PA World of Make-Believe: Israel supplies weapons to Palestinians to fight one another and illegal fireworks to cause injuries - by Nan Jacques Zilberdik

What does the civilian say? Journalist Omar Nazzal said that ‘the harming of the other has become a culture that is not limited just to celebrations of success at the matriculation exams, but rather prevails in all the phenomena of harassing the other on the claim that it is only [for] a day or an hour… Many who have an event, whether it is an engagement party, a release from the occupation’s prison, or success in the matriculation exams, hold these celebrations in a manner that disturbs others.’An El-Bireh Municipal Council member… said that: ‘The responsibility is on everyone. We have failed in assimilating a civil culture within us.’”

Nan Jacques Zilberdik..
Palestinian Media Watch..
18 August '20..

As the Palestinian Authority is struggling with increasing internal violence, what better way to deal with it than to blame Israel? As Palestinian Media Watch has documented this is the PA’s modus operandi whenever bad things happen.

Thus, PA Police Spokesman Col. Luay Erziqat blamed Israel for the rise in violence in Palestinian society, claiming Israel “encourage[s] violence and murder in the Palestinian society” and is “supplying” arms to Palestinian weapon dealers:

PA Police Spokesman Col. Luay Erziqat:“There are elements of the occupation (i.e., PA term for Israel) that have begun to raise their voices and have begun to spread crime and to help spread crime… We have found suspicious and funded [internet] pages, we have found ‘mouthpieces’ and elements of the occupation that encourage violence and murder in the Palestinian society. In Area C (i.e., West Bank areas under full Israeli administration according to the Oslo Accords), at the basic level, the Israeli occupation is preventing the [PA] Security Forces from acting there, and is transferring supplies to the weapon dealers. If you look for example at the southern areas like Hebron – there are weapons there, 250, 500 (rifle models –Ed.)… It is clear who is supplying these weapons, and who is transferring the supply to the dealers of these weapons.”
[Official PA TV, Directly With the Police, June 1, 2020]

In the same way, the PA blamed Israel for accidents caused when Palestinians use fireworks for celebratory occasions, for example when they receive the results of the matriculation exams. The PA’s official news agency claimed Israel deliberately supplies fireworks to Palestinians to “destroy the Palestinian society”:

“The main source of the fireworks is the settlements and the occupation, whose goal is to destroy the Palestinian society, and therefore it allows their entry into the Palestinian market, and simultaneously bans their sale in the 1948 territories (i.e., Israel) except through companies that specialize in the field of fireworks… The usage of fireworks in Palestine is one of the serious phenomena… that has contributed to turning parties and joyful occasions into sad events… and this constitutes a danger to the social well-being, and threatens the stability and the social ‘domestic peace.’”
[WAFA, official PA news agency, “Negative Social Phenomena” section, accessed July 16, 2020]

Manager of the PA’s Import Tax Administration Public Relations and Communications, Ibrahim Ayyash, supported this allegation, saying that “most of the explosives and fireworks are smuggled from the settlements… as well as fireworks that are imported from China, and the Israeli authorities turn a blind eye knowing that they are meant for Palestinian markets.” [Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 13, 2020]

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Surprise? Another Anti-Israel Lie Pushed by Palestinian Activist - by Dexter Van Zile

The result is that the entire premise of the article — which accuses the United States of denying human rights activists access to satellite images they can use to document alleged Israeli misdeeds against the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza — is destroyed. They’ve had access to the images since 2012.

Dexter Van Zile..
Algemeiner..
06 August '20..

When people say or write things, they should try to avoid contradicting themselves on a factual or logical basis. This is the essence of the “Liar’s Paradox.”

This lesson was lost on the folks at Foreign Policy (FP), who published a piece by Palestinian activist Zena Agha titled “Israel Can’t Hide Evidence of Its Occupation Anymore.” The piece, which appeared on FP’s website on August 3, 2020, contradicts itself in a pretty obvious way.

The gist of the article is that a US law passed by Congress in 1996 has made it impossible for human rights activists to get high-definition satellite images of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, making them unable to document Israeli actions in those areas.

The article then reports breathlessly that this law was recently amended, giving human rights activists the information they need to document the evil acts against the Palestinians.

But when read closely, the article (a) reveals that the law only applied to US companies, and that (b) high-definition images of Israel and the Gaza Strip and West Bank have been available on the global market for most of the past decade, rendering the law in question meaningless.

The result is that the entire premise of the article — which accuses the United States of denying human rights activists access to satellite images they can use to document alleged Israeli misdeeds against the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza — is destroyed.

They’ve had access to the images since 2012.

Here’s the background:

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Clearly there is a right to vote, but not to dismantle the state - by Jonathan S. Tobin

In comparing Arab doctors to Joint List Knesset members, Israel’s critics are exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to promote the lie that Zionism is racism.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
17 March '20..

It seems like a devastating argument. If Israeli Jews are willing to accept life-saving treatment from Arab doctors, why won’t they give their representatives in the Knesset a seat in the country’s government?

That’s the point The New York Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief David Halbfinger made last week both on Twitter and in an article that made the same point. It’s been echoed elsewhere in features in the Israeli press.

But the premise is false. The idea that objections to giving anti-Zionist Arab parties a role in the government of Israel is racist is more than a cheap shot aimed at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters. The attempt to use the coronavirus pandemic as a way of chipping away at the legitimacy of a Jewish state demonstrates that Israel’s critics consider the catastrophic spread of a deadly disease as merely just another opportunity to take pot shots at Zionism.

It’s important to separate two arguments being made here. One is about the yearlong standoff between Netanyahu and his political opponents as the two sides continue to battle over who will lead the country’s next government, and whether the votes of Knesset members who support Israel’s enemies should be the deciding factor. The other is a more fundamental question about whether Israel can be both a state devoted to protecting the national rights of the Jewish people while granting equal rights to non-Jewish citizens.

Of course, Jews gratefully accept treatment from Arab doctors and nurses working in the country’s hospitals. Arabs—both those who are citizens of Israel and residents of the territories—also accept the care they got from the far larger number of Jewish doctors and nurses that work in the same medical facilities. It should also be pointed out that even the families of hostile Palestinian terror groups based in Gaza or the West Bank have been admitted to Israeli hospitals, where they are treated with the same scrupulous devotion that any Jew gets.

So when Dr. Ahmad Tibi, a physician who also serves as a Knesset member of the Joint Arab List, which won 15 seats in the Knesset earlier this month, claims that Jews who would accept his services as a doctor, but don’t want him deciding who will be prime minister, are racists and hypocrites, he isn’t being honest.

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Tweet and delete. Because the Palestinian Theory of Truth says you can. - by Victor Rosenthal

Not fully verified? Not certain? How about, “a dangerous lie and murderous incitement?” But at least she went this far. Rashida Tlaib simply deleted her retweet. The shameless Galloway left it up and even pinned it to the top of his Twitter account. Ashrawi and Tlaib are media veterans who fully understand how this plays. In case you don’t, let me lay it out:

Victor Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
26 January '20..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2020/01/tweet-and-delete/

Israel has experienced very heavy rains recently. Several people were killed when they were swept away by floods. In a particularly gruesome case, a young couple died of exposure after being trapped in a water-filled elevator in a basement parking garage. The emergency telephone system was not able to handle the volume of calls generated by the massive storm, and rescuers weren’t alerted until it was too late.

Last Friday afternoon, Qais Abu Ramila, an 8-year old Arab boy from eastern Jerusalem went missing. First responders and hundreds of Arab and Jewish volunteers searched for him until the next morning, when he was found dead, drowned in a deep pool of rainwater near his home.

Another tragedy. Possibly, as his parents said, the Jerusalem municipality should have filled in the pit. Often things aren’t done that should be, and the results are heartbreaking. One hopes lessons are learned.

But there was another side to the case of Abu Ramila, where lessons need to be learned but probably won’t be. Shortly after he disappeared, rumors started that he had been kidnapped by a group of “settlers.” Someone produced a security video that showed a boy being pulled along by the hand by an older man; but the boy’s father said that the child in the video was not his son. Nevertheless, despite a complete lack of evidence, the rumors spread. Some Arabs even tried to enter a nearby Jewish neighborhood in search of the “kidnappers.”

And then social media amplified the blood libel into an international event. Former Palestinian Authority official Hanan Ashrawi retweeted a fanciful tweet by “@RealSeifBitar” – possibly a fake account, presently nonexistent – which accused “a herd of violent #Israeli settlers” of assaulting the boy and throwing him into a well to die. She was followed by others, including professional (since he no longer has a job in the British Parliament) Jew-hater George Galloway, and, shockingly, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who retweeted Ashrawi.

When it became clear that the boy’s death was accidental, Ashrawi deleted her original tweet and tweeted a partial apology, saying “My apologies for retweeting something that’s not fully verified. It seems that the news of his being kidnapped is not certain.”

Not fully verified? Not certain? How about, “a dangerous lie and murderous incitement?” But at least she went this far. Rashida Tlaib simply deleted her retweet. The shameless Galloway left it up and even pinned it to the top of his Twitter account.

Ashrawi and Tlaib are media veterans who fully understand how this plays. In case you don’t, let me lay it out:

Question - Does Jewish morality require Israel to leave the West Bank? - by Evelyn Gordon

So is conditional Zionism anti-Semitic? That depends on the conditions. But nowadays, the key condition usually involves suicidal Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. Thus today’s conditional Zionists require one nation, of all the nations in the world, to destroy itself for another’s sake. And yes, that’s anti-Semitic.

Evelyn Gordon..
Analysis from Israel..
20 November '19..
Link: http://evelyncgordon.com/does-jewish-morality-require-israel-to-leave-the-west-bank/

Zionism seems like a binary proposition: You’re either for or against the existence of a Jewish state. But a third option has become increasingly popular, one I would call conditional Zionism. It holds that a Jewish state has a right to exist, but only if it meets certain conditions.

This position is spreading rapidly among liberal American Jews. In an essay in Haaretz in August, for instance, Abe Silberstein argued that Israel must be coerced into creating a Palestinian state because otherwise, the only alternatives are perpetuating the status quo or a one-state solution—and any moral Jew would have to deem the latter “infinitely preferable,” even though it would probably end Jewish statehood. In other words, the Jewish state’s right to exist depends on satisfying Palestinian (and American Jewish) demands.

This position is also common among non-Jews. For instance, in a September essay for Mosaic on whether a Catholic equivalent to Protestant Zionism was possible, Gavin D’Costa concluded, “If the Israel-Palestinian dispute were to be resolved tomorrow, with the full agreement of both parties and with international support, I believe official Catholic Zionism would emerge quite quickly.” In other words, the Church might someday accept a Jewish state, but only if Israel satisfies Palestinian (and Western) demands.

Ostensibly, such positions could be dismissed as simple anti-Semitism based on Natan Sharansky’s famous 3D test (demonization, delegitimization and double standards). The relevant criterion here is double standards since no other country’s existence is deemed conditional on its behavior, even when said behavior is far worse than Israel’s. For instance, China has occupied Tibet for almost 70 years and currently holds a million Uighurs in detention camps, and many people want these policies stopped. But nobody says a Chinese state has no right to exist without such changes.

Nevertheless, dismissing conditional Zionism as anti-Semitic poses one obvious problem: Any rationale for a Jewish state, whether religious or secular, rests on the Jews’ claim to be a distinct people with a distinct religion, language and culture. And that very heritage deems the Jewish people’s right to remain in its land conditional on its moral behavior. This isn’t a minor detail; it’s a core element of Jewish theology.

Surprise? ‘The Squad’ Co-Sponsors Bill Claiming Israel Tortures Children, And Parrots Other Terrorist Propaganda - by Warren Henry

The claims made in the bill originate mostly from a group that could be described as the propaganda arm of a terrorist organization.

Warren Henry..
The Federalist..
26 August '19..

Many Americans now know that Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar—two members of “the squad” of far-left congresswomen so much in the news—were recently barred from traveling to Israel to agitate for the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. Fewer know all four members of “the squad,” including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, have co-sponsored a bill that accuses the Jewish state of torturing children. Fewer still know the claims made in the bill originate mostly from a group that could be described as the propaganda arm of a terrorist organization.

The so-called “Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act“ was re-introduced in the House by Rep. Betty McCollum, whose congressional district neighbors Omar’s in Minnesota. Until recently, McCollum was considered a supporter of Israel, but a critic of its government.

In February, however, she condemned “[t]he right-wing, extremist government of Benjamin Netanyahu and its apartheid-like policies,” adding “there are now members of Congress who are not willing to ignore the Israeli government’s destructive actions because they are afraid of losing an election.”

McCollum’s invective prompted Mark Mellman of the Democratic Majority for Israel to respond that Netanyahu “came to office in a fair and democratic election in which every Arab citizen of Israel had the same right to vote as any Jewish citizen.” Mellman added that “by suggesting that Jews have disproportionate influence on U.S. elections, the Congresswoman exploits an anti-Semitic trope widely used by far right forces from Czarism to fascism.”

McCollum’s bill, while not directly exploiting the anti-Semitic trope of blood libel, trades on the accusation that Israel treats non-Jewish children cruelly and inhumanely.

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Proclaiming Israel to be an apartheid state is both racist and a lie - by Karen Harradine and Paul T Horgan

...And this is all why anyone who uses the term ‘apartheid state’ in association with Israel cannot be taken at all seriously. Firstly, they are being anti-Semitic by the standards of the IHRA. Secondly, it is a provably bogus comparison. Thirdly, it tacitly supports terrorism. The term should be banished from our media as much as any other racist epithet.

Karen Harradine/Paul T Horgan..
conservativewoman.co.uk..
16 July '19..

Sharing some of my many painful memories of growing up in apartheid South Africa with Paul, my co-writer of this post, one stood out in particular. On a hot summer’s day my mother had fetched me from school, as she always did. Driving up a steep hill on our way home she suddenly stopped the car, rolled down her window and asked a man on the street if he wanted a lift.

She had noticed the elderly black man, in dusty clothes, leaning heavily on a stick as he struggled to walk up this hill. As he got into the car he started to cry and pray, thanking my mother and praising her for having the courage to help a black person. That act, of helping a black person classified as an ‘inferior race’ by apartheid laws, was an aberration in our separate and unequal society.

This ailing black man was barred from whites’ only buses and hospitals, both amenities far better than anything black South Africans were permitted to use. His fragility, caused by decades of deprivation under successive apartheid governments, encapsulates the suffering of millions under the apartheid regime. Those who accuse Israel of being an apartheid state belittle this man’s suffering.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) defines any comparison between Nazi Germany and Israel as anti-Semitism. Anti-Semites attempt to bypass that by making false comparisons between apartheid South Africa and Israel. This rhetoric is designed to smear Israel as a ‘racist’ country and is yet another attempt to delegitimise the Jewish state.

But they fail to grasp that accusing Israel of being racist is not only wrong but also a form of anti-Semitism under the IHRA definition.

This libel stems from the hate-fest that was the 2001 UN ‘anti-racism’ conference, held in Durban. This conference birthed not only the insidious Boycott Disinvest Sanctions campaign but also the unholy concept that being anti-Israel is a requisite for proclaiming anti-racist credentials.

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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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No, a sledgehammer blow didn’t ‘Judaize’ Jerusalem or kill the peace process - by Jonathan S. Tobin

The real problem is the Palestinian denial of Jewish history, not the presence of America’s ambassador at the unveiling of a biblical archaeological site.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
01 July '19..

The critics are right about U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman’s presence at the ceremonial opening of Jerusalem’s “Pilgrimage Road” being unprecedented. None of his predecessors would have been caught dead at a Jewish site on the wrong side of the “Green Line.” Up until last year, the United States had stubbornly refused to recognize that any part of the ancient capital of the Jews belonged to the Jewish state.

But even if we concede that the participation of Friedman and U.S. Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt was a departure from past policies—and that the ambassador’s swinging of a sledgehammer to break down the symbolic wall that completed the opening of the biblical route provided a metaphor for the critics of the Trump administration—that doesn’t mean it was wrong or a mistake.

If we have to use the imagery of the Americans smashing anything, it was not—as critics of President Donald Trump and Friedman contend—a symbol of their destruction of the already dead-in-the-water peace process. Rather it was yet another reaffirmation of the administration’s correct determination to emphasize the absurdity of the Palestinians’ willingness to go on denying Jewish history.

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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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Confronting the myth of ‘white, colonial’ Israel - by Lyn Julius

Israel represents the return to self-determination of an indigenous Middle Eastern people after centuries of subjugation and colonization.

Lyn Julius..
JNS.org..
23 May '19..

According to the late Israeli author Amos Oz, when his father was growing up in eastern Europe, the graffiti on the walls read “Jews go back to Palestine.” For centuries, Jews were considered swarthy aliens in Europe. This trend reached its tragic nadir with the mass Nazi extermination of the Jews as racial untermenschen.

Nowadays, the inverse message is in evidence—not so much on walls, but in the media, on campus and in the writings of academics and journalists obsessed with identity politics. Jews are portrayed as members of a privileged and powerful elite—white Westerners who came to colonize and steal land from the “native” Palestinian people. As a result, Jews are excluded from “intersectionality”—the idea that oppressed social groups, especially in the United States, stand up for each other.

This anti-Zionist, postcolonial trend in which Jews can never be victims has lately been insinuating itself into the ideology of the radical left of the U.S. Democratic Party. Positioning Israel as a white European colonialist aggressor delegitimizes Ashkenazi Jews as interlopers. This canard denies the Levantine origin, genes, culture, religion and language of Jews from Europe and the Americas.

The sin is compounded by the erasure from the narrative of Mizrahi Jews (Jews from Arab and Muslim countries), who now form the majority of Israeli Jews. These Jews are from now-extinct communities founded long before the Arab Muslim imperialist conquest subjugated indigenous peoples to Arabization and Islam. In the 20th century, a million Mizrahi Jews were dispossessed and forced to flee as refugees.

(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. 

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Bloodthirsty – in the mind of the anti-Israel activists - by David Collier

...This habit of choosing to take the story at face value – despite 1000s of examples of where this has been a mistake, is beyond irresponsible and a huge part of the problem. Especially footage from Hamas controlled Gaza. Israel is always guilty first, even though the witness in the box is a serial liar. The anti-Israel activists, and even many professional reporters have no interest in truth – what they want is food for their demonisation campaign and a body count.

David Collier..
Beyond the Great Divide..
04 April '19..

One of the biggest lies currently being sold to populations in the west is that anti-Israel activity is related to a movement of peace or justice. Relying on a strategy of intersectionality, this deception has permitted violent, racist ideologies to take a firm foothold within other well-known ’causes’. Infecting them and leading them astray. These people may call themselves members of ‘solidarity movements’ or ‘pro-Palestinian’ but they are nothing to do with ‘peace-makers’ in the traditional sense. I’ve been inside these movements, pretending to be an activist, infiltrating their social media groups and I’ve been researching them for years. Anti-Israel activity is full of little but fake news, hate and demonisation. In their twisted world, Palestinians are sacrificial, and these movements act as a bloodsucker, leeching onto the conflict, yearning for blood and only satiated when it flows.

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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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Welcome to the Israeli ‘apartheid’ wall that isn’t - by Stephen M. Flatow

The fact that Israel spends millions of shekels building roads for Palestinian Arabs is a remarkable act of unreciprocated generosity. The international community should be heaping praise on the Israelis for kindness, not harassing the Jewish state with lies about “apartheid.” But I guess we’ve all gotten used to that kind of treatment by now.

Stephen M. Flatow..
JNS.org..
14 January '19..

“Segregated Highway Opens in West Bank,” The Washington Post headline blared this week. “Israel Opens ‘Apartheid Road’ in Occupied West Bank,” announced Al Jazeera.

Apartheid? Segregation? Not even close. Like so much of what pretends to be news reporting about Israel these days, this latest “Israeli racism” allegation is just another cheap attempt to smear the Jewish state.

This newest prop in the Palestinian Arab propaganda war against Israel is a highway called Route 4370, northeast of Jerusalem. There is a physical barrier down the middle of the highway. Israeli traffic goes on one side, Palestinian Arab traffic on the other.

Is that apartheid? Of course not. Apartheid means separating people on the basis of their race. Jews, of course, are not a race; and neither are Arabs. On both sides of the divider, there will be drivers of various hues. Dark-skinned Ethiopian Jews alongside light-skinned Russian Jews. Dark-skinned Arabs alongside light-skinned Arabs.

How about religion? Is the traffic divided according to religion? Not at all. On the Israeli side, Israeli Jews, Muslims and Christians are all permitted to drive. On the Arab side, Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Christians drive.

(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. 

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(Excellent!) Georgia police groups slam Jewish Voice for Peace’s antisemitic “Deadly Exchange” campaign - by Miriam Elman

“Accusations that these valuable international training exchanges lead to deadly encounters in the United States are fallacious and slanderous”

Miriam Elman..
Legal Insurrection..
01 January '19..

Two professional associations of police leaders and chief law enforcement officers in Georgia have condemned the virulently anti-Israel and undeniably antisemitic “Deadly Exchange” campaign.

That campaign, led by ‘Jewish Voice for Peace’, falsely blames Israel and American Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), for U.S. domestic police practices and problems in minority communities.

In numerous prior posts we’ve written about this vile “Deadly Exchange” initiative, which aims to exploit preexisting and unrelated domestic racial tensions to stoke hatred of Jews by blaming Jews, all in the service of building an anti-Israel coalition.

As we discussed, the campaign was launched several years ago by the anti-Jewish and anti-peace extremist organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). It’s now being heavily promoted by many pro-BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) organizations based in the U.S.

Police departments across the country are coming under increasing pressure to end their relationships and exchange programs with Israel, but so far there’s been little if any push back.

Primarily that’s because JVP and its allies have been able to operate with a lot of “behind-the-scenes lobbying” and can work fast with “little public notice”.

Basically, they’ve been able to count on well-meaning people having little understanding of modern policing challenges. This makes it easier for JVP to promote “Deadly Exchange” as in the “best interests” of cities and to present it as consistent with progressive values and the larger progressive agenda.

Now all that could be about to change.

(Continue to 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. 

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Latest Campaign Against U.S.-Israel Police Programs is the BDS Version of Blood Libel - by Jonathan S. Tobin

Efforts to derail Israeli training for U.S. law enforcement reveal the link between BDS and anti-Semitism by attempting to blame Jews for police shootings in America

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Haaretz/Opinion..
04 December '18..

Jewish Voice for Peace can finally claim a couple of victories for its Deadly Exchange program. The Vermont State Police and the Northampton, Massachusetts Police Department have pulled out of a program in which law enforcement personnel take part in a week-long seminar on terrorism in Israel. Participants hear from Israeli and Palestinian Authority police and learn from their experience in dealing with the problem.

The program, which is sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League, is more than a decade old and is one of those that have been targeted by JVP as part of its so-called Deadly Exchange campaign. JVP’s argument is that exposing American police officers to the techniques and ideas employed by Israel in its counter-terrorism efforts encourages brutality and mistreatment of minorities back home. The conceit of Deadly Exchange is that such training is both inappropriate for Americans as well as indirectly responsible for outrages like “police murders,” “shoot to kill policies,” “extrajudicial executions” as well as “spying” and “deportation and detention.” The claim here is that Israeli police are a force that is primarily interested in repression and violence and those U.S. personnel that learn from them are more likely to kill Americans.

The problem with Deadly Exchange is more than a matter of how you think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be resolved.

(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. 

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The Marc Lamont Hill affair? Maybe Aljazeera will give him a job. - by Victor Rosenthal

...It might be controversial to fire a news analyst for taking an unpopular position on his own time. One could even argue that it’s his own business if he calls for the destruction of a state and the death or dispersal of its people, and supports violent terrorism. After all, it was said at the UN, where such ideas are commonplace. But his uncritical acceptance and regurgitation of the most blatantly false and misleading propaganda makes it clear that he is not competent in the role of political analyst for any media outlet that has the slightest regard for truth.

Victor Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
02 December '18..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2018/12/the-marc-lamont-hill-affair/

Marc Lamont Hill, a CNN political analyst, went to the UN on Nov. 29, its annual “Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” which just happens to be the anniversary of the partition resolution which could have created a state of Palestine – but didn’t, because the Arabs couldn’t accept a Jewish state next door. Hill called for (video) “a free Palestine from the river to the sea,” accused Israel of “settler colonialism,” and spoke approvingly of Palestinian Arab terrorism:

If we are standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people, we must recognize the right of an occupied people to defend itself. We must prioritize peace, but we must not romanticize or fetishize it. We must advocate and promote nonviolence at every opportunity, but we cannot endorse a narrow politics of respectability that shames Palestinians for resisting, for refusing to do nothing in the face of state violence and ethnic cleansing.

He also endorsed the program of the BDS movement, “the need to return to the pre-1967 borders, to give full rights to Palestinian citizens of Israel, and to allow right of return.”

I was planning to write about the history and meaning of the slogan “from the river to the sea…” and refute for the thousandth time the idea that Israel is a “colonialist” enterprise. I was going to explain yet again that “Palestinian” citizens of Israel do have full rights, and that “right of return” means converting Israel into an Arab-majority state. I was planning to present Hill’s explanation of why he didn’t really mean that Israel should be replaced by a Jew-free Arab state like the Jordanians created in the territory they occupied in 1948, and argue that he should have known better.

Well, screw it. I’m going to stop right here. I am tired of swimming in the sewers with people like Marc Lamont Hill. Either he understood the connotations of the words and phrases that he used, and knew that he was participating in an ugly annual ritual to whip up enthusiasm for uprooting the Jewish people from their homeland by terrorism and murder, or he didn’t know what he was saying. Is he in favor of terrorism and ethnic cleansing or just incredibly ignorant?

(Excellent) The Professor, Israel and the Arab Infant Mortality Rate - by Varda Meyers Epstein

...Here is the truth: The Jewish State deserves the widest recognition possible for protecting and nurturing its largest minority population, a sector that is overwhelmingly hostile to Israel and the Jewish people. Israel’s methodology for lowering the Arab population’s infant mortality rate is one that might well be emulated throughout the Arab world and studied in the halls of academia.
If only we could find an honest teacher.

Varda Meyers Epstein..
Judean Rose/Elder of Ziyon..
17 October '18..

Google the phrase “arab infant mortality rate” and step into Wonderland gone wrong. The featured snippet is from a Times of Israel piece: “In Israel, infant mortality rate 3 times higher among Arabs.” Based on the title alone, without further investigation, who wouldn’t curse a blue streak, damning Israel to hell for its villainy against the Arab people—damning Israelis as baby killers?

Unless you were a thinking person, that is, who knows better than to accept what the Times of Israel wants you to believe about the disparity between the Arab and Israeli infant mortality rates. If you were a thinking person, you’d look to confirm the statistic. And assuming it were true, well then you’d want to know the context.

But of course, it’s ever so much easier to blame Israel. Or alternatively, the “occupation,” another thing you might read about in the media and accept as true without a second thought. After all, you think, a news site wouldn’t print something untrue. They’d get caught. They’d lose credibility, you are sure. And so you believe what you read.

That’s if you’re a regular joe. But what if you were someone who lived in the ivory towers of academia? Someone with a higher education who had successfully defended a PhD thesis, someone entrusted with teaching young students. Wouldn’t such a person know better than to accept at face value what he or she reads in the news?

Wouldn’t a college professor be aware, when reading a title like that in the Times of Israel, or a similar one in Haaretz, “Huge disparities between Israeli Palestinian health systems,” that media bias may be in play here? When the title contains such a glaring smear, thinking people are supposed to stop short and think: wait a second—is that really the whole story?
Often it is not. As in this case. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

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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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A BDS Lesson in Dishonesty via the NY Times - by Daniel Pomerantz

...Levine engages in many claims that range from misleading to outright wrong. Yet all are based on the premise that it is perfectly acceptable to support a movement that works for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state, to silence all those with whom you disagree, and then to paradoxically claim that you are a bastion of morality, reasonableness and freedom. Nothing could be more (in the words of Joseph Levine himself) dishonest.

Daniel Pomerantz..
Honest Reporting..
04 September '18..

In a 2,000 word diatribe in the New York Times, Joesph Levine, philosophy professor and a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace Academic Advisory Council, defends BDS, asking, “Is Boycotting Israel ‘Hate’?”

He claims, “Opponents of the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement are involved in a dishonest branding campaign.”

BDS

Make no mistake, the purpose of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) is to destroy Israel.

Omar Barghouti, founder, BDS:

Definitely most definitely we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine.

(Separately he clarifies that “Palestine” means all of Israel.)

As’ad AbuKhalil, California State University Professor of Political Science, BDS leader and activist:

The real aim of BDS is to bring down the State of Israel…this should be stated as an unambiguous goal.

John Spritzler, author, BDS leader and activist:

I think the BDS movement will gain strength from forthrightly explaining why Israel has no right to exist…

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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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Myths, Facts and J-Street lies for @UNRWA - by Elder of Ziyon

...There's lots more in J-Street's list of myths, but it is obvious that an organization that states flatly that over 5 million Palestinians have a "right" to "return" to destroy Israel is not a pro-Israel organization.

Elder of Ziyon..
14 August '18..

J-Street has a "Myths and Facts" page about UNRWA where they deliberately switch the myths and the facts.

Once again, the "pro-Israel" J-Street can find nothing bad to say about an organization that teaches its students that they must remain stateless until they "return" to destroy Israel.

Their "myths and facts" could have been written by UNRWA itself, and I think there is a good chance that this was in fact the case.

Literally everything they say in the first section is a lie:

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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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How the Obama State Department lied with a map - by Elder of Ziyon

The map is a lie. But look how impressed the Obama White House and John Kerry was with the deception.

Elder of Ziyon..
12 July '18..

From The New Yorker:

One afternoon in the spring of 2015, a senior State Department official named Frank Lowenstein paged through a government briefing book and noticed a map that he had never seen before. Lowenstein was the Obama Administration’s special envoy on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, a position that exposed him to hundreds of maps of the West Bank. (One adorned his State Department office.)

Typically, those maps made Jewish settlements and outposts look tiny compared to the areas where the Palestinians lived. The new map in the briefing book was different. It showed large swaths of territory that were off limits to Palestinian development and filled in space between the settlements and the outposts. At that moment, Lowenstein told me, he saw “the forest for the trees”—not only were Palestinian population centers cut off from one another but there was virtually no way to squeeze a viable Palestinian state into the areas that remained. Lowenstein’s team did the math. When the settlement zones, the illegal outposts, and the other areas off limits to Palestinian development were consolidated, they covered almost sixty per cent of the West Bank.

Lowenstein showed the small map to Secretary of State John Kerry and said, “Look what’s really going on here.” Kerry brought the map to his next meeting with President Obama. The map was too small for everyone in the Situation Room to see, so Lowenstein had a series of larger maps made. The information was then verified by U.S. intelligence agencies. Obama’s Presidency was winding down, but Lowenstein figured that he could use the time left to raise awareness about what the Israelis were doing. “One day, everyone’s going to wake up and go, ‘Wait a minute, we’ve got to stop this to at least have the possibility of a two-state solution,’ ” Lowenstein said.

This is idiotic.

The white areas of the map are essentially Areas A and B under the Oslo Accords from 1995. Under the accords, the rest of the West Bank was under Israeli control.

This has nothing to do with settlements. It is a map of Palestinian areas being misrepresented as evidence of Israeli settlement growth.

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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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Electronic Intifada's Falsehoods, Erekat's Jenin Fictions - by Gilead Ini

...It bears repeating that 52 Palestinians, not 500, were killed during intense urban warfare in Jenin. And it bears remembering who, in the days and months that followed, tried to deceive the public — not only Saeb Erekat with his lies about Jenin, but also Ali Abunimah with his lies about Saeb Erekat’s lies.

Gilead Ini..
CAMERA..
05 July '18..

In 2002, during the campaign of Palestinian suicide bombings known as the “Second Intifada,” and at the height of Israel’s counter-terrorist offensive to stop the attacks, Palestinian officials took to CNN to allege an Israeli “massacre” in the West Bank city of Jenin.

This charge, and the more specific allegation that Israel killed 500 people in the city, quickly spread through the media. Almost as quickly, it was walked back, after it became clear that just over 50 Palestinians, mostly combatants, and about two dozen Israelis, were killed during intense house-to-house fighting in the city.

“That’s not 500,” conceded one critic of Israel, in an article lamenting the “credulous response” by many of his fellow left-wing activists to false Palestinian claims about Jenin.

Reputations suffered. One of the Palestinian officials most responsible for the false rumors, Saeb Erekat, was ridiculed as “Mr. 500 dead in Jenin” by the director of the Center for Israeli Studies at University College in London. The New York Post was more direct, titling a column about Erekat and his accusations “Why TV News Loves a Liar.”

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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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The Adalah Scam: An anti-Israel list that is racist, as well as an exercise in cultural and political appropriation - by David Collier

...Why are European charities and government agencies funding an NGO that is clearly out to make everything worse for everybody? And why is anyone listening to them? Those are the questions that really needs to be answered.

David Collier..
Across the Great Divide..
04 July '18..

Adalah is a name you may not recognise. They are an Israeli NGO and are responsible for one of the most important ‘scams’ of the delegitimisation campaign against Israel.

Adalah created a database of laws that they claim ‘discriminate’ against the Arab citizens of Israel. There are currently sixty-six laws listed.

Whenever you hear the claim that Israel is a ‘racist state’ or that it is an ‘Apartheid state’, it is the Adalah database that underpins the claim.

So I went through each of the sixty-six ‘discriminatory laws’ and have just published a report on my findings. This is what I discovered:

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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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