with an evil eye, asking themselves, “What is it with them? How can they support a country that does such terrible things to those innocent and helpless Palestinians?”

When the biased articles and news segments come out, people start calling CAMERA’s office in Boston to tell us about it. Like any researcher at CAMERA, I get a fair number of these calls. Sometimes, they complain about a particularly dishonest segment on the BBC that was aired in the United States courtesy of National Public Radio, or about how a legacy network is using its jaundiced coverage of Israel as a selling point for its news shows. Sometimes, the callers describe the impact that this distorted media coverage has had on their lives.

(Continue to Full Column)

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. 

.

Israel United Against Iran Deal, As Should Be Its Actual Friends

...Efforts by the administration’s left-wing allies to undermine the unity of the pro-Israel community should be dismissed out of hand. The deal is a clear and present danger to Israel’s future and should be treated as a litmus test of backing for Israel as well as reliability on U.S. security. All members of the House and Senate — especially those, like Senator Chuck Schumer that have staked their reputations as being guardians of Israel’s security — should be put on notice that they must choose between loyalty to Obama and what is right.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
23 July '15..

This morning during a Senate hearing on the Iran nuclear deal, Secretary of State John Kerry tried to pour cold water on the notion that friends of Israel are obligated to oppose the pact. Citing a Washington Post op-ed titled “How the Iran deal is good for Israel, according to Israelis who know what they’re talking about,” Kerry treated the piece that cites the opinions of a few retired officials that agree with him as proof that his claim that the result of his two years of negotiating with Iran would benefit the Jewish state as well as the United States. A similar piece in the Forward by J.J. Goldberg quotes some of the same figures. Taken together, they seem to make a strong case that the pro-Israel community ought to either sit out the Iran deal fight in Congress or even support the agreement. But the two articles leave out a couple of important facts about Israeli opinion about the Iran deal. One is that most of those quoted are either disgruntled former officials who hold a grudge against Prime Minister Netanyahu for not keeping them in office, or ideological opponents of the man who has won three consecutive elections. The other is that while Netanyahu’s political foes in the Knesset are as sharply critical of the prime minister as the Obama administration, they have joined him in forming a united front against the Iran deal as a deadly threat to the country’s future. That’s a point that any American that claims to be a friend of Israel needs to consider before they consider backing the administration’s push for détente with the Islamist regime.

As Jeffrey Goldberg, who has been the administration’s unofficial mouthpiece on Israel issues and their dutiful amanuensis when it comes to smears of Netanyahu, noted in The Atlantic last week, the man that Washington desperately wanted to win the Knesset election in March has turned on Obama. Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog was the darling of the White House earlier this year as the administration moved heaven and Earth in a failed attempt to influence the Israeli electorate to reject Netanyahu’s bid for a third straight term as prime minister. As Goldberg wrote, Herzog’s line on the Iran negotiations last winter was that he trusted Obama to get a “good deal” with Tehran. But rather than continuing his effort to cozy up to the administration, Herzog now completely agrees with Netanyahu’s evaluation of the deal. As Goldberg wrote:

In a telephone call with me late last night, Herzog’s message was very different. The deal just finalized in Vienna, he said, “will unleash a lion from the cage, it will have a direct influence over the balance of power in our region, it’s going to affect our borders, and it will affect the safety of my children.”

Iran, he said, is an “empire of evil and hate that spreads terror across the region,” adding that, under the terms of the deal, Iran “will become a nuclear-threshold state in a decade or so.” Iran will take its post-sanctions windfall, he said, and use the funds to supply more rockets to Hezbollah in Lebanon, more ammunition to Hamas in Gaza, and “generally increase the worst type of activities that they’ve been doing.”

Colonel John Patterson - The Lion Hunter of Zion

Natan Slifkin..
Times of Israel..
15 April '13..

In his youth, King David proved his heroism by slaying a lion. He went on to put his life on the line for the Jewish People and become a hero for all Israel. Three thousand years later, another lion-hearted lion-slayer also put his life on the line for the Jewish People and became a hero for all Israel. He wasn’t even Jewish, but he was one of the greatest friends and supporters that the Jewish People ever had – and his experiences with lions assisted in numerous ways.

Colonel John Patterson was an Irish soldier and engineer assigned to Kenya by the British Empire at the turn of the twentieth century. His job was to supervise the construction of a bridge over the Tsavo river for a massive railroad project. Unfortunately, railroad workers were constantly being slaughtered by the most notorious man-eating lions in recorded history. Two maneless but huge lions, working together, were estimated to have killed and eaten well over a hundred people working on the railroad.

Patterson was faced with the task of not only killing the lions, but also surviving the wrath of hundreds of workers, who were convinced that the lions were demons that were inflicting divine punishment for the railroad. At one point, Patterson was attacked by a group of over a hundred workers who had plotted to lynch him. Patterson punched out the first two people to approach him, and talked down the rest!

After many months, Patterson eventually shot both lions. He himself was nearly killed in the process on several occasions, such as when one lion that he had shot several times suddenly leaped up to attack him as he approached its body. He published a blood-curling account of the episode in The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, which became a best-seller, and earned him a close relationship with US President Roosevelt.

Upon returning to England, Patterson was a hailed as a hero. When World War One broke out, however, Patterson traveled to Egypt and took on a most unusual task: forming and leading a unit of Jewish soldiers, comprised of Jews who had been exiled from Palestine by the Turks. As a child, Patterson had been mesmerized by stories from the Bible. He viewed this task as being of tremendous, historic significance. The unit, called the Zion Mule Corps, was tasked with providing supplies to soldiers in the trenches in Gallipoli. Patterson persuaded the reluctant War Office to provide kosher food, as well as matzah for Passover, and he himself learned Hebrew and Yiddish in order to be able to communicate with his troops. The newly-trained Jewish soldiers served valiantly, but the campaign against the Turks in Gallipoli was ultimately unsuccessful, and the Zion Mule Corps was eventually disbanded.

In 1916 Patterson joined forces with Vladimir Jabotinsky to create a full-fledged Jewish Legion in the British Army, who would fight to liberate Palestine from the cruel reign of the Ottoman Empire and enable the Jewish People to create a home there. The War Minister, Lord Derby, succumbed to anti-Zionist agitators and attempted to prevent the Jewish Legion from receiving kosher food, from serving in Palestine, and from having “Jewish” in their name. Patterson promptly threatened to resign and risked a court-martial by protesting Derby’s decision as a disgrace. Derby backed down and Patterson’s Jewish Legion was successfully formed. During training, Patterson again threatened the War Office with his resignation if his men (many of whom were Orthodox) were not allowed to observe Shabbos, and again the army conceded. Meanwhile, Patterson brought Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook to address and inspire his troops.

To yet remember Lewis Yelland Andrews, the Jews' forgotten friend

The man who offered simple yet vital assistance to the Yishuv is no longer remembered or commemorated. Andrews helped establish dozens of communities, including tower and stockade settlements. He transferred tens of thousands of dunams of land to Jewish ownership, and dozens of communities that were established in the Hula Valley region, the Beit She'an Valley and the Hefer Valley owe him their very existence.

Nadav Shragai..
Israel Hayom..
15 April '13..

Lewis Yelland Andrews, the British district commissioner for the Galilee, was assassinated on his way to prayer services at the Anglican Christ Church in Nazareth on Sunday evening, Sept. 26, 1937. Four small handguns were fired at him simultaneously, killing him instantly. He was clearly a friend of the Jews, and after his death they eulogized him as though he had been one of them. The Arabs, on the other hand, had a hard time mourning for him. Although the Arab Higher Committee published an official mourning notice, residents of Acre danced on the rooftops, and Judge Anwar Nusseibeh felt that Andrews had been an Arab-hater. He remarked sarcastically that "Andrews found his God when he had gone looking for him."

Andrews' assassins were several students of Sheikh Izzedine al-Qassam, the national hero of the Palestinians, who to this day provides inspiration to Hamas murder cells. From their perspective, the assassination of Andrews was no accident. Andrews was a high-quality target, and his murder was a kind of targeted killing directed against a man who had given actual assistance to the state in the making, "a fitting end" to a man who had become a friend to the Jews, many years before the better-known friend from that same period, Charles Orde Wingate, known to the Jewish men he commanded as "Hayadid" (the friend), was given the title.

* * *

Ninety-three-year-old Yosef Strauss of Kibbutz Beit Zera still remembers that on the evening of the murder, Andrews stopped by to celebrate the kibbutz's tenth anniversary and play with the babies there. A few hours before his death, on his 41st birthday, he read congratulatory telegrams and cards from the heads of the Yishuv — the Jewish community in Palestine — and from his wife and children in England. Then he raised a glass to celebrate his life, which was to end that very day.

At 5:45 PM, he was shot to death in a narrow alleyway near the post office, not far from the Casa Nova Hospice, as he was on his way to prayers at the church. His bodyguard, police officer MacIan, was wounded and died shortly afterward. Andrews' deputy, Assistant District Commissioner Pirie-Gordon, slipped and fell and was miraculously unharmed. The murderers fled. England was gripped by sorrow and grief. The British saw the assassination as a violation of their unwritten agreement with the Arabs that government officials were not to be harmed.

While mourning in the Yishuv was organized, it also took place at the grass-roots level. So grass-roots was it, in fact, that the day after the murder, which was the festival of Simchat Torah, the day of Andrews' burial, worshippers in the north interrupted the festive dancing with Torah scrolls to go out into the streets and salute the district commissioner as he went on his last journey from the north to Jerusalem. Thousands of residents lined the streets between Nazareth and Afula, where Andrews' coffin passed. For many of them, particularly in the region of the Galilee, Afula and Safed, Andrews was almost family.

After the Flotilla the Jackals are Out

Why's it our fault?

Shoshana Bryen
JINSA
01 June '10

Not those jackals.

The world splits roughly between those who denounce Israel from a religious or ideological base, and those who denounce Israel because they are tired of defending Western civilization to which they are heir but aren't sure why they should care (and those who bash Israel as a cover for their own anti-Semitism). The tired and the impatient might be slightly moved by better PR on Israel's part, and OK, why not? But the others don’t care and those are the ones Israel fights.

The jackals in this case are pundits, including patriotic Israelis and committed friends of Israel, who live to tell Israel publicly how it should have been done. "Israel should have known..." "The IDF should have…" "Better PR would have…" Even when they acknowledge that Israel was within the bounds of international law and moral behavior, nevertheless, "This just complicates U.S.-Israel relations" or its companion, "This just complicates American efforts to: a) find a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, or; b) deal with Iran."

(An example of the Not Jackals, and what support sounds like at BGU)


Whatever Israel did, if only Israel had done the way the jackals wanted it done everything would have been just fine. They are so sure that if the Israeli government had just listened to them it would have produced a different result – the "right" result – and the world would have approved.

Who, other than them, says that a different result would have produced "better PR" (which always figures in the denunciation of whatever Israel did)?

And why is it so important for friends of Israel to publicly berate the Israeli government today, of all days? Are Israel's enemies not doing a good enough job this morning?

Points of order:

(Read full article)

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.
.