Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Who is the Ugliest of Them All?

...The leftist organizations' long-standing claim is that they are holding a mirror up to Israeli society that shows its "ugliness." And here, now that a group has shown up to smear their faces in the same manner, the glaziers are all of a sudden calling to break that mirror.

Dror Eydar..
Israel Hayom..
17 December '15..

1. I don't like the Im Tirzu clip. It's too chilling and has clear connotations that tie the figures that represent leftist organizations to a knife in the nation's back. It's inappropriate.

The need to spark public debate through provocation is understandable, but it's possible to speak harshly without stepping over the line to the point where people aren't listening to what you have to say, but rather are scared of you. It would have been better if the clip had never been made, but now that it's out in the world, we should probe it and the public discussion it has awoken.

I hear the cries of "incitement, incitement." The leaders of Im Tirzu are being admonished that they will be responsible for any harm that, heaven forbid, might befall the figures featured in the clip. The concern is clear and the debate must remain a verbal one. But what about the harm to the IDF and the citizens of the state? Are we relieving the leftist groups of any responsibility here? If we're so awful, such thugs, murderers and thieves, then not only is the armed struggle against us permissible, it's a precept -- jihad sponsored by the Yahud (Jews)!

Is Hamas Becoming a Second ISIS? by Evelyn Gordon

...Indeed, the Paris attacks themselves underscored Hamas’s skills: Though the gunmen were well-trained and deadly, the three suicide bombers collectively managed to kill exactly one person. By contrast, Hamas suicide bombers routinely produced double-digit fatalities until Israel figured out how to arrest most of them before they struck. In short, a Hamas free to focus on the West would be no laughing matter. Fortunately for the West, Hamas isn’t free to do so, because the pesky Zionist state is still in the way. ISIS is what happens when a terrorist organization encounters a power vacuum it can fill – i.e. when there’s no strong, stable state like Israel to contain it. Hamas is what happens when a terrorist organization does run up against a state like Israel: Its ability to harm the rest of the world is minimal.

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

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared Hamas to the Islamic State after the Paris attacks, he was widely scorned. But as several recent news reports make clear, the analogy was quite well-founded. Hamas, like ISIS, glories in its own brutality and boasts of it to the world. It actively arms, funds, and trains Islamic State’s Sinai affiliate. One of its senior officials has vowed that as soon as it gets rid of the pesky Zionist state, it will set its sights on the rest of the West. And the West seems determined to eliminate the one remaining difference between the two groups.

Hamas’s glorification of its own brutality was on display this week, when the group celebrated the 28th anniversary of its founding. In honor of this event, the Israeli daily Israel Hayom reported, Hamas posted a video on its website featuring highlights of its greatest terror attacks and listing all its other achievements, which were as follows: It has fired 16,377 rockets and mortars at Israel, reaching as far north as Haifa, and now manufactures most of its rockets locally. It has perpetrated 86 suicide bombings, 250 shootings, 36 stabbings, and over 500 cross-border raids. And it has kidnapped 26 Israelis, “both dead and alive.”

Note what’s missing from this list: any effort to improve the lives of the Palestinians it has ruled in Gaza since 2007. That, of course, is because there weren’t any. But the reason there weren’t any is because, like ISIS, Hamas has no interest in actually improving the lives of the people it rules; what interests Hamas is killing infidels. This order of priorities is why it builds tunnels to attack Israel but no bomb shelters to protect its civilians from Israeli counterstrikes, or why it keeps its people imprisoned in Gaza rather than accede to Cairo’s conditions for opening its border with Egypt. And it’s also why Hamas’s promotional video highlights its brutal murders of Israelis, just as Islamic State’s promotional videos highlight its brutal murders of Westerners.

Then there’s the actual cooperation with Islamic State’s Sinai affiliate, Wilayat Sinai, detailed by both Ehud Yaari for the Washington Institute and Alex Fishman for the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth. Hamas provides logistical support to the Sinai group, ranging from training to medical care, and Wilayat Sinai’s top military commander has visited Gaza to further this cooperation. But the main joint activity is arms purchases.

Hamas is the one with the money, provided by Iran, Qatar, and Turkey. Ostensibly, the latter two only fund civilian projects, but Hamas takes a generous cut for military purposes; for example, about a third of the cement imported for Qatari-sponsored construction projects in Gaza was diverted to Hamas’s tunnel-building enterprise. Wilayat Sinai, in contrast, is the one with physical access to the arms; it procures them from Iran and Libya and delivers them to Gaza in exchange for either cash or a cut of the shipment.

Finally, there’s the issue of Hamas’s stated ambitions. As researcher Pinhas Inbari noted last month, Hamas parliamentarian and cleric Dr. Yusuf al-Astal has declared for years that once Israel is defeated, Hamas will move on to the rest of the world. As he put it in one 2008 speech, “We will conquer Rome, and from there continue to conquer the two Americas and even Eastern Europe.”ael

Al-Astal is no fringe figure. He regularly writes articles for the Hamas journal Al-Risala, is interviewed by Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV, gives sermons in Hamas-controlled mosques and universities, and was included on Hamas’s parliamentary slate. Nor is Hamas-run Gaza a democracy with free speech for all; if Hamas disapproved of Al-Astal’s message, it wouldn’t let him promulgate it in Hamas-controlled institutions.

One group of killers of Americans remains politically untouchable

...Imagine if a Palestinian living in, say, Ramallah, noticed his next door neighbor’s photo on the site and decided to turn him in to get the reward money. What would the Obama administration do? Would it demand that the PA extradite him to the US for prosecution? Would it put a PA policeman on trial in US federal court? Not a chance. Because doing so would undermine the administration’s entire policy of promoting the idea that the PA is moderate and anti-terror and should be given a state as soon as possible. And so, even on a US government website whose purpose is to catch killers of Americans around the world, one group of killers of Americans remains politically untouchable.

Stephen M. Flatow..
Algemeiner/JNS.org..
16 December '15..

JNS.org – One of the Obama administration’s least-known anti-terrorism programs was back in the news this week. After the capture of a fugitive Rwanda genocide suspect on Dec. 9, the news media noted that eight other Rwandan mass murderers are still on the run, and the State Department’s “Rewards for Justice” program is offering $5 million to anyone who provides information leading to their capture.

Paying tipsters may not be the single-most effective way to combat terrorism, but one should not dismiss the program’s contributions. Its website,www.RewardsForJustice.net, reports that more than 80 informers have received reward money. Nine “success stories” are described, including the capture of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind, Ramzi Yousef.

Nabbing killers like Yousef is important not only for the principle of justice, but because putting them behind bars keeps them from killing more people.

Yet if you take the time to look at www.RewardsForJustice.net, you notice something strange: one of the world’s most prolific group of terrorists is almost completely absent from the site.

There are plenty of Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, and Taliban terrorists featured on the site, alongside killers from their various offshoots and all sorts of terror gangs whose names are barely known to the wider world.

There are “most wanted” sections targeting various Saudis, Pakistanis, Qataris, Yemenis, Lebanese, Indians, Somalis, and practically every other national group under the sun.

Yet the group that invented international airplane hijacking in the 1970s, that pioneered suicide bombings in the 1990s, and is now leading the new wave of terrorism-by-kitchen-knives, is almost nowhere to be found. You almost need a magnifying glass to find any Palestinians on the State Department’s website.

The Palestinians have spoken and sometimes polls do tell the truth

...Our sages maintain that "the face of the generation will be like the face of a dog." In other words, a leader who looks back to check that his flock is still following him isn't leading his people toward peace. The leader is instead led by where he thinks the people want him to go. In this case it appears that the Palestinian people, judging by the recent polls and their rejectionist, bloodthirsty terrorism, are not pointing the PA toward peace. Sometimes polls do tell the truth.

Dr. Reuven Berko..
Israel Hayom..
16 December '15..

The Arab fable maintains: "What is written above the eyebrows the eyes need to see." Hamas, which seeks to destroy Israel, won the 2006 elections in the Palestinian territories with a clear majority. The peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians failed for many reasons, among them the rejection of Israel's minimum demands and violation of the Oslo Accords by using terror as a means to advance diplomatic objectives.

Regretfully, it has become apparent that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, like his predecessor Yasser Arafat, is conducting a two-faced diplomacy. Anyone who saw the thousands of rock-throwing dolls, designed to mold the next generation, could not have seen "what is written above the eyebrows" because the smuggled terror dolls were garbed in traditional Palestinian head coverings, or "keffiyehs."

Precisely like these vile dolls, the Palestinians hide their intentions, speaking in forked tongue while inciting toward savage war against us, while some Israelis carry on blindly.

A recently published poll shows that 55% of Palestinians oppose a two-state solution. What's worse, 66% support the stabbing and car-ramming attacks, convinced these will lead to an intifada that will serve the Palestinians more than negotiations with Israel. The poll did not include Palestinian descendants in the diaspora, who are known for their "affinity" toward Israel and are, according to Abbas, supposed to return to Jaffa, Acre and Safed within the "right of return" framework.

Abbas and his cohort persist in their hypocrisy: On one hand they claim to want peace, but simultaneously incite and justify "popular resistance," glorify martyrs ("shahids") as role models and pay their families while poisoning the climate against Israel on any diplomatic stage.

Hear about the stabbing in the heart of Jerusalem this afternoon?

...Life would be so much simpler if, in the course of opening up Israeli society to everyone (the exact opposite of what Israel is widely accused of doing), terrorists with mayhem on their minds wore a sticker on their foreheads announcing them as potential stabbers or shooters or bombers or rammers. Because that's not how life is lived here, we owe a debt of deep thanks to the vigilant and courageous security people and those responsible for training and deploying them.

Allegedly, today's
attempted stabbing
attacker, her 
face obscured
 [Image Source]

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

Several people were not killed, others not injured, in yet another Arab-on-Israeli stabbing attack in the heart of Jerusalem.

The attacker, a Palestinian Arab woman, attracted the suspicions of Border Police officers patrolling the center of the capital. We learned that they stopped her on Dorot Rishonim Street, right in the business and tourism center, the area called Jerusalem's Meshulash ("Triangle"), and carried out a search in the course of which a screwdriver was found on her (exactly where is not said).

The Israeli victims - perhaps a pensioner or two, a kindergarten child walking with a parent, a soldier getting a coffee - who thankfully were spared being attacked, don't even know they were about to fall prey to yet another jihad-minded opportunist with PA-government-approved incitement ringing in her ears. The men who preside over Hamas would be delighted with what she tried to do [here's some evidence].

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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 as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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What should the price of unjustifiable murder be?

...Indeed, Abbas may believe, as Arafat did, that more violence only generates greater interest in the Palestinian cause. Abbas, Arafat’s longtime aide and the organizer of atrocities, still remembers that it was Arafat’s embrace of terror that put the Palestinians on the political map. Moreover, like ISIS and other Islamist terror groups, Fatah understands that the root of its legitimacy isn’t in peacemaking but in demonstrating the élan that comes with inflicting ruthless terror. But there may be limits even to what European elites would be willing to do for a Palestinian Authority that can’t really be differentiated from its Hamas rivals. Nothing Abbas does, no matter how awful, would be enough to motivate Europe to embrace the Israelis. But an undeniable embrace of terrorism by Abbas is inconsistent with his carefully honed image as peacemaker, an ideal to which many in the U.S., Israel, and Europe have held. Support for a terrorism double standard that exempts Palestinians from the consequences of their actions is not inexhaustible.

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

There are tipping points in history in which trends that were once thought permanent prove to be temporary. Sometimes we don’t even notice when such events occur because we are too caught up in the immediate concerns of the day. Such a moment may be happening now to the Palestinians. Not only do they seem to be unaware of it, but they may be under the mistaken impression that nothing can or will change. They should understand that if they continue to practice in discriminate terror, they may ultimately pay a price, even if mass murder is something their leaders tell them is not only justifiable but think is a smart tactic.

“Justified” happens to be the word that PA leader Mahmoud Abbas used on Monday when he addressed a United Nations-sponsored event. Abbas’s narrative about the conflict with Israel didn’t merely include the usual disingenuous litany about how settlements and Israeli intransigence have victimized the Palestinian people. Abbas isn’t content merely to lie about his own refusal to make peace or the independence and control of territory he eschewed simply because he can’t bring himself to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn.

Abbas has now reached the point where his pose as a champion of peace that earned him the praise of President Obama has become such a burden that he can’t manage to keep it up even part of the time. That his latest bout of incitement came only hours after a Palestinian rammed his car into a crowded bus stop, injuring 14 people including a 15-month-old baby, showed that he long ago stopped caring about trying to cultivate the Israeli left or center that would happily accept a two-state solution.

It needs to be remembered that in the infancy of international terrorism as we know it now, the Palestinians had a difficult time being heard. The problem was that their national movement and its leader, Yasir Arafat, was so thoroughly associated with the most brutal forms of terrorism that few in civilized societies were prepared to listen to their case against Israel. In the decades since Arafat’s followers slaughtered Jews at the Olympics and made plane hijacking fashionable, that has changed. That was largely due to the ability of both Arafat and his successor, Abbas, to play a double game in which they pretended to accept the concept of peace with Israel while speaking to Western and Israeli audiences while simultaneously signaling Palestinians that the long war to eradicate the Zionist entity was just getting started. It was that deception that allowed the Oslo Accords to be signed and celebrated as the beginning of a new era of peace in the Middle East. So successful was this piece of stagecraft that it survived the collapse of Oslo when Arafat turned down the first Israeli offer of statehood and answered it with a terrorist war of attrition.

Arafat lost all credibility as a peacemaker, but his replacement quickly earned the confidence of a credulous Bush administration, as well as other supporters of the peace process. Abbas looked the part of a responsible leader in his suit. That was a good image adjustment for a people that had been led by a man who couldn’t bear to take off his faux battle fatigues even for a peace ceremony.

Though he had the consistent support of the Obama administration as it tilted the diplomatic playing field in his direction in its quest for “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem, that wasn’t enough to entice Abbas to recognize a Jewish state or negotiate seriously. Despite his antipathy for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his ardent support for a Palestinians state, President Obama has clearly given up on the peace process even if Secretary of State John Kerry still harbors messianic hopes about cutting the Gordian knot.

It’s one thing to have exhausted your friends; it’s quite another to throw away all of your questionable international credibility. That’s what Abbas has done in the last few months as he first fomented a new surge of violence with lies about mythical Israeli plots against the Temple Mount mosques. Since then he’s doubled down on his slurs about preventing “stinking Jewish feet” from polluting Jerusalem’s holy places and treated those Palestinians that attempt to murder random Jews they see on the street as “martyrs” or victims of Jewish persecution and part of a “popular peaceful uprising.” At the UN ceremony, he continued in this vein saying that Arabs that seek to butcher Jews are engaging in “justified” behavior because of the stalled peace process or the canards he’s floated about the Temple Mount.

Surprise? Lost in Haaretz Translation: Saeb Erekat's Relative Shot 2 Israelis

...It is precisely the unfounded claims of Palestinian perpetrators' innocence and false charges of 'extrajudicial killings' which fuel additional Palestinian attacks." Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat is the latest to pull this deadly trick, and yesterday he found a helping hand at Haaretz's English print edition

Tamar Sternthal..
CAMERA Snapshots..
15 November '15..

In the past, CAMERA and others have noted how Palestinian leaders and social media have falsely claimed that Palestinians killed as they were carrying out terror attacks were innocent, and that the purported Palestinian victims were killed in cold blood. As previously noted here, "It is precisely the unfounded claims of Palestinian perpetrators' innocence and false charges of 'extrajudicial killings' which fuel additional Palestinian attacks."

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat is the latest to pull this deadly trick, and yesterday he found a helping hand at Haaretz's English print edition. The Dec. 14 page-one article by Barak Ravid ("Obama to HaaretzQ conference: Peace a must for Israel to remain a Jewish state") referred to Erekat's nephew, who had carried out a terror attack on Dec. 3, as follows: "Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, whose 37-year-old nephrew [sic] killed [sic] last week at the Hizme checkpoint . . . "

The print edition article does not include the critical information that Erekat's nephew carried out a shooting attack on Dec. 3, moderately injuring an Israeli Arab man and lightly hurting a soldier. It was then that Israeli forces shot him dead.

Speeding car, Israeli victims: a terrorist's fast path to martyrdom

...Not really comprehending the ethics and values of Palestinian Arab society, we can only say one thing with real confidence about the life and death of yesterday's bogus "martyr": the promoters of the hatred he embodied will make sure - via posters, news articles, YouTube and Twitter - that he will be emulated by others.

Looking down at the scene of Monday's
terror attack in Jerusalem

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

A video clip posted to YouTube overnight by an Arabic news agency [here] calls yesterday's deliberate running down of ordinary Israelis waiting for a bus by a young man sitting inside his speeding car a "heroic operation".

It's not an aberration: the passion for terror has erased all the remaining red lines in Palestinian Arab society.

Monday's attacker, a young man with a life of promise and (we assume with confidence) a Jerusalem-resident Israeli ID card, was shot by several armed by-standers, including security personnel, before he could get out of the smashed vehicle and do more harm with the axe and knife he brought along evidently for that purpose. The car's license plates were standard black-on-yellow Israeli [as this photo shows].

His funeral and the family's mourning tent in the coming few days (in Hebron, not Jerusalem) will probably provide further opportunities for elevating his wasted life to the kind of transcendental status that Palestinian Arab society so loves to honor.

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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 as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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Sorry, but Ayman Odeh is not a man of peace

...Ayman Odeh is not a man of peace. He is far from accomplishing the mission described in Foreign Policy. To Odeh, Israel is a temporary colonial entity. He does not condemn terrorism against Israel and even legitimizes it, and in the internal Israeli-Arab debate, he represents the side that prefers to leave the Arabs alienated from and hostile to the Jewish state. Odeh is a nationalist politician who exploits the openness of Israeli democracy in order to divide, cause friction, and incite. Peace will not come as long as people like Odeh are viewed as moderates deserving of honor and respect.

Image by © ALAA BADARNEH/epa/Corbis

Akiva Bigman..
Commentary Magazine..
14 December '15..

The standing ovation given to Ayman Odeh, leader of the Joint Arab List party in Israel, at the Haaretz conference yesterday is a clear demonstration of how he is seen by Western elites. The hundreds of journalist and intellectuals who packed the hall in New York see him as a leader who promotes peace and equality, the embodiment of the progressive dream for the small Jewish-Arab state. His critique of the “establishment that occupies two nations” excited the crowd, and his vision of social justice no doubt touched the hearts of the wealthy Jewish liberals in the audience. The standing ovation for Odeh was a standing ovation for a shared goal: coexistence and equality in a multi-national welfare state.

Foreign Policy has chosen Odeh, an Israeli Arab Member of the Knesset, for its list of 100 leading global thinkers for 2015. In explaining their choice, the editors note that “Middle East peace talks may be all but dead, but Ayman Odeh still dreams of resolving the world’s most intractable conflict,” adding that he “heads the Joint List, a coalition of Arab political parties that united for the first time ever to run in Israel’s March elections.” According to Foreign Policy, Odeh has “yoked diverse leaders — Islamists, secular feminists, socialists,” and his party “is now the Knesset’s third largest and the biggest Arab legislative faction in Israeli history.”

It is difficult to argue with success, but nearly every one of these sentences misrepresents the facts.

MK Odeh has not “united” the Arab parties or “yoked” Arab leaders. In order to understand this, we need a bit of background. In the Israeli political system, many parties run in Knesset elections. In the last elections, no fewer than 25 parties ran, only ten of which won seats. A party must receive a certain minimal percentage of the vote to enter the Knesset. Any party receiving less than this percentage — the “electoral threshold” — will remain outside, even if has received tens of thousands of votes.

The electoral threshold is occasionally changed through legislation, with the aim usually being to neutralize small parties in order to stabilize the political system around medium-size and large parties. In the previous Knesset, right-wing MKs, led by Avigdor Lieberman of Yisrael Beitenu, initiated a relatively dramatic increase in the electoral threshold, from 2 to 3.25 percent. This provided an immediate incentive for small parties with three to four MKs to join together.

The Arab parties, which have a rich record of rivalries and internal conflicts, have received 2 to 4 percent in recent years, placing them on the border of the electoral threshold. A higher threshold endangered their existence, and the decision to undertake a “historic union” was meant to enable them to survive. It was not Odeh who united the Arab parties, but Avigdor Lieberman.

That’s if there was any union at all. The parties that make up the Joint List preserved their organizational and ideological independence, and aside from the fact that all are in the opposition (which is nothing new), they do not operate as one list. The “Joint List” is daily riven by disputes over how to approach the Arab League, cooperation with the Zionist parties, and various draft bills. Even the name of the list shows this: it is only “joint” and not “united.” In Hebrew, this difference indicates technical but not substantive cooperation.

What about Odeh’s goals and policies? Is he a man of peace and conflict resolution? Not if one looks at the evidence. Odeh habitually attacks Israel in a way that leaves no hope for either negotiations or a settlement that includes compromises by both sides; he also consistently walks a fine line between the legitimate and the illegitimate in his support for terrorism.

Inciting terror with Amnesty’s support by Petra Marquadt-Bigman

...Amnesty’s continued support for the Tamimis of Nabi Saleh sends a clear message: no matter how bigoted your views about Jews are, no matter how enthusiastic your support for terrorism against Jews is, no matter that your stated goal is the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state – Amnesty International, the world’s most powerful human rights organization, will support you.

Petra Marquadt-Bigman..
Times of Israel..
11 December '15..

It’s no secret that Amnesty International – which is arguably the world’s most powerful human rights organization – takes a dim view of the world’s only Jewish state. Whenever Israel has to defend itself against rockets and terror attacks, Amnesty will rush to accuse the IDF of using disproportionate force. On the other hand, Amnesty will happily host anti-Israel activists dedicated to promoting the idea that there can be no peace as long as Israel exists as a Jewish state, and it will happily employ people who occasionally illustrate that anti-Zionism is often just a façade for antisemitism. And while Amnesty has rejected a motion to combat anti-Semitism in Britain, the organization is eager to help fight Islamophobia, even if it means co-sponsoring an event that features a former Hezbollah fighter who cheered 9/11, despises gays and has doubts about the Holocaust.

It is therefore hardly a surprise that Amnesty marked Human Rights Day on December 10 by trying to orchestrate a “Twitter storm” promoting the Tamimi clan of Nabi Saleh. As I have shown in an extensive documentation published in last month’s Tower Magazine, the Tamimis have never made a secret of their ambition to ignite a “third intifada” with the weekly protests they have held for years, and they have never pretended that their goal is the peaceful co-existence of a Jewish and a Palestinian state. They have consistently refused “to forswear bloodshed” or condemn terrorism and have openly acknowledged that the most notorious Tamimi clan member — Ahlam Tamimi, the unrepentant mastermind of the 2001 Sbarro massacre who was released in the Shalit deal – remains a “much loved” figure in Nabi Saleh.

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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 as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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When Pixar's "Cars" meet a Haaretz news story about a Palestinian attack

...It's very doubtful that the car made a deliberate decision to drive into the soldiers. In fact, it's probably safe to say that the vehicle did not make any decision of any kind.

Tamar Sternthal..
CAMERA Snapshots..
12 December '15..

What happens when Pixar's "Cars" meet a Haaretz news story about a Palestinian attack? Anthropomorphic vehicles ram soldiers and flee the scene.

Haaretz's page-one article yesterday ("Four soldiers wounded in car-ramming") begins: "Four soldiers were wounded when a car deliberately drove into them at the Beit Arye junction in the West Bank yesterday afternoon."

It's very doubtful that the car made a deliberate decision to drive into the soldiers. In fact, it's probably safe to say that the vehicle did not make any decision of any kind.

Nevertheless, further assigning agency to the personified attacking vehicle, the article also states:

The Hanukka connection: Judea, Samaria and Gaza by Michael Freund

...Both in ancient and modern times, the miracles of Hanukka have been directly associated with Judea, Samaria and Gaza, those portions of the Land of Israel that the world is so keen to take away from us. Now, in particular, when international pressure is mounting on the Jewish state to forgo these areas, it is all the more important that we appreciate the deep connection between the Festival of Lights and Israel's heartland.

Michael Freund..
Pundicity/JPost..
11 December '15..

As Jews around the world gather this week to celebrate Hanukka, it is worth taking a moment to consider an aspect of the holiday that is often overlooked.

Both in ancient and modern times, the miracles of Hanukka have been directly associated with Judea, Samaria and Gaza, those portions of the Land of Israel that the world is so keen to take away from us.

Now, in particular, when international pressure is mounting on the Jewish state to forgo these areas, it is all the more important that we appreciate the deep connection between the Festival of Lights and Israel's heartland.

Consider the following: many critical chapters in the Maccabean wars, when God "delivered the mighty into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few," took place in the territories that the world now accuses us of "occupying" and "colonizing."

In 166 BCE, at Beit Horon, which is west of what is now Ramallah, Judah the Maccabee defeated the Seleucid governor Seron and routed his forces in a crushing defeat. This victory followed shortly after Judah and his men had vanquished Apollonius, the Seleucid commander, at Ma'aleh Levona near Shechem (Nablus) in Samaria.

In Beit Zecharia, in what is now Gush Etzion, Judah's brother Elazar was killed when confronting elephants deployed by Antiochus against the Jewish rebels.

And it was in the hills around Beit El that many of the Hasmoneans found refuge from the Seleucid tyrant's forces of oppression.

Indeed, in Samaria one can visit the remains of fortresses that were erected by the Hasmonean dynasty, such as the one on the Horn of Sartaba, a mountain overlooking the Jordan Valley, where the Alexandrion fortress was built by King Alexander Yanai.

The list goes on, and it underlines the incontrovertible fact that Mattathias and the Maccabees fought to expel foreign invaders from Judea and Samaria and reclaim this central part of our ancestral patrimony.

All this took place some 800 years before Islam was founded, and more than two millennia prior to the establishment of the United Nations, giving the lie to claims that Israel has no right to these areas.

The price of the Shalit Deal and the countries that help it keep rising

...The existence of an amorphous terror structure operating from Judea and Samaria and led by released Palestinian Arab prisoners was documented this past summer in a monograph published by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, directed by Dr. Reuven Erlich and usually called ITIC. It focuses on three men, all sentenced by Israeli courts to long prison terms for terror, all freed and all currently engaged in plotting fresh murders from the safety of other countries. Two were released in the Shalit Deal; the third was released from prison in 2010 and took part in the Shalit negotiations.

The price of the Shalit Deal and 

the countries that help it keep rising

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing war..
11 December '15..

It was always clear that the release of 1,027 convicted and imprisoned Arab terrorists from Israeli jails in the ill-conceived Shalit Deal would lead to, and has in fact caused, the deaths of numerous innocent Israeli victims.

What is less clear even now is the enabling role provided by certain countries in empowering a cohort of Shalit Deal graduates to emerge as key figures in a campaign of anti-Israel terrorism by remote control. The note below focuses on just four: Turkey, Qatar, Jordan and Malaysia.

A small flurry of media attention in the past day indicates that the worst of the deadly consequences of the 2011 Shalit Deal are still ahead:

Palestinian prisoners released and deported to Gaza, Turkey, and Qatar as part of the Shalit deal are organizing their own terrorist cells in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, according to a report on Thursday. The deported prisoners, who are members of Hamas’ military wing, are providing guidance and funds to these cells, Hamas sources told Ynet... The operation is being run by senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri, who is based in Turkey... The exiled Hamas members also have created their own cells in the West Bank to incite, protest and clash with Israeli security forces... The sources said, according to the report, that the Hamas leadership in Gaza is pushing for suicide bomb attacks to be carried out in the West Bank and east Jerusalem... Israeli officials are convinced that Hamas will make every effort to execute a large-scale attack by using whatever means are available to its men in the field. Mahmoud al-Zahar, a senior figure in Hamas' political bureau, told an Islamist-affiliated web site in Gaza in October that he was hopeful the current violence would escalate into "an armed intifada." ["Freed Hamas prisoners from Schalit deal forming independent terror cells, says report", Jerusalem Post, December 10, 2015]

(We would add that Mahmoud al-Zahar, mentioned above, is more than just a senior Hamas figure. He's usually identified as Hamas' foreign minister in the media, but not being part of Hamas' armed "wing" doesn't prevent him from saying he is hopeful the violence now happening here daily will evolve into "an armed intifada". )

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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 as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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When PA Talking Points Become AP Talking Points by Gilead Ini

...The short-cut of relying on the Palestinian narrative's template, which casts Israelis as hardline, Abbas as innocent but helpless, and Palestinians as provoked to violence by Israeli oppression, doesn't cut it. Reporters should resist the temptation to push their subjective opinions on readers by using their authoritative voice to push Palestinian talking points while minimizing Jewish concerns as mere claims by bad Israelis. And by hiding the extent of Palestinian support for violence and downplaying their opposition to Israel's existence, reporters ensure the story isn't told in its full complexity. Associated Press readers expect and deserve more.

Gilead Ini..
CAMERA Media Analysis..
09 December '15..

"This round of Israeli-Palestinian violence has defied … easy explanations," the Associated Press states at the top of a story today. But AP's attempt at explaining the story seems to have been easy enough. They largely embraced pre-packaged talking points by the Palestinian side, often relaying those in the authoritative voice of the Associated Press, while contrasting them with claims and allegations attributed to Israel's "hard-line" government, most of which were buried deep in the article.

The Palestinian narrative pokes through from the first attempt by the reporters, Mohammed Daraghmeh and Karin Laub, to "explain" the wave of Palestinian attacks.

The violence is playing out in one of the darkest periods of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Israeli rule over Palestinians well-entrenched. Hopes for a peace deal establishing a Palestinian state are at a low after Israelis this year re-elected their hard-line government, which continues to build Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

The story being pitched is clear: In the big picture, there is Palestinian grievance, and there is Israeli intransigence. Israelis alone are cast as being at fault for the dark period and the dashed hopes. It is their settlements. It is they who elected a "hard-line" government.

But which leader has been taking a harder line? The right-of-center Benjamin Netanyahu, who has called for negotiations and a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish one, and under whom settlement construction has actually slowed (though the article seems to suggest otherwise); or Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority leader who has called on Palestinians to protect Jerusalem from the "filthy feet" of Israeli Jews, who has rejected renewed negotiations and the very idea of Jewish national self-determination, and whose party frequently extols murderers as heroes?

To be sure, those partial to the Palestinian narrative do insist Israel is responsible for the impasse and hopelessness, that Israel's leaders are the hardliners, and that Abbas is a would-be peacemaker who has "given up hope of independence through negotiations after two decades of failed attempts." That last quote, though, comes not from proud partisans of the Palestinian cause, but from the AP authors, who claim awareness of, and the authority to enlighten readers about, Abbas's deepest hopes and disappointments.

But, of course, even AP journalists are not omniscient, and do not know what Mahmoud Abbas feels or "hopes." Like Netanyahu, Abbas is a politician, and for that matter one deeply involved in an information war. He has advisors, even entire departments, to help him shape talking points and positions in support of Palestinian goals.

What AP journalists do know, on the other hand, is that despite attempts by Palestinian leaders to cast themselves as being without agency, and thus without responsibility for the current state of affairs, Abbas was offered a peace deal and statehood by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, but did not take advantage of that offer. Abbas's own responsibility for Palestinian statelessness was ignored by authors, while his purported feelings — his talking point about giving up hope — were relayed as fact.

How the Israel Fixation Feeds Terror by Evelyn Gordon

...After 20 years in which repeated territorial concessions have brought only more terror rather than peace, most Israelis can no longer be persuaded to buy this nostrum. So instead, these foreign-funded NGOs work to drum up anti-Israel sentiment overseas in the hope of generating international pressure and sanctions on it....In other words, this money goes mainly toward trying to circumvent Israeli democracy by forcing its government to do something most voters oppose.

Evelyn Gordon..
Analyses from Israel..
10 December '15..

Several commentators have pointed out recently that, had the West not spent decades treating terror against Jews and Israel as an “understandable” outgrowth of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it might have less of a terrorism problem today.

Liel Leibovitz of Tablet detailed links between people who perpetrated attacks on Jews and people who later perpetrated attacks on non-Jews in the same countries. His analysis suggests that, had the original attacks on Jews been investigated more thoroughly, the later attacks might have been preventable. Gil Troy argued in the Jerusalem Post that the West’s consistent response to Palestinian terror – capitulating to the terrorists’ demands and pressuring Israel to do the same – persuaded subsequent generations of Islamic terrorists that terror is an effective means of furthering their goals. But there’s a third way in which the West’s attitudes toward Israel have contributed to its terrorism problem: Its conviction – in defiance of all evidence – that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was the Mideast’s central problem led it to focus obsessively on this issue, at the expense of all the real problems that are coming back to haunt it now. And nothing better illustrates this than the seemingly trivial issue of NGO funding.

Both Europe and America, but especially the former, grant tens of millions of dollars a year to Israeli NGOs for the ostensible purpose of promoting “democracy” and “human rights” in the one Middle Eastern country that already does a reasonable job of protecting both. However, they spend far less on promoting democracy and human rights in other Mideast countries. A document obtained by the Israeli newspaper Makor Rishon, for instance, showed that in 2010, the British government gave £600,000 to Israeli NGOs; if you exclude Iraq, that’s six times as much as it gave NGOs in all other Arab countries combined. Nor does the West lavish this kind of money on NGOs in other fellow democracies: According to NGO Monitor, “No other democracy gets nearly as much foreign government funding” as Israel does.

Why this peculiar obsession with democracy and human rights in Israel, alone of all the world’s countries? The answer, of course, is that the donations aren’t primarily motivated by concern for democracy and human rights at all. They go almost exclusively to organizations dealing in some way with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict – or, to be precise, organizations striving in some way to get Israel to adopt the West’s recipe for solving it: ever more concessions to the Palestinians.

After 20 years in which repeated territorial concessions have brought only more terror rather than peace, most Israelis can no longer be persuaded to buy this nostrum. So instead, these foreign-funded NGOs work to drum up anti-Israel sentiment overseas in the hope of generating international pressure and sanctions on it (see, for instance, Breaking the Silence, which travels worldwide to accuse Israel of “war crimes” but refuses to cooperate with Israeli law enforcement agencies so its allegations could actually be investigated, or B’Tselem, which eagerly cooperated in UN efforts to smear Israel as a war criminal, inter alia, by supplying inflated statistics about civilian casualties). In other words, this money goes mainly toward trying to circumvent Israeli democracy by forcing its government to do something most voters oppose.

Swedish delights? Not really.

...Lofven and Wallstrom have drawn attention recently to themselves with their insane comments about terrorism against Israelis. First up was the foreign minister, who on Friday accused Israel of conducting "extrajudicial executions" while defending itself against Palestinians committing terror attacks. Israel slammed these remarks with the Foreign Ministry responding that her statement was "delusional, rude and detached from reality. The foreign minister is suggesting the citizens of Israel simply present their necks to the killers seeking to stab them with knives. The citizens of Israel and its security forces have the right to defend themselves. In Israel, every person who commits a crime is brought in front of a judge, including terrorists. The citizens of Israel have to deal with terrorism that receives support from irresponsible and false statements like that."

Judith Bergman..
Israel Hayom..
10 December '15..

"We have to temporarily adapt to reality," said Swedish Environment Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Asa Romson recently, inadvertently delivering the truth about Sweden and its politics over the past decades while involuntarily making herself sound like a pathetic fool at the same time.

Swedish top politicians are on the wrong kind of roll right now, delivering a grotesque kind of theatrics that are at times sinister, at times very entertaining to watch from the outside, but most of all plainly embarrassing to many Swedes, who are increasingly shaking their heads at a leadership gone very awry. It should be added that Swedes are a stoic and extremely consensus-seeking lot who will go to great lengths before uttering any kind of dissent, but even they seem to be fed up with a leadership that is so inept, as is evident from the soaring support that the Sweden Democrats have been getting recently.

A YouGov poll from mid-September showed that the anti-immigration party holds 27.3% of voter support, making it the biggest political party in Sweden. In comparison, Swedish Social Democratic Party is trailing behind at 21.3%. Both Prime Minister Stefan Lofven and his foreign minister, Margot Wallstrom, are from the Social Democratic Party.

Lofven and Wallstrom have drawn attention recently to themselves with their insane comments about terrorism against Israelis. First up was the foreign minister, who on Friday accused Israel of conducting "extrajudicial executions" while defending itself against Palestinians committing terror attacks. Israel slammed these remarks with the Foreign Ministry responding that her statement was "delusional, rude and detached from reality. The foreign minister is suggesting the citizens of Israel simply present their necks to the killers seeking to stab them with knives. The citizens of Israel and its security forces have the right to defend themselves. In Israel, every person who commits a crime is brought in front of a judge, including terrorists. The citizens of Israel have to deal with terrorism that receives support from irresponsible and false statements like that."

The Swedish Foreign Ministry then issued a meaningless statement on Saturday morning, clarifying that "the foreign minister did not say that Israel conducts 'extrajudicial executions.' The foreign minister made a general statement about international law and the right to self-defense and the importance of proportionality and distinction. What she stated applies to all parties."

That statement is particularly meaningless, because Wallstrom has demonstrated the particulars of her ignorance of international law and the principle of proportionality by falsely implying that the latter has to do with how many casualties there are on each side.

Enter Lofven. While trying to do some much needed damage control regarding Wallstrom's disastrous forays into international law and obvious anti-Semitism, he actually managed to deteriorate things by claiming that stabbing attacks are actually not terrorism at all! "No, it is not classified as that. There is an international classification when it is, or is not. What I know is not classified as terrorism," he told Swedish news agency TT.

Double Standards? Terror in London But Not Terror in Jerusalem?

...For the Mail Online (and others) it appears that there is a different standard at work when it comes to what is terrorism. When British people are on the receiving end it is undoubtedly terrorism. When Israelis are the victims or Palestinians the perpetrators, it is somehow questionable. Yet one more example of the insidious double standards at work in the media when it comes to coverage of Israel.

Simon Plosker..
Honest Reporting..
08 December '15..

In recent days London has experienced a similar incident to the many Palestinian stabbing attacks that have taken place against Israelis over the past few months.

An attacker, who was later found to have material linked to Syria and global terror on his cellphone, slashed passersby at a London Underground station while shouting “this is for Syria, my Muslim brothers.”

As far as the UK security forces are concerned, this was an act of terrorism carried out by a radicalized individual. Indeed, the Daily Mail’s Mail Online makes it quite clear in its headline and opening sentence that this is terrorism.

Compare the above, however, with a story published only hours later concerning a terrorist knife attack in Jerusalem.

(Video) Meet "The Settlers"

...We are talking about a very diverse society combined of wonderful goodhearted people. 2 minutes. Small taste.

Ezri Tubi..
08 December '15..

"You've probably heard about them. You know - those backward brutal racist religious bigots. The ones with the big nose. Now they are the biggest moral problem in the Middle East. So first of all - we're not settlers. We're Jews living in our Biblical land. And second: We are talking about a very diverse society combined of wonderful goodhearted people. 2 minutes. Small taste.



Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvfZu9y-Elg

Become involved by supporting a good cause at http://asif.la/stt

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

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Facebook vs Golda by Yarden Frankl

...We could ask you to write to Facebook, but what will likely get their attention even more is if everyone reading this posts the image themselves. And after all, what she is attributed as saying still rings true. Peace will come when they love their children more than they hate us.

Yarden Frankl..
Honest Reporting..
08 December '15..

Last year, at the beginning of the Gaza conflict, we posted an image of Golda Meir with the most famous quotation attributed to her: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”

With all the evidence of Palestinian indoctrination of children to hate Israelis, we felt that her message was as timely as ever. After all, both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority regularly use their own media to glorify acts of terrorism. Last year this contributed to an all-out war while this year, we see almost daily attacks on innocent Jewish men, women, and children, often times by young Palestinians.

Quite a few of these acts have resulted in the deaths of the attackers by Israelis defending themselves. When interviewed, the parents of many of these would-be killers have expressed pride that their children died while trying to kill Jews.

So doesn’t it seem reasonable to assert that the Palestinian hatred of Jews may be stronger than the love of even their own children?

So we were shocked when we received a message from Facebook that said our picture of Golda had been removed because it violated Facebook’s community standards.

Yes, that’s right. According to Facebook, our picture of Golda Meir would lead to a “genuine risk of physical harm or direct threats to public safety.”

Of course, a quick Facebook search finds that the group “Death to America and Israel” is still very much alive, posting all sorts of garbage.

Here are some of the appalling images on that site that FACEBOOK HAS NOT AT THIS TIME REMOVED:

Answering John Kerry by Caroline Glick

...At the outset of his remarks, Kerry explained that as far as US Middle East policy is concerned, “Our goal, our strategy is to help ensure that the builders and the healers throughout the region have the chance that they need to accomplish their tasks.” Sadly, this is neither a goal nor a strategy. It is the sort of platitude you’re likely to find inside a Chinese fortune cookie.

Caroline Glick..
Opinion/JPost..
07 December '15..

On Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry gave a speech before the Brookings Institute’s Saban Forum.

Kerry focused on the Palestinian conflict with Israel and sought to draw a distinction between the two-state policy model, which he supports, and the one-state policy model, which he rejects.

To justify his rejection of a policy based on Israeli sovereignty over areas beyond the 1949 armistice lines, Kerry raised a series of questions about what a one-state policy would look like.

I answered all of his questions, as well as many others, in great detail in my book The Israeli Solution: A One- State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. I will do so again here, albeit with the requisite brevity.

But before discussing the specific questions Kerry raised with regard to the one-state model, it is important to discuss the nature of the policies Kerry described in his speech.

Kerry argued Israel should deny civil and property rights to Jews beyond the 1949 armistice lines, and ignore the building and planning laws of both Israel and the military government in Judea and Samaria in order to allow unrestricted Arab construction in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.

Such steps, he argued, will advance the cause of peace because they will pave the way for an Israeli withdrawal from the vast majority of these areas. Such a withdrawal in turn will bring about the desired two-state solution.

Since the two-state solution is supported by the whole world, Kerry argued that once Israel withdraws from the areas, it will gain the support of the world, peace with its Arab neighbors as well as the Palestinians, and become more prosperous and happy than it is today. It will also secure its democracy.

On the other hand, Kerry argued, if Israel respects the civil and property rights of Jews and continues to enforce the law toward Arabs as well as Jews, and if it eventually applies its laws to any or all of Judea and Samaria, Israel will enter a state of perpetual war with the Palestinians and the wider Arab world. Israel will cease to be a democracy. Israel will be impoverished.

Israel will be isolated internationally even more than it is today.

If Kerry’s options were real options, then Israel would have a clear and easy choice, just as he argues it has.

But unfortunately, they aren’t real options. They are fantasies.

You can’t occupy your own land

Europeans like to say that “Israeli settlements outside of the Green Line are illegal under international law.” The US State Department prefers “illegitimate.” But they are wrong.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
06 December '15..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2015/12/why-jewish-settlements-in-judea-and-samaria-are-legal/


Europeans like to say that “Israeli settlements outside of the Green Line are illegal under international law.” The US State Department prefers “illegitimate.” But they are wrong.

Usually the explanation has something to do with Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which says that

The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.

The original intent of this is generally understood to prohibit transfer against the will of the transferees, such as the expulsion of Jews from Germany into occupied Poland that took place during WWII. But since the text does not say this explicitly and it does mention “forcible transfer” in another context, it is often argued that it applies to Israeli Jews who have moved by their own volition across the Green Line, especially if they have received government support to do so.

The argument has also been applied to the transfer of Turkish settlers to the part of Cyprus occupied by Turkey.

This would be a stretch, even if Israel were to be an “Occupying Power.” But unlike Turkey in Cyprus, it isn’t. Here is a generally accepted definition of ‘military occupation’:

Military occupation is effective provisional control[1] of a certain power over a territory which is not under the formal sovereignty of that entity, without the volition of the actual sovereign.[2][3][4] [notes at link]

So who is the “actual sovereign” in the case of Judea and Samaria? Let’s look at history.

The territory called ‘Palestine’ was controlled by the Ottoman Empire until the Empire was dissolved after World War I. In 1922, the League of Nations issued a Mandate to Britain to hold the land of Palestine, from the river to the sea, in trust for a national home for the Jewish people.

The Mandate explicitly guaranteed the rights of Jews to live anywhere in its territory and called for “close settlement of Jews on the land.” This guarantee is independent of whatever meaning is attached to the expression “national home.”

In 1948, the Mandate was terminated and the British withdrew from its territory. The League of Nations had been replaced by the UN. However, Article 80 of the new UN Charter carried forward to the UN obligations created by trusteeships like the Mandate, such as the obligations to the Jewish people.

A review of BBC compliance with PLO media guidance

...Whilst we do not know whether or not BBC journalists received this PLO document at the beginning of November, it is obvious that BBC content has already long complied with much of the ‘guidance’ for the media as laid down by that organisation and that recent reports have included messaging eerily similar to that promoted in this document. But whilst the query of whether the PLO managed to save itself a stamp remains unanswered, the real question is how BBC adoption and promotion of specific terminology and themes – which are obviously viewed by the PLO as furthering its aims and narrative – can be said to contribute to meeting the corporation’s public purpose remit of enhancing audience understanding of international issues through accurate and impartial reporting.

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

Early in November the PLO’s ‘Negotiations Affairs Department’ – headed by frequent BBC contributor Saeb Erekat – issued a guidance document to members of the international media titled “Key Points to Remember when Reporting on Occupied Palestine“.

Analysis of the document’s content falls outside our remit but has already been carried out by Dr Eran Lerman at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. In this post we will take a look at the degree of BBC compliance with some of the PLO messaging laid out in that ten-point media guidance.

The PLO’s first point is titled “Israel occupies the State of Palestine” and journalists are told that “Israel is the occupying power and Palestine a nation under foreign occupation”.

(Read Full Post)

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

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Beyond the politics of the moment by Dror Eydar

...Kerry called on us to "see beyond the politics and the pressures of the moment and to look to the future." Exactly right. That is the essence of the return to Zion -- looking past the politics of the moment.

Dror Eydar..
Israel Hayom..
07 December '15..

Nearly seven years have passed since President Barack Obama took office and, with much fanfare, introduced a new U.S. Middle East policy. What has been achieved during that time? What remains of the vision Obama laid out in his Cairo speech? What is left of the Middle East that existed when Obama came to power (a Middle East which with Secretary of State John Kerry was very familiar)? Very little.

Only one country in the Middle East remains stable -- Israel, thank God. The truth must be told: Israel has remained stable precisely because it has not accepted the advice of the White House, even though this advice was based on a genuine concern for Israel's future as a "Jewish and democratic state."

Islamic terrorism reared its ugly head in San Bernardino last week, but Kerry refused to be distracted from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"There will always be a reason not to act," he said on Saturday. In Kerry's view, Israel must "act" now. Why? Have the Arabs in our region changed for the better? No. Syria and Iraq have collapsed into civil wars. Lebanon is a tinderbox set to be ignited by an Iranian-Shiite flame. Egypt went through two revolutions in three years, and Jordan survives only due to Israeli and American assistance. The Islamic State group is spreading across the world. And Turkey is flirting with visions of a new Ottoman empire, which directly clash with Russian President Vladimir Putin's visions of a new Czarist empire. That is not enough craziness? If there was ever a "reason not to act," the current global geopolitical reality provides one.

The Left in Israel and the U.S. speaks about "hope," which actually is despair. Leftists in both countries prefer wishful thinking over a correct reading of reality. Israel has had enough leaders who believed they could change the course of history. "They forgot to be modest," as Albert Camus wrote in his book, "The Plague."