Some Thoughts Concerning Kerry, Rabin, the PLO, and the “Peace Process”

...Rabin would have been completely familiar with the lies, the incitement, and the terrorism we now see, having experienced all of them. His own daughter said years ago that he wasn’t a “blind man” and would have reacted to it all. We honor Rabin by honoring his dedication to Israel’s security, not by appropriating his name for administration policy at a moment when Israel is once again facing exactly the conduct from which he spent his life defending his country.

Elliott Abrams..
Pressure Points..
05 November '15..




Marking the anniversary of the death of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin this week, Secretary of State Kerry said this:

Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin devoted his life to defending Israel. Today, on this solemn anniversary, we express our profound appreciation for his contribution to the cause of peace. And we honor his vision that would create a better future for both Israelis and the Palestinians: two states living side-by-side in peace and security….Rabin is gone, but his legacy endures as a challenge and an inspiration to us all. Recent events and violence in the region underscore the urgency of advancing Rabin’s vision: a two-state solution that provides the security for Israelis and Palestinians to live their lives in peace, dignity and prosperity.

Actually, it is quite uncertain whether Rabin would have pushed forward to the two-state solution under the conditions that existed when he was assassinated, or would today.

Consider these words several years ago from the Jerusalem Post and from his own daughter Dalia:

In fact, Rabin may have been close to calling-off the Oslo process, according his daughter Dalia. Three years ago, she told Yediot Aharonot (October 1, 2010) that “many people who were close to father told me that on the eve of the murder he considered stopping the Oslo process because of the terror that was running rampant in the streets, and because he felt that Yasser Arafat was not delivering on his promises.”

“Father after all wasn’t a blind man running forward without thought. I don’t rule out the possibility that he was considering a U-turn, doing a reverse on our side. After all he was someone for whom the national security of the state was sacrosanct and above all,” former deputy defense minister Dalia Rabin said.

Why might Rabin have made such a decision were he prime minister now? First, because terror is once again “running rampant” in Israel’s streets. And then there is the question of PLO conduct. Consider the most recent move by the PLO ambassador to the United Nations:

Ibrahim Who Begat Is’hak by Sarah Honig

...Since Islam’s debut on the world stage, however, Muslims have made it their routine custom to expropriate the holy sites of others. When Muslim conquistadors first invaded Jerusalem, they called it Bayt al-Maqdis, their adaptation of the Hebrew Beit Hamikdash – the Holy Temple. Al Quds – the contemporary Arabic contraction for this original appellation – daily highlights the very Jewish heritage which Arabs now take inordinate pains to obliterate.

Jews praying at the Western Wall –
an 1859 painting by Carl Haag.

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
05 November '15..

All UN institutions serially test our sanity – very sorely so. UNESCO – the gallingly misnamed “educational, scientific and cultural” arm of the dysfunctional organization – managed to barely brake at the brink of bedlam, but only just and only for now. At the very last minute it let go of a plan to pronounce the Western Wall a Muslim holy shrine, an integral part and parcel of the al-Aksa Mosque compound.

That presumably would have accorded Muslims international sanction to bar the Jews from Judaism’s holiest site – the remnant of the great Temple, in front of which for 2,000 years Jews bewailed the Temple’s destruction, the loss of their sovereignty and their ongoing tragedy.

So pivotal a Jewish site was to be consigned to Islam because of a Johnny-come-lately tale that Muhammad tethered his winged steed Burak there on a mysterious mythical midnight flight.

Here it needs be noted that the identification of the Western Wall as Burak’s hitching post is quite recent – less than a hundred years old. It was the brainchild of the infamous Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, who would become Hitler’s avid collaborator during WWII.

As British rule began after the First World War, Husseini evinced overnight attachment to the Western Wall. He sanctified it as Burak’s stopover spot and thereafter Husseini abided Jewish wailing at the Wall only occasionally, after remittance of exorbitant fees for the privilege – providing Muslim sensibilities weren’t offended.

The problem was there was no telling what would give offense. In 1919 wooden benches for the old and infirm were pointed to as insufferable affronts. The British promptly removed them but Arabs then began to regularly drive cattle and laden donkeys through crowds of Jewish congregants. From Al-Aksa perched above the Wall, Arabs also hurled stones and tossed human feces, animal dung and all manner of garbage onto the praying Jews below. These presumably are all befitting representations of Muslim respect for sanctity.

From 1920 the muezzin was dispatched to bellow his loudest chants precisely during Jewish services. By 1921 the sound of the shofar, blown at the Wall on High Holydays, became the next pretext for unrest. The British authorities obligingly forbade the annoying blasts. Thereafter, Jewish youths had to smuggle the shofar to the wall.

The shrillest Arab outcry was raised in 1928 over a flimsy cloth partition put up to segregate male and female worshippers. The British lost no time to tear down the insulting screen right at the climax of Yom Kippur prayers.

Even so, the premeditated disruptions at the Wall grew increasingly violent. Husseini exhorted all Muslims to a “Holy War to protect al-Aksa from Jewish conquest.” On August 23, 1929 Husseini sent his disciples to avenge what he hyped as a Jewish conspiracy. The week-long bloodbath left 133 Jews slain and destroyed the venerable old Jewish community of Hebron.

UNESCO was a micro-millimeter away from sanctioning Husseini-like incitement about the Wall along with derivative holy bloodletting. But it did declare two other intrinsically Jewish sites – Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem – as exclusively Muslim. To this was stitched a firmly-worded demand that that both be removed from the inventory of Jewish heritage sites.

Hang on – that’s not new! It’s just a replay-cum-reaffirmation of precisely what UNESCO already wrought five years ago. In 2010 this same shameless UN agency demanded exactly the same.

Welcome to the Both Real and New Middle East

...All of which is to say Peres’s idea that all the spears would be beaten into plowshares didn’t take into account the fact that Palestinian nationalism is inextricably tied to the struggle to eradicate Israel, no matter where its borders would be drawn. Its failure had nothing to do with Netanyahu and everything to do with the Palestinians.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
05 November '15..

The 20th anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination has set off a bit of nostalgia in some precincts for the euphoria that affected many in Israel and the United States after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. At the time, Shimon Peres’ book, The New Middle East, symbolized the pie-in-the-sky expectations about the peace process. Though all of his predictions proved absurdly and tragically inaccurate, Peres still holds onto his faith in a process that was flawed from the start by placing his trust in a terrorist. He still foolishly blames Prime Minister Netanyahu and not Yasir Arafat for the collapse of his dreams. But while Peres’ idiotic vision of the region turning into a version of the Benelux nations (tell that to Hamas and Hezbollah, not to mention Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah), the truth is that there are some things about the real Middle East today that benefit Israel and are every bit as extraordinary as Peres’s fanciful scenario. More importantly, they were achieved by a so-called right wing government staying strong and making common cause with Arabs who share Israel’s fear of Islamists.

This week in a move that stunned the Arab world, Egypt voted with Israel in the United Nations for the first time in its history. Days before that, reports told of Jordanian combat pilots participating in a joint military exercise with Israel and the United States. Neither event is by itself of great significance. But taken together and put in the context of the conflicts in the Middle East that have nothing to do with the Palestinians, they show that that although Israel’s critics harp on its isolation, Israel is no longer completely surrounded by enemies but can, in fact, look at Egypt and Jordan as nominal if not entirely friendly allies.

The vote at the UN was over something relatively minor — membership on the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space Affairs — but the mere fact that it was the first time it ever voted for Israel for something is historic. After an avalanche of criticism from the Arab world, the Egyptian government claimed the move was really just a tactical move that might ensure the election of some Arab nations to the committee, too. But that excuse doesn’t hold water, and there’s no denying the symbolism here. After 67 years of fervent opposition that continued even after a peace treaty was signed between the two countries in 1979, the vote indicates just how far the government of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has moved towards cooperation with the Jewish state since the military toppled the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013. Cairo now correctly views Israel as a fellow combatant in the struggle against the Islamists of the Brotherhood, Hamas, and its Iranian allies.

That’s the same view held by Jordan’s government, though, to be fair. King Abdullah and his father, King Hussein, always understood that Israel was a covert ally in the Hashemite regime’s struggle for survival against Palestinian and other radical Muslim foes dating back to the 1970s. The only difference is that, with ISIS on the march and Iran (with the tacit acceptance of the Obama administration) extending its influence across the region, the need for close cooperation with Israel on security matters is now more important than ever.

What this means is that, although Israel’s enemies are still legion, and Palestinians remained mired in a culture of hate and rejectionism, two of the nations that posed the most potent military threat to Israel’s existence in the first decades of its life are now more or less allied with it. Indeed, their governments see eye-to-eye with Netanyahu on all major security matters, including their justified concerns about the implications of President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

Even as we celebrate these developments, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that anti-Semitism and hate for Israel are still endemic in both Egypt and Jordan. The rising tide of global anti-Semitism that has its roots in the Muslim world still constitutes a potent threat to Israel’s future and requires it to, as Netanyahu correctly noted, “live by the sword” for the foreseeable future.

Beyond the Red Lines: The Travesty of Amnesty

...Amnesty International crossed every red line long ago, but this latest report manages to up the slander of Israel one more notch. That is saying quite a lot for an organization that has been in libeling business for a long time.

Judith Bergman..
Israel Hayom..
03 November '15..

Amnesty International's conclusions on the situation here in Israel are always bizarrely perverse. The latest is no different: "Israeli forces have carried out a series of unlawful killings of Palestinians using intentional lethal force without justification ... based on the findings of an ongoing research trip to the West Bank, including east Jerusalem. ... The organization has documented in depth at least four incidents in which Palestinians were deliberately shot dead by Israeli forces when they posed no imminent threat to life, in what appear to have been extrajudicial executions. ... Since Oct. 1, Israeli forces have killed more than 30 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Israel either after stabbings were carried out or the Israeli authorities allege stabbing attacks were intended.

"There is mounting evidence that, as tensions have risen dramatically, in some cases Israeli forces appear to have ripped up the rule book and resorted to extreme and unlawful measures. They seem increasingly prone to using lethal force against anyone they perceive as posing a threat, without ensuring that the threat is real," Amnesty International wrote in a press release on Oct. 27.

As blogger Elder of Ziyon has already exposed, Amnesty's "in-depth documentation" is based on lies. This is the most egregious element of Amnesty's attempt to insert itself into the situation.

Another, no less infuriating element is the phrasing. The so-called researchers on behalf of Amnesty take great care not to mention explicitly, even once, against whom or why Israel is defending itself. Stabbings were "carried out" and "the Israeli authorities allege stabbing attacks were intended." So according to this kind of jargon, also popular with mainstream media outlets like the BBC ("Jerusalem attack kills two"), the stabbings more or less carry themselves out with no one really at fault.

Indeed, the phrase "Israeli authorities allege" is used precisely to plant doubt in the reader's mind as to whether the stabbings and all the other recent terrorist attacks are in fact a figment of the Israelis' paranoid imagination. Indeed, Amnesty describes Arab terror sweeping across Israel with a typical misnomer -- "mounting tensions."

Astoundingly, Amnesty does not mention a single Jewish terror victim in its report; it's not even trying to conceal its heavy bias. Instead, Philip Luther, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Amnesty International, says, "Israeli forces and civilians have faced genuine attacks and threats to their lives over the past weeks."

That is probably the understatement of the year. Here are the cold and heartbreaking facts according to the IDF and Magen David Adom emergency medical service: As of Nov. 2, there have been 58 stabbings, five shootings and six car rammings, in which 11 people have been killed and 153 wounded, 18 of them seriously. Magen David Adom also treated 72 people for shock. Let us not forget -- many of the terror victims who suffered shock or physical injuries will live with the effects for years to come. Many will suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, of which nightmares, constant anxiety and fear of leaving the house are just a few of the symptoms. The families and friends of the dead will live with the sorrow forever. These are real people, but Amnesty International does not even consider it worth mentioning them as a statistic.

Other Priorities? The Independent and “Israeli Occupation Forces”

...Just who are the “Israeli occupation forces?” Does this include Israeli policemen who have shot dead terrorists within Israeli cities such as Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Beersheba? If so, then The Independent has adopted Mahmoud Abbas’s narrative that considers the whole of the State of Israel to be “occupied.”

Simon Plosker..
Honest Reporting..
04 November '15..





While Israelis continue to be attacked by knife-wielding Palestinian terrorists, The Independent clearly has other priorities.

The main feature of the paper’s latest story focuses on an embedded video courtesy of Russia Today, the Kremlin’s propaganda channel, under a headline (complete with a very careless spelling error) that begs the question as to why this would even be considered newsworthy:

There follows nearly half a minute of mind-numbing footage of a Palestinian hitting a wall as if this were vaguely interesting or important.

It’s only in the penultimate paragraph of the story of Palestinian students clashing with Israeli soldiers, that Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis are mentioned. But it’s the final paragraph that makes you wonder if The Independent is taking its cue from the Palestinian Authority:

Acceptable Speech or Hate Speech? It's Official: BDS is Hate Speech

...Increasingly, it's clear that a movement whose formal goal is solidarity with the Palestinians is not really focused on the Palestinians at all. Just as the Arab states turned on their own Jewish communities after failing to defeat Israel on the battlefield, the BDS movement compensates for its futile gesture politics by placing local Jewish communities in its sights. The elements involved in the act of boycotting Israel — picking a particular store at which to demonstrate, selecting products to place warning stickers on, waving symbols equating the Star of David with the swastika, repeatedly chanting insults against "Israel," a word that originates in the Jewish Bible after all — all carry the prospect of confrontation with local Jews before anything else.

Ben Cohen..
Pundicity/JNS/Sun Sentinel..
03 November '15..

A few years ago, the British anti-Semitism scholar David Hirsh remarked that while Israel was the ostensible target of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, first in the firing line were diaspora Jews. This shouldn't be surprising if you consider it carefully — Jewish organizations are typically called on by the media to defend Israel, particularly during times of conflict, and many individual Jews have faced ostracism within their own professional communities for speaking in support of Israel and against the boycott.

So, when I learned the news that the highest appeals court in France had upheld fines imposed on anti-Israel activists for "inciting hate or discrimination" during a demonstration promoting the boycott, I was reminded immediately of David's insight. For what the French court decision demonstrates — and too many people in the Jewish community, especially in Israel, still don't properly understand this — is that BDS is essentially a domestic form of anti-Semitism that attacks local Jews through the demonizing of the Jewish state. The only way for Jews to remove this stain is through publicly dissociating themselves from, and loudly condemning, the State of Israel. Quarantining Israel in order to eliminate it may be the stated goal of BDS, but its immediate and often only impact is upon those Jews in the vicinity of the movement's propaganda activities.

Here's the story of what happened in France. In 2009 and 2010, mobs of BDS activists began descending on supermarkets and forcibly removing Israeli products — many of which were available, for obvious reasons, at the kosher counter for Jewish customers. Video footage of one of these many supermarket invasions shows the protesters thuggishly chanting in favor of the boycott as they surround customers and staff, sealing off aisles where Israeli products are on sale.

By any standards of decency, these protests were both physically threatening and bigoted in their expression; few people would want to be caught in the act of purchasing an Israeli avocado by this rabble. In the eastern city of Mulhouse, 12 activists were charged with incitement after they distributed leaflets urging "Long Live Palestine, Boycott Israel," with another one warning customers that "buying Israeli products means legitimizing crimes in Gaza."

As Abbas Plays the Same Old Double Game

...But just as the peace processors ignored Arafat’s double game, they are continuing to do so for Abbas, as they laud his statement to the Dutch Jews while ignoring his speech that showed he thinks all of Israel is “occupied.” It is high time someone in Washington called him to account for this, but such realism about the Palestinians will clearly have to wait until Obama leaves the White House.

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

For those like Presidents Obama and Clinton, who view Israel and its policies as the primary obstacle to peace in the Middle East, what the Palestinians do, say, or even think never seems to get on their radar screen. Compared to the Palestinians — both the supposed moderates of Fatah in the West Bank and the Islamists of Hamas that govern Gaza — the Israelis are relatively more powerful and so they are judged to be the ones with the ability to end the conflict and create a two-state solution. But in order for even this form of magical thinking to work, Israel requires some kind of peace partner. Cast in that role is Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas, Yasir Arafat’s successor and a man that President Obama has praised as a champion of peace. But in order to believe he is such a person, observers have always been forced to restrict their study of his behavior to a limited number of moderate-sounding statements generally made in English and directed at Western and Israeli audiences. At the same time, you have to ignore the host of other damning utterances and actions that make it clear he is not interested in peace that are in Arabic and directed at his own people.

Arafat perfected that double game during the heyday of Oslo euphoria in the 1990s as Americans and Israelis clung to statements that could parsed as indicating he wanted peace while everything he said to Palestinians showed that he still intended Israel’s destruction. Abbas has learned to play the same double game with great skill. Last week, we got an example of just how he plays to different audiences when he extolled the two-state solution and his willingness to stick to Oslo when speaking to Dutch Jews. But two days earlier he told the United Nations Human Rights Council that he considered all of Israel, including land it held before the 1967 Six Day War, as “occupied” (this can be viewed at the Palestine Media Watch website). Like its silence about Abbas’s record of incitement that has helped fuel the current wave of anti-Israeli terror, the United States has remained silent about a statement that both reveals his intentions and explains his repeated refusals of peace offers.

In the decade since he succeeded Arafat (he’s currently serving in the 11th year of a four-year term as president of the PA), Abbas has cultivated a good reputation among American and Israeli left-wingers. His Dutch speech is not an anomaly in that he has told countless Western and Jewish audiences the same thing about wanting two states and giving up the “right of return,” which is synonymous with the end of Israel as a Jewish state. That’s just what Westerners who want to believe in the two-state solution want to hear. Thus armed with what they think is proof of a Palestinian willingness to make peace, they then attack the Israeli government and demand it show it grant Abbas the concessions he needs to sell a deal to his people.

It sounds good, but for every hopeful statement Abbas makes, he makes a few that indicate that his peace talk is as much of an act as the blood-soaked terrorist that he succeeded.

Case in point is his UNHRC statement in which he asked the UN body, “How long will this protracted Israeli occupation of our land last? After 67 years, how long? Do you think it can last, and that it benefits the Palestinian people?”

The term “67 years” is significant. According to those who believe a two-state solution is currently possible, it will require Israel to give up all the land it won in the Six Day War. Those who are serious about the idea understand that the Jewish state would have to be allowed to keep some of that land since hundreds of thousands of Jews now live there in exchange for parts of pre-1967 Israel. But even if you believe that is a deal the Palestinians can make, simple math tells us that the “occupation” of the West Bank and Jerusalem began 48 years ago, not 67.

Showdown at the OK Corral by Caroline Glick

...These stories have been interpreted in various ways. Regardless of how they are interpreted, what they show is that on the one hand, the Obama administration has used US intelligence agencies to weaken Israel’s capacity to harm Iran and to actively protect Iran from Israel. And on the other hand, Israel is wary of the administration’s efforts to weaken it while strengthening its greatest foe. These stories form the backdrop of next week’s meeting between Netanyahu and Obama – the first they will have held in more than a year. They indicate that Obama remains committed to his policy of weakening Israel and downgrading America’s alliance with the Jewish state while advancing US ties with Iran. Israel, for its part, remains deeply distrustful of the American leader.

Caroline Glick..
Our World/JPost..
03 November '15..

Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu's meeting with US President Barack Obama next week is likely to look less like a rapprochement than a showdown at the OK Corral.

The flurry of spy stories spinning around in recent weeks makes clear that US-Israel relations remain in crisis.

Two weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal published a fairly detailed account of the US’s massive spying operations against Israel between 2010 and 2012.

Their purpose was to prevent Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear installations. The Journal report, which was based on US sources, also detailed the evasion tactics the Obama administration employed to try to hide its covert nuclear talks with Iran from Israel. According to the report, the administration was infuriated that through its spy operations against Iran, Israel discovered the talks and the government asked the White House to tell it what was going on.

Over the past several days, the Israeli media have reported the Israeli side of the US spying story.

Friday Makor Rishon’s military commentator Amir Rapaport detailed how the US assiduously wooed IDF senior brass on the one hand and harassed more junior Israeli security officials on the other hand.

Former IDF chiefs of General Staff Lt.-Gens. Gabi Ashkenazi and Benny Gantz were given the red carpet treatment in a bid to convince them to oppose Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear installations. More junior officials, including officers posted officially to the US were denied visas and subjected to lengthy interrogations at US embassies and airports in a bid to convince them to divulge information about potential Israeli strikes against Iran.

Sunday, Channel 2 reported that the IDF’s Intelligence Directorate’s information security department just issued guidance to all IDF soldiers and officers warning them about efforts by the CIA to recruit them as US agents.

These stories have been interpreted in various ways. Regardless of how they are interpreted, what they show is that on the one hand, the Obama administration has used US intelligence agencies to weaken Israel’s capacity to harm Iran and to actively protect Iran from Israel. And on the other hand, Israel is wary of the administration’s efforts to weaken it while strengthening its greatest foe.

These stories form the backdrop of next week’s meeting between Netanyahu and Obama – the first they will have held in more than a year. They indicate that Obama remains committed to his policy of weakening Israel and downgrading America’s alliance with the Jewish state while advancing US ties with Iran. Israel, for its part, remains deeply distrustful of the American leader.

This Israeli distrust of Obama’s intentions extends far past Iran. Recent statements by Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have convinced Israel that during his last 15 months in office, Obama intends to abandon US support for Israel at the UN Security Council, and to ratchet up pressure and coercive measures to force Israel to make irreversible concessions to the Palestinians.

From Netanyahu’s perspective, then, the main strategic question is how to prevent Obama from succeeding in his goal of weakening the country.

The implementation of Obama’s deal with Iran deal will form a central plank of whatever strategy the government adopts.

Iran’s anti-Semitism: Too deep for deterrence?

...assume, prudently, that the Iranian regime means what it says about Jews and their “Zionist entity.” Then apply Snyder’s warning: Ideas have consequences. The idea of anti-Semitism is uniquely durable and remarkably multiform. It can express a mentality that is disconnected, as in Hitler’s case, from calculations of national interest. Hence an anti-Semitic regime can be impervious to the logic of deterrence. Much, including Israel’s calculation of what military measures are necessary for its safety, depends on the nature of Iran’s anti-Semitism.

George F. Will..
Opinion/Washington Post..
30 October '15..

Yale University historian Timothy Snyder is indebted to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who recently made Snyder’s new book even more newsworthy than his extraordinary scholarship deserves to be. And Netanyahu is indebted to Snyder, whose theory of Hitler’s anti-Semitism is germane to two questions: Is the Iranian regime’s anti-Semitism rooted, as Hitler’s was, in a theory of history that demands genocide? If so, when Iran becomes a nuclear power, can it be deterred from its announced determination to destroy Israel?

Netanyahu recently asserted, again, that a Palestinian cleric was important in Hitler’s decision to murder European Jews. Netanyahu said that on Nov. 28, 1941, when Hitler supposedly preferred to expel Europe’s Jews rather than exterminate them, Haj Amin al-Husseini, grand mufti of Jerusalem, met with Hitler and urged him to “burn them.”

Certainly the mufti favored genocide; he certainly was not important in initiating it. Mass murder — the Holocaust — accompanied the German army, especially after the September 1939 outbreak of war, and especially after the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. Granted, it was not until the January 1942 Wannsee Conference that the “final solution” became explicit. But by the time Hitler met the mufti, approximately 700,000 Soviet Jews had been shot. Snyder, not Netanyahu, should be heeded concerning the Holocaust’s genesis.

Attempts to explain Hitler’s obsession with Jews began with the idea that he was unfathomable, a lunatic “Teppichfresser” (carpet eater). The comforting theory was that no theory can explain Hitler because he was inexplicable, a monster, a phenomenon without precedent or portent.

In 1996, however, Daniel Goldhagen’s book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” argued that the explanation for the genocide was acculturation — centuries of German conditioning by the single idea of “eliminationist anti-Semitism.” This cognitive determinism reduced Hitler to a mere catalyst who unleashed a sick society’s cultural latency.

This drew a rejoinder from Christopher Browning, author of “Ordinary Men” (1992), a study of middle-aged German conscripts who became consenting participants in mass-murder police battalions in Poland. Browning noted that protracted socialization — centuries of conditioning — could not explain the Khmer Rouge’s murder of millions of Cambodians or the Chinese slaughter of millions of Chinese during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

When the numbers pour cold water on the nonsensical optimism of the peace processers

...But the numbers pour cold water on the nonsensical optimism of the peace processers who keep telling us compromise is possible. As much as it would be nice to think it was so, Palestinians attitudes toward peace, terrorism, and the existence of Israel have not changed for the better in the last generation. More importantly, nothing Israel has done, whether it was signing Oslo and granting the PA control of much of the territories or even the complete withdrawal from Gaza, convinced them that Israel wanted peace....To the contrary, such actions seem to have only solidified Palestinian belief in Israel’s eventual destruction. That majorities of Israelis have always supported compromise only seems to convince them that the Jews lack conviction and will eventually be defeated.

Image by © Ibrahim Khatib/Demotix/Corbis

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
02 November '15..

On Saturday night, speaking at the memorial for Yitzhak Rabin twenty years after his murder, Bill Clinton challenged Israelis by telling them “it is up to you” to decide whether there would be peace with the Palestinians. As I noted yesterday, this was a remarkably obtuse statement from the former president. He has spent the last 15 years complaining that it was Yasir Arafat that robbed him of a Nobel Peace Prize by refusing an Israeli offer of statehood and peace. Nowhere in his speech or in the remarks delivered by President Obama via a video was there a mention of the fact that it had been the decisions of the Palestinians that blocked each attempt to broker a compromise over the course of the last century. Indeed, most of those who speak about the conflict never even consider what it is that the Palestinians are thinking as they focus solely on attempts to try and force Israel to make concessions that might enable peace.

The dynamic of the process has always been like this as, in effect, Israel has tried with a predictable lack of success to make peace by itself. An answer to the sort of tunnel vision that Clinton exhibited would be if someone sought to clarify exactly what it is that the Palestinians think about peace, terrorism, or Israel and the Jews in order to see whether the concessions demanded of Israel would solve the problem.

But now someone has done just that. Shalem College’s Daniel Polisar has written an analysis of Palestinian public opinion for Mosaic Magazine. He studied over 330 surveys taken of Palestinians by the four major Palestinian research institutes over the course of the last two decades. As he notes, the four bodies have different points of view and are independent of the Palestinian Authority or Hamas as well as that of Israel. Taken as a whole, their results provide a statistically significant sample of Palestinian beliefs on key issues about the peace process. As such, his findings published today ought to be must-reading for anyone who cares about the future of the Middle East. More to the point, the results should inform the policy decisions being made by the United States as the Obama administration prepares for what may be a final drive for a peace agreement with the Palestinians.

Some elements of this study are, to a certain extent, understandable. After a century of conflict, nobody should expect the Palestinians to love Jews or Israel. Nor is it particularly surprising that they tend to blame Israel for all their problems, even those that are the function of internal politics and disputes, such as those between the Fatah that runs the PA in the West Bank and the Hamas rulers of Gaza. Though it is disconcerting, it should also not shock anyone that Palestinians tend to think of Israel as always being in the wrong or that it starts wars and deliberately targets civilians, even if the demonstrable truth is just the opposite. The willingness to see the enemy in a war as always in the wrong is not an exclusively Palestinian trait.

But when it comes to specifics and general attitudes toward Jews and Israel, Palestinian opinion goes further than that. Indeed, among the most puzzling of Polisar’s findings are those that require the Palestinians to ignore obvious political facts about Israel that they are in a position to know is not true.

(Video) Terror attack survivor Kay Wilson on the current wave of stabbings

Stand With Us
Published on Nov 2, 2015







Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqYEnM7GEF0

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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Contending with the Palestinian 'war of history'

...According to the Palestinians, the ones who were burned in the crematoria were not the Jews in Europe but rather Palestinian children in Israel. These are widely held beliefs, attributed to the highest-ranking clergymen in the Palestinian Authority. They can be found in school textbooks. They are broadcast on Palestinian Authority television, not just Hamas networks. The rewriting of both Jewish and Palestinian history has one very clear goal: It serves to negate Israel's right to exist and as a basis for refusing to recognize it.

Dr. Nesia Shemer..
Israel Hayom..
02 November '15..

A quiet war has been raging for years and few but researchers in the field have paid it any attention. This war is a "war of history" that the Palestinian Authority has been waging against the State of Israel.

The scandal surrounding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's remark recently that Jerusalem Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini planted the idea of exterminating the Jews in Hitler's head can be considered a mild revision of history when compared with what is currently happening in Palestinian society, in a blatant, intentional manner.

One of the main staples of the Palestinian Authority's policy is the rewriting of the history of the Land of Israel. Thus, Jewish history is wiped and replaced with a fabricated, ancient Muslim-Palestinian history that supposedly pre-dates the Jews. Before the establishment of the state, the Zionist narrative rested on the Bible as a source of legitimization for establishing a Jewish state here. When David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, was asked by the Peel Commission why he -- a native Pole -- was demanding rights to this land, he replied: "The Bible is our mandate. Our historic right has existed since the dawn of the Jewish people."

To counter this narrative, the Palestinians have, for years, cultivated the "Canaanite myth." On Palestinian television programs, the Biblical Canaanites are morphed into Arabs who have lived in this land since 7000 BCE and to this day. After all, even the Bible says that the Canaanites lived in this land before the Israelites and Abraham came along. Incidentally, in these Palestinian documentaries, Abraham is turned into a Muslim who built Al-Aqsa mosque. Moses becomes a Muslim who shepherded the Muslims out of Egypt, and Jesus is not a Jew but a Palestinian.

Yolande Knell exposes the absurdity of BBC’s ‘international law’ mantra

...Knell’s insertion of the BBC’s standard mantra on ‘international law’ may not be at all surprising, but it does raise an interesting question. Her application of that standard insert to a place where Israelis live according to the terms of an agreement signed between Israel and the Palestinians suggests that either the BBC is either woefully under-informed or – in similar fashion to its bizarre approach to Israel’s capital city – considers itself qualified to over-rule and ignore existing documents and agreements which do not fit in with its political narrative.

Hadar Sela..
BBC Watch..
02 November '15..

Nearly nineteen years ago, in January 1997, Israel and the PLO signed an agreement called the “Protocol Concerning the Redeployment in Hebron“. That document came about under international tutelage like the rest of the Oslo Accords, which have been described as follows:

“This overall series of commitments and obligations constitutes a contractual framework of obligations between Israel and the Palestinians, signed as witnesses and guarantors by the King of Jordan, the Presidents of the U.S. and Egypt, the Foreign Ministers of the Russian Federation and Norway, the EU and endorsed by the UN.”

Under the terms of that agreement, Israel would administer the area defined as H-2 and the PA the area defined as H-1, with both Israelis and Palestinians continuing to live in the city of Hebron.

However, the BBC’s Yolande Knell has apparently not heard of that agreement willingly signed by the internationally recognised representatives of the Palestinian people.

(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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Acknowledging an aspect of the “Palestinian Narrative”

A memorial that sacralizes death and terror is evil. And if that is what the Palestinian Authority engages in and promotes, then we should all recognize that that is the true “Palestinan narrative.” And act accordingly.

Yisrael Medad..
Times of Israel..
01 November '15..

As has been pointed out by many, the incitement generated by the Palestinian Authority is deep and is embedded well in all forms of its activity. Educational programming, sports, quizzes, television, crossword puzzles, religious sermons and more glorify the killing of Jews.

Families of terrorists who are killed in action merit special funding as do the terrorists themselves who survive and are incarcerated. Squares and other locations are named after “martyrs”.

Shmuel Yerushalmi, a son of a neighbor of mine in Shiloh, was murdered by an Arab ‘suicide bomber.’ That happened on June 9, 2002.

His friend and neighbor – five houses separated them – Avraham Chaim Siton, was murdered two weeks earlier, shot in the back on the basketball field of his high-school.

The families decided to memorialize them. They renovated a shelter in the Ramat Shmuel neighborhood in Shiloh and it serves as a youth cultural center and, of course, yet another synagogue.

Actually Bill, It’s Not Up to Israel

...So far from advancing the cause of peace, speeches like Clinton’s actually retard it. Of course, if Clinton were to go to Ramallah and tell the Palestinians that it was up to them to finally make peace, he would not be greeted with thunderous cheers, as was the case in Tel Aviv. But it would be an important wake-up call for a people that are still trapped in its own rhetoric of delegitimization. Israel has taken plenty of risks for peace.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
01 November '15..

He should have known better. Bill Clinton spent the years after he left the White House loudly and bitterly lamenting the fact that Yasir Arafat cost him a Nobel Peace Prize. Clinton hosted a peace summit at Camp David in the summer of 2000 at which Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians an independent state including almost all of the West Bank, a share of Jerusalem and Gaza in exchange for peace. Arafat said no and months later launched a terrorist war of attrition. But in spite of this, Clinton told a huge crowd in Tel Aviv last night that “it is up to you” in order to make peace in the Middle East. Clinton was an honored guest at a peace rally/commemoration of the 20th anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s murder. President Obama also sent taped remarks along similar lines that were played at the event.

It is all well and good to praise the search for peace. It is quite another to tell them that it is up to them to decide whether there will be peace. Because if there is anything that the last 22 years have taught us it is that it clearly not up to the Israeli people.

According to Clinton:

I always thought the role of the United States was to provide whatever help necessary to ensure Israel’s security, maximize the benefits of peace and minimize the risks. But the decision is yours.

The next step in the magnificent story of Israel… the next step will be determined by whether you decide that Rabin was right, that you have to share your future with your neighbors, that you have to stand for peace, that the risk for peace isn’t as severe as the risk of walking away from it. We are praying that you will make the right decision.

Yet, as Clinton knows, Barak repeated the offer the next year, and Ehud Olmert sweetened it in 2008. Both times the Palestinians against refused. Then Benjamin Netanyahu offered withdrawals from most of the West Bank and committed himself to a two-state solution and still the answer was no. Before that, Ariel Sharon withdrew every soldier, settler and settlement from Gaza hoping to create an opening for peace and instead set the stage for the creation of an independent Palestinian state in all but name there that is an Islamist terrorist dictatorship. Each time Israel took the kind of risks for peace that its friends and critics had been urging it to do yet got neither peace nor credit for the sacrifice.

To be fair to Clinton, there’s little doubt that he cares about Israel and the Israeli people have always appreciated his genuine affection and returned it. That’s more than can be said for Obama, who, at best, regards Israel with condescension, restricting his praise for a mythical Israel of the past that didn’t face the real country’s terrible war and peace dilemmas.

But in spite of Clinton’s intimate knowledge of the peace process, he still clings to the notion that somehow it is within the power of the Jewish state to force an end to a century-long conflict with the Palestinians.

The signing of the Oslo accords on the White House lawn was a high point of Clinton’s presidency and sealed his relationship with Rabin. Clinton’s honoring a man who was tragically murdered is entirely appropriate. But the problem here is the implicit assumption that it was assassin Yigal Amir’s bullet that killed the peace process or the Israelis who peacefully demonstrated against their government for empowering terrorists and not the third man in the famous picture with Clinton and Rabin: Arafat.

Surprise! .@Amnesty believes Arab "witnesses" and ignores other evidence

...It is obvious that the family's (and others') initial reaction was that of course Fadel attacked the Israeli. Only when the propaganda value of re-casting him as an innocent victim became obvious did the narrative change. Amnesty never bothers to find any evidence that contradicts what it wants to find.

Elder of Ziyon..
01 November '15..

Amnesty International has issued another anti-Israel report, only days after their last one, this one claiming that Israeli "settlers" in Hebron are wantonly attacking Palestinians.

"In the space of less than a month, attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in Hebron have escalated from what was already an unacceptably high level," the report says in a call-out.

The entire report gives exactly two examples of such attacks - in a month when there are daily attacks against Israelis in Hebron.

The one that takes up the bulk of the evidence is this one:

On the morning of 17 October, 18-year-old Hebron resident Fadel al-Qawasmeh was walking to work when he was shot and killed by an Israeli civilian. The Israeli military claim that he had a knife and intended to stab the Israeli civilian but have released no evidence to support these claims, despite the fact that al-Shuhada Street, where the incident took place, is heavily monitored by video cameras operated by Israeli forces.

(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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Remembering fondly the Palestinian deformative years

Teach kids colours, numbers and their ABCs and they’ll embrace life and adulthood. Teach killing, nihilism and AK-47s and they’ll embrace death and the afterlife. Palestinian children are brainwashed right from the start. Rejectionism and the cult of death are at the core of their culture

Palestinian's at school. But 
what are they learning?

Richard Ferrer..
The Commentator..
22 October '15..

Today’s column is brought to you by the letter ‘J’ for jihad and number 72 for virgins in paradise.

Once upon a time there was a little mouse called Farfour [Mickey's copyright infringing twin], star of a children’s show called Tomorrow’s Pioneers on Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV. Farfour loved to tell all the boys and girls about world Islamic supremacy and how an AK-47 assault rifle would one day ”liberate all of Palestine”.

And the children squealed: “Oh Jerusalem, it’s the time of death and we will fight a war!” Farfour squeaked his last in a touching season finale, which saw him “martyred” at the hands of Israeli soldiers while “defending his land”.



He was replaced by Assoud the rabble-rousing rabbit, who told the boys and girls he’d “finish off the Jews and eat them” before joining Farfour in paradise at the hands of Zionists -- but not before urging them on his deathbed to “fight and die to liberate Tel Aviv.”

We all fondly recall the positive impact our favourite children’s TV characters had on our formative years. For me it was the Green Cross Code Man and Windy Miller (watch out for those windmill sails, Windy!) Well, thanks to the sick society they’re born into, Palestinian children have ‘deformative’ years.

Last night my two-year-old watched Peppa Pig, who playfully jumps in muddy puddles. Last night Palestinian two-year-olds watched Nahoul the Hamas bumble bee, who violently “punches Jews and turns their faces into tomatoes”.

Teach kids colours, numbers and their ABCs and they’ll embrace life and adulthood. Teach killing, nihilism and AK-47s and they’ll embrace death and the afterlife. The BBC might consider selling the rights for Basil Brush to Al-Aqsa TV. They’d love his catchphrase.

This totalitarian propaganda, more anti-Semitic than anything Joseph Goebbels dreamed up, has warped susceptible minds for decades. It’s intoxicating stuff, provoking a conditioned Pavlov’s dog response in the subject.

So for the past three weeks the same toddlers who told Farfour, “We will fight a war!” have as adults been avenging his martyrdom with kitchen knives and meat cleavers -- hacking down Jews in the street in scenes reminiscent of the murder of Lee Rigby here in the U.K.

Last week, a diagram emerged showing children how to stab a Jew. For any Palestinians reading this, the most effective way to butcher me is to plunge the knife through my skull, right common carotid artery or left or right clavicles. That’ll teach me to be born.

This so-called ‘knife intifada’ has nothing to do with occupation or liberation and everything to do with a Palestinian’s favourite pastime: Jew hating.

And what do the world’s media and politicians do when confronted with the savage symptoms of this self-inflicted sickness? They continue to stick the proverbial knife in -- condemning the violence on BOTH sides; they blur the line between victims and cold-blooded killers; they frame the violence as cause and effect; they absolve Palestinian society of any duty to act morally, treating them as irresponsible toddlers who think stamping their feet is the solution to -- not the cause of -- their problems.

Racist Petitions, Boycott Letters and Academic Freedom

...The main response to the pro-boycott letter, however, may well be, "Who?" Who knew, for instance, that Israel -- or any state -- would be diminished if it could not gain from the wisdom of Professor Alex Callinicos, one of Britain's most obscure Marxist academics? He is the author of numerous interminable tracts; his efforts to bring his thoughts into mainstream politics reached their summit during his involvement with the Socialist Worker's Party, an entity too extreme even for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party. As almost nobody in Britain wants Prof. Callinicos's thoughts, why would anybody in Israel be begging for them?

JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series,
 is one of 150 leading British writers, musicians
and others who have signed a public letter
opposing boycotts of Israel. (Image source:
White House video screenshot)

Douglas Murray..
Gatestone Institute..
30 October '15..

It is that time of year again. News arrives of 343 "university teachers" who signed a letter pledging that henceforth they will not cooperate with Israeli academic institutions. Their joint letter took up a full page advertisement today in Britain's left-wing Guardian newspaper (where else?) and has caused almost no stir in Britain. It comes days after a letter in the Guardian's letters page, signed by 150 leading British writers, musicians and others -- including JK Rowling, Simon Schama and Hilary Mantel -- opposed any and all such boycotts against Israel, and pointed out that in the eyes of most people, intellectual and cultural exchange is a good thing.

The anti-boycott letter was signed by some of Britain's leading intellectuals. The main response to the pro-boycott letter, however, may well be, "Who?" Who knew, for instance, that Israel -- or any state -- would be diminished if it could not gain from the wisdom of Professor Alex Callinicos, one of Britain's most obscure Marxist academics? He is the author of numerous interminable tracts; his efforts to bring his thoughts into mainstream politics reached their summit during his involvement with the Socialist Worker's Party, an entity too extreme even for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party. As almost nobody in Britain wants Prof. Callinicos's thoughts, why would anybody in Israel be begging for them?

Or consider another figure on the letter, one Professor Jane Hardy who teaches at the University of Hertfordshire. It would come as a great surprise to most people in Britain -- and possibly to many people in Hertfordshire -- that such an institution exists. But a quick internet search reveals that it does, and that until 1992 it was known as "Hatfield Polytechnic." So what are the students in Israel unilaterally going to lose the right to know, thanks to the stance taken by Professor Hardy? Well, her own profile page says, "My research and publications on regional development, and the gender and class impacts of change have been underpinned by a concern with the lives of ordinary people and how they have contested neoliberalism." One tries to be polite, of course, but it is worth pointing out that this kind of "study" has never been helpful in finding a place in the job-market for British students (apart, possibly, in furthering their studies in low-grade academia). Why the withdrawal of Prof. Hardy's research on regional development, gender and class in a Hertfordshire context should be such a loss to students in Israel, one is at a loss to guess.

Others on the list comprise a list of the even more obscure and unknown. Perhaps their families know who some of them are? The majority are from Britain's second or third tier universities, former polytechnics misguidedly rebranded as universities, which have lowered the coinage of universities as a whole. Of course, there is, as usual, the requisite smattering of Jewish names, brought to the fore by the petition's organizers in an attempt to cover over the latent bigotry and racism of their letter. But what a chorus of presumption and self-importance is there.

The struggle between Zionism and … something else

...The answers are provided, ironically, by the UN, in its Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007, which asserts the right of self-determination as well as the rights to maintain the culture, institutions, religion, and language for indigenous peoples. It grants them the right to live in peace and security, and to not be subjected to genocide or expulsion from their native lands. It calls for them to have free access to their religious sites, and for them to be free from incitement to racial hatred against them. Zionism is the principle, justified by historical experience, that these rights can be guaranteed for the Jewish people only in a state under Jewish sovereignty. So why was there so much opposition to the passage of this resolution? After all, it was the World Zionist Congress.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
30 December '15..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2015/10/is-zionism-colonialism-or-indigenous-self-determination/



The World Zionist Congress met last week for the 37th time since it was founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897. Like many Jewish institutions today, it has become a battleground for the Right and Left. But what happened at the meeting put into clear focus that the struggle is really between Zionism and … something else.

An organization called LAVI introduced a resolution (the English version is here) calling for the recognition of the Jewish people as an indigenous nation:

The bill declared that “the Jewish people is a Semitic people, indigenous to the Land of Israel and seeking international recognition of its indigenous status” …

The proposal argued that “Israel’s contrived Western identity” was not only handing ammunition to its enemies to falsely label Zionism as a “colonialist” project, but that it was also placing an artificial barrier preventing peace between Israel and its other “Semitic” neighbors.

It included a statement that it “does not negate the indigenous status of any other people.” Nevertheless, it barely passed, by a vote of 51% of the delegates.

I believe that the essence of Zionism is the assertion that the Jews are an indigenous people to the land of Israel, with indigenous rights (sometimes called aboriginal rights) in the land. In fact, the Jewish people are one of the oldest documented indigenous peoples, with a unique language, culture, religion and history tied directly to the land of Israel.

The resolution refers to the struggle of the Jews to return to the land after displacement by “Roman imperialism,” but it could also have mentioned the conflict between the Jews and the Arab imperialists of the seventh century or the Jordanian and Egyptian ones that invaded the land in 1948.

A moment’s reflection should suffice to show that the narrative by which the Jews suddenly appeared in 1880 or 1948 to dispossess a flourishing ‘Palestinian’ people is nonsense. Jews have been physically present here to some extent since biblical times, and they are the paradigm case of ‘a people’ in history. ‘Palestinians’, on the other hand, are Arabs who are mostly descended from recent arrivals from Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and Transjordan. Their specifically ‘Palestinian’ culture developed very recently, in opposition to what they see as the threat of Jewish (non-Arab and non-Muslim) sovereignty. They didn’t even call themselves ‘Palestinians’ until the 1960s; and prior to 1948, ‘Palestinian’ meant ‘Palestinian Jew’.

The Arabs know that Zionism rests on Jewish peoplehood, and on the connection of the Jewish people to the land – our indigenousness. They know that their moral case to displace us is based on the argument that they are a long-term indigenous people and we are European colonialists. Thus they insist there is no Jewish people, only a religion. Thus they attempt to erase Jewish history in the land – by arrogating Jewish holy sites to themselves and by physically destroying archaeological evidence of the ancient Jewish presence. Their claims may appear ludicrous, but they have been successful in persuading large numbers of people.

At the BBC, Terrorist? Motorist? It’s all the same to the Kevin Connolly

...But just in case listeners were by now drifting off message, Connolly brought them back with more promotion of equal suffering and inaccurate portrayal of violent riots as “protests”.

Hadar Sela..
BBC Watch..
29 October '15..

As noted in a previous post, the October 18th edition of BBC Radio 4’s ‘The World This Weekend’ included an item by Kevin Connolly (available for a limited period of time from 25:41 here).The World This Weekend

In addition to Connolly’s amplification of baseless conspiracy theories pertaining to Temple Mount and promotion of the notion that the “identity” of Temple Mount is “Islamic”, a number of additional themes seen repeatedly in BBC coverage of the current wave of terrorism in Israel were promoted by Connolly and the programme’s presenter, Edward Stourton.

Stourton’s introduction began with promotion of equivalence between Israelis murdered by terrorists and the perpetrators of those attacks – who clearly interest him more than their victims.

“Forty-one Palestinians and seven Israelis have been killed in the latest eruption of violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories but the figures don’t really tell the full story. Many of the attacks which have resulted in those deaths were carried out by young Palestinian men with knives and they must surely have acted in the knowledge that they would almost certainly be killed themselves. The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has thrown up violence in all sorts of forms, but this is new.”

The inaccurate notion that the current violence is “new” has also been seen in previous BBC content but of course there is nothing “new” at all about knife attacks or – as the second Intifada showed – about Palestinians committing terror attacks in which the likelihood of their being killed in the process was either obvious or intended.

(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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