Love of the Land

Monday, December 7, 2015

(Video) Chanukah - Against All Odds

Chanuka is a time for miracles, both in those days and ours.

Torah Live

To see more Torah Live Chanuka videos,
visit http://www.youtube.com/user/TorahLive

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.

Erekat's semantic games and the PA's open embrace of terror

..."But where is the partner for peace that Israel needs?" It's a fine question. But so long as media analysts and political figures are willing to play along with the not-terror-but-self-defence semantic games of loathsome figures like Erekat and his boss, Mahmoud Abbas, and as long as gunmen and knifers and car-rammers are claimed as Palestinian Arab "martyrs" and role-models, peace is certain to remain a mirage.

Erekat on the left, hanging out with the
mourners in the Aribah/Oraiba home in
Abu Dis on Saturday [Image Source]

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
06 December '15..

Just a few days ago, we reported ["03-Dec-15: Thursday morning north Jerusalem shooting attack - gunman is a PA officer"] on a terror attack at the busy Hizme checkpoint on the edge of the Pisgat Ze'ev neighbourhood of north-east Jerusalem. A gunman emerged from his vehicle, and opened fire on nearby Israelis, striking two of them before being shot dead by alert IDF service personnel.

We mentioned that Fatah - at whose head stands none other than Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president - declared three days of mourning and a mass strike in Abu Dis, the Jerusalem suburb where the gunman - Oraiba Mazen Hassan [مازن حسن عريبة] - lived. The ostentatious response to yet another terrorist killed in the act may have stemmed from this particular gunman having been, at the time of his unexpected demise, a salaried officer in the PA armed forces.

Oraiba/Aribeh is in the news again today because, as Times of Israel notes, Saeb Erekat, the noted Palestinian Arab "peace" negotiator with the amazing ability to resign from the role again and again and again and still escape mainstream news media ridicule, paid a condolence call to the deceased gunman's family on Saturday.

(Read Full Post. Please Share)

Choosing to prioritise terrorist deaths at BBC News

...Almost three months into this wave of terror attacks, it is remarkable that the self-styled “standard-setter for international journalism” – which is legally obliged to provide its funding public with accurate and impartial information aimed at enhancing their “understanding of international issues” – has to date failed to produce even a single report on the issue of Palestinian Authority incitement and glorification of terrorism.

Hadar Sela..
BBC Watch..
07 December '15..

On December 4th the BBC News website’s Middle East page published its first report since the beginning of the month concerning the ongoing wave of terror attacks against Israelis. The previous report dedicated to such terror attacks had appeared on November 23rd and the last mention of any of the daily attacks had been in an article on another topic which was published on November 24th.

The headline chosen by the BBC after that ten-day hiatus in reporting was “Four Palestinians killed after attacks on Israelis in West Bank” and the report was presented on the website’s Middle East page under a title which also chose to prioritise the deaths of terrorists killed whilst carrying out violent attacks.

The report relates to three separate attacks on members of the Israeli security forces which took place in Hebron, near the village of Abud and near Ofra. Why those particular incidents were deemed more newsworthy than any of the numerous others which had taken place in previous days is unclear but it is notable that the December 3rd attack at Hizme in which a soldier and an Arab-Israeli civilian were wounded by a terrorist reported to be a member of the Palestinian Authority security forces did not receive BBC coverage.

(Read Full Post)

Terrorism, Terrorists and Double Standards

...As even those like President Obama, who have tried to downplay the danger from ISIS terrorists, hopefully start to sober up about the need to take this war seriously, the one exception to the united front against terror still appears to be Israel. So long as Western leaders treat killers of Jews as being worthy of understanding and condemn Israelis for defending themselves, terror will continue. Those who correctly lament the tragedies in Paris and San Bernardino should also spare a moment in their public expressions of sympathy for Israelis that continue to undergo a daily terror nightmare without the benefit of support from Facebook.

(Photo by Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto) --- Image
by © Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto/Corbis

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
06 December '15..

Americans are still shaken by the San Bernardino shooting this past week and the revelations that — contrary to the initial assurances of the Obama administration and the mainstream liberal media — it was an act of Islamist terrorism. But for Israelis, such outbreaks of violence, largely inspired by Muslim religious fanaticism, are routine events. For more than two months, a so-called “stabbing intifada” has been going on there in which every day Palestinians try to stab, shoot, run over, or stone random Jews they see on the street. Yet unlike their reactions to tragedies that happen elsewhere, Facebook users around the world aren’t changing their profile pictures to express their sympathy with the victims or to express outrage at the terrorists. To the contrary, much of the world seems primarily interested in blaming the Israeli victims and treating acts of self-defense by the victims and Israeli police as the real problem. A classic example of this double standard comes from Sweden where Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom claimed Israel was conducting “extrajudicial executions” of Palestinian terrorists.

Wallstrom was referring to the fact that some of those who attempt to murder Israelis have been shot dead while trying to commit murder by their intended victims or by police that come to their rescue. Later, Wallstrom walked back that remark to some extent and claimed she was merely saying that Israel’s response to terror was “disproportionate” and blamed both sides for the problem. If any of those at the holiday party that the San Bernardino killers targeted had the ability to fire back at their attackers, would that have been considered disproportionate? At best, this is a reprehensible example of a false moral equivalence between terrorists and victims. At worst, it’s yet another blood libel against the Jewish state whose premise is that, unlike other people, Jews don’t have the right to try and stop people from killing them.

But that’s not the only double standard regarding Israel and terrorism.

Mr. Kerry. About That Israeli “Partner” for Peace?

...Maybe Kerry was behind in his news feed. And maybe no one told him that the Palestinians’ chief peace negotiator was busy Saturday, while Kerry was speaking, paying honor to terror.

Elliott Abrams..
Pressure Points..
06 December '15..

Last week a Palestinian terrorist named Mazen Aribah shot two Israelis, just north of Jerusalem. What made this incident especially noteworthy was that Aribah was also a Palestinisn Authority police officer.

How does the PA react to such a terrible event, where one of its own officers commits an act of terror? By honoring him. On Saturday, Saeb Erekat visited the home of Aribah’s family to pay his respects to Aribah, who had been killed by Israeli police at the scene of his attacks.

Erekat is in fact the chief Palestinian negotiator with Israel as well as a high PLO official, so one may say the path to peace is in the hands of a man who thinks it appropriate to honor terrorists.

Israel: The West’s Strategic Asset by Evelyn Gordon

...Israel’s primary goal in taking military action is always to protect itself. But in protecting itself, it often ends up protecting the West, and in failing to protect itself, it often puts the rest of the West at risk. It’s too early to say which of those will prove true with regard to Iran. But it’s definitely past time for the West to say “thank you” to Israel for keeping Islamic State from getting the bomb.

Evelyn Gordon..
Analysis from Israel..
06 December '15..

Two news items over the past two weeks provide timely reminders of why Israel’s willingness to take military action in its own neighborhood makes it an unparalleled strategic asset for the West – including those Westerners who deplore military action and prefer to rely exclusively on diplomacy. At first glance, neither report has anything to do with Israel. Yet both underscore its vital role in Western security.

The first was a New York Times report on the Islamic State’s efforts to obtain red mercury – a material that, “when detonated in combination with conventional high explosives,” is rumored to “create the city-flattening blast of a nuclear bomb.” Proliferation experts all say red mercury is a hoax, but it’s a hoax widely believed in many corners of the globe. The terrorist group was therefore willing to pay ‘‘whatever was asked’’ to procure it, as one Islamic State official told the arms dealer he tasked with the mission. Nor was this a passing fancy: The official “kept inquiring about red mercury for more than a year … pressing for results” until he disappeared (presumably because he was killed).

What the report shows is that while red mercury may be a hoax, the Islamic State’s efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction are in deadly earnest. And had it not been for Israel, the group might well have succeeded – because its Syrian conquests include Al-Kibar, site of the secret nuclear facility Israel destroyed just before it went live in 2007. Granted, the Syrian government would presumably have invested more in Al-Kibar’s defense if the reactor hadn’t been destroyed, but it has lost many areas it genuinely strove to defend. Thus the possibility that Islamic State could have captured the facility, and thereby acquired raw material for a nuclear bomb, is far from unrealistic.

Obviously, nobody foresaw Syria’s collapse in 2007. But that’s precisely the point: Though Western countries presumably would have taken military action to keep the world’s most vicious terrorist group from obtaining nuclear weapons, none of them was willing to do so merely to prevent a vicious dictator from obtaining nukes; the West preferred negotiations with Damascus. And had Israel bowed to this preference, it would have been too late for military action by the time Islamic State rolled in. You can’t bomb a live reactor.

Question. Why do Palestinian refugees get so much more attention than others?

...Let us not say that the lie is triumphing in Berkeley and other American campuses. The lie is triumphing here. The Nakba film festival isn't a victory for free speech. it's a victory for lying propaganda. It's a victory for the Palestinian peace refusal camp. It's a defeat for peace and common sense.

Ben-Dror Yemini..
Israel Opinion/Ynet..
04 December '15..

November 30, which was this week, was declared the day of remembrance for the banishment and expulsion of Jewish refugees from Arab countries. The Jewish Nakba. Aside from a conference at Bar-Ilan University, the subject echoed very faintly through Israel. Part of our elite is busy with another Nakba, which they celebrate again and again: the Palestinian one. They even organized another festival of Nakba films, produced by organizations or people who nurture the fantasy that is the right of return.

When someone attempts to wonder out loud about this injustice, the crocodile tears appear, along with complaints of silencing voices and other assorted goods. Silencing voices? The Palestinian Nakba receives the greatest marketing, in Israel and around the world. The first half of the 20th century saw between 52 and 60 million people go through the experience of forced relocation, most of them in the 1940s after World War Two, for the purpose of building nations. Because that was the norm in those days. It went well with the right of self-determination.

And of all of the dozens of cases of population switches, only the Arabs, who later became the Palestinians, receive this grand commemoration. There are thousands of publications in their name and in their honor. Entire shelves in every university. Departments and cathedrals in almost every university in the world, all to celebrate and glorify their suffering and victimhood. And Israeli film festivals as well.

Who has heard of the population exchange between Poland and Ukraine? How many conferences and film festivals are there commemorating that event, which included 1.4 million refugees, and 100,000 deaths, along with pogroms and slaughters? There's something small, reduced, for those in the know, mostly those who speak the local languages in Poland and Ukraine.

Harvard, Princeton, and Berkeley don't hold special ceremonies with giant budgets, or any film festivals. Neither do they hold these for the Jews of Arab countries, who went through pogroms, and were expelled. Because the propagandists of the progressive forces, in Israel too, dedicate their vigor to only one Nakba. And they dare to complain of others silencing their voices.

BDS, Murder and the Culture of Jew-Hatred

...It’s not just that a Jewish leftist can be found to spout rhetoric delegitimizing Israel and Israelis even if it means attacking a child. We know there are plenty of leftists, especially in Britain, who are filled with loathing for fellow Jews. The really significant thing about Levine’s stand — and by extension the other leftist Jews she probably speaks for — is how much it dovetails with the culture of Jew-hatred that leads individual Palestinians to go into the streets and to try and slaughter any random Israeli they meet.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
03 December '15..

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t amount to much. But one email from an Anglo-American academic has gone viral on social media and taught us all a little bit more about the nature of hatred against Israel. Though it is just one person rather than a group, the incident in question has gotten a lot of attention not just because it was egregious and nasty. Rather it is has made an impact because it illustrates the nature of the pathology of a particular type of left-wing Jew that believes Israel has no right to exist and that its people should be treated accordingly.

The email was from one Marsha Levine, a retired Cambridge University professor who is or was an expert on horses. She had been contacted by a 13-year-old girl living in Zichron Yaakov, Israel who wanted some information about the origin of horses for a school report. Here is what Levine wrote in reply in an email later posted on Facebook by the child’s mother:

I’ll answer your question when there is peace and justice for Palestinians in Palestine. I am a member of Jews for Justice for Palestinians. I support Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions. You might be a child but if you are old enough to write to me, you are old enough to learn about Israeli history and how it impacted on the lives of Palestinian people. Maybe your family has the same views as I do, but I doubt it. So I suggest you look at this link.

yours sincerely,Dr. Marsha Levine

Much has already been written to express outrage about this note and the sentiments it espouses. Suffice it to say, Levine is not merely criticizing certain Israeli policies such as settlements or borders. She was making it clear to the child that she considered Israel to be illegitimate, and its people have no right to live in peace in their own homeland. Levine doubled down on these comments in an interview with Britain’s Jewish Chronicle in which she expressed support for Palestinians in Gaza and said Israelis were “Nazis.” Nor did she think the fact that Shachar was merely a child should have obligated her to refrain from treating her as a non-person. Indeed, Levine’s rant was so extreme that it was even disavowed by the organization she supports. The group said it supported only “smart” BDS not a blanket boycott of everything and everyone in Israel and thought children ought to be exempt from being given the BDS treatment.

Thus, while friends of Israel have seized upon Levine’s statements and subjected her to some well-deserved opprobrium, left-wing critics of the Jewish state are saying that she is just an individual and doesn’t speak for them. Indeed, they believe discussing her extremism is a distraction from the real issues and a way for Israel’s defenders to avoid discussing its offenses.

They are right that Levine is just one person, and if this was just a solitary, nasty Jewish woman with a complex about Israel, we might do better to ignore her rather than pile on to the point where, no doubt, she probably now sees herself as a martyr to Zionist oppression. But there is something significant about her rants. It’s not just that a Jewish leftist can be found to spout rhetoric delegitimizing Israel and Israelis even if it means attacking a child. We know there are plenty of leftists, especially in Britain, who are filled with loathing for fellow Jews. The really significant thing about Levine’s stand — and by extension the other leftist Jews she probably speaks for — is how much it dovetails with the culture of Jew-hatred that leads individual Palestinians to go into the streets and to try and slaughter any random Israeli they meet.

Great Question! Who Is Stealing Palestinian Land?

...The lands that once housed Jewish settlements were supposed to transform the Gaza Strip into the Middle East's Singapore. Instead, all the grandiose and ambitious plans went right down the drain when Hamas seized control over the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2007. Since then, the entire Gaza Strip has been transformed into a base for various Islamist groups. In addition to suppressing and intimidating the local population, these groups, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other jihadi militias, have used the Gaza Strip to launch terror attacks against Israel and threaten Egypt's national security on the other side of the border.

At least they agree on one thing: Confiscating land.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (right)
shakes hands with Hamas's leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh,
during negotiations in 2007 for a short-lived unity
government. (Image source: Palestinian Press Office)

Khaled Abu Toameh..
Gatestone Institute..
04 December '15..

The beleaguered Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas, has found an original way to solve its financial crisis. The movement is now planning to pay its unpaid civil servants with former Israeli settlement land in the Gaza Strip.

Abandoned by Israel in 2005 as part of the "disengagement" from the Gaza Strip, the land was supposed to provide a solution to the severe housing crisis in the Palestinian-controlled area. Back then, there was much talk about building new housing projects for thousands of Palestinian families in the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli "disengagement" prompted some oil-rich Arab countries to propose plans to help solve the severe housing crisis in the Gaza Strip. The lands that once housed Jewish settlements were supposed to transform the Gaza Strip into the Middle East's Singapore.

Instead, all the grandiose and ambitious plans went right down the drain when Hamas seized control over the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2007. Since then, the entire Gaza Strip has been transformed into a base for various Islamist groups. In addition to suppressing and intimidating the local population, these groups, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other jihadi militias, have used the Gaza Strip to launch terror attacks against Israel and threaten Egypt's national security on the other side of the border.

The Palestinian Authority (PA), which was ousted from the Gaza Strip by Hamas, has since failed to provide any kind of assistance to the 1.8 million Palestinians living there. Today, it is clear that the PA's chances of returning to the Gaza Strip are zero. The Palestinian Authority is, in fact, lucky still to be in power in the West Bank.

Were it not for the presence of the Israel Defense Forces in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority would have collapsed long ago and Hamas leaders would be sitting today in the office of PA President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah.

Several attempts during the past few years to end the dispute between Abbas's ruling Fatah faction and Hamas have failed to bridge the wide gap between the two parties. For now, it appears that Palestinians will have to live, for many more years, with the reality that they have two separate states -- one in the West Bank and another in the Gaza Strip.

As the EU’s Economic Hold over Israel Wanes by Evelyn Gordon

...Elected politicians, whose voters expect them to produce economic growth, tend to be much less enthusiastic about economic sanctions against Israel than EU bureaucrats, who aren’t answerable to any electorate. Nevertheless, EU bureaucrats still wield a great deal of power, and they are likely to come up with more anti-Israel measures in the future. Thus over the long term, Israel’s best defense is to sharply reduce its economic dependence on Europe. And as the trade statistics with Vietnam show, Israel is making rapid strides toward doing exactly that.

Evelyn Gordon..
Analysis from Israel..
04 December '15..

The deputy prime minister of Vietnam visited Israel on Wednesday, prompting Jerusalem Post reporter Herb Keinon to delve into some fascinating trade statistics. Bilateral trade between Israel and Vietnam totaled almost $1.1 billion last year, a fivefold increase in just five years, and is now more than double Israel’s trade with Austria and four times its trade with Norway. In fact, Keinon later tweeted, Israel’s trade with Vietnam now exceeds its trade with 21 of the European Union’s 28 member states. And Vietnam is just one country; Israeli trade with other Asian countries has also burgeoned. All of which goes to show that one of Israel’s biggest Achilles’ heels – its economic dependence on an increasingly hostile Europe – is swiftly disappearing.

Taken as a whole, the EU is still Israel’s largest trading partner, but its lead has been shrinking rapidly as Israeli trade with other parts of the globe expands. Moreover, many of the European countries most hostile to Israel are among its least important trading partners. Norway, Sweden, and Ireland, for instance, would star in any list of the most hostile countries, yet each of them conducts less trade with Israel than Vietnam does. In other words, the countries that are most hostile to Israel tend to be those with relatively little ability to cause it economic harm.

Israel has long since ceased to count on Europe for diplomatic support. In international forums, many European countries reflexively back even the most outrageous anti-Israel resolutions, while even Israel’s best friends in Europe rarely do more than abstain. This past May, for instance, every EU country voted for a UN resolution declaring Israel the world’s worst violator of health rights (perhaps they think Israeli hospitals should stop treating Syrian war victims or cancer patients from Hamas-run Gaza?).

A monstrous culture of cruelty by Vic Rosenthal

...I don’t have the answers. But this is what we need to do. We can’t cooperate with the monstrous culture of cruelty whose reason for being is to destroy our state. We can’t let them keep getting stronger while we pretend that some day we will be able to live at peace with them. Nothing has changed since 1972 except now they have produced a generation of children who can stick a knife in a Jew as easily as kicking a football. It won’t get better. The lesson we should have learned since 1972 is that ultimately it’s going to be them or us. Let it be us.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
04 December '15..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2015/12/a-monstrous-culture-of-cruelty/

The headline story in today’s Israel Hayom is about how the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorists tortured and mutilated their Israeli hostages.

I didn’t bother to read it. I don’t need further reinforcement about the degree to which the Palestinian movement is all about hate. Mahmoud Abbas, who organized the financing for the Munich attack, and Yasser Arafat, who approved it, went on after Oslo to create a hate-education apparatus probably matched only by Pol Pot’s indoctrination of child soldiers. While Israel changed its school curricula to “educate for peace,” deemphasizing Zionism and emphasizing the new ‘reality’ of coexistence brought about by Oslo, the Palestinian Authority went full speed in the opposite direction, teaching their students that ‘Palestine’ would be redeemed from the Jewish usurpers by their blood.

In the 22 years since Oslo, the PA/PLO hasn’t backed off one iota in its campaign to make its children candidates for martyrdom, despite agreeing to stop numerous times. That’s why today Arab teenagers in Jerusalem go looking for Jews to stab as an after-school activity.

The diverse Arabs that have called themselves ‘Palestinians’ since the 1960s talk a lot about their cultural traditions. But what are they, in addition to the Arab culture they brought to the land from Syria, Egypt, Jordan, the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Yemen, and other places, mostly after the beginning of Zionism? The unique Palestinian part of their culture is the mythic presumption of victimhood at the hands of the Jews, their burning hatred of us, and their intention to get revenge. Their heroes are terrorists, and the most important qualification for a Palestinian politician is how strongly he opposes Israel (and how many Jews he has personally murdered). Their founding fathers were pogromist and Nazi supporter Haj Amin al-Husseini, and Yasser Arafat, a man responsible for several wars and countless acts of terrorism.

The rest of the world has consistently made wrong decisions in its relationship with them, and as a result massively increased the number of Palestinians, fed their grievances and encouraged them to continue their conflict. And it paid the price. In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, Palestinian terrorism was international in scope; the PLO was not the first group to hijack airplanes for political purposes, but it popularized this form of terrorism, as well as attacking airports and even cruise ships. In 1968, a Palestinian terrorist named Sirhan Sirhan even assassinated American presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.

Literally billions of dollars every year are pumped from the pockets of Western taxpayers into the Palestinian Authority, UNRWA and EU initiatives, out of alleged humanitarian concern. Most of this money pays the salaries of thousands of policemen, teachers, bureaucrats, and soldiers whose primary function is to support the Palestinian movement to destroy Israel and only secondarily to provide services to the Arab refugees and the populations of the territories. Much of it is siphoned off to support the various terrorist militias and the lavish lifestyles of the leadership.

Dear Defense Minister: I respectfully – but firmly – disagree by Martin Sherman

Moshe Ya’alon is a man of intellect, integrity and courage. As such, I hope he will address the troubling questions this column raises.

Martin Sherman..
Into the Fray/JPost..
03 December '15..

A brief prologue: I would consider myself remiss if, before broaching the topic of this week’s column, I did not pause to pay tribute to my friend Maurice Ostroff, who, sadly, passed away this week at the age of 90. His tireless and articulate efforts in defense of Israel (including his erudite Jerusalem Post blog) will be sorely missed, and his passing will leave the public discourse on Israel, and its international standing, decidedly diminished.

How do you manage in these conditions to create a situation in which those not involved in terror activities can continue with their lives? How can you not undermine the routine of life, while providing an effective response to the threat that emerges from individual attackers – knives, vehicle rammings, shootings? It is not organized; there is no organization, but it comes directly out of the civilian population. How can you, nevertheless, allow a sizable Arab civilian population in Judea and Samaria to live its life if it is not involved in terror activities?

…In this war which is predominantly a war of wills, of two societies with conflicting wills, a war in which endurance is more important than firepower, [the question is] which society will prevail?

– Defense Minister Moshe (Bogie) Ya’alon, Israel Democracy Institute, November 25

This is not an easy column for me to write.

Although I cannot claim to be a “bosom buddy” of Defense Minister Ya’alon, I have, over the last decade, maintained an amiable relationship with him, and spent a considerable number of hours discussing – more often than not in a like-minded manner – various issues on the national agenda.

Recently, however, I find myself increasingly at odds with several of his public pronouncements, and not infrequently at a loss to fathom the political rationale underlying the course they are intended to chart.

Despite my personal bias

I must confess to having a strong personal bias in favor of Ya’alon. In many ways, he is the epitome of an officer and a gentleman, a far more thoughtful politician than one normally encounters in the Israeli political system.

Indeed, I do not think I am being overly naïve in believing he is motivated more by his sincere perception of the national interest than of any narrow personal gain.

However, despite my esteem for the man and his impressive accomplishments, the issues at hand are so fateful that I feel compelled to overcome my personal reluctance to engage him critically in public, and take him to task for what I see as grave misperception of reality and of the policy required to contend with it.

It was a headline, “Ya’alon: We must let West Bank Arabs live as normal lives as possible” in last Thursday’s Jerusalem Post that provided the impetus for this column.

The report, by the Post’s Jeremy Sharon, referred to an address Ya’alon gave at the inauguration of a new program at the Israel Democracy Institute on “National Security and Democracy” in memory of the late IDF chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Amnon Lipkin-Shahak.

While not a verbatim quote of what Ya’alon actually said, the headline did encapsulate the substance of an important portion of his talk, which comprises the point of departure of the ensuing critique.

Fatah Knives, ISIS Knives and Palestinian Child-Sacrifice

...Just last week, the distinguished author, Professor Ibtihal Al-Khatib of the Kuwait University, said on television, "If we do not reform ourselves, we will become extinct. Nations which stick to principles that are at odds with the progress of civilization will come to an end. Such nations will not survive. Any attempt to justify or to legitimize terrorism is a terrorist idea; the idea and the act are equally dangerous." Al-Khatib's statement instantly showed her to be light years more advanced than U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who idiotically blurted out that some terrorist attacks had "a legitimacy... a rationale." For this pronouncement, he was roundly and befittingly ridiculed. The excuses the terrorists find to justify murdering the innocent are infinite in number, unlimited in depravity, and they corrupt our societies.

Bassam Tawil..
Gatestone Institute..
03 December '15..

Recently, more and more young Palestinian men, women and children have left their homes and gone off to stab Israelis. Palestinian Authority (PA) officials claim our children make this decision independently and that no one sends them to carry out terrorist attacks. But in reality, every Palestinian knows that behind these supposedly "independent," "spontaneous" attacks there is organized, deliberate incitement, some from politicians and some from fatwas [religious opinions] issued by clerics.

One such cleric, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, sits far away in the safety of Qatar and sends Palestinian children to their deaths. The mosques and schools in the Palestinian Authority and the Gaza Strip, as well as their social media, often unashamedly exploit Palestinian children – perhaps emotionally a bit lost, and who long for admiration for a grand, "heroic act" in a grand romantic "cause."

Tragically, as Israeli forces often do not let such attackers get away, many murders these children commit also end up as needless "passive" suicides.

Our perverted leaders do not only encourage young Palestinians to commit murder. When these children are killed in the act of committing murder, both the PA and Hamas claim that that Israelis "executed" them. They then call our kids martyrs (shuhadaa), glorify them and turn them into role models for other loser kids. Then they pay their families enormous bonuses.

They send minors to do their dirty work, while knowing full well they will likely be killed by the Israeli security forces. How can we justify this to ourselves? What have we allowed to happen to the good minds that Allah gave us? Whatever happened to our sense of morality?

It is agonizing to see how these youngsters are turned into bargain basement castoffs. It is child sacrifice by a cynical Palestinian leadership that fosters a dark culture of murder and death.

If the Palestinians really want to pick a fight with Israel, why do they send children to fight a "holy war" instead of fighting it themselves, like men?

No good has come -- or is even expected to come -- from these deaths on either side. Has the situation of Al-Aqsa mosque "improved?" Is it no longer "in danger?"

The problem is, Al-Aqsa mosque never was in danger. There were also never were any poison-resistant rats, supposedly released by Israelis, as claimed by the official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, to drive Arab residents of Jerusalem out of their homes. As one Arab reporter dryly wrote, "It is not clear how these rats were taught to stay away from Jews, who also happen to live in the Old City." There was also never any chewing gum supposedly laced with an aphrodisiac by the Israelis to corrupt our men and women. Has one meter of Palestinian land ever been liberated? Are the Jews really fleeing "in terror" from Israel? On the contrary, the Jews of Europe are fleeing to Israel. Ironically, while the Jews seem divided and at each other's throats, we have only been driving them closer together.

Somehow, the Israelis always seem to overcome the abductions, suicide bombers, murders and general terrorism we Palestinians throw at them. They never retreat; they advance.

There are, then, two jobs that seem urgent. First, we need to decide, and quickly, if we really want another armed conflict with the Israelis. Second, we really need to get our kids away from our killing fields. Anyone who sends young people -- many of them probably with emotional problems -- to kill and to be killed, is a murderer himself and will be destroyed in the end.

The NWSA and the Moral Vacuum of an Academic Boycott Against Israel

...“Moral narcissists,” observed legal commentator Jay B. Gaskill, “have adopted a camouflage strategy to escape the moral disapproval of others [and] . . . they accomplish this camouflage by cloaking their narcissism in the trappings of ‘social justice positioning.’” The moral narcissist’s reasoning may defective, ahistorical, counter-intuitive, or just wrong, but he still feels good about himself. But in this worldview there can be only one enemy of justice, and Israel is that enemy.

Richard L. Cravatts..
Times of Israel..
02 December '15..

Seeming to give proof to Orwell’s observation that some ideas are so stupid they could only have been thought of by intellectuals, yet another academic association—this time the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)—has followed the lead of the American Studies Association, the American Anthropological Association, the Asian Studies Association, and several others by ignobly voting to approve another academic boycott of Israel.

With the characteristic pseudo-intellectual babble that currently dilutes the scholarly relevance of the social sciences and humanities, the NWSA’s recommendation to approve a boycott announced that, “As feminist scholars, activists, teachers, and public intellectuals we recognize the interconnectedness of systemic forms of oppression,” that “interconnectedness,” no doubt, justifying the singling out of Israeli academics for their particularly odious role in the oppression of women in the Middle East. “In the spirit of this intersectional perspective,” these moral termagants continued, “we cannot overlook the injustice and violence, including sexual and gender-based violence, perpetrated against Palestinians and other Arabs in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, within Israel and in the Golan Heights, as well as the colonial displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba.”

Apparently, this rarified “intersectional perspective” has not enabled NWSA members to notice the injustice and violence currently being meted out against Israelis, either as a result of the shower of some 12,000 Hamas rockets launched from Gaza since 2005 with the intention of murdering Jewish civilians, or as part of the ongoing “knife Intifada” which has claimed the lives of over 20 Israelis in the past few months who have been murdered by psychopathic Palestinians wielding knives, guns, rocks, and automobiles used as weapons.

But facts and history are not the concern of the morally-elevated professoriate. Based on this politically-charged, biased language, the boycotters expose that they have, with the breathtaking certainty that only the very sanctimonious and intellectually-elite can do, framed the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in such a way that they have determined precisely which side is worthy of opprobrium and which, by virtue of its perennial victimhood, is worthy of complete moral support. Revealingly, the language conjuring up “the colonial displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba” reveals the victim-centric, oppression-laden worldview of the NWSA, in which the legal creation of the Jewish state is framed as an unjust colonial enterprise during which innocent, indigenous Arabs in a factitious country called Palestine experience a “Nakba,” a catastrophe, in which they were either ethnically cleansed from their lands or remained and now live in the oppressive, apartheid, racist state of Israel.

That historically inaccurate view is not at all surprising, given the ideologues within the NWSA who both crafted the language of the recommendation and pushed through the boycott resolution within the organization. One of these virulent anti-Israel activists, Simona Sharoni, is one of the co-founders of Feminists for Justice in/for Palestine, the ad-hoc group that sponsored NWSA’s pro-boycott campaign. Sharoni, a professor of gender and women’s studies at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, is also, not coincidentally, one of the founders of the anti-Israel International Solidarity Movement (ISM)-linked group, Women in Black, an organization that is an apologist for the terrorist group Hamas and works diligently to interfere with Israel’s self-defense. In fact, Rachel Corrie, the notorious ISM activist who was killed in 2003 while throwing herself in front of an armored bulldozer to interfere with the IDF as it attempted to destroy a terrorist’s home in Rafah, was Sharoni’s protégé, making it quite clear where Sharoni stands, ideologically, when it comes to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and how she influenced the NWSA vote.

When Consuming A Steady Diet of Hate

...People need to understand that Arab violence against Jews is not because Jews are mean to Arabs. The fact of the matter is that if Israel was a 23rd Arab-Muslim country it would be regarded as the most enlightened country in that part of the world; the freest country and the country with most civil liberties for its citizenry, the only country hospitable to the civil liberties of Gay people and of women and of all people, regardless of religion. It is strictly because it is the lone, sole Jewish state that it is reviled by the surrounding Arabs and its hostile European interlocutors.

Michael Lumish..
Israel Thrives..
01 December '15..

The Elder has a piece from last Wednesday, November 25, entitled, The death cult.

It is the story of two Arab-Palestinian children, one aged 11 and one aged 14, who recently set forth to murder Jews.

The Times of Israel tells us:

In their interrogation, the two children said they carried out the attack as an act of revenge, without planning in advance and with no encouragement from any adults.

“We travelled from Shuafat to Damascus Gate in order to stab a soldier but did not do it because the soldiers were in groups and we didn’t find one standing alone,” recalled the 11-year-old. “Then he told me ‘let’s do an attack together to revenge the death of Muhammad Ali.’ He opened his bag and showed me the knife. At Damascus Gate I bought a pair of scissors and then we boarded the light rail and looked for Jews to stab.” (Emphasis added.)
Looked for Jews to stab.

One thing that needs to be understood is that none of this is new.

Arabs have encouraged their children to harm Jews, or stab Jews, or stone Jews, for many centuries since the time of Muhammad.

In Jews and Arabs: A Concise History of Their Social and Cultural Relations, S.D. Goitein recalls that:

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.

Unlawful, under al-Sharia, to forbid it.

People need to understand that Arab violence against Jews is not because Jews are mean to Arabs.

The fact of the matter is that if Israel was a 23rd Arab-Muslim country it would be regarded as the most enlightened country in that part of the world; the freest country and the country with most civil liberties for its citizenry, the only country hospitable to the civil liberties of Gay people and of women and of all people, regardless of religion.

It is strictly because it is the lone, sole Jewish state that it is reviled by the surrounding Arabs and its hostile European interlocutors.

Rewriting History and Salon's Bogus Ethnic Cleansing Claim

...Playing loose with history, as Salon does in this article, does not contribute to a greater understanding of the Israel/Palestinian conflict, and how it’s reached the current impasse. If only the media held the Palestinians to account for their part of the conflict, things might start to change.

Alex Margolin..
Honest Reporting..
01 December '15..

This week’s anniversary of the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which led to the creation of Israel as an independent state in 1948, is a good opportunity to look at a key point in the history of Palestinian rejectionism.

Unless, like Internet magazine Salon, you subscribe to the media narrative of the pristine and innocent Palestinians, ever the victims and never the aggressors. Then it’s an opportunity to rewrite history and whitewash Palestinian and Arab violence.

The UN voted to divide the area under the British Mandate into a state for Jews and a state for Arabs. The Jewish leadership accepted the plan and the Arabs rejected it and turned to violence, leading eventually the Israel’s War of Independence in 1948.

But you’ll get quite a different picture from the Salon article, a deeply flawed, one-sided picture that completely ignores Arab or Palestinian aggression in order to paint a picture of Israeli “ethnic cleansing”:

The Partition Plan was never implemented, however. The very next day after it was voted on, the 1947-1948 war broke out.

In this war, Zionist militias systematically ethnically cleansed large portions of historic Palestine, sacking hundreds of Palestinian villages and expelling more than 750,000 people — around two-thirds of the indigenous Arab population.

War simply broke out? Actually, the inconvenient truth for Salon writer Ben Norton, is that the war did not just simply start. The Palestinians started it, as historian Benny Morris explains:

On November 30, Arab gunmen, in the first shots of the war, ambushed two Jewish buses near Petah Tikva, killing seven passengers, and snipers firing from the Arab town of Jaffa hit pedestrians in neighboring Tel Aviv. The Husseini-led Arab Higher Committee (AHC), the Palestinian Arabs’ “government,” called a general strike. The civil war had begun.

And as for ethnic cleansing, it was the Arabs, who were seeking the annihilation of the Jews, not the other way. Morris provides the details:

The pride of Palestinian Arab society: Monstrous mothers, sacrificed children

..In a speech delivered on November 7, 2015, she focused on what she termed the "uniqueness" of Palestinian women which differentiates her from the women of the world, as [only] she receives the news of her son's martyrdom with cries of joy.

Dr Al-Agha, the minister so proud of Palestinian
Arab mothers' cries of joy [Image Source]

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
01 December '15..

Some background to what's happening:

We posted earlier today (Tuesday) about the fact that three of today's crop of Arab-on-Israeli stabbing attacks were done by women.

Earlier still, this morning, we noted that yet again a knifing attacker turns out to be a child of sixteen (he was shot dead in the attempt).

Last Thursday, we wrote about how many of the "martyrs" and assorted other stabbers are children of 15, 14, 13, 12 and 11.

Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the government that is supposed to look after these women and children, praises their savagery and their deaths to the skies. As we wrote here an hour ago, this venal, power-drunk kleptocrat says he blesses "every drop of blood... spilled for Jerusalem". It's "clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah", this thug in a suit says to his people - in Arabic, but never in English. "Every martyr (the Arabic word is shahid) will reach paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah..."

The depravity of the society over which this awful person presides was on display last week in another excellent Palestinian Media Watch analysis. It focuses on a speech made by the PA government's Minister for Women's Affairs, Haifa Al-Agha. As we review the barbarism this woman is busy marketing to her public, keep in mind (as Wikipedia discloses) that this disturbed politician is a graduate of Oklahoma State University where she earned a PhD in Educational Studies in 1991. And though she serves the Fatah-controlled "moderate" PA today, there was a time when she was a Hamas functionary, a minister in its Gaza-centred Islamist regime.

(Read Full Post. Please Share)

Context-free Tweet from Gaza BBC correspondent compromises impartiality

...The information...is undoubtedly relevant to the story of the “17 y boy in Jerusalem” as presented by Rushdi Abualouf in that Tweet amplifying messaging from the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Whilst one may not have expected that latter body to disclose the particular incident’s context and circumstances or to clarify that most of the Palestinians killed in recent weeks died whilst carrying out terror attacks or engaged in violent rioting, a BBC correspondent bound by guidelines on using social media should surely have made more effort to avoid calling the BBC’s accuracy and impartiality into question.

Hadar Sela..
BBC Watch..
01 December '15..

On November 29th two terror attacks took place in Jerusalem within a matter of hours. In the first incident a 38 year-old Palestinian stabbed a Border Police officer.

“A Border Police officer was lightly to moderately wounded in a stabbing attack at the Damascus Gate leading to Jerusalem’s Old City Sunday morning.

The officer, in his early 20s, was stabbed in the neck. Magen David Adom medics evacuated him to Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem.

The terrorist was identified as a 38-year-old Palestinian resident of Nablus in the northern West Bank.

He was shot and killed by officers at the scene.

He shouted “Allah akbar” as he stabbed the policeman, officers said. A body search found an additional knife in the assailant’s clothing.”

In the second incident a Nepalese national was stabbed by a 17 year-old Palestinian who was later arrested.

“According to police, “An initial investigation of the attack revealed that the woman was standing next to a bust stop on Shamgar Street, when a Palestinian man approached her and stabbed her in the back before fleeing the scene. The wounded woman was evacuated to Sha’are Tzedek hospital. Forces conducted a man hunt to find the assailant.”

He was later apprehended at a construction site and tied himself to the attacks.

According to police, the suspect was a 17.5-year-old Palestinian, who tied himself to the attack. Two other Palestinians were detained for questioning by police.”

The BBC News website did not report either of those attacks.

However, BBC Gaza bureau correspondent Rushdi Abualouf – who likewise ignored the two terror attacks in Jerusalem – did find it appropriate to send the Tweet below to his followers later on the evening of the same day.

(Read Full Post)

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

(ElderToons) Palestinians try to hijack climate conference

...Do the people who work so hard on these conferences get upset at these blatant attempts to hijack them for narrow political ends? Or are they so far gone already that they all believe that if only Israel didn't exist, all other world problems would go away?

Elder of Ziyon..
01 December '15..

It is truly amazing.

Every time "Palestine" manages to get membership in an international forum, they try to hijack it for their own selfish purposes.

They do it with UNESCO. They do it at conferences for refugees. They do it during international days for children and for women.

Yesterday, the pattern continued:

(Go to Full Post)

Are values universal? The telling example of the Palestinian death cult

...Life and death. Life itself—its sanctity, its desirability—is not a universal value. Hamas’s TV channel has warned Israelis that “[we] love death more than you love life.” Or as Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah has put it: “The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win, because they love life and we love death.” Or as a 16-year-old Taliban warrior declared, “War is our best hobby. The sound of guns firing is like music for us…. The Americans love Pepsi Cola, we love death.”

P. David Hornik..
frontpagemag.com..
30 November '15..

“An attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share,” was what President Obama called the Paris terror attack. As commentators have pointed out, it’s unfortunately not so; Western values, even including the sanctity of life, are not shared by all of humanity and do not necessarily prevail in some parts of the world.

Here in Israel, where we’ve been under an assault variously dubbed the Knives Intifada or the Children’s Intifada for two months, it’s impossible not to be aware of a lack of universality of values. Many, but not all, of the examples I give below (which, of course, are far from comprehensive) are taken from Palestinian warfare.

Combatants and noncombatants. This is a Western distinction that is often conspicuously lacking in other parts of the world. While Palestinians sometimes attack Israeli security personnel, they more often attack Israeli civilians. Age and gender, of course, are of no consequence; the concept of the “enemy” is tribal and includes any and all Israeli Jews at any and all times. The principle of tribal assault applies, of course, in surrounding countries as well. The only reason Israelis are not massacred on the same scale as Syrians, Iraqis, Sudanese, and others is Israel’s military and security capability. What happened in Paris was a Middle Eastern tribal assault, not just an attack by lone “terrorists.”

Human shields. Whereas Western countries do not use the human-shield strategy, in another part of the world it is increasingly common. Before the 1991 Gulf War, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein detained Westerners and used them as human shields. Hamas has extensively used the strategy in the three Gaza wars (2008-2009, 2012, 2014) with Israel. Hizballah has turned tens of thousands of southern Lebanese villagers into human shields for the next war with Israel, with rocket launchers installed in private homes. Islamic State is, of course, using the strategy in Iraq and Syria. In other words, at least in the cases of Hamas and Hizballah, the combatant-noncombatant distinction is further violated as civilians on one’s own side are “drafted” for a role in combat. Voices of protest are not heard; Hamas remains popular with Palestinians, and Hizballah with Lebanese Shiites.

Children. Not only are “enemy” children attacked, and children on one’s own side “drafted” as human-shield combatants, but children are often turned, explicitly or by encouragement, into warriors. Examples are legion. Among others, Iran sacrificed tens of thousands of Iranian children as soldiers in the Iran-Iraq war. Boko Haram is training and deploying child soldiers as young as 10. In the current Palestinian intifada, as Israeli columnist and author Nadav Shragai reported on Friday:

Misleading audiences on the Arab-Israeli conflict at BBC News

...Clearly BBC audiences cannot properly understand the factors underpinning the Arab-Israeli conflict if the BBC erases the crucial context of the Arab states’ pre-existing opposition to the establishment of the Jewish national home mandated by the League of Nations even before the State of Israel was founded.

Hadar Sela..
BBCWatch..
01 December '15..

An article which appeared on the BBC News website’s Middle East page on November 27th under the headline “Israel ‘to open UAE diplomatic mission’” opens as follows:

“Israel is to open its first diplomatic mission in the UAE, Israel says, despite the absence of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Israel’s foreign ministry says its office will be part of an international energy organisation based in Abu Dhabi.

Israel has opened trade and other offices in some Gulf states before, but there are no official ties.

The UAE, like most other Arab states, has not recognised Israel since the Arab-Israeli conflict began in 1948.”[emphasis added]

Whilst it is true to say that most Arab states have not recognised Israel since its establishment in 1948, the wording of that sentence inaccurately suggests to BBC audiences that the Arab-Israeli conflict began at the time of – and because of – Israel’s birth, thus erasing important historical context essential to audience understanding of the issue.

However, the BBC knows full well that the Arab-Israeli conflict did not begin in May 1948 – as its own profile of the Arab League indicates:

(Read Full Post)

Lethal radio and the darker corners of the news reporting industry

...Referring to incitement-to-kill of this kind as "anti-Israel content" is disingenuous at minimum, and white-washes a process that has cost the lives of Hebron residents, as well as their Israeli victims. Reporting the claims of Palestinian Arab propagandists in a straight-faced manner as if the facts were documented and beyond controversy makes the media channels that engage in this kind of thing complicit.

IDF forces raid the Al-Hurriyya radio station in
Hebron on November 21, 2015 [Image Source]

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
30 November '15..

Unless you have been taking at face value those scurrilous news reports that focus exclusively on Palestinian victimhood in this violent times of stabbings and rammings and shootings, you will know that a disproportionate number of the terrorists/attackers in the current wave of lethal violence come from Hebron. An article by William Booth ["Hebron becomes the center of Palestinian violence", Washington Post, November 7, 2015] says

Israel and the Palestinian Authority see Hebron as a center of influence for the militant movement Hamas in the West Bank. Hamas has been egging on violent resistance on its Web sites and via the media but has been careful not to have its leaders at the forefront. There have been more than 20 Palestinian attacks in Hebron center over the past three weeks.

He might have added (though he didn't) that a steady stream of young men and women from Hebron have fanned out throughout Israel to carry out vicious terrorist attacks on, mainly, Israeli civilians. Many of these attackers were killed by alert Israeli security.

Israel's security authorities have noticed. And one of the ways they are responding is to seek out and silence Hebron's incitement to kill. There's no shortage of it in Hebron. And it's not that hard to locate.

One of the most potent outlets for the hateful, murderous anti-Jewish messaging is local radio. Hebron has several radio stations. Three of them have been forcibly shut down by IDF action in the past month. A Palestinian Arab source says there are"90 local radio stations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as 18 TV stations". Those numbers are substantially larger than the numbers of Israeli radio and TV outlets.

Advocates for the Palestinian Arab right to kill and maim in the name of "resistance" - and there's no shortage of those either - are currently engaged in a full court press to paint Israel's suppression of the incitement to kill innocent civilians as an attack on democracy, a curtailing of free speech, the heavy hand of occupation and similar such familiar refrains.

Here's a sample of how some of the darker corners of the news reporting industry and the social media have depicted the recent silencing of Hebron-based incitement to kill:

(Read Full Post. Please Share)

Monday, December 7, 2015

Sunday, December 6, 2015

Saturday, December 5, 2015

Friday, December 4, 2015

Thursday, December 3, 2015

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Receive Love of the Land by E-Mail

About Me

Subscribe To

FEEDJIT Live Traffic Feed

Total Pageviews

Weather B'Aretz

My Blog List

IMRA

Homeward Bound

Media

The Bad Guys

Blog Archive